WEEK3 - AA1 - Studio Quickstart

Bradley and I headed for the studio. First off we hit the mains switch and then went through the procedure I have in my notes: mains, rack (power conditioner), ProTools 192, Mac (recorder), desk, but I'm assuming the desk is on and neutralised after you switch on the mains. Finally we switched on the speakers.

Once things were running, we set up a microphone around 2cm's from the radio speaker in the dead room, plugged it into input 1 in the dead room wallbay, checked we had the line out from output 1 in the control room and began experimenting.

On the desk we punched channel one into the main mix, punched in monitors and brought up far right fader to unity, aux 4 to 2 o'clock, turned up gain for channel 1. We were getting action on the 192 in/out indicator lights on the front panel and sound through the speakers. So we booted up ProTools and commenced a new session:

We created an audio track to arm and record onto:

... and saved the as yet empty track into an appropriate folder and hard drive (Temp):

After arming the track we were getting a level through on the indicator for track one in ProTools. It wasn't that loud - regardless of what we tweaked on the desk - and I began to think later that maybe the problem was a setting in ProTools and we were looking in the wrong place for our gain theif. Regardless, we recorded a few seconds to check all else was behaving correctly:

We had an audio file! As you can see, not much level. We had the levels on the desk (gain for channel 1) fairly loud for not much of a result and were trying to solve the problem by tweaking the desk. We debated whether it could be the mic, so we swapped for another. An improvement, but I would have expected a lot more volume through to the software. Never really solved that problem on the day, but it has been an excellent exercise, as I have been trying to figure the cause of our lack of volume ever since. We neutralised the desk, performed the reverse of our power up procedure and blended into the day.

To record as hot as possible it would be nice to think you could possibly get burnt if you're not watchful (isn't that part of the excitement?), not be pushing things (namely the desk) to the limit just to get an acceptable signal. I intend to devote some time this week to running through this exercise again and finding out why we got such meagre gain.