Medieval Acoustic Dream

One cool thing about playing in Europe for extended periods is that you often have opportunity to hook up with musicians who work in genre's different than your own. Back in the land of the big PX there are so many players doing the same thing you are that one tends to forget there is anything else outside your little Alt-Country/Metal/Hip-Hop/Feminist Folk scene. I have just finished a project with an extroardinary Dutch composer & guitarist named Ian Boelens.

While he is adept at many acoustic fingerstyle techniques, this project was a full CD of his own Celtic and Medieval flavored compositions. These were recorded at his studio near Amsterdam and then we spent a week here at JennyCo Studios FR mixing and mastering. This kind of thing is done regularly these days as it is normally quite easy to record on, say, Pro-Tools, and then carry or e-mail session or .WAV files to someone elses platform, say... Cubase. Well, I have for many years been using the Roland platform.

Starting with a VS-1680 and more recently moving up to the flagship VS-2480HD workstation.
Yes, I know all the pros & cons of PC based vs. standalone workstations. This doesn't have nearly the detailed editing capabilties or the sheer number of plug-ins available but it does have a few and they're really good ones. I also don't need an external controller or mixer in order to mix "out of the box" (because it IS a controller with full flying faders automation), or record without latency. There simply is none. You can even use it as a very powerful control surface for a number of popular programs like Cubase, Pro-Tools, etc. The main thing is it's totally portable, sturdy and reliable. I have had only two crashes in nearly seven years and they were both my fault. Just try getting through even one session on a Mac or PC without one sad- face or blue screen of death. You can tell by now that I love this platform especially since you can now import and export .WAV files for a certain amount of cross-platform comptibility. But!, (everybody's got a big but) that doesn't mean it's easy to do so and this now is my only gripe with this otherwise great machine.


All this has come home to roost for this project for which I had to import 15 .wav files recorded on Ian's Mac/Logic set-up. One-At-A-Time.
The actual mixing, EQ'ing, reverb, all that went great, but then if you want to export the finished product for instance to CD Architect or some other platform you have to do it again in the opposite direction. This system was meant to allow one to record, mix, master and burn the final CD all on one machine which it does just great, but the ability to import/export non-Roland projects is really only a convenience feature.

Just so you don't think I'm not too "with it" as the kids say, I do, in fact, use programs such as Nuendo, Soundforge, CD Architect and others for certain things and as these get more face time I think the Roland will come in real handy as a control surface and master clock.

Anyway it all got done, but it was just very time-consuming and only later did I discover during some online research and manual diving that the VS does actually offer more elegant methods to accomplish what we did. So another lesson learned. Chief of which is one I have always known but tend to forget in my desire to bull through: RTFM or Read The F*****g Manual.

And the Music? Absolutely stunning! Twelve gorgeous sound poems played with a skill and depth of feeling that often brings tears. I hope to share some bits as soon as all the copyright stuff is cool.

So long,
Philbillie