When things go wrong - the making of the sample library that nearly broke me

[thesteelydane]

I've made a little film about what it was like to make my latest release, because this was a project where absolutely everything went wrong. Not sure if this is the right sub-forum to post it though.

Anyway, if you like it, a thumbs up and a subscribe is always a great help for a small dev like me.

[Guy Rowland]

A fun video to make out of a nightmare! I almost literally feel your pain.

I continue to brazenly make mistakes on a daily basis, some of them are howlers. Two weeks ago I recorded a tiny tiny piece of backing vocals - four words in fact - into Cubase, at the end of a PT vocal record session almost as an afterthought. My usual templates, my mic I can hear working just fine. I remembered to switch the input to the right mic in Cubase. Only when the artist went home did I realise that I recorded ten takes of absolutely nothing. The Cubase routing under the hood was wrong - I'd swapped inputs on the ADAT mic preamps at some stage between the underlying template to the project and right now.

So when you say "don't assume that something that worked yesterday will work today" - so true. Something that worked 10 minutes ago might not work now in a different project (on a different DAW). Totally my fault (obvs).

The other one I felt was not listening to your still small voice. "It'll be fine", that voice lies in the moment. And again it's wretched because there's no-one else to blame.

I was surprised that RX (or anything else) couldn't better fix that noise, but even if it had you'd have ended up with the sustains problem. But as you say, it is lessons learned I guess. Hope your next project will be less painful!

PS - I liked the travelogue side of the video too.

[thesteelydane]

A fun video to make out of a nightmare! I almost literally feel your pain.

I continue to brazenly make mistakes on a daily basis, some of them are howlers. Two weeks ago I recorded a tiny tiny piece of backing vocals - four words in fact - into Cubase, at the end of a PT vocal record session almost as an afterthought. My usual templates, my mic I can hear working just fine. I remembered to switch the input to the right mic in Cubase. Only when the artist went home did I realise that I recorded ten takes of absolutely nothing. The Cubase routing under the hood was wrong - I'd swapped inputs on the ADAT mic preamps at some stage between the underlying template to the project and right now.

So when you say "don't assume that something that worked yesterday will work today" - so true. Something that worked 10 minutes ago might not work now in a different project (on a different DAW). Totally my fault (obvs).

The other one I felt was not listening to your still small voice. "It'll be fine", that voice lies in the moment. And again it's wretched because there's no-one else to blame.

I was surprised that RX (or anything else) couldn't better fix that noise, but even if it had you'd have ended up with the sustains problem. But as you say, it is lessons learned I guess. Hope your next project will be less painful!

PS - I liked the travelogue side of the video too.

Thanks Guy! Yeah, it's all on me, it just seems that misfortune never travels alone. The sustains were recorded on day 1, so they would actually have been fine except for the vibrato, but because they took up the bulk of the day 1 session, in the end there was very little of the original session in the finished product - a very costly series of mistakes, but the bigger problem was how it delayed everything else I had planned this year. I pretty much only make money when I release something new, so it was stressful financially.

I was surprised I couldn't fix it with RX too, and I spent a lot of time tweaking the advanced settings. I could get it fairly clean, but I always ended up losing some of the signal I wanted to keep, or with too many artefacts. The signal to noise ratio was just against me, it being a library focused on soft playing and the mic furthest from the instrument.