The RedFaux Transmission

Online Storage for Recording Projects

For the last 6 months my band, Fluorescent Echo, has been busy working on our new EP.  We are in the final stages of mixing and are almost ready to hand our new songs off for mastering.  All of the mixing has been done in my home studio, thus all of the files are on hard drives in my studio.  I didn't think this was a problem until this weekend.  On Labor Day weekend our neighborhood was evacuated due to brush fires which destroyed 25 homes and damaged 30.  Before we knew the exact location of the fire I had to get comfortable with the possibility of losing all the work we had put into the album. Luckily the fire was contained enough on Labor Day and we were allowed to go back home.  However this close call made me realize that I need to think about a better way to store our work.  I spent a few hours today researching free options for cloud storage.  For those of you not familiar with the concept you can catch the Wikipedia definition here. 

I need to find a solution that allows for enough storage to store all of our recording sessions and mixes until I we have finished the album and I can archive them.  I have the following requirements:

1. Space: Audio .wav files can be big.  Currently our album folder is coming in at about 20GB.  
2. Reliability: We want to know that the company hosting the files will still be there tomorrow. 
3. Budget: Free if possible.   
4. File Sharing: we want to be able to make these files available to all band members
5. Security: While this isn't overly sensitive data, I don't necessarily want other people messing with our work in progress.
6. Platform Compatibility: PC and Mac
7. Easy Interface: band members have varying degrees of tech savvy

I have been looking at a number of options... Next we'll look at Amazon Cloud Drive.

Stay tuned... 

- RED

 

Portable Vocal Recording with Fluorescent Echo

 Last week I headed over to Colorado to record some demo vocals for the new album my band, Fluorescent Echo, is working on.  We are in the process of writing and learning the songs currently and recording them as rough demos.  After we have the song demos done I will do the synth and arrangement work and we'll get back together to record the final takes. 

This was an interesting exercise for me as I hadn't ever taken a portable laptop recording kit out with the intention of recording vocals. I have taken DAT rigs and a plethora of mics out for sound effect recording, but never vocals in this type of context. In my suitcase I packed a little Lexicon Omega audio interface box, my BeyerDynamic studio headphones and some cables, which fit nicely in my carry on suitcase. I brought my laptop as well as my Akai LPK25 and Korg NanoKontrol which all fit in the laptop bag. I used Sony Vegas & Ableton Live in this session. My singer provided the microphone which was an MXL V69M Vacuum Tube Condenser mic.   

 We set up to record in a spare bedroom.  I set up the "control booth" in the walkin closet and we set up his microphone in the bedroom.   The bedroom was pretty empty except for a big bed which did alot to help absorb reflections in the room, which was good because we also had a window in the room without any drapes. Next time we might want to set up some sort of diffuser, but for these demo takes the room worked out ok. 

The Lexicon Omega did pretty well except I really was wishing it had onboard audition reverb and compression.  When we record the final vocals we will have to a better solution for this. The session went well and overall I was amazed at the clarity of the MXL tube mic we used.  It sounded amazingly good for being a $400 microphone. 

Stay tuned for announcements in the future about the Fluorescent Echo website and new release.  In the meantime I'll be periodically posting about our happenings in the studio on this blog. 

Over N Out... 

- RED