tips....007.

A trick if you cant afford a fancy pc.
a nice sempron good for 40 tracks prolly or more is around 300 buks.
but lets assume you cant afford that. what can you do ??
well, there are several tricks you can use. without spending money.
firstly before doing any serious recording, run a test. lets say granny gave you
her old pc. firstly thank her. i miss my granny !! god bless her up in heaven.
then bring the pc home. and ensure without plugging it in that nothing is clogging up
the fans. if you dont know how to do this get a pc tech to do a general clean up.
maybe a fresh windows install. ensure the hard drive or drives are blank ready for recording.
now lets see what grannys pc will do !!
install ptw and just start recording blank audio tracks. one after the other for 30 seconds.
ALL THE TIME WATCHING THE PTW NOW TIME READOUT LIKE A HAWK.
normally if a system isnt being taxed, the NOW time box will fly by.
as the system is asked to playback more tracks while recording a new one..
youll see at some point the NOW will become "stickier". And not fly by.
It might occur after 20 tracks for example. Make a note of when this "sticky"
condition occurs. This is prolly nearing your max track count. But on some pc's
you might get quite a few more tracks. before grannys pc starts puffing out.
once again you can use monitoring software of various types to monitor load as well as windows own features.
maybe you can improve things by putting in some used memory you get a deal on for ten buks,
provided it works well of course or a new hard drive for 80 buks.
one thing i WOULD ADVISE. DONT try and get by with 128 mb ram.
even on grannys machine i would recommend adding ram. because windows needs ram memory itself.
Lets say you can only get 20 tracks before that NOW box starts getting sticky,
no problem. as before mix the 20 tracks to stereo mix (FILE>>>WAVEFILES>>MERGE)
and then reimport the stereo mix to a new blank seq song session...
and record 19 more tracks.
Another trick to consider on grannys donated machine is to do mostly midi recording.
in contrast with audio tracks. midi represents a light loading on a pc if you use external midi modules for playback.
therefore consider on a really slow machine only useing audio tracks for your final live keeper vocals
and lead instruments. ie....USE MIDI TRACKS AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.

Your first real song recording.
NOT SO QUICK ! youve installed ptw either downloaded from pg or from the sent CD's.
and its a nice smooth install isnt it ?? your eager to record a song.
i understand. youve read the manual and you understand you need to select a track,
arm it as either an audio or midi track before recording. (by clicking on the midi plug for example).

but before you do this i want you to get ORGANISED.
firstly make sure you have read about selecting your input and output
midi and audio drivers. (more detail on this to follow).
then i want you to do some housekeeping tasks that will make your recording life easier.
in the future. create a new folder on your recording hard drive and name it
ptwtemplates. in this folder you will store standard song templates.
for example i write songs in many styles. you might think about a template for each
song style. SO HOW DO YOU CREATE A TEMPLATE AND WHAT IS IT ???
a template does not store any tracks at all. its basically a skeleton of your settings.
which can be used time and again. an example of a template would be if youve given custom names to
tracks one thru 16 for midi tracks and tracks 20 to 48 as audio tracks.
( i normally leave 17 thru 19 as spare midi tracks in case i need them later).
so now please look at the TRACKS window. and assign common names to each track you know
youll need on various sessions. for example kik drum or snare or violin or lead vocal one
or lead vocal two. ie....STEP ONE. decide on your track names.
and i would like you to name one extra track and call it "PUNCH INS TRACK".
(more on this later). Maybe a punch ins track for midi and one for audio.
this is a trick i use to save doing punch ins on tracks ive already recorded if i change my mind.
(moreon this later). I also would like you to think about which tracks should be midi and which audio.
If your mainly a audio person with a bit of midi. maybe you only need to designate a few midi tracks.
In summary think about your track names, set your tracks to be audio or mono or stereo audio.
(read the manual for more info)....then FILE>>>SAVE AS and name the seq template or
some custom name you wish to give it like. rok template or country template or whatever and save it
in the ptwtemplate directory file. the PURPOSE of all this being you dont have to go through sertting up
your track names and settings for each new song. you just OPEN the template.
and there it is. all your settings and names. in summary think about useing this technique for
song organisation. THE NEXT THING BEFORE STARTING RECORDING OF A NEW SONG IS
the following procedure. navigate to that ptwtemplate folder.
in the folder right click with the mouse once again to create new folder.
then rename it to your song name. ie..if the songs called "rok my socks".
call the folder socks or some unique name. this is where youll be storing your song seq consisting
of all your tracks and settings. NOTE...song seq's can get quite big due to the size of audio files.
SO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE LOTS OF DISC SPACE. The next step is load up ptw...
to start working on "socks" or whatever song. FILE>>OPEN and navigate to the
ptwtemplate folder and load in your custom template we previously talked about.
voila !! all your tracks are already named, and all your midi and audio tracks are set up.
neat huh ?? NOW...before starting recording you need to save the template to
the "socks" folder you set up. so SAVE AS...but this time name it your song name
like "socks" or whatever and navigate and save it in the socks new song folder you have set up.
NOTE THE NAME OF THE SEQ IN THE BLUE LINE AT THE TOP OF THE PTW WINDOW.
youll see it say socks or whatever name you gave it.
you are now ready to record. it sounds more complex than it really is.
its just a organisation method which youll come to understand is usefull once you have a lot of
songs youve recorded. ie...by navigateing to the ptwtemplate folder youll see all the ten songs (for example)
that youve recorded over time neatly organised.
ie...in summary within ptwtemplate ...song a, song b, song c, song d etc etc
ie....a CENTRAL REPOSITORY FOR YOUR SONGS IN ONE PLACE. within ptwtemplate folder.
rather than being spread out in various folders all over the place.
Lets recap.
1. create a standard track template for each genre you work in and store in ptwtemplate folder.
2. open the template in ptw and save it with a unique NEW NAME in a uniquely created
sub folder with a unique song name within ptwtemplate folder.
This is the method i use.
(lots more to come over next year.)

retired puter engr....powertracks on amd......NICE !
"what is the black art of audio engineering ?"
my silly songs...motagator.com/bmanning
see my tips in the tips section.