Keith Lay, Composer - Electronic Music

Last month, my trusty Mac G5 computer was mortally wounded by a falling 7 lb. agate ball, quickly followed by Tannoy powered speaker. My son was not hurt (by the falling objects, or by me). VOT Engineering, owned by Brent Hughes, had just wired the room for surround, and I had just purchased a used Apogee Ensemble - all to get back into creating surround sound electronic music, too. Darn. After a couple of MacDoctor bills and numerous new drives over several weeks, he finally perished in a sea of blue screen finality.

I just took delivery of a new machine, a Mac Pro 8 core, with a large monitor and Logic 8 Pro. Now I could start a project to revive "Starboy", my 2004 electronic music opera! I spent this last weekend resuscitating the old G4/ProTools system in order to bring these files into the new system. Now my challenge was how to best get a ProTools v5.1 5.1 surround project rebuilt into a Logic 5.1 project? Not easy. ProTools does not get along with Logic.

I first tried saving the files as OMFs. my first idea was to stay in the digital domain and use modern plugins in Logic to achieve the same results. This may have worked, but the GRM-Tools plugins on the old computer are just so unique as to not be duplicated. Plus, the sound of the old system has its own flavor, especially with Unity Session samples and the reverbs available to me then - that i knew I simply needed to record from the analog outputs.

So, the process for each piece is creating a surround track for each surround element, only using stereo or mono for elements that don't require a complex surround placement or image. "Aria One", "Dear Star" and "Star Falls" are the first done. With a long long way to go!