Grammy winning CD edited and mixed entirely within SAW

[Mogers]

Hi all

Very pleased to bring some good news - a CD that I edited and mixed entirely within SAW Studio has won a Grammy :D

Best Classical Contemporary Composition
Jennifer Higdon - Percussion Concerto
Performed by Colin Currie and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop
Recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall, London, UK
http://londonphilharmonic.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/grammy-award-higdon-percussion-concerto/

The recording of the rehearsals and concert was made by Simon Hancock of BBC Radio 3 - capturing 48 mics onto a Pyramix system in their mobile truck. I then got the 48-track 48kHz PMF audio files, and used Pyramix Native to convert them to 48 mono BWAV files for loading into SAW Studio (using Rail's BWF Helper to get them in the right place).

All the editing and mixing was done in SAW - and the only external plugins I recall using were Bob's Leveliser and Reverb, and the Sonoris Linear Phase EQ. Because the mic positions in the Festival Hall were less than ideal (no fault of the BBC - just the way it was, with limited rigging time and almost everything being slung), I ended up making lots of use not only of automated faders but also of automated keyed and linked dynamics to help dig out the string sound from what would otherwise have been an overwhelmingly percussion-heavy balance. That I was able to do this whilst still maintaining most of the extreme dynamics of the original performance is in no small part due to Bob's great mixer/automation design. SAW Studio is by far my favourite mixing environment.

I mixed all the source takes (rehearsals and concert) to 2-channel 48kHz 24-bit WAVs, and then edited these together in another EDL. The JMS Batch File Generator was used to make these mix WAVs, so that I could easily go back and revise the mix of a take if the edit revealed it to be necessary. Whilst I could have done a multitrack edit directly in my mix EDL, I prefer working this way for classical productions as I find classical-style multitrack editing in SAW to be somewhat cumbersome, with lots more keystrokes and fiddling around than when doing regular 2-track editing (Pyramix is my DAW of choice for this kind of work these days).

The final 2-track edit was then sample-rate converted in SAW to a 24-bit 44.1kHz file and delivered to my colleagues at Floating Earth, who did the compilation and mastering (the concerto only makes up part of the complete CD). They must have been happy with the output from SAW as they did nothing other than dither to the final 16-bit CD master.

So big thanks and credit once again to Bob for creating and sharing with us such a fabulous set of tools :)

And I'd recommend a listen - it's a great piece, and Colin Currie is a seriously fine player (I'm a percussionist too, and I'm in awe...)

cheers
Mark

[Bob L]

Good news... and congartulations are in order.

I'm happy to have SAWStudio be a part of your success story.

Bob L

[Mark Stebbeds]

Kudos Mark, on a great piece of work.

I was nominated a few years back for "best engineered recording, non-classical". Didn't win but it's a great feeling knowing that your peers respected your work.

I didn't vote in the classical category this year, because we are only allowed to select 8 out of the many (in addition to the "general"...best record, etc.), but I really appreciate NARAS' partnership with iTunes ....to allow voting members a place to listen to everything nominated (except a few things that had licensing issues). It levels the playing field in the "new Media" era, where you can't hear new releases on the radio. You can actually listen to the nominated music, and make an honest decision ....as opposed to guessing, or voting for a name.

Once again ...congratulations.

Mark

[mikebuzz2]

GOOD JOB !!!!
Great to see somebody getting some accolades !!! :D

Now we just need a " GRAMMY " button BOB :eek:

[TotalSonic]

Congratulations Mark!

Best regards,
Steve Berson

[CurtZHP]

SAW-Weet!!

:D

[Ian Alexander]

Jennifer Higdon is wonderful. I've sung for a couple of her chorus pieces and enjoyed the music and her encouragement. Congrats on the Grammy!

[Rabbit]

That's fantastic news Mark. Congratulations !

:)

[Oz Nimbus]

Congratulations!

[Himhui]

Congratulations!

Great Sounding.....:)

[Marvin]

Congratulations, sounds great!!

marvin

[Bruce Callaway]

Brilliant work and congratulations....

[Mogers]

Many thanks to everyone for your very kind comments - as Mark Stebbeds says, it's a great feeling knowing that your peers respect your work :)

Mark

[JonathanT]

Well done Mark

The clip sounds great, I'll have to buy the CD for the full experience!

Regards

Jonathan

[ffarrell]

Very well done, Mark

fvf

[Craig Allen]

Congratulations! Excellent job!

[DavidandMary]

Congrats Mark!:)

[Sean McCoy]

Beautiful. Congrats!

[mako]

Great stuff Mark - well done.

cheers mako

[Grekim]

Very exciting! Thanks for sharing!

[bcorkery]

Mark,

Powerful stuff there! Congratulations and thank you for sharing!

[MikeDee]

Excellent work, Mark! Gr8 sound...even on cheap computer speakers, I could still feel the vibe.

