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The Road to Recording
Dec. 1st, 2022 06:13 pmWhen K announced that she wanted to learn how to run things in the recording studio, my first assumption was that I needed to show her how to do this in a sane fashion with just one person down there recording themselves. This was wrong, but that's where I started from.
One of the absolutely critical items in getting this to work is having a remote control for Cubase so that you can push the start button from inside the recording booth. I have the Cubase IC Pro app for my iPad that allowed for just this.
If I could find where it had gotten to.
After a fair amount of searching, the iPad turned up on my desk. Almost completely discharged. With the charger missing. Great. I borrowed a charger from K, topped off the charge on the device, and went to Chambanacon. When I got back, the iPad was fully charged.
And several OS updates behind. Ok, let's download and install those. This will later prove to be a nearly fatal mistake for the process, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Last night after dinner, we went down to the studio. It turned out that I could do the engineering, since what K wanted to do was to sing to a karaoke track for a school project she was working on, but I wanted to show how to run the booth solo, so I did want to get the remote control working. But I could do that in a few minutes. The first thing to do was to get that karaoke track off of YouTube and into Cubase.
This is easy to do with ClipGrab, a program that I have on the studio computer.
Um, no. A program that I have on the *old* studio computer. I hadn't gotten around to loading it here. Easy enough to fix though. Let's just download that and install it.
Why is my antivirus software quarantining the ClipGrab installer?
It turns out that ClipGrab, like many freeware utilities, gets paid by trying to convince you to install a few other products along with it. You can decline to install them, but because those installers are present, my antivirus software has a fit.
After messing around with it for a bit, I temporarily disabled the real-time virus protection function of my software so that I could download and install ClipGrab in peace. Having done so, it was now a trivial exercise to get an MP3 from YouTube and import the stereo track into Cubase.
We had already fired up the recording interface, the speakers, and the headphone amp. The last thing to do was to pull up the Cubase IC Pro app and show how you can use it to remote control things from the booth.
The app came up in portrait mode, wouldn't rotate, and wouldn't let me enter the computer's IP address. That's not what it did the last time that I used it. I went to the App Store, looking for an update and was told that the software was not available in my country/region.
Apparently, the old software was not compatible with the new iOS on the iPad. Further, although there is a lovely webpage for the app on Steinberg's web page, the app has not been updated in years and can best be described as abandon-ware. Oh, joy.
I really need that remote control function, because I want to be able to record myself in the booth. Time for more research, which explained that the free Avid Control app would work with Cubase and provide the functionality that I needed. I downloaded it and installed it and started fighting with it, trying to get it to talk to my Cubase installation.
This was about the time that Julie showed up wanting help with her phone, because Spotify had misbehaved, she had uninstalled it, and now the Play Store wouldn't let her *reinstall* Spotify, which was very, very bad, since she wanted to use it. I told K to go upstairs and spent some time messing with Julie's phone, which she eventually took away from me before I could try several of the solutions that were suggested on line, because Julie does not trust me not to delete things from her phone in this process.
Eventually, I got Avid Control working with Cubase and called K down to record. We did one take and then another, the second being acceptable to K. I then spent a bit of time throwing plugins at the vocal track and the mixdown track until I was satisfied with the way it sounded. I then showed K how to render the mix as an MP3, emailed it to her, and declared victory.
Then I downloaded and installed my update to Melodyne and to the iLok software.
Whee!
The track sounds good...
One of the absolutely critical items in getting this to work is having a remote control for Cubase so that you can push the start button from inside the recording booth. I have the Cubase IC Pro app for my iPad that allowed for just this.
If I could find where it had gotten to.
After a fair amount of searching, the iPad turned up on my desk. Almost completely discharged. With the charger missing. Great. I borrowed a charger from K, topped off the charge on the device, and went to Chambanacon. When I got back, the iPad was fully charged.
And several OS updates behind. Ok, let's download and install those. This will later prove to be a nearly fatal mistake for the process, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Last night after dinner, we went down to the studio. It turned out that I could do the engineering, since what K wanted to do was to sing to a karaoke track for a school project she was working on, but I wanted to show how to run the booth solo, so I did want to get the remote control working. But I could do that in a few minutes. The first thing to do was to get that karaoke track off of YouTube and into Cubase.
This is easy to do with ClipGrab, a program that I have on the studio computer.
Um, no. A program that I have on the *old* studio computer. I hadn't gotten around to loading it here. Easy enough to fix though. Let's just download that and install it.
Why is my antivirus software quarantining the ClipGrab installer?
It turns out that ClipGrab, like many freeware utilities, gets paid by trying to convince you to install a few other products along with it. You can decline to install them, but because those installers are present, my antivirus software has a fit.
After messing around with it for a bit, I temporarily disabled the real-time virus protection function of my software so that I could download and install ClipGrab in peace. Having done so, it was now a trivial exercise to get an MP3 from YouTube and import the stereo track into Cubase.
We had already fired up the recording interface, the speakers, and the headphone amp. The last thing to do was to pull up the Cubase IC Pro app and show how you can use it to remote control things from the booth.
The app came up in portrait mode, wouldn't rotate, and wouldn't let me enter the computer's IP address. That's not what it did the last time that I used it. I went to the App Store, looking for an update and was told that the software was not available in my country/region.
Apparently, the old software was not compatible with the new iOS on the iPad. Further, although there is a lovely webpage for the app on Steinberg's web page, the app has not been updated in years and can best be described as abandon-ware. Oh, joy.
I really need that remote control function, because I want to be able to record myself in the booth. Time for more research, which explained that the free Avid Control app would work with Cubase and provide the functionality that I needed. I downloaded it and installed it and started fighting with it, trying to get it to talk to my Cubase installation.
This was about the time that Julie showed up wanting help with her phone, because Spotify had misbehaved, she had uninstalled it, and now the Play Store wouldn't let her *reinstall* Spotify, which was very, very bad, since she wanted to use it. I told K to go upstairs and spent some time messing with Julie's phone, which she eventually took away from me before I could try several of the solutions that were suggested on line, because Julie does not trust me not to delete things from her phone in this process.
Eventually, I got Avid Control working with Cubase and called K down to record. We did one take and then another, the second being acceptable to K. I then spent a bit of time throwing plugins at the vocal track and the mixdown track until I was satisfied with the way it sounded. I then showed K how to render the mix as an MP3, emailed it to her, and declared victory.
Then I downloaded and installed my update to Melodyne and to the iLok software.
Whee!
The track sounds good...