As Will and I have mentioned before, we’ve used Cakewalk Sonar exclusively for our mixing and mastering needs. We’ve spent nearly as many hours working on mixes that had needed improvement as we have fine tuning our musical skills. Additionally, we’ve become modestly familiar with some of the other popular Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) out there and have concluded that Sonar has strengths that many of its competitors lack. What Will and I had not ever experienced was working with the granddaddy of them all – Pro Tools.
So how did we get to try our hands at this recording wonder tool? About a week or two ago our drummer Jason heard from a good buddy of his at Sweetwater that there was a special deal on Pro Tools that rarely comes up. The package was for Pro Tools V7.0, a Digi 002Rack, the Digi interface and plugins. Normally this mixing monstrosity would sell for a whopping $3k, but Jason (our drummer) had the opportunity to pick it up for about half that. Talk about a sweet deal. Unfortunately Jason, like most musicians was short some cash. Fortunately his dad agreed to help him pay for it even though his parents didn’t normally fund Jason’s music career. Both Jason and his dad realized the opportunity to really get some great recordings of Jason’s and his bands’ music.
Now I have to admit that when Jason brought the boxes down to Koos the first night I was impressed immediately with the Digi interface. I could imagine what that could mean for improving the ease of use for any DAW software. I was also equally taken in by the Digi 002 Rack which I had heard had exceptional preamps. What I was skeptical of was the software itself. How did ProTools stack up against Sonar? Admittedly I hang out in the Sonar forum and I’m a bit biased. I’ve heard complaints that ProTools can be difficult to use, unwielding, and after all who likes dongles? Well Friday night Jason and the rest of XONE really had the chance to fire this puppy up. And after setting up the band (barely even looked at the manual – which by the way is far more succinct and easy to use than Cakewalk’s), checking a few levels and getting familiar with the interface we were up and recording some amazing sounds. Will and I were absolutely floored by the recording quality of the 24 bit at 44.1 (we didn’t have enough ram to run at 88) and we gazed over the natural sound of it. Our recordings actually sounded like what we were playing in the room. And as far as interface, it was classically easy to use and some features definitely were better than Cakewalk, while others were pretty close. I’m sure that once we have more familiarity with it, the process will only get easier.
For the coup d’etat, we pulled in some of the ProTools plugins that Jason had received with the package. Let me tell you right now, that the standard reverb, delay, and compression floored the Sonitus (Cakewalk plugins) and even the Sony Sound Forge plugins were stomped. I still can’t get over how easy to use and natural sounding the compression is. Yes!! And the granddaddy of them all was when we threw on the bomb factory mastering compression to the final mix. I think I wet myself. It sounded better than any of the mastering compression tools Will and I have heard including the L2 (Waves) which we demoed.
Needless to say, if there were any doubt before about what DAW we were going to utilize for our next album all doubt has been removed. My only criticism of the unit at this point is that I hate dongles. Well, for sound like this I can live with the dongle!
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