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Last year I christened my drum tracking room “Borrowed Time Studios,” an ironic comment on the fact that as soon as Raphael needed his own bedroom, or we had houseguests, I’d have to tear it down. The fact that I’ve postponed this journal entry until after having spent 12 hours carefully documenting every EQ and compressor setting, photographing every mic choice and position, stacking and wrapping acoustic foam, winding cables, latching cases, and stowing a room’s worth of studio gear in other rooms around the house makes the name all the more poignant.

So ends another summer’s recording session. I tracked six songs, which will find their way onto three CDs by two artists… not bad for a summer’s work (despite the nagging voice that says I should have done more).

Here was the view from the more fun of my two offices this summer:

See more pictures in the new Debris.com Gallery.

The acoustic foam was haphazardly placed, but it worked out fine. As before, the main rule was to avoid scarring the walls. I velcroed most of it to the ceiling, and duct taped more to the windows.

The big piece of soundboard on the left side of the room was a new invention for this session. It covers a small alcove and the room’s doorway. It reduced bleed into the house (aside from the concussion of kick drum that travelled straight through the walls and ceiling) and removed a troublesome source of reflections.

I opted against miking the toms for this session. None of the songs I recorded really called for heavy fills (well, one exception), and I wanted to try recording the room in stereo. The feedback I get from the various mixing engineers will inform my decision next time… or, I’ll just buy that Onyx 800R I’ve been lusting for, and do away with this silly 8-track limitation. (Why not record 13 tracks of drums? What else are you going to use all those inputs for… vocals?)

Snare mics: M422 on top, Audix D-1 underneath. Both tracks were compressed through an RNC, about 3:1, and recorded separately, to give the mix engineer lots of options for snare sounds.

Kick mics: D-112 inside, M380 outside. These two tracks were compressed through a second RNC, about 7:1, then mixed to mono.

The hi-hat mic was an ATM-31, an old condenser that sounded much better in my rough mixes than I expected. Some recording engineers figure the overheads will capture enough hat sound, but I like to put a dedicated mic on it for the offbeat chirp sounds that might otherwise get lost in the mix.

The overheads you know about.

Room mics were EV-635a’s. They lack high-end response, which works out fine for an ambient application.

The snare is a cheap old Tama steel-shell drum. I haven’t recorded it in years, but I got it sounding good for a remake of an old Police tune, the first song I tracked this summer, and then I didn’t want to take the time to dial in my “better” drum. I tuned it high and tight, Copeland style, and I think I got a pretty good crack out of it. In fact, listening to one of my rough mixes from this session, I think it sounds great, and I am certifiably lousy at mixing. So there you go.

One of the great truths of recording is that it’s impossible to finish a session without making a shopping list for next time:

• Another Oktava MK-012 for the hi-hat. I’ll try the hypercardioid cap in hopes of limiting snare bleed.
• A large-diaphragm condenser. I haven’t researched these yet, but I’m eager to try one on the dulcimer.
• An FMR RNP would go really nicely with that large-diaphragm condenser.
• As noted above: Mackie’s Onyx 800R. It would give me a pile of additional inputs and a digital output. Oh yes. Hmm, Ebay is open 24 hours…

I know people whose acquisitions are filtered through the “zero sum” rule: for every new item they purchase, they donate or recycle or dispose of an equivalent old one. Sometimes this is due to space limitations, or attention limitations, or a sincere refusal to have their lives overrun by stuff.

I’m not one of those people.

But occasionally I delete some of the detritus. Pictured is the boneyard, the land of forgotten and obsolete hardware, saved from years past for a future date when a 1 GB external SCSI drive with a 50-pin Centronics connector might come in really handy! Gad.

The complete inventory:

• 350 MHz G4 tower, the slowest G4 Apple ever made (it’s actually a G3 board retrofitted with a first-gen G4 CPU)
• an old AGP video card from ATI
• a PCI video card from ATI that was nice in its day (unfortunately, that day was in 1997)
• a complete LVD SCSI RAID subsystem, functionally flawless but too complex for my G5-fueled austerity
• another pair of old LVD SCSI drives, source unknown, saved (if I recall correctly) for the home MP3 server I’ve been thinking about building for five years
• a “930U” PCI SCSI card from Orange Micro, a veteran Apple hardware company that recently went out of business
• yet another SCSI drive, this one a 2.1GB unit, with internal cable
• a serial-to-USB hub, new in box, used exactly once to configure an ISDN router in 2002
• still another SCSI drive, the aforementioned 1GB external
• and yes, a :CueCat, still in its box from Wired

Most of this stuff is going to the recycler, but if you’re building a home MP3 server, let me know…

Last week I spent a couple late nights finishing up some cleanup editing on my drum tracks for Michael Capella. I was doing the final export of the final song — literally, I was 20 minutes from being 100%, completely done with the project.

