Have you ever had the situation where you've got a really cool session going on at home, and then you get called out on the road? All of a sudden you're taken out of your project, and everything is on hold until you get back. Major Drag. It just so happens that I'm in the middle of this right now. I sit here at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport waiting to get to Nashville for a couple of gig dates there.

And yes, I am in the middle of a couple of very happening projects at the moment.

While I'm sure that the trip will be great & present many opportunities for me, I'M STILL NOT IN THE STUDIO!!!

So what's a musician to do?

My answer was the laptop. On the PC side, they're pretty cost effective and work well, and on the Mac side they're a little more expensive, but I still like them for multimedia, and audio applications.

On a Mac 1Ghz Powerbook G4 with 1GB of ram and a Superdrive (CD & DVD burning), I can still get a ton of work done.

So here's how to set-up for all of this:

It doesn't matter if you own a computer at home, plus a laptop or just a laptop, BACK EVERYTHING UP! If you've been reading the column for a while, you'll already know my acronym SESO (Save Early Save Often). I truly believe in this. So if you have a drive that will burn to DVD, make a backup set of discs to take with you. Then if for some unknown reason your files get erased, or corrupted for some reason, you have your last backup from home at least to go back to.

Then load the files from the DVD(s) to your laptop.

This gets you ready to work AND double-checks those backups to make sure they're good. Keep in mind that you have to have the same software on both computers, or at least compatible software. Also you'll need to take with you whatever licenses that will be necessary to use the software. Whether that's going to be a USB Dongle, like Emagic Logic & Cubase types, or maybe an M-box for Digidesign tracks.

Take the install discs for any software that may time out & ask you for the install disc. Better safe than sorry. If you're really happy with using a trackball, take it with you. I personally don't really dig using laptop track areas, or little eraser mice. I like my big ol' trackball. Also a track ball doesn't need as much real estate as a mouse. On the plane you can usually have it on the tray, armrest, or on your thigh. In the hotel, it's nice to have the ease of using the trackball & the custom button clicks you may have programmed into it for speed and ease of use. Headphones travel well, and can be fairly low profile as far as packing goes. Small travel speakers are an option as well. See what works best for you.

Now let's approach the session part of this.

Think of how many parts of the session really don't need a killer playback system. You can organize files, clean up & delete unused tracks, make many producer type decisions on what takes you like of different tracks of the song (I tend to keep lots of takes) and clean up tracks as far as deleting unused areas of the track. Hand/fret noises, coughs, all kinds of incidental bits that are only going to serve in clouding up my mix.

You can always use strip silence (a feature in many digital audio programs to automatically get rid of sound below an assignable threshold), or a plug in noise gate for this, but you may not want to chew up DSP if you don't have to, and besides, in a plane or in a hotel. you've got the time! You don't need to have great fidelity, you just need to hear when the music comes in & goes away. If there are questionable areas, you can save those for when you get back home.
You can make rough mixes to listen to. Mostly, you could do this for studying the structure of the song. Does it really need that last modulation? Should the solo section be longer? That kind of stuff.

Let's not forget about optimizing files, and other maintenance items.

What if we want to record new things? If you normally go through a guitar processor direct to digital, perhaps the path is pretty much the same in the hotel room. Maybe you use virtual synths.

There are many boxes on the marketplace, as far as small interfaces go. I brought my half rack space interface. It has mic inputs, line inputs, MIDI inputs, MIDI outputs, headphone outs, and digital inputs & outputs. And it fits in my computer bag with my laptop. If you put a small keyboard with your checked bags, you could write parts w/ internal synth sounds all day in the hotel room. If you had your guitar rig, or processor with you, you could track guitar parts. If you wanted to keep them, fine. At a minimum though, you could get the ideas down and try different arrangements before re-tracking the parts when you got back home.

So as you can see, you're not as dead in the water as it would seem. You can get a ton of work done, and even be able to back the changes up to DVD to bring back home.

I'm actually using this trip to kill two birds with one stone. I was going to have to fly a bassist out from Nashville to Los Angeles for one of the projects. Now I can go to a local studio, hook a firewire interface up & track him in Nashville. If I really like the interface I use, I could even just have him drop by the hotel & track it in the room going direct. So I do my guitar gigs AND get tracks done for the record. How cool is that?!!

Many of us have to travel, and I think it's pretty cool that for once (at least in a studio sense), you CAN take it with you!

Phil
makintrax@philgates.com
www.philgates.com