# Big boys setups



## peksi (Apr 17, 2016)

What kind of DAW setups do the bigger budget studios / professionals use? Hopefully someone with first hand experience has time to answer too.

If real time performance is not possible to expand beyond home PC i5 / i7 then I am most curious on how this problem has been solved professionally.


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## Smikes77 (Apr 17, 2016)

Slaves. I think Harry gregsoj Williams has 5 if I remember correctly.


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## Jdiggity1 (Apr 17, 2016)

Sooooooo many resources for this kind of info.

Just to get you started, check out Spitfire's Creative Cribs videos. Trevor Morris, Charlie Clouser, John Powell, HGW, and more 'big boys' of the industry walk you through their studios and set-ups.

Also of note, Junkie XL puts up his own tutorial videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/junkiexlofficial/videos often detailing his workflow and set-up.

See how you go with those, then report back if you still need more.


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## peksi (Apr 17, 2016)

Jdiggity1 said:


> Sooooooo many resources for this kind of info.
> 
> Just to get you started, check out Spitfire's Creative Cribs videos. Trevor Morris, Charlie Clouser, John Powell, HGW, and more 'big boys' of the industry walk you through their studios and set-ups.
> 
> ...



More than enough pointers. Thanks for helping out.


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## trumpoz (Apr 18, 2016)

At one stage there was a story of HZ had something like 36 slave computers........


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Apr 18, 2016)

trumpoz said:


> At one stage there was a story of HZ had something like 36 slave computers........



I believe Klaus Badelt had the record of 40. Probably back before I was even born  I'm interested to see if HZ has slimmed down recently from the rack of servers he had (14?).


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## AlexRuger (Apr 18, 2016)

It's funny--many of the "big boy" setups I've seen are smaller than a lot of the rigs on this forum. I do tech for a couple of A-listers and have gotten their rigs down to one or two VEPro hosts. I'm sure that when Klaus had 40 slaves, they were Giga machines with, like, 4GB of RAM max. Lots has changed since then! 

I know of and/or have helped set up a couple others that are just running one computer (beefed up trash can Mac Pro or in certain cases a monster of a PC, all of which are running VEPro locally only).

Overall, most composers are excited that they can _finally _simplify their rigs. Fewer moving parts means fewer problems. And fewer goddamn hard drives to buy/make backups of...

That said, most of the Remote Control guys tend to have a penchant for pretty absurd rigs, not just including the number of slaves. John Powell's self-tuning acoustic system comes to mind. It's awesome, but goddamn, son.


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## jononotbono (Apr 18, 2016)

AlexRuger said:


> John Powell's self-tuning acoustic system comes to mind. It's awesome, but goddamn, son.



What devilry do you speak of? This sounds awesome. What on Earth is a self-tuning Acoustic System? haha! Man, I love what some people get up to!


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## Jdiggity1 (Apr 18, 2016)

jononotbono said:


> What devilry do you speak of? This sounds awesome. What on Earth is a self-tuning Acoustic System? haha! Man, I love what some people get up to!


You obviously haven't watched the creative cribs videos I recommended! http://www.spitfireaudio.com/editorial/cribs/john-powell/ --(skip to 5m in if you're short of time)


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## jononotbono (Apr 18, 2016)

Oh I have watched that (I have watched all the Creative Cribs videos) but I didn't realise that's what a Self- Tuning Acoustic System was!


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## Vin (Apr 18, 2016)

Cliff Martinez's mobile studio - _Only God Forgives_ was completely composed using only this equipment. One of my favorite composers. Now, those Beats...


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Apr 18, 2016)

jononotbono said:


> Oh I have watched that (I have watched all the Creative Cribs videos) but I didn't realise that's what a Self- Tuning Acoustic System was!



It's basically just a Max patch set up my John Crooks to route the signals between the mic and speakers with some delay. There's an article and video about it on the Cyclin' 74's website. I've tried it out in my studio using quad + 1 ceiling speaker and it actually worked quite well and convincingly when I talked or played violin. I don't think there's any sort of "self tuning" going on. It's not to adjust the acoustics for mixing, just to add a nice reverb to the room when recording.


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Apr 18, 2016)

AlexRuger said:


> It's funny--many of the "big boy" setups I've seen are smaller than a lot of the rigs on this forum. I do tech for a couple of A-listers and have gotten their rigs down to one or two VEPro hosts. I'm sure that when Klaus had 40 slaves, they were Giga machines with, like, 4GB of RAM max. Lots has changed since then!
> 
> I know of and/or have helped set up a couple others that are just running one computer (beefed up trash can Mac Pro or in certain cases a monster of a PC, all of which are running VEPro locally only).
> 
> ...



John Powell may have a massive facility but if you look at the Spitfire video it's just 2 mac pros and 2 PC slaves for the writing rig.


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## afterlight82 (Apr 18, 2016)

Excluding the cost of sample libraries (which if you buy smart isn't all that bad), you can do pretty much anything with a decent sequencer and a decent slave costing not much if you build yourself. I have my rig completely mobile now - 1 5960X machine as a Cubase DAW, two xeon slaves, and a hackintosh for PT/Videoslave (depending on which I'm feeling like running picture from and how much I need to print to PT).

The days of 10 gigastudio pcs and 12 E4s and a bunch of S760's through O2Rs, with the huge amount of cabling required...are gone, mercifully! I had a hard time even selling my E4's...and I bought them almost full price new...


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## afterlight82 (Apr 18, 2016)

I actually think it's a pretty useful exercise - restrict yourself to one library. Or one machine. Or a laptop. When you have to think creatively around technological corners you often get cool results....


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## URL (Apr 18, 2016)

Gerhard Westphalen said:


> John Powell may have a massive facility but if you look at the Spitfire video it's just 2 mac pros and 2 PC slaves for the writing rig.


