Production Expert Podcast
Production Expert Podcast
September is arriving.. Is Your Recording Studio Fail Proof? (You may be surprised at this checklist!)
In this edition Ashea and Julian are joined by James Richmond (former SSL) & Production Experts Luke Goddard where they walk through Julians checklist from his blog article: Is Your Studio Resilient ?
About Our Guests:
James Richmons is a producer/engineer based in Oxfordshire, UK.
Production Expert’s very own Luke Goddard. Yes that one!
And it killed both the drives.
SPEAKER_06:Oh
SPEAKER_04:my goodness. Yeah. What did you do? How did you react? What can you do? Did you say a sexual swear word or anything like that?
SPEAKER_03:This podcast is sponsored by Genelec. If you've ever been disappointed with the way your mixes sound on other playback systems, then check out Genelec's Unio monitoring ecosystem. By providing a seamless bridge between loudspeaker and headphone Unio allows you to quickly create great sounding mixes that translate consistently wherever you choose to work. No more guesswork, no more surprises, just truthful, accurate audio monitoring from stereo to immersive. To find out more, visit Genelec.com forward slash Unio, spelt U-N-I-O. Your mixers will thank you for it.
SPEAKER_05:Welcome to the Production Expert Podcast. I'm Ashaya and in this edition Julian and I are joined by James Richmond. James is a producer and engineer based in Oxfordshire, UK and production expert Luke Goddard and I urge you to check out Luke's articles and videos if you haven't already and if you haven't already, shame on you. Anyway, we're going to be talking about an article that Julian has recently put together which I found particularly interesting and the article in question is called is your studio resilient and that's a question I think we all need to ask ourselves in case of any disasters that may strike so I'd like to go around particularly as we have James and Luke with us as well to to see how resilient to potential failures each of our studios are for our individual needs if you don't have the article to hand I'll quickly read through the checklist before we get into each question further okay so the working checklist list. One, so what hardware failures could shut you down? The next question is, could you move your work elsewhere if needed? What parts of your setup could be substituted or borrowed? The next question is, do you have an internet fallback? That's a good question. Do you have a backup power plan? Can your workflow adapt to headphones? And the last question is, are your software authorizations resilient? Okay, so why don't we go through a and have a think about our own studios and people listening can think about their own studios.
SPEAKER_01:I was talking to Jules about this the other day, actually, and, you know, in terms of system drive, I've just got a whole second machine, basically.
SPEAKER_05:Handy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so it's obviously not a mirrored backup as such, but it does mean that I can work in the very same way and switch machines if I need to. But obviously, as far as my working drive is concerned, then that is an experience external working drive with the backup and I tend to backup either to the system drive that I'm working on or I will take a take a cloud copy as well that's you know just the third way
SPEAKER_05:that's good so do you work on PC or Mac
SPEAKER_01:both so I've got so that's my second system is Windows and Primary is Mac. And, you know, sometimes I'll switch between the two. Sometimes it depends where I'm working. Sometimes it's as simple as whether or not I want to, you know, take the Mac out of the studio or whether it suits me to set up an alternative rig somewhere else using the Windows machine. It just depends.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, I mean, I use Logic, so I have to have Mac. So I've got my old MacBook and a new recent MacBook that I keep. And I, like you, Lou, can I do a cloud backup of everything to Dropbox? I'm told Dropbox is not terribly reliable, but I do that. And a time machine backup as well. Is that any good, James? Is that a decent backup system?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, data doesn't exist to exist in three places is the maxim. That's not dissimilar to what I do. I have multiple machines, and they all get backed up to a NAS, and then that NAS gets backed up to the cloud. And what I do is have a one-way syncing. So there's no way that if something gets deleted off the cloud that it will then replicate down.
SPEAKER_01:That's a good idea.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. There are arguments for and against. That means if someone in the studio does something dumb, then that can get replicated up. So these are just the daily backups. I also do a drag copy on a daily basis.
SPEAKER_05:A daily basis. Okay.
SPEAKER_04:Mostly. Mostly. When I remember. Okay. Probably once a week. Of important data. So session files audio files and it's literally just a folder drag everything in that folder gets copied across and by date order so If I'm working on an album and it takes three weeks, if I was to do it every day, I'd have 21 folders. What I want to be able to do is go back to an earlier version. Right. And if I've saved over something, I kind of want to be able to find it. But it's probably overkill, but it's just how I do it.
SPEAKER_05:So how do you label your files then? Because you must label them really sort of specifically in order to...
SPEAKER_04:So this is an interesting question. So if someone's working on a song, and say you're working on a song over a two-week period, how many session files would you end up with? Wow.
