"And Now For Something Completely Different" - John Cleese

I don't really know Chris Mickle. I think that this is odd, since we are in the same business and have worked many of the same venues and worked with some of the same artists. Sort of a small word/big world situation. We've recently began bumping into each other on line, and find that we have a lot in common. Chris's live recording trucks turn up at places like South By Southwest and Red Rocks, and the client list includes such artists as Puff Daddy, Melissa Etheridge, The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Ani DeFranco, Dave Mathews, and other high visibility artists.

Chris is running SAWStudio in his A truck, and wanted to share his experiences with the tool in a mission-critical environment.

The 48 Track Quest - A Personal PC Odyssey It was the end of August 1992, and I got a call from the long-defunct Chameleon Records informing me that they desperately and immediately needed a particular song from one of their bands, Sonia dada, we'd recorded live 2 nights earlier. It was to be released as a promotional "B" side for radio station airplay across the country. Why would I remember that in such a special way, you ask? Well naturally, that particular song was THE problem song of the entire night's recording. It was a new tune and in the middle of the song, the band's three singers all suddenly began loudly clapping their hands, in triplicate beats, just inches (if that!) from their vocal mics. This caught us all by surprise, peaking out quite a few bars of the stereo mix before we could compensate the levels in the truck…and, of course, back then we never had a multitrack budget for those live radio shows. Oh yes, I could just imagine how thrilled the label would be by this explanation! This was not the sweet smell of success…. The very next morning I unwrapped a Fedex box containing my new Turtle Beach 56k DIGITAL (!) editing system and installed the hardware and loaded the software into my "hot-rod" 386 PC (with 1 whole MEGABYTE of ram!!!) all the while wondering if I could somehow use this new gadget to fix my soon-to-be-train-wrecked remote recording career. I looked at the manual, briefly, with dismay. I rebooted the computer. Not having the slightest idea of what I was going to do or how to do it, I loaded that evil song from the concert DAT into the computer. I watched hypnotically as the waveforms paraded across the screen and was mildly amazed to be able to find the distorted section where each wave suddenly turned into a digital "mesa". What to do…. Wishful thinking getting the best of me, I found that I could zoom in and actually redraw the tops of each flat wave form…….and amazingly it worked!! It took all day to fix, but you really had to listen for the trouble spot in the midst of a great recording of a really great song to hear something that might be almost wrong! I felt great. I flew out to LA right away to personally hand deliver the new, pristine DAT and, of course, Chameleon Records was going under as I walked through the hall….the very day I was there. But oh, what a feeling! I had saved the day with my trusty 386! It was 1992 and I was hooked. Things would never be quite the same for me. "I can't wait to record 48 live tracks right into this computer….there must be a simple way of doing that….." I said to myself. Chris Mickle (recovering) Fast Forward Fast forward to 3 am, 3/1/01. The new baby and the wife are sleeping, it's just me and my recording truck this morning, no distractions – just a little tired. I turn to my dual 1ghz Pentium III, NT machine with 1 gig of PC 133 ram. It's loaded with the latest IBM GXP75 drives, and 2 full Project Hammerfall cards being fed 48 tracks of lightpipe from 2 Motu 2408 boxes, which are being fed by the TDIF outputs of 3 HR-78's and 3 DA-88's, the master of which is the system clock. All going into the latest product from the seemingly unlimited mind of Bob Lentini (Innovative Quality Software). I'm readying an impressive "pre-release" version of his new killer multitrack audio recording/editing software platform called "SAW Studio" for the ultimate "stress test" I can think (dream?) of. Saw Studio, or "Studio" as we call it in IQS land, is a radical advancement of the SAW family tree. In short, it's about $400,000 worth of hardware right inside your computer for just a couple thousand dollars. It hasn't been an easy "birth" as products go, and I'd been working with the beta team for several months to help get it ready for prime time. And prime time is tonight…. er…this morning, for me and Studio. No more fooling around in Beta land. So, Studio is in "Record Ready" waiting to print 48 tracks of 24 bit audio all at once. I hit play on the Tascams, and a previously recorded 48 track concert starts up. The "Studio" meters start dancing, and my pulse quickens a bit…..(ok, I admit it!). But I've been here many, many times before, with almost every other software/hardware combo available to me….including the Motu PCI 324 system, Vegas, Cubase, Samplitude, Cool Edit and others……only to be let down "at the altar" – so to speak. Wanting to get this over with, I click "Record" and the Saw Studio meters continue to dance, and the counter counts. Good sign! Some other attempts through the years have allowed me to get this far, and what usually happens is the computer locks up either immediately, or almost immediately. Some of the more deceitful platforms simply pretend they're recording, when, in fact, they have actually locked up and are just faking it….. will Saw Studio be different?? It's late, but I let it run for 20 minutes (75gig drives are simply wonderful), thinking that if it will record for 20 minutes, then it would record for as long as I'd like. At this stage of the process, when you stop recording things tend to fall apart, if they're going to. I take a deep breath and stop the recording…and… much to my delight, waveform after gorgeous waveform draws across the screen, filling up the screen with the recorded tracks! I'm still wary. I've seldom made it this far, and when I have, hope has always turned to dismay and sadness when the playback of the tracks sounds almost, but not quite, like music. Let's hear how this sounds. I've assigned Saw Studio's 24 stereo outputs to each of the inputs of my 40 channel Amek Einstein console, the extra 8 tracks are routed to an auxiliary mixer and then patched into the console as well. Reversing the original signal flow, all of the Tascams are now in "all input" mode. Now, the computer is emulating a 48 track tape machine. I click "Play" and, after another deep breath and a moment of anticipation, the buffers fill and the board comes alive with loud, wonderful, crystal clear music! All 20 minutes of it! I solo channel after channel and all sounds great! Well, after nine years and thousands of dollars trying to make this moment happen, how do I feel? Not too darn shabby! Should have just got Pro Tools from the start, you say?? Remember, even Pro Tools still can have issues with that many simultaneous tracks, and how many mortals could have afforded a 48 track Pro Tools rig or a 48 track Otari Radar back then anyway? Such sweet success at 3:30 am! I go to bed with a smile. And stumble out again 30 minutes later rejoining the real world…. with some diaper duty! Chris Mickle Professional Sound & Recording Denver - 303-456-5705 chrismickle@home.com

