Travis Dickerson Recording Studio Forum

It\'s the filter cutoff of the Moog patched to a controller. I do tend to use it quite a bit.

Caper, sorry, I skipped over your post, thank you about common ground, I had way too much turkey and started speed reading.

To be clear, I did not author the above text. Also to be clear about how I feel about it, it\'s just a song.

 "while pensive poets painful vigils keep" (Alexander Pope)

 Pensive: contemplative, reflective, meditative, thoughtful
These adjectives mean characterized by or disposed to thought, especially serious or deep thought. Pensive often connotes a wistful, dreamy, or sad quality. Contemplative implies slow directed consideration, often with conscious intent of achieving better understanding or spiritual or aesthetic enrichment: "The Contemplative Atheist is rare... And yet they seem to be more than they are" (Francis Bacon). Reflective suggests careful analytical deliberation, as in reappraising past experience: "Cromwell was of the active, not the reflective temper" (John Morley). Meditative implies earnest sustained thought: The scholar was reticent, aloof, and meditative. Thoughtful can refer to absorption in thought or to the habit of reflection and circumspection: Thoughtful voters carefully considered the candidates.

Something like that.

Thank you everyone for the kind words. I have a ton of stuff I\'m working on for this project and it\'s still taking on shape. This record could go a few different ways, I\'ll have to get a feel for the direction and choose the stuff that best fits. So It won\'t be out tomorrow. This piece was close enough to done and I though the mood fit the times so I thought I\'d share. Have a great holiday everyone.

Something Pensive for thanksgiving, Common Ground
http://tdrsmusic.com/musicpreviews.html

I have a mini Moog. never used the Nord, sorry.

Yes I always sub-mix a super compressed kick and in fact the entire drum kit back into my drum mix. I use a stereo La2a copy David Royer made for me and aux send a mix of the kit through the compressor hit it hard  and mix it back with my drum mix. There is an infinite number of ways to mic a drum kit. The most important aspect in my experience is always the the quality of the drum kit it\'s tuning and the drummer playing them. I have been so lucky to record some of the best drummers in the world and it never fails to amaze me how an experienced studio drummer can find the sweet spot on the drum head and hit it every time, taylor the part to fit the song choose the right sticks, realize when the heads are slightly out of tune and correct it, play so tight to the click you can\'t hear the click anymore because it\'s perfectly masked by the drumming. No amount of gear can compensate for a lack of those things.

Lately I have been interested in very dry in your face drum sounds. I haven\'t been using room mic\'s but I have been using Royer 121\'s on the overheads which are an omni directional mic\'s and my room is fairly large so I get a bit of ambience. I\'ve been recording drums for over 30 years so I\'ve been though a lot of different drum sounds. Last year I did the last Jethro Tull album here, for that record I placed a pair of Sony c-37\'s high and behind the kit and compressed them quite a bit since we were looking for a little more ambient sound. Doane uses a fairly large kit and with all those mic\'s running open you get a nice hum going from all the close miced toms. In the nineties I did a lot of room mic-ing, one of my favorite sounds is to put a U47 about 20 feet out in the room and run it through a Valley People dynamite set as a limiter on stun. You get a great sucking sound as the limiter lets go after each hit, them mix that in with the close mic\'s.
In February Doane Perry and I hope to do a Sample CD of classic drum sounds of the early and late 60\'s, 70\'s, 80\'s, and 90\'s. It should be fun recreating those drum recording technique\'s, I\'m sure we\'ll pull one or two tricks from Eddie Kramer\'s book while were at it.

FF, I know what you mean and your right. There is no "right gear" it\'s just how you apply yourself to what you have.

There is a huge difference between a Pro Tools TDM system and just about everything else out there. The difference is TDM hardware has the processing computer built into the hardware. All the computing for the TDM audio path is done in real time on the card leaving the computer to do just screen redraws and the like. So a TDM system can run on a lowly Mac 9600 ( about $50.00 on ebay). The biggest benefit to this is zero latency with TDM. The other benefit is stability, these things never crash. The other difference is price, a workable TDM system is about $10,000 and up. You have to figure that cost into your business model at that price pint or at the very least have a rich uncle. Most other systems, Logic, Cubebase, and Digidesigns Pro Tools LE systems run natively on the computer and use it\'s CPU to do all the work so you need a fairly powerful computer to do all that work ( Logic, the old Studio Vision and some others will run on TDM hardware otherwise they run natively). So it\'s important to differentiate between the two.  The reason TDM systems are the standard in recording studios is because they are a standard, they are bullet proof when running in an Digi approved system, they can maintain high track count and huge plugin loads without even touching the computers CPU. This can be very comforting when you have a client paying $100.00 plus an hour breathing over your shoulder hour after slamming hour.  
I know better than to get into this but I\'m a Mac guy and I can\'t help it.
I disagree about a Mac getting just as jacked as a PC.
I don\'t have to worry about my Mac\'s all being on a WAN and LAN while doing music because there may be thousands of viruses and Trojans for the PC there are almost none for the Mac and there is zero working Trojans for a Mac. I\'ve been mixing, matching and mod-ding Mac\'s for 20 years, and I would rather spend my hours of computing time working with the elegant beautiful OS that the Mac is then......oh oh I\'ve started haven\'t I.
O.K. enough about Mac vs PC, the bottom line is there is a ton of reasonably priced gear out there that allow you to do good work. None of this gear matters as much as what it is you are recording. So figure out what you can spend, buy what you can afford and get started.

I\'m a Pro Tools user. We have a couple of producers here who use Logic but 99.9 percent of the projects done here in L.A. are in  Pro Tools and the few times a Project comes in started in Logic it\'s a PITA to translate it back and forth. It\'s just a fact of life that Pro Tools is the standard so it\'s just practical to work in it. I have used Digidesign software since Sound Designer so PT is second nature to me. I\'m also a Mac guy, my PC tends to collect virus\'s and dust in that order.

I partly mix in ProTools. I still like to mix drums through the console and back through the Neves, sometimes other tracks as well then I re-patch those track back into my Pro Tools mix. The Soundcraft is a great old British console with nice sounding EQ\'s. I was turned onto it by a friend of mine who cut the Traveling Wilburys records on one. Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Dave Stewart all have one in their studios here in L.A.

I don\'t list stuff about my studio on this site cause it\'s really not a site about the studio but rather about the artists and the work. I\'m always interested in talking about gear though. I use Neve mic pres and EQ\'s. La2a, Summit and David Royer tube compressors, A George Augsburger Monitor system. I have a Soundcraft 2400 console, record to a TDM ProTools rig. I have a selection of Nuemann, Sennheiser , Royer and AKG mic\'s among others. More importantly sound wise is I have a nice collection of vintage musical instrument I\'ve collected over the last 30 years and even more importantly sound wise is I\'m very fortunate to work with some incredible players and artists.

Here\'s a link to a recent Vince interview.
http://www.melodic.net/