Meanwhile, over the last few months…

Kowloon Walled City – We just released our third record, Container Ships. Here are a few studio journals: part 1, part 2. Writing and recording this record was an intense, exhausting experience, but it was worth it. Listen.

Old Man Gloom – In September, I recorded OMG at a sweaty warehouse show in Chico, while Kenneth Thomas and crew filmed it. This came out awesome. Here’s video.

Satya Sena – We just finished a 3-song 7″ that’s due out soon. We tracked in one long day at Sharkbite, with a few vocals the next day at TTJ.

I mentioned a few records-in-progress last update, and they’re out:

• Tigon Infinite Teeth (listen)
• Ladder Devils Nowhere Plans (listen)
• Yowie Damning With Faint Praise (listen

Garris Shipon – My interview with Garris was in the August issue of Tape Op. Brutal Truth! CoC!

Andrew Schneider – My interview with Andrew was in the June issue of Tape Op. Since then, Andrew moved Translator Audio to a fantastic new spot, only to see it completely decimated by Hurricane Sandy. Awful news. Last I heard they’re recovering and rebuilding, and I wish them the best.

I’ve had some Tape Op gear reviews lately too. The longest is this Cubase 6.5 review; the nerdiest is this review of two computer keyboards.

(photos: Satya Sena – Shannon Corr; Garris & Andrew: me)

Cellos The Accident I still listen to their Bomb Shelter EP twice a week, and I was stoked to get their LP followup. It’s really good. Canadians! RIYL the modern “noise rock” thing.
Omotai Terrestrial Grief Another band whose EP I wore out since getting it, and whose LP followup was welcome. Voivod meets Atheist? I don’t know. I love this.
El-P Cancer 4 Cure I never listen to as much hip-hop as I want to, but I probably would if I could find more records like this. Dude is brilliant.
Barkmarket L Ron I missed this in 1996 and made up for that this year. What a record. The compression!
St. Vincent Strange Mercy I didn’t hear this until this year and I couldn’t stop listening to it.
Death Grips Exmilitary A 2011 release, and they’ve put out two more since this one, but this is the one I found first this year and listened to the most. Unfortunately I heard (and saw the video for) Guillotine first, and nothing can touch that. Single of the year.
Deftones Koi No Yokan I like this more with every listen. Every time he grabs the Meshuggah string, I’m all OH YEAH.
Dog Shredder Brass Tactics Batshit awesome.
Future of the Left The Plot Against Common Sense These guys continue being great at what they do. The lyrics, where do they all come from?
Gaza No Absolutes in Human Suffering Filthy and pissed off. I actually like the slow parts as much or better than the fast parts.
Pins Of Light II Great record and great live band. Riffs and short-ish psych jams.
Golden Void s/tLoving homage to 70s psych rock. I dig the recording too.
Sore Saints 1.1 & 1.2 Short and sweet, non-heavy noise rock.
Unsane Wreck Yep.
Power Take Off Plow Share It’s one song, it’s one riff, it’s 10 minutes long, I love it.

Still working on these but digging them so far:

Zebras s/t
Killer Mike R.A.P. Music
Empty Flowers Six
Metz s/t
The Great Sabatini Matterhorn & The Royal We

(for better or worse, I post more often on twitter – @gscottevans)

Ventid – Remember Your Audience was released last fall on vinyl. I love this record. RIYL Slint, Cursive, prog (the good kind). They have a few copies left. Listen.

Kowloon Walled City – Last spring we recorded a song for a split with Thou, as part of the Hell Comes Home singles series. Thou covered “4th Of July” by Soundgarden. We covered “July” by Low, with guest vocals by the amazing Lisa Papineau. I recorded our side at TTJ (our classy practice space). Anyway — the record is finally out and it looks great. The label is sold out of individual copies, but has some subscriptions left. We’ll have a few individual copies for sale pretty soon. Listen.

Generalissimo – Iron Heart is a 7″ with two songs from our session last fall. It contains the bass tone of a thousand forgotten proles. Listen. (this is neat: there’s another version of “Silver Skin”, recorded the following week by Tim Green at Louder, on their new LP.)

Sanford Parker – My interview with Sanford was in the Nov/Dec Tape Op. There’s some bonus content online.

