Choosing the right multitrack software

A good multitrack recording software is a like any other good tool. It has to fit perfectly into your palm and work well. Choosing the right software for you is fairly easy, if you know exactly what your needs are. The following grid might help with making the right decision, especially, if you are just trying yourself out in the digital multitracking world

1. What operating system are you running?

This is the most obvious question to ask, but for some, it can be the most limiting one. Logic Pro for instance, is not available on Pc since 2002, when Apple bought the original software creator Emagic in 2002.

Most budget home studios already have either a Mac or a PC to build upon. Unless, you want to start from scratch, you will look for a software for OSX or Windows.*

Luckily, a lot of advanced multitrack software available on the market that have both PC and Mac versions, so this is not a real restriction for most users. The easiest / cheapest solution is to stay with they system you already have, unless you want to upgrade anyway soon.

*For Unix,  as far as I know,  the best multitracking software is Audacity, which does not really match up to the level of any commercial software. Due to the lack of a real choice in versatile software, Unix is not a true heaven  for home recording enthusiasts. 

2. Do you face any limitations because of your computer's capabilities?


It is good to be aware of any unsolvable limitations your current PC or Mac configuration might be having such as memory, speed, screen and ports (USB & Firewire). This can be assessed the best once you are clear about the main purpose for buying a multitracking software for yourself. If you will mostly record yourself with one guitar (two tracks at a time for instance), possibly adding some tracks later on 1 by 1 is a very different scenario from the one where you are trying to track 16 or more channels at the same time to create a good quality demo of your band or to record a live gig with post-event mixing and editing intentions.




3. Know your budget

 This is the only thing you cannot really change. You have X amount (a maximum of X and some) to spend on the software part of your studio. This will need to be divided between all the different types of software you are planning to use such as the wave editor, the multitrack recorder, plugins etc. Once you are clear on what you can spend on the multitrack recording solution, you can clearly see which options are available for you from the list above.

4. Know your priorities

Choosing the right budget obviously involves setting up an order of possible features according to their importance. Some of the questions you might want to ask from yourself are:

Do you need vsti support, do you need cabinet simulations, would you use the session drummer or the built-in violin orchestra heavily? Do you need a midi sequencer? Do you want to have more than X tracks in the same projects? Do you want a solution that contains a high-level wave editor as well? If not, can you come up with a cheap alternative for wave editing functions?

Know your priorities and do not be afraid to make compromise where needed. Eventually, you are not the sound engineer of a global label (just yet).

5. How often and where are you planning to use this software?

If you are planning for 1-2 recordings a year, mostly at home, stability will not be your primary concern. An occasional need of reinstall of plugins and drivers will not impact you too negatively. You can securely go with a cheaper software like the well-known N-track.

On the other hand, if you plan to record fairly often, or if the few recordings that you have a year are crucial for you and might need to be carried out under pressure, maybe at an off-site event and not at home, stability will be the most important factor for you.

Based on the points above, you should be able to narrow down the number of possible options for you. To see, which would work the best for you, take the time and download the demo versions of each of the candidate software and spend some time fooling around in the interface. Try to create a very simple multitrack recording with some effects and EQ to your own taste, test the exporting options, see the speed performance of the tool. Look out for bugs, browse through the support forum of the software to highlight any potential issues such as hardware and software conflicts.

Investing some time is necessary in order to avoid disappointment and always pays off in the end.

Pleszkán Frigyes, rest in peace

 UPDATE 07/03/2011:

According to Ferenc Gayer, bassist of the Pleszkan Trio, Frigyes Pleszkan committed suicide. In a recent interview he told a gossip tabloid the followings:

"He had a dream of becoming an excellent, well-known, world-wide musician. Not much came true of these dreams. I think, he can also be blamed for this. In his early 30s, when his fellow musicians stared to pick on him, saying he did not have a style of his own, he moved to Switzerland and exchanged concert halls to clubs of hotels, he became a bar pianist.

