RS1 - My First Pro Tools Experience

This week, a new lesson was added to my timetable. This has replaced our other recording session that is now our Live Sound session with Andy Oakley, but all that starts next week with a slightly earlier time of 9am. It's been a bit confusing because even I thought we should have started it this week, but we had one last session with Rob to mix our little project and then physically submit it.

I had a short practice with the level 3 students that I'm working with briefly before this new lesson today, only for half an hour because then I needed to be upstairs. RS1 is an amazing studio, I knew that before I entered the room. There are three studios at Clarendon and this one is by far the best, especially now I know how to use it and patch up all of the microphones into the preamps and then the preamps into Pro Tools. This is a big step up from RS3, which is a Logic studio. A lot of it is still the same and most of the skills I've learnt from there are transferable, but the console in RS1 that controls the Pro Tools software is just incredible, even if slightly broken. When a new track is created, one of the faders will automatically go up. It's incredible to watch, technology at it's absolute finest.

Our tutor Matt lectures for this session, but then just lets us get on with it after a while. He ended up giving us a bit of a history lesson because of some of the technology they still have racked up for use are now a bit predated. There was an AKIA S2800 3 1/2 inch floppy disk sampler and another tape something or other. One of the first things he shown us was how to import audio because of the task he was going to give us. He then went on to show us all of the different preamps we could work with, and their qualities before showing us the patch bay, which I surprisingly picked up rather fast. I had done some patch work before during my level 3 course, but I didn't understand what I was doing because it was never explained to me properly. Matt explained it clearly and I actually feel like I fully understand, and this is just the first session. I was naturally quite worried about this session, just because of the new things, but really with the experience I already have its just feels like a little extra on top which relaxes me a little.

After Matt had helped import/technically convert the track, 'Just Be Good To Me' originally by Deborah Cox into Pro Tools, shown us the desk and helped us set up a bus channel so we could hear the track in the other room, sending it though an output routed to the live room through patching he pretty much left us to it to. Oh, and after showing us all of the different microphones that we get to play with. We were left to set up 12 microphones, all plugged into one of two stage boxes in the live room and then patch them all up to specific preamps that Matt had listed for us. It took us a about half an hour or so to set up all of the microphones on stands and have them all connected to the right input, then it was time to route everything using the patch bay.

Setting up all the microphones: We didn't record them all
like this, but it looked pretty cool.

I thought we did really well. We worked really we together as a team, even if I sort of dominated the leader position, but it's good to have someone coordinate things so work gets done. We took it in turns to work on the patch bay so that we could all get used to it and start to feel comfortable using it, after all it does look ridiculously confusing the more barton cables we added, but we started to notice a pattern which made things much easier. The ins and outs were usually either directly above or below. Matt came back to check on us when we got halfway through patching everything, which was perfect actually because we just hit a problem. One of the preamps didn't seem to be giving out much of a level even with the gain on full. We couldn't work out if it was a problem with preamp or just that the microphone wasn't very sensitive and neither could Matt. It was quite funny actually. He was sat by the patch bay trying to work out if we had done anything wrong or missed anything, (which we hadn't) there's a possibility that is could have been a loose connection within the patch bay, but we ended up just re-routing it into the AMAZING Focusrite 428 MkI. I love it. It's by far my favourite preamp to work with in that studio. It's reliable and it sounds great, it's just a shame they are so damn expensive.

Our session was meant to finish at 2pm, but we ended up running over. The session starts at 11am and we didn't finish until about 3:30pm. So, we had 5 and a half hours studio time. Mental. I loved every minute of it though, especially once Matt left us too it. I feel like if he had watched over us the whole time I might not have learnt as much, but yeah I'm quite impressed with both myself and Pro Tools after today! Can't wait for the next session!