Alchemist Blog

It is Christmas time, do not fear the Reaper.

Diego Colombo — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:51:56 +0000

Getting ready to go back to Italy. I am planning to record the vocals for a couple of song I wrote with a friend of mine in 1996. While I am taking my precious Rack rig I am not taking with me the Mac Pro, so no Logic. I am planning to use an old Mac Book Pro : the first edition!!

Equipped with Firewire I can use my Focusrite Saffire and my UAD Satellite (yes yes, Studer, Ampex, VOG, BX Digital and Neve channel strip on!!!) and the daw of choice for tracking is … Reaper!

I run a test with exactly same setup with both Reaper and Pro Tools 9 … and reaper is consuming less than half on the CPU PT sucks out of my lil’old mac book. After a full day test I have to say it is pretty stable and I feel happy about running this experiment and record few tunes with my old friends and bands. Pretty sure Reaper will be up for the task and won’t let me down, that would be a pretty smart thing if a 45 pound software with a 8 MB download gives me what PT 9 for only 10 times more does. So far I wasn’t able to get anything stable with PT on any of my 3 macs, quite sad that one is a Mac Pro with only 24 GB of ram and 8 cores ….

Waiting for Clive 2.0

Diego Colombo — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:44:45 +0000

The class at ACM is over. Just 18 months after first steps in ACM me and my friend Mark are scared of “free week end” … We are planning to get some more recording wisdom out of our beloved teacher. The work we have done on the band This Boy has been really interesting, also thanks to the marvellous “French Man” and his great expertise in microphone placement. Let’s see what we get ready for after XMas with the most powerful moustaches in the world (if only the class was sponsored by Old Spice …).

Mid Side Afternoon …

Diego Colombo — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:11:31 +0000

Great session today ACM with Clive and Jean-Gabriel. A day recording drums guitar and bagpipe with M/S technique. Once home wanted to do more, so as Clive says : learn the rules and break them.

So I used a non matched pair of mics and also different preamps and dynamics just to confuse even more. To keep going “custom” I also recorded the six piezo of my ovation with alternate strings between L and R channels with a little eq in there as well. The Mid is a sE 2200a going through a LA 610 with little boost on low shelf and cut in the high shelf filter above 4.5KHz. Of course compression was on!! The Side mic is a sE Z3300a and the preamp a Focusrite liquid. The L/R where going via the Focusrite Octopre with some compression. So every acoustic take was 4 tracks! I just did 4 layers of acoustic so far.

Nice Sunday with coffee…

Diego Colombo — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:32:20 +0000

Working on few new tracks lately, but also “upgrading” some old one, the upgrade to Komplete 8 left some unfinished project less finished. Quite annoying but needs to be done. I am trying to avoid the eternal versioning, want to get stuff done and out but once you start something…. The cool stuff was how I ended up working. Quite a messy setup and not so good sounding room, but cannot complain of the quality of the rig and the size of the session that it can handle.

Can I have a UAD frappuccino?

Diego Colombo — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:45:30 +0000

Just few days ago I had a LA 610 MKII delivered with a nice companion : a UAD 2 DUO. Set it up in tandem with the satellite I already own and … Added a nice UAD powered BX Digital V2 to my plugin collection. At my recording studio class at ACM we started discussing

M/S techniques and how expensive it could be on your desk (all the channels you need to encode/decode the signal) but BX comes in handy in your daw because only 2 mono signal are needed and it will do all the work for you. I am really waiting for next lesson where we will be recording drums and guitar with M/S technique and also using the just awesome Dyn EQ from Brain Worx, .. That is what I really wanted and Fabfilter Pro-C il almost there but not exactly there with what I want to achieve. In the meanwhile I am using the 619 channel strip as a send/return effect. Logic makes it a little weird while Pro Tools, Ableton and Reaper makes it so cole to the “physical world” that is really a piece of cake, would be great to be able to freeze this aux sends .. Should be hard and hope Apple will think about it, instead of destroying the product reputation as they did with Final Cut.

Upgrade week end

Diego Colombo — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:20:23 +0000

Few hours later got full upgrade to Komplete 8, the new drummer instrument is impressive! Also .. a new little one joined the family, a Focusrite Octopre Dynamics. Going to be a cool week end working on Sfulmination 15 years later. So many things to do and try, so little time, need to keep focus and next week back to ACM for the best sounding moustaches ever!

Submission in She Wants Revenge – Take the World Remix Contest

Diego Colombo — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:20:11 +0000

Let’s see if that year at ACM got me some new skills. Really loved using Speakerphone and UAD Moog filter here.

Check out this submission in She Wants Revenge – Take the World Remix Contest on Indaba Music.

Class is over..

Diego Colombo — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:51:33 +0000

And the first year at ACM is gone. This final session mixing with Clive Cherry has been so cool. Waiting for him to be back from holiday and me and Mark will have a good session in his studio. Chad Jackson has been a great guide for music production and Clive has the ‘work with band’ background that really is the last missing piece in my learning path at ACM. I suggest everybody to attend a part time class at least at ACM, really worth it and the people is simply brilliant!

After Abbey Road Studio session ..

Diego Colombo — Sun, 08 May 2011 19:13:20 +0000

This the EP I was working on in the past weeks

After the mastering session with Adam Nunn I have to say that .. I am missing his speakers.

In the field with you .. by Luke J-rard

Diego Colombo — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:45:08 +0000

Almost finishing the polishing of the track I wrote with Luke J-rard, my cousin.

Here it comes

The way we built this track was so quick and easy, it just built itself. We are using the Moog Guitar here to make some nice moving texture underneath.