We did not really know about his life in Switzerland, we did not even know the places he played at. He never really liked to talk about this. People, who knew him say that Pleszkán Frigyes was a kind, sensitive, helpful person who lived for music. He could play the piano for hours at social event, he enjoyed being watched and listened to. Everyone was shocked to learn how brutally he turned against himself. We last talked two weeks before his death.  He was a bit blue, but not as much that would make you realize, tragedy is coming. Only after his death do I realize how little I knew about him. It is shocking to see what has happened to him, my goal now is to preserve the memory of Frici - Ferenc Gayer said. "

On the 14th of February Frigyes Pleszkan (Pleszkán Frigyes in Hungarian) passed away suddenly, leaving behind a lot of his dreams that now will never come true. Pleszkán was the most virtuoso Hungarian jazz pianist, a unique talent and one of my personal favourites. He is a perfect example of how even the most talented musicians might not gain enough exposure throughout a lifetime.

When I heard the news, I started to search around to find out details about his recent activities and I was shocked about how little information is available about him. Furthermore, almost nothing is available in English, apart from some incomplete discographies. I have collected materials from various resources to draw a quick picture of Pleszkan Frigyes for non-Hungarian fans. But first, let's have a listen to a fairly recent recording of Pleszkán Frigyes. The following YouTube excerpt is from an Oscar Peterson Tribute night, Frici (as close friends and colleagues called him) plays his own version of “Feelings” in the style of Oscar Peterson.

It is interesting to note that the otherwise well-known and talented double bass player Ferenc Gajer makes a quite audible mistake by mixing up the verse and the chorus part of this well-known jazz standard at 2:27.

The life of Frigyes Pleszkan (Pleszkán Frigyes)

The story of the most virtuoso Hungarian pianist started at the small city of Csorna on the 1st of July, 1959., 50 years later, when asked to talk about himself, he started the interview with the following, simple sentences:

"Hi, I am Frigyes Pleszkán. I was eight when I first played the piano and I had my first concert when I was 11."

It was in these very early years that Oscar Peterson was giving a concert in Hungary. While Pleszkan did not attend the concert, one of the national radio stations aired the recording of the concert which eventually was taped by Frigyes. He learned the songs Oscar Peterson played at that concert by ear and applied with these songs to the Jazz Deparment of the Béla Bartók Secondary School of Music. He got admitted straight away.

Playing like Oscar Peterson at the age of 14 made a huge impress on everybody around him. Considered as an extraordinary talent, a true prodigy, he performed solo at the Pori Jazz Festival in 1976, already at the age of 17. Along with Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz and John McLauglin, one more line appeared on posters and tickets of the festival: "unkarilainen pianon ihmelapsi Frigyes Pleszkán”, which stands for "Hungarian pianist prodigy child, Pleszkán Frigyes".

Janos Gonda, director of the Jazz Department, and the mastermind behind jazz movements and jazz life in general in Hungary in the 1970-1980s, wrote the following note about his student:

"His diligence, humility, and his internal discipline manifesting in his piano playing are truly unique, a real rarity. He plays the piano on a wide spectrum,c overing everything from rock to traditional jazz. His memory for music is excellent, which enables him to reproduce the contents of a full album in detail after the first listening. It may sound strange, but theoretically speaking, technically unsolvable task does not exist for him."

Pleszkán began his career as a prodigy, something that could have been enough for world-wide fame and life-long success, had he not been born into Hungary. Not being favoured by the ruling regim during the years of Soviet ruling, after much struggle he escaped to the safe but less glamorous life of a successful bar pianist, playing and living in Western Europe.

On a personal note, one of my relatives celebrated funerals in the 1980s, where Pleszkan was playing regularly the piano music for almost no money at all. I think this clearly exemplifies the life Pleszkán was trying to leave behind when he decided to move to Switzerland. The legend says, he was always improvising to much during the funerals :-)

Pleszkán remained in his exile until the middle of the 1990s, when he started to give concerts more and more often again in Hungary. He never fully returned to Hungary though and lived mostly in Switzerland until his very recent death on the 14th of February, 2011.

