We had a solid studio night last night.  Mike and I convened to do some recording and to install the new Pro Tools 003 rig.

Before we did anything hardware-related, we recorded one last track on the old Digi 001: the bass track for “Lose U Baby”.  It’s a fun tune that I posted a demo of some time ago. We had a great drum session with Nashville drummer Jim Evans just before Christmas, so we are finally building the song with real parts.

Mike ran through a few takes, which we saved on separate playlists for the track.  We took the best one and created a master playlist, and then we fixed any timing issues by comping from the various playlists or punching in to clean things up.  And BAM, there’s the bass track.

Then we got down to the real nitty-gritty.  We unplugged most of the connections to the big rolling rack that houses preamps, patch bays, synth modules and more.  It’s generally a big mess of cable spaghetti back there, and I lucked out in that Mike was the one disconnecting and reconnecting stuff.  I was in front of the rack moving gear into position.

After a couple hours we had everything successfully re-racked and patched, and we fired up Pro Tools 8 on the Mac (which I had installed earlier).  I copied over a session from the old Pro Tools computer and fired it up.  Worked like a charm!

So we’ve moved into the new millennium, gear-wise.  We’re planning to put the old computer into a rack-mount case and house it and the Digi 001 in a portable rack that we can bring to remote locations as necessary.  And we’re excited that we can finally use some new virtual instruments and updated capabilities to take things to a whole new level of drunkdudery.

More to come…