Posts
It's a continuous never-ending quest to make sure everything is functioning properly in any sized recording studio. I'm often reminded of the very first thing I learned in Audio 101, actually it's the THREE most important things in audio:
- Signal Flow
Signal Flow
Signal Flow
Downtime is a scary word to any studio, but using it to make the studio a well oiled machine is a great way to turn downtime into a very productive day. The longest hours I've ever spent here at the studio were days when nothing was booked. It's a great time to tear stuff apart and put it back together again.
We recently ran into a rash of problems with our API mic-pres. We have a total of 12 channels of them. The op-amps inside of them were intermittently failing. Intermittent problems are perhaps the hardest to solve, especially in the midst of a busy studio schedule. When you finally get that narrow window of time to investigate the problem, you can't make it fail.
The "soundtrack" to the video above is me while I was testing one of our API mic-pres. There are well over 20 tracks layered on top of each other (not all of them made it to the final rough-mix of my silliness). The mic-pre in question didn't fail me once, there wasn't even a detectable hint of an issue that I could find. Yet, the very next day, in the middle of a full band tracking session it failed again. Sometimes I think these problems have their own personalities and will only show themselves while paying clients are in the building.
If I didn't know better, I'd be inclined to believe that the problematic API was showing off to a neighboring compressor. This may be a method of gear attempting to gain "rack-cred" and garner the respect and admiration of all the other gear in the rack.
We've thankfully gotten past our API issues, and have logged in some pretty heavy sessions since experiencing the intermittent politics of the democratic rack. Vote for us for your next recording session!