The export failed. The message from Pro Tools was, “bounce handler could not keep up.” This happens occasionally, if some background process steals too many CPU or i/o cycles from Pro Tools. The fix is as easy as increasing the buffer size or disabling networking or quitting any other app that might be running.

The second attempt hung. This never happens. Pro Tools is just about the most stable application I use. Hanging is a bad sign. I couldn’t force-quit, either, a worse sign. When I rebooted and the export hung a second time and I again couldn’t force-quit and had to reboot, it was a worst sign. What’s worse than worst? Super-worst? Überworst? Liverwurst?

My recording rig is an old Powerbook. All audio files live on an external Firewire drive, which now appeared to be having “issues,” a euphamism I occasionally employ just before tearing a piece of recalcitrant computer hardware from its mounts and drop-kicking it off the balcony into the creek. I recalled, during the second reboot, that this device had originally been the boot drive in a refurbished G4 tower, and therefore had seen untold levels of abuse at the hands of uncounted previous owner(s). Not good, or maybe less than that.

The drive mounted. I immediately began copying the key audio files to my Powerbook’s internal drive. This failed too. Oh, really not good, or definitely less than that.

I actually had backups. At most, I’d lost a couple hours’ editing work. I wasn’t at risk for having to re-record anything. But hardware problems get under my skin.

Then it hit me — maybe the problem wasn’t in reading the external audio drive, but writing to the laptop’s internal drive. To find out, I attached the external drive to my workstation. It mounted fine. I copied all the important stuff to my workstation’s RAID, and burned a DVD of all my current music projects, while holding my breath.

Some time later I regained consciousness to the happy ‘bing!’ sound that means disk verification completed successfully. So, my audio drive was fine… it was my laptop drive that was dying.

Fortunately, my laptop contains little data that can’t be restored or recreated easily. But I tried to recover it anyway, by booting from CD and repairing the directory, always a sane first course of action. The repair failed with a disheartening message like “optimization failed due to device corruption,” which I read to the sonic accompaniment of a quiet repetitive clicking sound that, in my experience, invariably means “your disk drive is well and truly fsck’d.”

You’ve started your backups, right?

My story ended happily. I cabled the powerbook to my workstation via Firewire, booted it into “target disk mode,” and successfully repaired the disk with no apparent data loss. It tests clean; the S.M.A.R.T. diagnosis passes. I can’t explain it, but I’m not complaining.

I’d be wise to replace it, and I probably will, even though that will contribute yet-another questionable piece of storage hardware to the boneyard.

Good eco-news always catches me by surprise, I guess because I so rarely get any of it.

This is really neat: the owners of Maui Recycling have opened a biodiesel car-rental agency on Maui and Oahu. You can rent a new diesel VW Beetle or Golf and burn pure recycled vegetable oil (B100 biodiesel).

There are only one or two B100 fueling stations on each island, but I think it would be hard to use up a full tank of gas within a week on the island. I mean, driving 500 miles in a week is something you go to Maui to stop.

Once we began using my growing collection of tech-conference tote bags as earth-friendly grocery sacks, I realized that the good folks down the road at O’Reilly could promote the effort by using real reusable bags instead of the inexpensive cotton/canvas totes that are the current conference standard.

I found a strong candidate at reusablebags.com: the Earth-tote is a $20 nylon sack that mimics the form factor of traditional foldable paper grocery bags. It has a lifetime guarantee! Which means, among other things, that the handles won’t pull off if you try to carry more than a few kilograms of food. Double one of these superbags, and you could carry home a stockboy to put your groceries away for you.

The Earth-tote is made from 600 denier coated Cordura nylon, which is actually a stronger fabric than the body of my old Aerostich Roadcrafter motorcycle suit. So, not only can you carry your organic produce home without poking yet-another paper-or-plastic finger in the eye of Mother Nature, you can drop your groceries on the highway at 65 mph without so much as bruising a single locally-grown Fuji apple.

Wait, you don’t drive to the grocery store, do you?!?!?!

In a fit of late-night eco-angst, I sent a thoroughly unsolicited email to one of the conference guys at O’Reilly suggesting that future conference attendees would be better rewarded with a dedicated, lifetime-guaranteed, truly reusable shopping bag, which no doubt would look fabulous with the O’Reilly logo stamped on the side. I was surprised to receive a thoughtful reply a couple days later: my suggestion has been passed along.

I’ll find out in October if it got any traction. The conference team gives away books like there’s a fire in the storeroom, so I surely hope they’ve found a way to justify spending 0.71% of everyone’s Web 2.0 Conference admission fee on an Earth-tote.