Congratulations! :)

[Richard Rupert]

Terrific! Hat's off to you! :)

[Trackzilla]

Excellent work!

[Angie]

Really wonderful!

[dragoodan]

First off, Congratulations! I can only imagine what wonderful news that must be :D

Pyramix DAW? The very first time I have heard about it, I was hoping you might write a small personal review or comment on why it works for you instead of the other more commercial ones, atm I am working with Sonar but am always in search for something better.

Thanks!!

[averombri]

Congratulations!

[Grekim]

First off, Congratulations! I can only imagine what wonderful news that must be :D

Pyramix DAW? The very first time I have heard about it, I was hoping you might write a small personal review or comment on why it works for you instead of the other more commercial ones, atm I am working with Sonar but am always in search for something better.

Thanks!!

In terms of software, it's the mixing software that matters here and deserves the praise.

[Mogers]

In terms of software, it's the mixing software that matters here and deserves the praise.

You're absolutely right - it's SAW's mixing that really made the difference here, and Bob deserves the praise. It was a live performance, with a few (very few) patches from the rehearsals, so there wasn't an awful lot of editing.

Regarding Pyramix, I prefer it for most of my classical editing projects for three key reasons. In the classical world (which is fairly small), virtually everyone uses one of three DAWs - Pyramix, Sequoia or SADiE. All of these systems have the features described below, which were invented by Sonic Solutions in the late 80s/early 90s. In those days, virtually the entire classical world used Sonic Solutions, but for various reasons they sort of gave up on the market, and the others took over. Which system one uses today is mainly a matter of personal preference, though Pyramix (in its Native version) has by far the cheapest entry point.

These three key features are now thoroughly well established, tested and proven. Frankly, nobody has thought of a better way to make the process of classical music editing less painful.

(1) Source-Destination editing (a.k.a. the 3- or 4-point editing model) - think of this as like having two (or more) SAW multitrack windows open at the same time. Your source takes are in the Source timeline(s), and you then copy the music section by section into the Destination timeline to create the edited piece. Whichever timeline has the focus is the one that plays when you hit the spacebar. You select edit points by placing "gates" - usually by hitting the [ or ] keys. You select In and Out points in the source to mark the piece you want, and In and (optionally) Out in the destination to show where you want it to go. The joy of this system is particularly apparent when it comes to re-edits (e.g. after the artist has heard the first edited version and come back with requests for changes). Just select the four points for a new patch section, hit whatever the "Do Edit" key is, and the new take gets slotted into place, with all the subsequent stuff on the destination timeline sliding either left or right (known as "rippling") to compensate for any difference in the durations.

(2) Multitrack editing which involves no more effort than single track editing - by having the ability to group "regions" (in SAW-speak) vertically, then whatever gets done to one gets done to all - without a single extra keystroke. So when you do the equivalent of a K cut, it creates two vertical groups - one to the left of the cursor and one to the right. When you grab a region to move it, all its fellow regions on other tracks move too. Everything stays in sync by default - effort is only required for those very rare occasions when you want to slip sync on purpose.

(3) A comprehensive fade editor - the ability to tweak virtually every aspect of a crossfade has, rightly or wrongly, become ever more important in the classical field. Artists and producers know what can be done and expect it to be done. Whilst almost all this kind of thing can be done in SAW, it's just more fiddly, and having a central place where all aspects of a crossfade can be adjusted and auditioned makes the workflow much quicker. For example, many classical edits require overlaps that in SAW would need the regions to be laid on separate tracks. That's fine for stereo, but a pain for multitrack. A very common and efficient way of working is to do a rapid rough edit of a whole piece (stabbing the [ and ] keys, hitting the "Do Edit" key, don't even bother to listen to it, move on to the next edit point and repeat), and then open the fade editor and work your way through each edit making it sound nice - knowing that the ripple functionality mentioned earlier means that whatever you do to your current edit won't affect prior or subsequent edits/automation etc in any way. Here (http://www.takelog.com/Pyramix/PyramixFadeEditor.jpg) is an example of the Pyramix fade editor - as you can see, there's a lot to tweak!

So these are key reasons why I (and pretty much everyone else in classical music) use one of these three systems. I really love working in SAW - I love its feel, its solidity, its sound - and my absolutely ideal DAW would be SAW with these three aspects incorporated. But I understand that they are niche requirements, and that the market is small, and that Bob is an incredibly busy, talented, committed and generous guy with other priorities, and that I'll just have to dream on!

Sorry to have rambled on... and thank you once again to everyone for your words of encouragement... I'm still grinning :D

cheers
Mark

[Bob L]

Nicely described... I put the ideas on the list.

Bob L

[Mogers]

That's great Bob - thank you :)

If/when you decide to venture down this path, do feel free to get in touch. I'd be very happy to throw some ideas around on how these things could be included in SAW Studio.

cheers
Mark