The long holiday weekend was a blast. There was much food and fun, and a bit of off-hours studio spelunking too. One of the things I’ve been holding out on was the install of sound libraries I had licensed right around the time of my move. I discovered Sonokinetic through several friends’ links on Facebook and found some really nice material that I wanted to add to my kit. This weekend was the time to put those libraries on the appropriate drive and re-index Nuendo 5′s Media Bay as well as Native Instrument’s Kontakt 4.1 databases to find them. All went smoothly, and I had some fun making sonic discoveries along the way (loading drum loops from Sonokinetic into Steinberg’s LoopMash plugin was a particularly rewarding excursion). There are some grooves I built over the weekend that are definitely going on my first album project.
Every weekend I take one morning to do a thorough sweep of the place. Aside from the general studio dusting and gussying-up, I also spent some time tuning the “inner” workspace – my computer desktop. Even though film composers are surround by technology, a lot of our work still comes down to vibe. And like most composers in this field, it really helps when the physical and virtual space meshes into one contiguous environment, even on a subtle level. I built some new customized screen layouts (called “workspaces”) in Nuendo 5 to fit my workflow (tracking, using virtual instruments, scoring and mixing) and modified the color scheme to match the look of my SmartAV Tango console – a dark slate color that I really dig. I also use RME’s Totalmix and DIGICheck interface as a sanity check for levels as they’re showing in Nuendo, and getting all of the visual elements to match up makes for a more cohesive experience. Less distraction = more music, and that’s always a good thing.
I’ve known about the custom skins for the RME Totalmix, designed by Terry Gorle, but never really considered using one of them until now. I was looking for the latest Nuendo 5 skin, but found that they didn’t have a Mac version available. On inquiry I found out that Terry had built the Windows-based images himself, but that the Mac versions were converted into the appropriate format by another person who wasn’t available to do the deed. So, I volunteered to do the work myself. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but it wasn’t really easy, either. Figuring out how to get Windows bitmap images into a Mac rsrc file wasn’t exactly intuitive. Then again, there aren’t a lot of people (outside of developer circles) that are interested in this sort of thing. Since I’m somewhat familiar with Mach OS (from my days in college) and wanted to peer into the Mac world a bit, I thought it might be time well spent as a bit of a refresher – and I was right. I discovered Automator, a really handy tool for scripting repetitive tasks – as well as the freeware “Rezilla” for resource editing on the Mac. Not only did I get over the hump fairly quickly, but Terry was nice enough to build a custom skin for Totalmix based on my own Nuendo5 color scheme, to compensate me for my time. Here it is:
RME Totalmix skin based on my Nuendo 5 color scheme
I refer to the look as “dark slate” – not quite black with a slight bias toward red undertones. I kept the orange level meters at the base (which is the default for Nuendo5), but I also added yellow and red to the upper bands to match the K-System meters in DIGICheck. Overall the vibe works for me. If Terry makes this skin available on his site, feel free to ping me for screen shots of how my UI is set up in Nuendo 5 (which should also work for Cubase 5, with some slight changes to UI settings) and I’ll be happy to post screen shots from my Preferences Panel.
And now, back to making music…