SPEAKER_05:I mean, I save compulsively. I save as compulsively. Are
SPEAKER_04:you saving as? Are you going, okay. Saving
SPEAKER_05:as, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Song one underscore one. Exactly. Song one underscore two. Yeah. Okay, so I might end up with 150 saves. Yeah. Plus all of the auto-saves in Pro Tools. And so, yeah, I just use that naming convention and use the date. Yeah. And I'll sometimes save, like say I do a bunch of drum edits and the drum edits are screwy, I'll say, you know, drums are screwed in the file name.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So I know, okay, well that was when I made a mistake, but I'll still keep it. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:I just basically title the save as thing. So if I haven't mixed it yet, I'll just say premix and then mix version one, mix version two, sort of vocals up or whatever. And then I'll just Dropbox that, keep it in Dropbox. So that does auto updates and then do a time machine backup sort of weekly when I remember, basically. Right.
SPEAKER_04:Okay. So I've got time machine running at all times. It just... Okay.
SPEAKER_01:It's just there the whole time, yeah. then that's a great way of referring back and, yeah, just jumping back and forwards if you need to. Yeah. Good
SPEAKER_05:labelling. Yeah. Good points, everyone. So could you move your work elsewhere if needed? Luke, do you think you could do that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely, yeah, because my working drive is portable and backed up and my system drives are replicated, albeit across two different operating systems. Yeah. Yeah. Short answer is yes. I would have to think about it. I wouldn't be up and running within seconds like James would be.
SPEAKER_04:Might it take a little longer? Like it really would because it depends on what goes down. If it's studio monitors, there's a couple of sets of monitors here, there's headphones. If it's an audio interface, then the way in which I've got everything configured is I've kind of got a degree of redundancy there.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:If it's a computer, as much as I would like to say that my backup computer is replicating exactly the Mac Studio, it's kind of not. I'm changing configuration, installing plugins all the time. So that would take a little bit of time, I think. Yeah,
SPEAKER_05:I mean, all I need when I go to sort of other studios and stuff to mix or to record with clients, all I need, all I take is my laptop, my iLock, that's important, and potential headphones but they most studios have monitors they have you know audio interface all that stuff so it's pretty easy to set up somewhere else for me
SPEAKER_04:yeah my issue is the amount of analog outboard I'm using and the specific items I'm unlikely to find them elsewhere so what I tend to do is I have I duplicate the the group buses and I've got a set of group buses that have the analog outboard and then a set of a duplicate set of grip buses that have the plug-in equivalents. And so if I'm working, if I need to take a project onto a laptop or move it around, then I've got... So I have a hardware massive passive here. I will replicate the settings in the plug-in version of it.
SPEAKER_05:Good idea.
SPEAKER_04:And that allows me to fairly quickly... I don't have everything because some things don't exist in software. There's no Cranesong STC8. There's no BAE 10DCF. They don't exist in software at all. So you have that
SPEAKER_05:all organised beforehand?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think I'm pretty organised, just because I don't want to get caught out. I've been caught out before and it's really embarrassing.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:yeah I can imagine and traumatic depending on who the client is in the room with you yeah
SPEAKER_04:even if it's yourself you know I agree completely if it's you know you don't want to be the thing that kills the buzz but also for myself if I'm trying to put a project you know move a project forward I don't want to be messing about with something that if I just at the start of the session spend 10 minutes 15 minutes setting it up then I just sail through it and it just takes experience you're never going to know you know I couldn't teach someone else how to do this because their process is going to be different it has to be personal I think
SPEAKER_05:yeah absolutely yeah and so what parts of your setup could be substituted or borrowed for example audio interfaces I have two spare ones um What else? Yeah, cables. Really important to have spare cables.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, I am lucky I've got a number of audio interfaces. I do, actually. My daily driver is just for stuff like this is my little 2i2 4Gen. That's a great little box. But for everything else, I've got... various rack mount things and desktop interfaces as well you know so I've got the SSL 12 I've got the ID 44 from audience I've got yeah a number of different options so if my interface died I'd be alright good I'm glad to say
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SPEAKER_05:Julian.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_05:You're very quiet.
SPEAKER_03:What's the question?
