Hey John! So cool to hear about your history with Neotek. Are you still located in Chicago and doing tech work? We have an old Series III that needs a little TLC. Email me! alex@ess.org
Thank you guys so much for uploading this and understanding how much of a treasure and how something like this can’t be hidden behind a pay wall. It is really appreciated as someone who inspires to be a professional, audio engineer, and someone who has looked up to Steve Albini for years and will continue to. It really means a lot.
Why can't you store a digital session as some number of equal length wav files on a CD or HD? A session from 25 years ago stored like that could easily be reopened and mixed today
You can do that. But it won't usually be the same. In the digital domain it's not unusual to not commit to anything. So instead of doing a little bit of pre shaping the sound with a little bit of gating, EQ, compression,... on the way in, you do all of this in the session. Often times you won't print the comps to new wave files but you keep all those small snippets that are being comped together. So if you really care for this, you could prepare your mix to be exported in a way that would resemble the analog workflow. But the reality is that most people just won't do it.
Built in to the analog process is the creation of a durable archive. You can do that with wav files like you described but it's an optional step that 99.9% of people don't do. Aside from that is the storage medium. Optical discs and hard drives are an imperfect archival medium (read up on disc rot and bit rot). Ironically, for long term backups, data centers use magnetic tape to archive data.
r.i.p steve albini you were the reason i recorded music of my own and others in the first place, in utero mixes changed my life...
RIP Steve. Many thanks to the uploader.
I was the service and qc tech for Neotek for 17 years, helped build, wire and test about 300 of these consoles.
Hey John! So cool to hear about your history with Neotek. Are you still located in Chicago and doing tech work? We have an old Series III that needs a little TLC. Email me! alex@ess.org
Thank you guys so much for uploading this and understanding how much of a treasure and how something like this can’t be hidden behind a pay wall. It is really appreciated as someone who inspires to be a professional, audio engineer, and someone who has looked up to Steve Albini for years and will continue to. It really means a lot.
Spot on. Took the words out of my mouth.
I’ve been searching & searching for a vid where Steve runs through the whole analogue workflow. Finally!
This is wonderful, pure Albini gold for all, thank you for the upload! I will miss him very dearly
Thanks for sharing this treasure with us!
Thank you so much for this. Anybody recognizes the song he plays around 15:45?
Maestro
Why can't you store a digital session as some number of equal length wav files on a CD or HD? A session from 25 years ago stored like that could easily be reopened and mixed today
you can, albini preferred not to. 25 years ago digital wasn't as popular as it as now
You can do that. But it won't usually be the same.
In the digital domain it's not unusual to not commit to anything. So instead of doing a little bit of pre shaping the sound with a little bit of gating, EQ, compression,... on the way in, you do all of this in the session. Often times you won't print the comps to new wave files but you keep all those small snippets that are being comped together.
So if you really care for this, you could prepare your mix to be exported in a way that would resemble the analog workflow. But the reality is that most people just won't do it.
Built in to the analog process is the creation of a durable archive. You can do that with wav files like you described but it's an optional step that 99.9% of people don't do. Aside from that is the storage medium. Optical discs and hard drives are an imperfect archival medium (read up on disc rot and bit rot). Ironically, for long term backups, data centers use magnetic tape to archive data.
Until we get hit with an EMP lol
Rest In Peace. ❤️