Brent Daniels

Regen Magazine talks with Brent Daniels about his score for A Lonely Place For Dying, Hednoize, and more in an interview available at:

http://www.regenmag.com/Interviews-270-Brent-Daniels.html

This week I began scoring the feature A Lonely Place For Dying. I'm excited. I'm going to score and mix it in surround, so I needed to upgrade my studio from stereo monitoring to a 5.1 system.

Currently I'm using two JBL LSR4328P speakers as my main monitors. They're networkable via ethernet cables and in a surround setup they can automatically calculate the appropriate delay time for all the speakers relative to the mix position, which is really cool. So I picked up 3 more and the matching subwoofer and a ton of custom cable. (BTW if any of you are looking for one killer guitar cable or a bunch of mic cables or whatever, I've been using Lava Cable, a custom cable shop, for all my cabling needs for the last couple years. Mark Stoddard's got every kind of cable and connector on the planet over there, and runs a business with incredible customer service. My order was a little behind because he was swamped due to the NAMM show and he hooked me up with some free upgrades including overnight shipping to meet my time frame. Highly recommended!)

The room I'm isn't terribly huge, and that sub is going to cause some low end havoc so I sprung for some real treatment, which was long overdue anyway. I ordered a bunch of bass traps from RealTraps, which I should get tomorrow. I have a feeling I'm going to need more, but I'm going to see how it works out with what I ordered first, which is the Starter Kit. I have a hunch I need a second one of those though, as it was designed with only 2 speakers in mind.

I snagged a second audio interface so I wouldn't lose any of my current outputs which are wired into a patchbay for my semimodular synth rig, two more Mackie Control extenders, a bunch of soft synths including Native Instruments Komplete 5/Kore 2 bundle, and a couple cases of Asahi. Okay, that last one's not really studio related, but I have a hard time coming out of Trader Joe's without a bunch of beer. ;)

When Daniel Lenz was here working on my music video with me for the single for ALPFD, we found it hard to get two chairs in front of my rig because I have a one inch thick bamboo chairmat (harvested from sustainable forests, fear not), and it's not wide enough. The place I'm in is a rental and it's carpeted, and I need to be able to roll around my workspace unencumbered, so for a long time I've been unsuccessfully trying to find large laminate chair mats, or parquet would flooring solutions that I didn't have to make myself. Justin Evans came up with a great idea -- portable dance floors! Seriously. Way cheaper ($3 - $5 per square foot), portable, and available in different finishes. And no I will not be using it for its intended purpose, ever.

A couple years ago when I was first designing my room I wanted to pre-visualize my space so I could make sure I could reach everything in my racks with ease. And, frankly, I wanted to make sure it looked cool. I had already one major piece of studio furniture (the desk, an Omnirax Force 40) and was planning on expanding that with a custom-built chassis to support an expanded mixer control surface, keyboard controller, and standard keyboard and mouse (which ended up working out really well), as well as a side rack for out-of-the-box effects processing. I discovered Sketchup, another app acquired by and made free by our future overlords (Google), and was blown away. I was able to reconstruct every element in my studio down to the millimeter. Then I was able to build any piece of gear or furniture in 3D using published dimensions and images from the manufacturer's websites. It worked out exceedingly well. I updated my Sketchup model last week to drop in the center and rear speakers, some of the RealTrap MiniTraps, and the floor mat to check the sizes and placement before I purchased them. If you're building a house, designing a room, or anything at all really, I highly recommend Sketchup. It's really easy to use if you watch the short, included tutorials, and best of all it's free. And except for a couple gear changes in the racks and the absence of detritus in the Sketchup model, it looks almost EXACTLY like my finshed room.

Check out some of the pics output from Sketchup, or better yet, download Sketchup here and download my model and have a look around the room.

UPDATE 02/03/09 It turns outJames over at RealTraps is a Sketchup user as well, and has made components of their traps; he downloaded my Darkmatter model and dropped in the traps I'm getting as part of the Starter Kit in the appropriate places, which will work better than what I've got pictured here. How cool is that? Thanks James! The model has been updated, so if you want some RealTrap components for your own studio model, re-download it.

UPDATE 02/12/09The portable dance floor turned out to be no go on carpet - not enough support. So I cut two pieces of 3/4" MDF into a 6' x 7' subfloor, and put the dance floor on that, and it worked perfectly. My chair rolls around on it smoothly.

Well, after voicing my frustration in a previous blog post about data loss, I got a great deal on firewire 800 Drobo from Newegg: 50 dollars off for using a 1 day PayPal promotion, 50 dollar rebate from Data Robotics, makers of Drobo, and what looks like a standard 50 dollars off from Newegg for a total of $360 bucks.  Killer.
I installed it on Monday, and finally finshed shuttling around several Terabytes of data today.  So far, so good.  I was a little worried about the fans in it, and how loud it would be, since my studio is basically a converted bedroom that functions as the control room and the tracking room, so all the gear is in one spot, and any fans in this room are noise issues.  The Drobo is definitely not any louder than my Mac Pro.  It's for sure quieter, but I can't tell by how much  It's right next to my Mac Pro and when I put my ear down there all I hear is the Mac Pro, but I know the Drobo is making noise, so, it's a win in that category.

It looks beautiful, and the Drobo dashboard app, which comes with it, is a very informative app that also shows you the status of your drives, so remote access monitoring of the lights on the front from the road (echoed in the app) should be a snap.

3 1.5TB drives and 1 TB drive gives me 3.6TB of redundant backup.  1TB of that is reserved for aTime Machine backup on the studio Mac Pro, and the Drobo is formatted for 16TB so I'll be able to grow the volume up from 3.6TB as bigger drives come out without reformatting or hopefully ever shuttling data around again.  Or for at least a very long while.

Eventually, it will hang off my Airport Extreme router via USB as a NAS (network attached storage) with RAID 5-like capabilities, and everyone on my house network (A Mac Pro, Powermac G5 and a Macbook presently) will be backing up to it, with 3 1 TB Time Machine sparse bundles for each Mac (Currently the Airport Extreme limits you to 1 TB for a Time Machine backup if the drive is not directly connected to your computer).

Note that even though the Drobo gives you three chances to replace three dead drives, nothing's perfect, and the Drobo should definitely not be the sole backup solution.  I still have a clone of my studio Mac's boot, dedicated project audio and soft synth library drives in my Mac Pro that are being synced nightly with Chronosync or incrementally updated with Carbon Copy Cloner in the case of the my boot drive.  I'm also using a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) solution, various raw SATA drives triple backing up the most important stuff using the Thermaltake BlackX, and storing them in Weibetech static-free cases.  A couple of these will be stored off-site, in case of fire/flood/theft.

Anyone with massive amounts of precious data, especially any of you audio or film people, should definitely consider a Drobo.  Hell, anyone with any precious data.

Click on the image at the top for a closeup view of my studio desktop and the Drobo Dashboard App.