SPEAKER_05:What parts of your studio setup could be substituted or borrowed? Oh,
SPEAKER_03:honestly, most of it. I mean, there's not many things that are real sticking points. There really aren't. I mean, certainly interface-wise, it's fine. I can get by without monitors and I've got some alternative pairs here. All that kind of stuff's fine. In terms of the computer stuff, I live halfway between like a desktop and my laptop as it is. Is there anything that... I'll tell you what would really, really make my life difficult is if my CalDigit dock went down and I just wouldn't be able to connect everything together. I've got a TS3, this sort of like the previous generation. And these things are so useful. And just by changing one Thunderbolt cable... I can swap between using my MacBook Pro, which I use loads, to be honest. I mean, a lot of the time I just work in the house. I've got a bit like Russ, really. I sort of like find myself working in the kitchen just because I don't bother to move after I've had breakfast. Yeah, or the sofa. Yeah, that kind of thing. But when I'm in the studio, I can just swap over and all the drives come along. Something that I've only just found out about because the thing that, well, one of the things that always bothered me about this was having to manually unmount your drives. And I haven't got a lot of connected drives, but I have, you know, a few I've got like four and yeah that's boring and there is a piece of software that I don't know if it supports the TS3 it says it's for the TS4 but that doesn't mean it doesn't work in the TS3 and I'd forgotten I installed it the other day and I haven't tested it yet and it's a thing that's got like a one button dismount all the drives button on it and I thought oh now that you know that's worth having so yeah little detail things you know but something I mean the conversations about data make me sort of shuffle slightly uncomfortably because I've got a fairly slapdash attitude to back up. I do have, I run Carbon Copy Cloner, running every night, backing up my work drives, all of that stuff. But like cloud stuff, I'm very selective about. But something that I'm kind of quite honest with myself about is just the fact that the majority of my data is worthless. It's like if I lose it, it doesn't matter. You don't mind? It just doesn't matter. No, no, it doesn't matter because most of it either mattered once and doesn't matter anymore or never mattered in the first place. But if I have a live project, something I'm working on, I treat it so carefully. Oh, goodness, yeah. And particularly if it's my work, then absolutely I'm careful with it. If it's someone else's work, I'm kind of like paranoid about it, appropriately paranoid. You have to be. Which is fine apart from when it's a big video project or something it becomes a complete pain just because it's you know but this kind of stuff and also I've got this attitude I mean you were talking about kind of you know 150 backups of a Pro Tools session or something and I mean I don't think I've ever gone above 20 really wow but what I am quite clear about is how much am I prepared to lose just because I do save over the top for little tweaks and then if something actually significant has happened something new has come into the session or I've done more work than I'm prepared to lose then I'll do a save copy but I don't go and keep going through just because it becomes a little bit overwhelming
SPEAKER_05:yeah I mean my fingers just go to the save button just like as a habit
SPEAKER_03:you know there are I save but this whole thing about saving a new copy I mean everyone must have made that mistake of saving over the same session over and over and over and over and over and then eventually it becomes huge and the wave cache file becomes gigantic as well but then something breaks in it and you've lost everything yeah sure you know yeah I did that a really long time ago but I did do that And there's loads of little things that I'll do. If I'm about to try something, I think, what happens if, then, you know, I'll duplicate the playlist, all of that stuff. You know, absolutely, there's other things that I do along the way. But I do take a sort of a realistic approach to kind of like, you know, what I've done since the last incremental save, am I prepared to do that again if something happened to it? Yeah, because to be honest, I've lost stuff. But I can only think of one thing I've ever... significant thing that i've lost that i actually i regret what's that i mean it was it was it was an album project i did kind of like 25 years ago um that client didn't need it they they had it it was finished and they and certainly they weren't the kind of people you'd be giving protools files to but i kind of wish i still had it and they're just kind of like through carelessness it's gone and you know that's a shame
SPEAKER_05:do you ever get clients that come back after i don't know a year or two and say no never happened
SPEAKER_04:i get that all the time
SPEAKER_05:really what's your policy with that? Because I know some people that they have a policy, I'll keep it on my drive for a year, two years, and then it's gone.
SPEAKER_04:So hopefully no one I work with is actually listening to this. So the policy is a year, but in reality, I have everything that I've ever done. I've had one critical data loss, and it was an electronic song that I thought had real commercial potential. And I had it on a Firewire drive, and I was connecting another drive too, and it killed both the drives.
SPEAKER_05:Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:What did you do? How did you react?
SPEAKER_04:What can you do? Did you say a sexual swear word or anything like that? Yeah. This was 2002, but I remember it. It wasn't a great thing. I was very annoyed, but it was also a very good lesson to myself.
SPEAKER_05:Yes, exactly. We live and learn from these things.
