What's a neat lifehack you've done with your setup?

For me I’ve gone completely mobile in addition to my home setup.

Got a macbook pro along with an Alesis Q25 keyboard controller. Found a great tumi bag that fits everything plus accessories.
Invested in a thin 2tb hard drive along with a thin usb hub, both of which I velcro to the back of my laptop.

Now I’m fully mobile when I want to be and can work from anywhere. Some days if I have nowhere to go I’ll even work in another room just for a fresh perspective.

I took my Saitek Command Unit, which I used for playing first person shooters, and reprogrammed all of the buttons to execute common Cubase functions.

Now when I’m recording my own vocals, I plug this into the front USB port, set the unit on my laptop stand next to the boom stand for the mic, and then with a few button presses I can stop recording; undo the crappy last take; reset to the last transport position; and start recording again.

It allows me to record several more crappy takes in the same amount of time than before when I had to use the traditional keyboard. :mrgreen:

I don’t know if this counts - for people with intonation problems with cans I’ve been recording vocals without cans for a while (this was described in an old SOS article, if anyone is interested). I put a monitor at the null point and play a HP filtered version of the backing track (around 7KHz, and no drums) to sing to.

Then immediately (without adjusting any volumes) record the backing track again, this time without singing. While I do that I actually have the vocalist stand at the same position at the mic to accurately reproduce backing track reflections off them into the mic.

If you flip the polarity of the backing track and add it to the vocal track, the bleed is not audible in the mix. It’s so low I’ve even begun singing to a backing track that has a guide vocal in it.

The reason to HPF and take the drums off is that for some reason those higher frequencies don’t seem to null as well. I just realized I don’t take all drums off, I use a kick/snare as a metronome beat in the backing track (just set it up using any drum VSTi).

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Before that, I would do the one ear on/one ear off technique for the singer, using the control room to pan everything to the “on” headphone cup.