Works of Pleszkán Frigyes

• 1978 – 1979: member of the band 'Lama'
• Early 1980s: formed the Pleszkán trio with Németh Tamás on drums and Gajer Ferenc on the double bass.
• 1985: recorded an album together with Gonda Janos and John Richard Kruza
• 1995: First solo album released, called Fingerprints, 10 songs out of which 5 was his own composition
• 1996: Second solo album released, called Second Step, featuring only his own compositions
• 1997: Third solo album released, called Pearls In Boogie Shell
• 1999: Fourth solo album released, called Magic Hands

In recent years, he was experimenting with jazz improvisations over classical compositions. and was planning to release a CD of these experiments. No details of his death are known at this date, news only reported about his sudden, unexpected pass away.

 R.I.P.  Pleszkán Frigyes

Resources (you will need a translating service, such as Google Translate to read these Hungarian articles): 

• http://regiolapok.hu/a_vereben_van_a_dzsessz
• http://www.jbsz.hu/component/content/article/54-ezredveg/764-pleszkan-ujjlenyomatai.html
• http://zene.hu/20110216_gyasz_elhunyt_a_kivalo_magyar_zenesz_pleszkan_Frigyes

Hardware or software multitrack recorder?

Both answers can be right, it all depends on your needs and working environment. I have had my share of both worlds, and after shifting from one to the other and back a few times, the only good advise I can give is to try and have your finger in both solutions.

Investing in both hardware and software based multitrack solutions is the best way to go in my experience. Both of these systems have their advantages and disadvantages and can be understood as complementary to each other instead of being supreme.

My extensive, money-burning budget-studio-home-recording experience tells me the followings:

Hardware based multitrack solutions:

 

Tascam Neo 2488 - One of the highest level portable multitrack recorders

Pros:

• Reliable in most cases (apart from some bad series from Tascam and others)
• Easy to use for basic multitrack recording
• Silent operation, especially with the memory card driven ones, but even HDD based solutions are fairly quiet these days
• High portability
• Dedicated knobs for many functions like PAN, EQ, EFFECTS
• One-stop solution from recording to CD burning (models with CD burners)
• Connectivity to PC for further editing

Cons:

• Can be very complicated for complex recordings / mixes
• Can be very limited in number of tracks
• Usually very limited in number of dedicated stereo tracks
• Small LCD screen, in many cases with terrible view angle
• Multi level menu driven operation
• Limited or no future expansions or upgrades
• No options to save user settings (except for a few multi thousand $ models)
• No mixer automation
• 'As is' solution with almost 0 customisation opportunities
• Expensive

Software based multitrack solutions:

Pros:

• Can be cheap ( software available from free / 25 EUR)
• Runs on any standard PC or Mac
• Works with any standard sound card
• Easily upgradable
• Expandable with third party software like effects, virtual instruments
• Can save and restore any user settings
• Offers maximum mixing automation (volume, panning, effects etc)
  
  
  

  Cons:

• Can be highly unstable
• Might be fairly complicated to use (Logic Pro)
• No dedicated knobs and buttons
• Works best with a high quality sound card (starting around 70 EUR)
• Requires a computer

The last one seems pretty obvious, but if you are mostly recording yourself alone at home as I do, or you regularly have recording sessions at non-real studio environments, you will not have the luxury of a separate, sound proof control room. This means that the computer that serves as your recording tool with be in the same room where you recording is taking place.

Multitrack recording software usually require quite a substantial amount of processing power from the computer. The best way to go is to work on a laptop as they produce significantly less noise than desktop machines. Still, even with a laptop, at least from time to time, the CPU cooling fan will switch on during your recording. After the first few tracks have been laid down, due to increased system loading, the CPU might come often fairly often.

If you want to do a proper, studio like acoustic recording, you will have to get rid the CPU fan noise. The only way to do that if you do not have a separate control room and a supporting engineer, is to use a hardware based recorder for acoustic recordings. While you can play around with mic placement for recording voice for instance, you will never be able to eliminate the fan noise from a quiet, finger picking recording.

Tascam DP 004 - one of the smallest multitrack recorders

And with that, we arrive to the conclusion I already revealed at the beginning of this article. Unless you never record live acoustic performances (eg, you use the cable output of your digital piano, amp, electric drum etc), you will sooner or later feel the need of a standalone, quiet solution. This is not a must to start with, but if you are into acoustic recording, either you will have trips to a local studio (which, in fact, is not a bad idea), or you will invest in one of the available solutions that usually start around 150 EUR in price.