SPEAKER_03:This podcast is sponsored by Genelec. If you've ever been and disappointed with the way your mixes sound on other playback systems, then check out Genelec's Unio monitoring ecosystem. By providing a seamless bridge between loudspeaker and headphone monitoring, Unio allows you to quickly create great sounding mixes that translate consistently wherever you choose to work. No more guesswork, no more surprises, just truthful, accurate audio monitoring from stereo to immersive. To find out more, visit genelec.com forward slash Unio spelt Your mixers will thank you for it.
SPEAKER_05:So what about internet fallbacks? I don't have an internet fallback other than my phone tethering to my 4G connection, which probably doesn't work very well, depending on what you're doing.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, who doesn't have that, though, you know? It depends on where the... I mean, I've got it, but I say in the article, I've got line of sight to the phone mast. I've got a really good connection.
SPEAKER_05:Oh, well, that's
SPEAKER_03:good. And it's gone down, and it's been fine. But, I mean, you can buy these, you know, automatic backup 4G router things and everything, and I'm sure that's fine, you know, but that's geographic. Depends where you are.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So what we've
SPEAKER_04:got here, because we're also running, you know, a non-music related business from here. We have two internet connections. One's for the residents and one is for the business. And they're set for failover. So it's one switch and, well, one router, sorry, and with two connections out. So one is fiber and the other is like, you know, is it like Zen internet, like regular over copper connection. And so if the fiber goes down, then I can still get, you know, 60 megabits per second off the house.
SPEAKER_05:And is that significantly more expensive than just having one internet connection, or is it...
SPEAKER_04:Well, no, one's through the business, and that's the fibre, that's, what, 40 quid a month, and then I think it's 20 quid a month for the residents.
SPEAKER_05:Oh,
SPEAKER_04:right, yeah. So it's just... Yeah, it's just having two connections, really.
SPEAKER_05:That's handy and important. So what's the other one we've got? Do you have a backup power plan?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, two UPSs, and then I'll get 15 minutes if I have total power outage for the entire studio.
SPEAKER_01:Fantastic. Yeah, if my power goes down, I can't work. So that's the one thing that I don't have ready should anything like that happen. which is, you know, a presumption on my part. But yeah, I guess if there were no electricity, then I might have bigger fish to fry other than, you know, that bounce or whatever. I mean, if you're in record and the power goes down, that's...
SPEAKER_03:You'd be furiously cooking everything in your freezer. That's what you'd be doing. Yeah,
SPEAKER_06:yeah.
SPEAKER_03:On gas, obviously.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, like, I think even with the UPS, unless you're going to be, you know, putting generators in, we get 15 minutes. That's enough time time to shut the service down
SPEAKER_03:it's a studio it's not it's not you know an operating theatre it's not an airport exactly it's not a hospital
SPEAKER_05:and if you really do need another studio there's always pirate studios or somewhere else that you could sort of quickly hire out
SPEAKER_04:I guess I could work on my laptop with a bus powered interface I've got a little arrow here but as Julian said I've got other things to worry about if the power's going out for that long you know find some candles
SPEAKER_05:exactly old school so can your workflow adapt to headphones I can imagine most of ours can
SPEAKER_04:absolutely
SPEAKER_05:James can yours
SPEAKER_04:I don't like headphones so I you know I'm one of these people I probably listen to headphones for about three minutes for an entire you know album mix I just don't like them so I can yeah definitely there are headphones here I'm wearing headphones now but yeah I would always rather go to to main monitors and new fields
SPEAKER_05:yeah so the last question are your software authorization resilient, things like iLock, cloud licensing. Lost iLock, that's a real problem, unless you have zero downtime.
SPEAKER_03:ZDT and a bit of a wait, that's all you can do.
SPEAKER_05:Yep,
SPEAKER_04:that's pretty much it. And I guess there are some plug-in manufacturers, so if you're relying a lot on the UAD SSL 4K plug-in, and you happen to have the plug-in alliance equivalent well, swap them over. It just takes a bit of time to do that. But honestly, I've only ever had one broken iLock in 25 years of having iLock.
SPEAKER_05:Wow. And you've never lost an iLock.
SPEAKER_04:So when you said before, when you go to a studio, you take your laptop and your iLock. Yeah. Even that, I felt the cold, you know, hit in my stomach. I hate, hate taking my iLocks out.
SPEAKER_05:Even if you wear them on a lanyard around your neck?
