Recording - April 2017 - 14

Song

writer's

Studio
guy's
journey

The sheer number of DAWs out there
can be daunting. How you choose is really a matter of personal preference and
compatibility with how you like to work.
I have had the luxury of trying most of
the major ones; eventually my choice
was based on my comfort level with the
ergonomics and the feature sets
of the programs I committed to.
Yeah, programs, plural: my DAW
is based around two programs,
not just one.
I like to work in a hybrid fashion,
using loops to create rhythm
tracks and atmospherics. I also
do quite a bit of linear recording
of instruments and voices. I could
accomplish that in one program,
but due to habit and comfort
level I actually use one DAW for
loops and soft synths and another
for linear recordings.
I have used all of the familiar
loop-oriented DAW programs-
Magix ACID, Lumit, Propellerhead Reason, Image-Line FL
Studio, etc.-and I have found
features to like in all of them. For my productions, though, I have settled on Ableton Live. I integrate the musical elements
created on that platform into PreSonus
Studio One, which is where I record live
instruments and voices and do my processing and mixing. I integrate my Live
material into Studio One via Propellerhead ReWire: a great piece of code that
allows two audio applications to sync and
pass audio back and forth. You'll want to
make sure that your applications incorporate ReWire protocol if you contemplate a similar workflow.
14

RECORDING April 2017

Alternately, you might find all you need
in one package, as some modern DAW
packages have added features that used
to be the sole province of the loop-based
programs. That includes Studio One, but
I haven't used many of those new tools
yet. I'm just used to working in a different
way... it all comes down to comfort and
personal preference and, truth be told,
more than a bit of inertia. Come to think
of it, Live actually does linear recordings
as well, but for me, combining the best
of both DAWs is the answer.
There are also times when I collaborate
with other musicians on projects in my
home studio. It's not uncommon for us
to take copies away and work on them
separately, merging our work later. It's
not impossible to share work from one
program to another, but it sure is a lot
easier to share files that are already in
a compatible format and created in the

I have a collection of guitar amplifiers
set up in a row along one wall of my
studio, individually miked, with a snake
that brings those mic cables back to
where my DAW and monitors are set up.
(Like many of you, I don't have a dedicated
control room.) This allows me to quickly
assess what amp sounds best for what
I'm working on. Often I combine two
amps to get a particular sound, and this
makes it easy.
I also often have a set of room microphones set up at the live end of my
basement studio. The room has hardwood
floors and a cedar-paneled ceiling. It
can sound quite nice depending on the
source. I often record ambience when
I'm recording live performances of guitars,
vocals, or percussion, and those mic
cables also route back to my DAW.
My songwriting setup's based around
a Zoom R16, a portable tabletop audio
interface (with the 24-bit/96 kHz
recording quality I desired) sporting eight mic preamps. It also
serves as a standalone multitrack
recorder/mixer, and can be used
as a control surface for your DAW.
You can even chain two of them
together to double the number of
inputs and recording tracks. It's a
truly versatile unit, with good monitoring options via the headphone
jack and the balanced line-level
outputs.
As I have more than eight audio sources, I route all of my mics
and snakes (including a pair at
Mission Control! Monitors, displays, controllers,
and multiple computers for various music rigs;
my mix position) to a Roland
we'll focus on critical elements for the
M16E, a standalone analog
songwriting setup in this article.
mixer that I've had forever. Most
often, I route my microphones
same program. I personally prefer to
first to one of my standalone preamps,
use Studio One 3, but I also have Avid
whose outputs then go into the line inputs
Pro Tools installed. Pro Tools is the most
of the Roland. I route the direct channel
ubiquitous program in the recording and
outputs of whichever mixer channels I'm
production world I live in, and I can use it
using through another snake to the inputs
to work with collaborators if that's easiest.
of my audio interface. In effect I'm using
the Roland mixer as a patch bay. It's a
bit of a hybrid routing solution, I admit,
In your (inter)face
but it works really well for me.
More often than not, I compose alone,
so I suppose I could get by with a small
number of audio inputs. I find it more
From one mic to many
efficient to have multiple inputs given the
That cheap dynamic mic I started out
way I work (there's that theme again!), so
with has long since been discarded. My
my interfacing is designed accordingly.
first quality microphone was an AKG

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