[ardour-users] A hundred tracks and counting...

[Russell Hanaghan]

On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 08:24, josh wrote:
> Well, I'm in full-swing recording a rock/pop record on Ardour. The 
> system is running FC1 with the ccrma patched kernel, running as root for 
> realtime, and I'm running fluxbox and Ardour with a M-Audio Delta 1010. 
> The rest of the hardware is an AMD Athlon 1400+ with some motherboard 
> that doesn't conflict with the sound hardware, coupla big hard disks and 
> a DVD/CD burner. It's really a pretty generic system that was fast maybe 
> 2-3 years ago.
> 
> So... I've recorded basic tracks for about 13 songs (4-5 drum tracks, 
> bass, scratch vocals and scratch guitars) amounting to about 100-150 
> tracks for those basic tracks, many edited together versions using 
> multiple takes and "punch-ins". Two songs are nearly complete with 
> 20-30+ tracks including heavily doubled electric guitars, hand 
> percussion, etc., and that number is growing every day. We're averaging 
> about 1-3 takes for drum tracks, 8 takes or so for guitar & bass tracks, 
> and one take on percussion and the like. So this is a pretty big track 
> count including all of the overdubs, punch-ins and alternate takes. I 
> expect to "complete" about 11 songs for this project (already putting 
> one on the chopping block) and have an average of about 35 edited linear 
> audio tracks per song.
> 
> With Ardour I have experienced a couple of nuisances, like for example 
> you can't open a project after you have worked on another without first 
> closing Ardour and restarting it, but since Ardour loads in about 5 
> seconds it's not a big deal. I have experienced two real crashes 
> yesterday, one where Ardour&Jack (dunno which one) caused the whole 
> X-window session to freeze for a few minutes and then suddenly returned 
> me to a text login screen, but Jack, envy24, etc., kept running. Second 
> time was working on the same song, similar situation, and Ardour seemed 
> to get into some kind of infinite loop and CTRL+ALT+BKSP killed fluxbox 
> but only after about 5 minutes of waiting. Seems to be if I do things 
> too fast, things get funky. The better I get at using Ardour, the more 
> often I upset it.
> 
> So far I haven't gotten into fades or detailed editing, but will 
> probably begin getting serious about editing later this week. I have not 
> really used effects much because I can't really figure out the busses 
> yet but I just need a touch of reverb occasionally and delay & 
> compressor plugins per-track at this point to continue tracking. Once I 
> get serious about mixing then I will have to get serious about effects 
> routing/bussing etc. and will probably try the version of Ardour that 
> supports vst so I can use blockfish and freeverb. I haven't been able to 
> figure out how to use submix groups either but it's just because I 
> haven't committed a lot of time to it.
> 
> In all, Ardour has been more stable, generally speaking and with the one 
> known common work-aroundable quirk, than Nuendo that I used on Win98SE 
> before. Linux is certainly a lot faster and more stable than Win98SE but 
> frankly I rarely had trouble with Win98SE, my rebellion is mostly due to 
> the high cost of Windows software, or in other words, I wanted to be 
> able to run the same software on multiple computers used by our label in 
> home studios and on laptops without coughing up $1200/ea for licenses.
> 
> Provided I can figure out the bussing, effects routing, submixes, and 
> automation in Ardour for mixdown, and I can get VST effects working well 
> enough to use blockfish at a minimum, then I think Ardour is a real 
> winner. As I write this, I am reminded I need to figure out how to burn 
> a DVD on Linux and make some backups real quick...
> 
> This is not just a "trial" or "hobby" project... we're making a record 
> to release on the Prophets & Poets record label and expect it to be a 
> success. I don't know how many others on this list are really making a 
> serious album on Ardour yet, so I wanted to post. It's been pretty 
> smooth sailing. Can't wait for 1.0. Maybe it'll be around by the time I 
> mix. In fact maybe 2.0 will be out by then. Here's hoping I can move my 
> projects to 1.0 or 2.0 by then. If all goes as it has been then I intend 
> to stick with Ardour for a long time.

I don't have anything quite this large in store but I do have to do a
demo of my own act ASAP for promotional stuff. I want to do a
compilation of about 8 or 10 songs and do a "fade in" and Fade out
medley comprised of the "hooks" of the cover tunes I do. (No one listens
to a whole demo when your selling yourself for gigs, right!?)

I use Sonar and Hypercanvas or Roland sound canvas for my midi backing
and play live guitar(s) and vocals. It should be very straight forward
in terms of "cutting" tracks but I'm good at complicating stuff! :)
I'm faced with the old "sonar XL vs Ardour" deal, mostly because I'm
familiar with the Sonar recording interface and although I've been
utilizing Ardour for some time, it has been mostly for an FX interface
and not recording.
For time purposes I'd prefer to just run my seperate midi box with
Winblows and Sonar and feed stereo of whole midi mix to Ardour box and
then track the guitars and vocals in Ardour and mix down. But I'm
concerned that I will need more control over the individual instruments,
mostly drums and bass and they would be committed already. So the
alternative is to track 2 tracks at a time from the sequencer box to
Ardour to commit each midi instrument to its own track in Ardour. And
thats a lot of time and effort...at least for me.

Now if Ardour had midi track capability, I could just run the sequence
tracks in Ardour and fire an external seq and adjust on the fly for
mixdown!! {hint, hint} :)

R~
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