Yowie – I just finished mixing a record for these guys, and it’s being mastered now. Crazy atonal prog-noise. This should be required listening for every tech metal band that talks about how their music is too weird for most people.

Ladder Devils – I just finished mixing four songs for a vinyl release that’s happening Really Soon.

Tigon – And right now, I’m working on a full-length for Tigon. We tracked at Sharkbite, with some overdubs at TTJ. These guys have been my favorite heavy Bay Area band for years. Weird, heavy, really good. I’m stoked on this record.

(photos: Ventid – me, Gmo – Shannon Corr, Sanford – me, Yowie – Dustin Winter/KDHX, LDevils – Ashley Campbell, Tigon – Bryan Proteau)

1. Total Fest
2. Yashicamat 124G
3. Sharkbite Studios, Oakland CA
4. Northern California camping
5. Finishing tour with “Hole in the Sky”, with Stavros from Atlas Moth on vox
6. Jon Howell
7. Every recording session I got to do this year
8. fastmail.fm
9. Peavey customer service
10. Ninkasi Brewing Company

Young Widows – In And Out Of Youth And Lightness
No contest, my favorite of the year. This record is incredible. Songs, performances, tones, recording, everything.
True Widow – As High As The Highest… and INO
Their first record dug a hole; these two crawled into it. I don’t know what that means but it sounds right. One of the few bands I hear and wish I was in that band.
Batillus – Furnace
Watching these guys play most of this record every night for two weeks = great. Watching people get knocked on their ass by the start of that first song = really great.
ME & LP – Chez Raymond
Super nice. I could listen to Lisa Papineau sing the dictionary.
Northless – Clandestine Abuse
Fuck my face, this record is enormous and heavy and hooky and awesome.
Whores – Ruiner
Perfect modern take on 90s drop-D riffage. Great recording too.
Paul McCartney – Ram
How did I never hear this record before? How was this made in 1971?
Cellos – Bomb Shelter
Am I just a sucker for Canadian noise rock? I stumbled on this on bandcamp a few weeks ago and I just keep listening to it.
Cartographer – Hats, Capes, Dark Arts
I shouldn’t list this since I recorded it and they’re buddies, but I genuinely love this record. Shellac-inspired aluminum guitar smart-assery.
KEN Mode – Venerable
I have loved KEN Mode for years. When this record is on, it is fucking ON. There is no other band doing what these guys do.
Mongoloid Village – Folly
Excellent weird rocking. Parts after parts after parts, but it works. These guys are allowed to name drop King Crimson; your shitty band isn’t.
Burmese – Lun Yurn
Batshit / awesome.

I’ve recorded a lot of very loud bands — including my own — in cramped practice spaces, using a mobile rig that I bring in for tracking. It’s a challenge, but it’s kind of cool. And laptops have gotten powerful enough that even older ones can loaf through a 16- or 24-input session.

But a few years ago I started getting bit by a nasty problem: intermittently, my DAW (Cubase) wouldn’t stay in record for more than a few minutes. A few minutes into a take, Cubase’s hard drive performance meter would freak out, then I’d see a “Too many tracks recording” dialog as recording stopped. This is the Nuendo version of the same dialog, but you get the point:

This really rattled me — how can you focus on what matters if you’re always worried about your recorder failing? — and it was hard to track down the cause. I had upgraded some hardware and software on my laptop, and the problem was very intermittent. But it always seemed to happen during real takes (ugh).

Steinberg support said it was probably the 5400 rpm drive in my old Thinkpad. I know you’re all saying “Of course! You can’t record with a slow HD!” but I had used a 5400 rpm internal drive for many sessions prior and never once seen a glitch.

But one or two fucked up sessions later, I gave in and upgraded my 7-year-old Thinkpad to a fairly recent Macbook Pro. You can’t have something like this threatening to ruin sessions.

And during my first session with the new machine, I got The Dialog. I felt sick. What the fuck?

I borrowed another Macbook Pro for a session and saw it there too. Three computers?!? Maybe Cubase 4.5 was a dog, or RME’s drivers had somehow regressed. My gut, based on 20 years as a professional computer nerd, told me it was neither, but you never know.

