Every now and then, the “glamourous” life of an audio engineer is disrupted by something slightly on the mundane side – it’s called printing. Basically, even though the technology lets us do wonderful things, like have lots of Instrument Plug-ins, it’s generally a safer option to print these as audio files. Some computers (like mine) can’t really stand having lots of different instruments open all at once. Reason and Pro Tools is a great combination when they are Rewired, but occasionally the computer spacks out. Where possible, I actually do prefer to keep things Rewired, but sometimes I am forced to make printing a necessity.

Printing files = coffee + patience
Printing files = coffee + patience

So I locked myself in the C24 Room at AIM and set about recording all the Reason sounds for Change To Survive. I spent a while tweaking sounds, and then laying them on to Pro Tools. On some sounds, I ditched the Reason sound altogether and imported the MIDI file from Reason into Logic. The Harpsichord track was an example of this. In fact I layered 2 different harpsichord sounds from Logic.

The Big Strings track was also another one where I gave up on the Reason sound and went looking for alternatives inside Logic. It was while I was doing this that I came upon an interesting idea. I accidentally made the Big Strings track play as a Church Organ and it sounded really, really cool. I thought it would be great to get a real church organ on this…and of course it can. St Aloysius College in Milsons Point has got one!! So a quick text to both Cameron and Antonia and the thing was organised. Cam would organise access and Antonia would play. I had to get a score to her, so I quickly rattled one off in Pro Tools. This is another cool feature of Pro Tools 8.

Using the Score Editor I quickly ran one off, emailed as a PDF to Antonia and done.