SPEAKER_04:Even still, like, it's like 40 grand's worth of software or something like that. Like, it's a ridiculous amount of money that I've spent on software over the years.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I don't like doing it. So actually what I do I think we've I mentioned this on a podcast that I was on a while back with you I think what I do is I take I will take an iLock but I take all of the licenses off the iLock put them back up into the cloud and then when I get to my destination put the licenses back on it
SPEAKER_05:see these are the kind of tips that we're after no
SPEAKER_04:that's an old one that is put them back up to the cloud and I never travel with an iLock that's loaded up with licenses it just fills me full of dread the thought of if I lose this
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SPEAKER_03:When the new iLocks came out, and one of the things that Pace was saying about them is that they're faster than the old ones. And I remember seeing some quite snarky comments online of people going, oh, I'm not worried about how fast my iLock is. And they're going, well, you're clearly not doing what James is doing because it makes a difference if you're doing that. Good
SPEAKER_04:point. It used to take like an hour to move all your licenses. And, you know, I had maybe 10% of the licenses that I have now. Like there are like thousands of plugins, which, you know, probably... probably points to a bigger problem that I have. But yeah, no, it used to be so slow that you'd have to sort of set aside part of your day just for the sinking of licenses.
SPEAKER_03:And I mean, if we're taking the long view on this, the old blue iLoks, the Snapmaster 3000s, they were nasty. They really were. But the metal ones are absolutely fine. And if you've got them on a little adapter, a little short lead, I've got a... like a full-size USB, whatever that one is. Is it an A, the slot one? A, yeah. To USB-C, just because, you know, that's what's happened. I thought about changing over to a USB-C one. I went, no, because I want it on this little floppy bit of... And then what
SPEAKER_04:do you do if you go to a, you know, go somewhere where you need to plug it into an A port?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I mean, you can get adapters the other way as well. But the point is, I want it on an adapter anyway. I used to have one that was A to A, and that was brilliant, just because it just meant that, you know, you didn't have that, especially when you had those blue plastic ones. They were a nightmare.
SPEAKER_05:I've had those, yeah. They're always breaking.
SPEAKER_04:So there is one thing to this, which is most companies are now doing it where they, you know, if you think about how many authorisations you get, you generally get more than one. There are a couple of exceptions. David Slate Trigger is one, iZotope is another. That's a potential pinch point here, in that if you've got a critical plug But you only get one authorization. Annoying, because your iLock breaks. Well, you can't get the license off it to then put it somewhere else. Having multiple licenses, having multiple authorizations for a license gives you the freedom to be able to say, okay, well, that iLock's dead. I've got a spare iLock. I've got a spare license. Exactly. Because otherwise you're dead in the
SPEAKER_03:water. Well, I mean, so interesting question here. I know some licenses don't support clans. But who here uses iLok Cloud?
SPEAKER_05:Not me.
SPEAKER_03:No. I do. Okay. And I don't. Okay, so that's like one out of four use it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I use it mainly because I'm just uneasy about moving licenses between... I don't like offloading my iLok and then reloading it, etc. So if I'm using Pro Tools off-site or on location, I do tend to move onto an iLock for that, but at home it's in the cloud, my Pro Tools license.
SPEAKER_04:What I do is I have my iLock in my studio and hard drive authorization where possible on the laptop. Okay. And that effectively deals with the same problem. Again, there are a couple of examples where that doesn't work. Steven Slate Trigger doesn't support machine authorization. It actually only supports a physical iLock and I don't like taking iLocks out. So, you know, to the point where if they supported machine authorization, even though they only support one license, I'd probably buy a second license of that plug-in because I use it so much. But I would also then have to have it on a physical iLock. So I just go, you know what, I'll do all the sample replacement bollocks and triggering from a different location, from the studio. Or now use Waves Intrigger, which is great.
SPEAKER_05:Didn't you try that, Waves Intrigger?
SPEAKER_01:I did, yeah. And it is very good. It works really well. And I like the way it generates the triggers because it definitely has some intelligence to it. It's definitely not just level-based. And the way it visualises the trigger nodes is also really clever. I think you have to be a bit selective with the sample content itself. I think some of it maps to the different velocity layers better than others I
SPEAKER_06:agree.
SPEAKER_01:But apart from that, I think as implementations go, it's as good as it can be. And I wouldn't... Yeah, there's not a lot that I would change.
SPEAKER_05:Nice. I need to try that, but it looks good.
SPEAKER_04:Has anyone seen the video that Stephen Slate has done about Intriga? No. Why has he done that? That doesn't sound like a good idea. Well, it's actually quite funny. I think he's taking... making fun of the fact that they've called their product Intrigger and his product's called Trigger. But yeah, I urge people to go and... It is quite funny. It's
SPEAKER_05:funny to see how triggered people become. Yeah, exactly. Brilliant. Well, that's all we have time for. Thank you so much to James and Luke for a fantastic chat. And we'll be back next time with another edition of the Production Expert podcast.
