Things I learnt last week.

I’m actually very good with Pro Tools – according to other people anyway. It’s always nice to receive praise from other professionals.

Recording is SO much fun. Recording with talented people makes it even better.

There’s some very very good things on the horizon.

On the end of the cassette

This BBC story talks about Currys announcing that they will no longer be stocking (blank) cassettes.

“It is estimated that there are 500 million tapes still in circulation” says the article.

Surely more than that, I seem to have about that many stored in boxes hidden around various places in my flat!

Hear the drummer get wicked.

Those very nice people at FXpansion kindly sent me copies of both Guru and BFD to play with. They’re both software instrument plugins (used as a RTAS plugin via their very own VST->RTAS wrapper on Pro Tools) that ‘do’ drums. BFD is concerned with real drum kits, Guru has more of an electronic-drums bent.

I don’t actually get sent free stuff THAT often so it’s nice when it does happen! I said I would write up reviews of both of them at some point, and I still intend to do that.

As a quick starting comment though, they are both very good products (I had been looking into buying Guru anyway, so it’s not like I’m just saying this ‘cos I didn’t have to splash out) – Guru, with it’s drum-machine mentality and crunchy sound-library is my favourite out of the two at this time. It’s brilliant fun to make up little 2 bar loops and muck around with them… in fact it can be a little TOO much fun sometimes, I’ve lost an hour or two here and there with it.

New Toys

One other thing that’s happened in my time away from the bloggage is that I got a brand new Pro Tools HD PCIe system. I’ve got it running inside a PowerMac G5 Quad 2.5Ghz desktop.

It was hard to actually find a G5 in the ‘retail chain’ last December (as my dealer pointed out, Apple don’t exactly advertise too far in advance when a whole line is being discontinued and it seems that many dealers were caught on the hop a little by the sudden introduction of the Intel desktops, so they ended up not being able to fill all the upcoming orders for PowerPC systems as Apple just decided to stop production of PPC stuff dead), but I didn’t want to jump straight into a MacPro system as at the time the situation with many HD plugins being updated to Universal code (or not, or doubt as to exactly when that might happen) was making me uncomfortable with the prospect. It felt a little version 1.0 to me.

It may have seemed a bit strange to some people (especially the folks the system was bought from!) that I was insisting on what is effectively yesterdays’ techonology, but essentially the CPU side of the system is the least-expensive (and easiest to upgrade) part of it. It was a good choice to do this, I still think, as although in the 4 months I’ve had it running all the installed HD plugins purchased have indeed been made Universal there’s still total support out there for the PowerPC userbase.

In summary – the new setup is lovely.

With version 7.2 and upwards, the PTHD software has finally come of age, it has not only the features it always should of had anyway (region groups for example) but also many additions that you didn’t realise you needed until there was an option to use them. Which, to me, is always the sign of a grown-up piece of software.

That’s not the same as when some applications get overtaken by ‘bloat’ though, as it feels like there hasn’t just been an attempt to throw in random new features just to lengthen the ‘look what it can do!’ list.

So, yes, I’m liking the new toy big time.