Here are some suggestions I got from friends, the internet, Steinberg support, etc: Never record to the OS partition. Never record to an internal drive. That’s what you get for using Cubase. Try trashing your preferences. Try adjusting the pre-record time in Cubase. I was sure that none of these was my problem. Three computers and two OS’s? Something was just wrong.

I couldn’t repro the problem at home, ever. I was usually recording 18 inputs, which should be a piece of cake, but I also saw it with 2-3 tracks sometimes. In certain sessions it never happened. In fact it sure seemed like recording only crapped out while really loud things were going on nearby. Wait a minute…

I started googling with the “loud sounds” thing in mind, and found a few forum threads mentioning the same problem. Eventually I found this Apple support page: Apple Portables: Advanced tips for Sudden Motion Sensor. Here’s the money excerpt:

In some environments, such as live concert halls, recording studios, or dance clubs, external vibrations may be major enough to cause the module to unexpectedly park the hard drive heads, resulting in interrupted sound or video playback.

Bam. That would explain everything. The SMS is there to prevent your hard drive heads from bouncing on the drive platter if you drop your computer. High SPLs can trick the accelerometer into thinking that the machine is being dropped. The protection system parks the hard drive heads, and recording is in trouble.

It turns out that Thinkpads had a similar feature, though not all hard drives supported it. That would explain why I didn’t have any issues with my Thinkpad’s stock HD, but did after upgrading it.

Now, learn from my pain.

I let Steinberg support know about this; they hadn’t heard of it before. Avid’s optimization guide covers it: “If you’re recording in a loud environment, this optimization will prevent the Sudden Motion Sensor from kicking in and throwing a -9073 error in Pro Tools.”

It’s interesting, the “common sense” problems were not the problem. Recording to an external drive probably would have masked this problem, but also probably would have led me to wrongly conclude “yep, internal drives / OS partitions are no good for recording”. My personal feeling is that a lot of these well-known tweaks are folklore left over from the early days of digital recording. They may still matter if you’re trying to get 2ms latency with 80 inputs, but not for tracking 18 inputs of 44.1/24 with no plugins or latency concerns.

Anyways — if you always record in a control room, or if you use a desktop machine, this shouldn’t affect you. But if regularly have 500 watts of pissed-off tube amps pointed at your laptop, this may save your session. I’m still testing, to feel 100% sure that I have a fix, so please report back.

Here’s the last time it hit me. My laptop was three feet in front of the Marshall cab.

Bonus trivia: when the drums abruptly cut off at the end of “Yowie”… yeah. We said fuck it and left it.

Chris Owens – My interview with Chris is in this month’s Tape Op. Thanks to Nick Thieneman for the photography.

Joe 4 – The aluminum guitars are strong with this one. I mixed an EP called Enola Gay which will be out any day now is on bandcamp, and 10″ vinyl. They tracked at Kramasonik in Croatia. I also mixed a song (tracked elsewhere) for the PRF Singles Club.

Generalissimo – We just finished five songs for a few splits and seven-inches. No, they didn’t wear the uniforms in the studio, but they did maintain an admirable work ethic. We tracked at Sharkbite.

Cartographer – Hats, Capes, Dark Arts is out and it rules. Colin from Ovipositor hand-silkscreened the cover with something like seven colors. Damn. Listen.

Ventid – I just finished an EP with them, tracked at Sharkbite. I love it. RIYL Slint, Cursive, prog (the good kind). Hopefully this will see vinyl in the next few months.

(carto pic by Shannon Corr)

Reaper – My interview with Justin and Christope is in this month’s Tape Op. Good read for music nerds and software nerds.

Tigon have a few splits out with the songs we did this spring. We tracked basics at Sharkbite in Oakland, and did guitar/vox overdubs at good old TTJ. I love this stuff. Dense mathy punk, sludged out heaviness. Listen.

Kowloon Walled City – If you missed it, a few months ago we did a split with Fight Amp and Ladder Devils. We tracked at Sharkbite. Download/buy. (Also, tour was great. Lots of pics.)

Cartographer – I recently finished a full-length with these fine gentlemen, tracked at Mr. Toad’s in San Francisco. This record rules and you should hassle Ben about releasing it promptly. Carto.