Morph Productions

**** UPDATE**** I originally did this blog posting December, 2010.  My 2 tb drive recently died and I decided to try a 3 tb drive in the time capsule to get even more space.  Of course the net and the boards all have a lot of contradictory information but enough people said that the WD Green 3tb drive ( WD30EZRX )  worked fine.  I bought the boxed/retail kit version and had no problems.  You can scroll down to the bottom for a link to one on amazon.com).  Anyway, enjoy the post! Any business that has client's projects stored on it's hard drive should have a few different backup systems for said files. Hard drives do eventually fail and while there's ways to get files back those methods are expensive and not guaranteed. Hard drive space is so cheap now that there really is no excuse not to have multiple backups of your files. A few years ago Apple came out with Time Machine and it's hardware counterpart, the Time Capsule . Time Machine is Appl...

Since Logic Pro has switched to 64 bit people have been asking me about 24/32/64 bit audio. I'm going to make this 24/32/64 bit thing a lot easier for you by giving you a bit of an explanation. When Logic is saying that it can run in 32/64 bit mode they're referring to the bit rate the program is running and processing at, not what your audio is recording at. Those are two separate things. You will still be recording your audio at 24 bit and running logic in either 32 bit or 64 bit mode. The advantage of 64 bit is that Logic will now be able to access all the ram available that you have in your system. In a 32 bit system a program can only access about 4 gigs of ram (even if you have 16 gigs, it won't be using more than 4). This doesn't sound bad for most programs but when you consider that all the plugins running within Logic are included in that 4 gigs you can see how you could run out pretty quickly! I switched over to 64 bit and am pretty happy overall. Th...

Just made a modern take on the public domain christmas song "Joy To The World" in the hopes of getting it licensed to TV/Film. If you hit this post looking for something like that you can go here: Ashton Price Composer Page It's track number 4 on the flash mp3 player. It's a dancy fun remake that I think would fit in a lot of different productions. If you're interested feel free to email me here: ashton@Morphproductions.com Catch me on the sites:

I was just updating some plugins and was shocked when one of them, East/West's Play engine disappeared after an update. After a moment of panic I remembered how 32 bit plugins can't be authorized while Logic is in 64 bit mode. To get it to show up again I simply loaded Logic in 32 bit mode and then closed and reloaded in 64 bit mode, presto! I guess we'll wait and see when all these plugin makers start switching their plugs to 64 bit mode. Logic's 32 bit bridge is not as light on the CPU as Apple claims. Hats of to Native Instruments for their conversion of Guitar Rig 4 to 64 bit mode. They're my first plugin (out of many!) to switch to 64 bit. From what I understand Melodyne will be later in October or early November. I'm sure Waves and East/West will end up being last on the list... Here's some links for you: Catch me on the sites:

If you do business in the states you may have heard that 30% of your money must be withheld by law for tax reasons. The way around this is getting an ITIN number which basically tells the companies in the states that you're dealing with that you are exempt from US income taxes. I just went through this process recently (twice) and I figured I'd put a blog posting with detailed instructions so all my fellow Canadian musicians will be able to get theirs a lot easier than I got mine. These instructions probably apply to Canadians who are not musicians as well but I'll let you decide that for yourselves. Please note I am not an accountant or tax lawyer so I'm not going to be held responsible if there is anything here that is incorrect. Use this as a guide and do your own homework! STEP 1 You must get your a photocopy of your passport notarized at the U.S. Consulate. You can book an appointment here (this is the Toronto consulate): https://evisaforms.state.gov/ac...

Many people are unsure of the separate roles a producer and engineer play in the recording process. While a lot of times in modern recordings these roles have been blended together it's still good to know what the different roles do. An engineer handles the more technical aspects of the recording process such as mic and mic placement, what type of processing (eqs, compressors and reverb/delay) to apply to the sound. The producer is in charge of the big picture and making sure that the sounds the engineer are using work for the production he/she is trying to create. A good way to describe this in very simple terms is that the producer can say "I'm looking for a U2 "Streets Have No Name" guitar sound" and the engineer figures out the best way to technically achieve that. The producer comes up with the idea of what he/she wants to hear and it's the engineers job to do it. It's important to note that the producer is in charge of all the pieces ...

Ever since I've been using Logic 9 I've been getting "Low Memory Errors" every so often which is pretty typical of Logic 9 so I hear. More disturbing though is Logic sometimes gives me an error message saying something like "The document "x" be saved". Not too cool if you haven't saved in a while! A quick way out of this mess is to get rid of all your melodyne plugins (you can't just bypass them, you have to get rid of them) and save the file as something else. This seems to work well. I have a feeling it's more a logic problem than Melodyne but hopefully they fix this issue. If you're not using Melodyne and you have that problem just get rid of whatever memory hogging plugins you're using, usually big audio sample instrument plugins like the ones that East/West makes. Catch me on the sites:

Just a little tip about the API 512c preamp. I've been using one for about 10 years now inside an API Lunchbox. It's my "go to" preamp to record vocals alongside my Neumann u87. The API 512c has a notorious hot output which makes you have to lower your pre level (there's no output level on this preamp). Unfortunately this means you can't drive the transformer in the pre as hard as you'd like. The work around for this is to get some sort of attenuator. Based on a recommendation I got a Shure A15AS attenuator. The advantage of this one is that it's adjustable in 5db increments (-15db to -25db). You can get a good price on one of these units here: This thing is always attached to my 512c unless I'm recording a professional voice over or audio book where I want as clean a sound as possible. It's nice having the extra control and the option of more sounds from the API 512c that this little device allows. Morph Productions - Toro...