Angie Dickinson Wilson and I have never met, but we have shared many stories over the years. We continually run into each other on newsgroups and in audio forums around the internet, and find that we tend to independently pick similar solutions to the various problems that small studio owners face.

Angie has run Avocado Productions since 1986. Though Avocado started out as a voice-over and On-Hold production room, the business soon expanded. Angie has been using SAW since the mid-1990s, starting out with a 386, a Digital Audio Labs Digital Only CardD, and a DAT machine, used for it's 16 bit converters, and the original SAW product, a 4 stereo track editor later dubbed "SAW Classic". Angie had this to say about SAW:

"Music became an important part of my oldest daughter's life and through the connections made with her music teachers, word got out that I knew something about recording and had a studio. The small town of Oswego, Illinois was growing, the studio was growing and luckily so was SAW. With each new product came more tracks and more features: DirectX and VST plug-in support, real time preview. And some of those features were added to free upgrades. By this time, I'd moved from what is now called SAW Classic to SAW32 and SAWPro rather quickly. I also moved from that 2-track DOC/DAT machine combo to a dual MOTU 2408 system along with a faster computer. You can still hear my voice on a handful of On-Hold messages, but the focus of the studio is now music production. Everything from Rap, R&B, Punk, Classical and Christian music has come out of the Avocado Productions Studio in the last couple years. Most of these projects were recorded directly to the computer, never leaving the digital domain. We've all heard what a money pit a computer can be in the studio. The nice thing about SAW has been that a modest computer set-up can go a long way. Until the recent upgrade to SAW Studio, tracking and mixing a standard three or four piece pop demo has been fairly easy with a AMD K6-III 450 CPU, Soyo Tek mainboard and 384M Ram. Even using the more resource-intensive SAW Studio this system has been able to handle some of these same types of projects. In the last couple years, only minor things have been added to the system: RAM, larger hard drives, dual-head graphics card. Of course, with each SAW version, the tendency is to want to do more with the mix because suddenly, you can. The more you want to do, the more demand on the CPU and the more you want to upgrade the computer. That's not news to anyone. So there are plans in the near future for a major studio computer upgrade. It's one though that should last a while. Sure I've looked at other multi-track packages, even tried using Cakewalk for a while. I've yet to find one as versatile, that offers the same level of user support, offers free upgrades or is as stable as the SAW family of software. After SAW Classic there's been no looking back."

Article continues >>