Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, after years of frustration setting gain levels, I have discovered a protools plugin that returns me to a metering format that I understand intuitively and can use even when I’m using one hand to choose patches and the other to play riffs – yes, the old school analog VU meter has come to pro tools in a *excellent* emulation by Klangheim

You can’t tell me this doesn’t just warm the cockles of your heart:

The emulation is extremely faithful, although to get the behavior of the meters of my youth I had to yank the rise time down to 150ms. (And yes, you can tweak the rise, overshoot, and fall times)

Because it’s a plugin that goes into a protools plugin slot, you can also easily do things like sticking a meter both before and after a compressor – and with four skins to choose from, you can easily tell them apart. When tweaking a vocal that won’t sit right in the mix this can be a real timesaver. It doesn’t appear to use any CPU to speak of. As a side bonus, when doing faster than realtime bouncing, the peak lights still work, so you get a nice sanity check if you put it across the master fader on bounce.

I would give this my ‘best plugin under $10’ prize.

So, as so often happens after I’ve had it shut down for a while, I decided to fire up the studio and of course various breakers need reset, equipment doesn’t want to talk to other equipment, etc.. so I do a test track to make sure everything is working. This one is extra 80s movie soundtrack so I thought I’d share it with you all

http://sheer.us/stuff/2015/80sMovieSoundtrack.mp3

So, for those of you who remember Tory from, among other things, Mischief Committee, we have been getting together and doing some tracking.

Here, for your listening pleasure:

track one
track two

In other news, I upgraded the virtual host that serves qm, so we again have disk space (yay!) and memory (double yay!). We actually have a fair amount of spare capacity on that machine now, which is a very nice feeling. QM and Brigandine both got upgraded to all-SSD operation, we got more disk for storing backups, and in general things were improved all around.

Luna continues to drive me nuts, she’s quite a furry little ball of energy. But, I love her.

And I continue to work on myself, as always.