I was recently opening a session to do some edits, and as Pro Tools fired up it paused and warned me that my interface was at the wrong sample rate. It’s my personal home studio system, so no one else ever has to use it and wonder what to do when this happens. But the slight pause and the 30 seconds it took to fix made me think of all the things that can happen that hinder – or even stop – the recording process. In my End Rant “Redundancy” (in issue #164), I talked about having extra gear on hand in order to swap out and keep working when recording. That’s important in a professional studio, but there are obstacles everywhere that can stop us from capturing music, and it happens more often than we realize.
I’m lucky that I have an extra room in our house for my home office/studio. I can keep a microphone (and its pop filters) set up on a stand that I can swing over and do voiceovers with. I have cables in a drawer that I can use to plug in bass or guitar when I need to add a part to a song. If I had to set up a mic and stand every time I needed it, I would have to put off doing the work, or even potentially skip capturing an idea. If I had to pull my speakers and interface out of a closet and set them up, I’d likely never work at home or write music here!
Before I swapped out interfaces and bought some new hard drives, every time I went to record in my home setup Pro Tools would take 5 minutes to load a session and then freeze up when I hit play. The only way I could figure out how to get around this was to restart the whole computer, and even that didn’t always do the trick. At times, I’d spend an hour getting the damn thing going! If I had mixing to do, I’d go downstairs in the morning, open Pro Tools, and come back later hoping it might play. Sometimes, I’d put off doing some mix prep at home and waste studio time on it since I knew that system would fire right up. But when I started budgeting in extra minutes just to fight with my system, I knew it was time for a change.