Archive for the ‘Sheer Sound Studios / Music’ Category

Civilization comes to protools

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2016

So, after years of frustration setting gain levels, I have discovered a protools plugin that returns me to a metering format that I understand intuitively and can use even when I’m using one hand to choose patches and the other to play riffs – yes, the old school analog VU meter has come to pro tools in a *excellent* emulation by Klangheim

You can’t tell me this doesn’t just warm the cockles of your heart:

The emulation is extremely faithful, although to get the behavior of the meters of my youth I had to yank the rise time down to 150ms. (And yes, you can tweak the rise, overshoot, and fall times)

Because it’s a plugin that goes into a protools plugin slot, you can also easily do things like sticking a meter both before and after a compressor – and with four skins to choose from, you can easily tell them apart. When tweaking a vocal that won’t sit right in the mix this can be a real timesaver. It doesn’t appear to use any CPU to speak of. As a side bonus, when doing faster than realtime bouncing, the peak lights still work, so you get a nice sanity check if you put it across the master fader on bounce.

I would give this my ‘best plugin under $10’ prize.

Test Track

Sunday, August 2nd, 2015

So, as so often happens after I’ve had it shut down for a while, I decided to fire up the studio and of course various breakers need reset, equipment doesn’t want to talk to other equipment, etc.. so I do a test track to make sure everything is working. This one is extra 80s movie soundtrack so I thought I’d share it with you all

http://sheer.us/stuff/2015/80sMovieSoundtrack.mp3

Me and Tory ride again

Wednesday, May 27th, 2015

So, for those of you who remember Tory from, among other things, Mischief Committee, we have been getting together and doing some tracking.

Here, for your listening pleasure:

track one
track two

In other news, I upgraded the virtual host that serves qm, so we again have disk space (yay!) and memory (double yay!). We actually have a fair amount of spare capacity on that machine now, which is a very nice feeling. QM and Brigandine both got upgraded to all-SSD operation, we got more disk for storing backups, and in general things were improved all around.

Luna continues to drive me nuts, she’s quite a furry little ball of energy. But, I love her.

And I continue to work on myself, as always.