TRISTAN JAMES: I am Tristan James. I work as an engineer and a music producer for an independent label called Proletariat Productions. We try to give opportunities to independent artists who mostly do kind of political, progressive, or radical work with their music.

Our first session with a metal band, we were trying and testing -- we wanted to test the sound proofing and all that stuff. We went through some pretty heavy labor to sound proof the place and build angled walls and all that stuff, so. But yeah, we wanted to kind of really test our capabilities in here, and so this band had a large drum set, tons of guitar amps, lots of vocal effects and stuff like that, and we said, “Okay. Let’s dive in and see how our setup is and how it’s working.”

I think it went well. It was challenging because we were trying to figure out things like, “Okay. How do we set up the click? How do you...,” you know, just like basic things you do when you’re not used to software like with Pro Tools I go to sleep thinking about Pro Tools because I used it so much. It was just like colored lines running across. But using -- Yeah, Nuendo definitely had a curve, trying to figure out how to punch in and out and do everything. You have to basically relearn it. Even though the concept is the same, you just have to find where everything is that you need.

I can play a little bit if you want. I believe this song is called “The Way”, and you’ll hear a lot of guitars and drums.

[TRISTAN JAMES PLAYING SICKFRoWN’S “THE WAY” FROM STEINBERG NUENDO]

Some things that wouldn’t actually have been possible or things like the distortion and the voice, you would have had to pay for an additional plugin for that distortion. Nuendo comes right out of the box with amp modelers, tube preamp modelers and all sorts of effects like that, and they sound pretty decent. Not to totally just endorse something like that but it’s -- I got to say it’s easier. It’s easier to use. The automation I found was very easy to use. You can see here we’ve -- There’s actually -- Something that I like a like a lot is the ability to pull down. You can add sections to each track. So, say I wanted to automate mutes and be able to see the mutes, the volume automation, you can just keep adding stuff, effects, bypasses, and effects controls, all that stuff is automatable same way as in Pro Tools except for in Nuendo I can see all the automation at one time and automate -- and be able to work with all of them simultaneously which is much easier for me.

Another thing that’s a huge timesaver, when I’m trying to build an effects loop, the reverb for example, I set up an effects channel which is sort of like a group channel. It sets up the effect and I, same as in Pro Tools, I insert an effect so there’s the Roomworks SE which is like a lite version of their reverb. And then what do I get in the channels? I -- In my sends section, I have a pulldown menu and it says reverb right there, the reverb that I use, and it routes it straight to it. It’s whereas in Pro Tools, you have to -- you just have to rename everything like okay, this is bus 1. Here I go, I’m going to send it to through bus 1 to input bus 1 on the effects channel. It takes twice as long literally, and it’s these are just little minuscule things but together they all add up. That’s huge for us because I mean we literally want this place going 24/7 and the more we can get done efficiently is so important to us.