Thats 4-computers for writing- I don't know which generation of the computers but its crazy massive I think- den for mixing in 192khz- a server room!


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## givemenoughrope (Apr 18, 2016)

afterlight82 said:


> I have my rig completely mobile now - 1 5960X machine as a Cubase DAW, two xeon slaves, and a hackintosh for PT/Videoslave (depending on which I'm feeling like running picture from and how much I need to print to PT).



These are racked? Curious how portable they are. Like carry-on portable? I have a MBP, 2 minis but the RAM limit...


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## owenave (Apr 18, 2016)

afterlight82 said:


> Excluding the cost of sample libraries (which if you buy smart isn't all that bad), you can do pretty much anything with a decent sequencer and a decent slave costing not much if you build yourself. I have my rig completely mobile now - 1 5960X machine as a Cubase DAW, two xeon slaves, and a hackintosh for PT/Videoslave (depending on which I'm feeling like running picture from and how much I need to print to PT).
> 
> The days of 10 gigastudio pcs and 12 E4s and a bunch of S760's through O2Rs, with the huge amount of cabling required...are gone, mercifully! I had a hard time even selling my E4's...and I bought them almost full price new...


I still got a Emu E6400 left. I like the sound of it and has a couple libraries I have only on it.


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## Rctec (Apr 18, 2016)

trumpoz said:


> At one stage there was a story of HZ had something like 36 slave computers........


14... Down to 5!
H


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## cc64 (Apr 18, 2016)

trumpoz said:


> At one stage there was a story of HZ had something like 36 slave computers........



I think he might have had something like 36 Roland S-760's at one point. If each one was maxed out at 32 MB of RAM, this setup probably cost him 4 times more than his current DAW setup ; P

Claude


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## afterlight82 (Apr 18, 2016)

givemenoughrope said:


> These are racked? Curious how portable they are. Like carry-on portable? I have a MBP, 2 minis but the RAM limit...



DAW and slaves are pcs...racked in 2u server cases with fanless PSUs and noctua low profile cooling/noctua 80mm fans. Not carry-on - they're all in a 22U Jan-Al cooled rack case, with a patch bay on the back with a single 25' snake to my desk so I can plug up and be ready to roll right away. The only other things in the racks are a grace monitor controller, the network switches, and a Furman for power.

hackintosh was a sweat to put together but once you get it right, you don't know it's not a real mac.  I just didn't want to have to do any of the old mac pro rack mount solutions and wanted it to be fixed down really solidly, and in the end a 2u case with the right components cost a ton less than any other solution with vastly more power.

I basically wanted to be able to push the rack out the door with no notice whatsoever to go work out of anywhere else if the job requires it - which I've had to do twice for projects in the last year including once transatlantic. Shipping it around actually isn't very expensive (Rock-It Cargo do good work and provided the customs carnet gets sorted you're fine). The best thing is the pci-e ssd drives like the intel 750's - I put two of the smaller ones in each slave and one as project drive in the DAW, which means that there's basically nothing to get shaken out during transit (which was always a problem with some SATA cables, they can work themselves loose...). With those and m.2 system drives screwed down well, you can have a setup that really has very little to go wrong even after flying. It's very specific to my needs but I think if you can take the time to build a rig that you can depend on and then basically forget about, that's ideal. Took me a while to iron out the bugs but once I did it's been awesome.


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## afterlight82 (Apr 18, 2016)

owenave said:


> I still got a Emu E6400 left. I like the sound of it and has a couple libraries I have only on it.



Yeah, they did sound nice. I sampled a bunch of stuff off at 24/96k with multiple velocity layers before I let go of the last, and tried to capture at least a bit of the sound of the filters...they were nice. Same with the roland s760 which the conversions never sounded right on due to the way the 760 worked. They had a certain mojo. I just got sick of the SCSI drives and the internal hard drives on mine kept dying in the last year I had four still left running. When you had multiples of them you really had to have a decent UPS if you didn't have the ones with the inbuilt hard drive, because otherwise you had to sit and load them from SCSI if the power even browned out, and there was a lot of swearing involved.


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## peksi (Apr 19, 2016)

VSL slaves are the way people are going and have been for a while for larger setups. This raises a question towards Steinberg and others: if it is really impossible to overcome the multi CPU barrier then why an earth have you not done a thing to cater musicians with larger setups? Why must there be a third party software to do all this while the inventor of VST sits by?

To the composer it could be as easy as installing a slave Cubase software (or better yet an appliance) to each slave, start Cubase on the master PC, let it auto detect slaves and start composing. I would presume it is doable for Steinberg and others if Vienna has done it as well.

Or did I miss something?


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## Pablocrespo (Apr 19, 2016)

I was thinking the same thing...why don´t steinberg rebuild vst bridge with VSL standards?


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## afterlight82 (Apr 19, 2016)

I'm sure it is less about how easy or not it is (pretty hard but they could obviously definitely do it)...and more about whether the huge investment of time it would take would be worth it in terms of returns which might not be very clear cut at all.


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## SillyMidOn (Apr 19, 2016)

peksi said:


> VSL slaves are the way people are going and have been for a while for larger setups. This raises a question towards Steinberg and others: if it is really impossible to overcome the multi CPU barrier then why an earth have you not done a thing to cater musicians with larger setups? Why must there be a third party software to do all this while the inventor of VST sits by?
> 
> To the composer it could be as easy as installing a slave Cubase software (or better yet an appliance) to each slave, start Cubase on the master PC, let it auto detect slaves and start composing. I would presume it is doable for Steinberg and others if Vienna has done it as well.
> 
> Or did I miss something?


No you didn't. You are totally right.

Logic had logic node (which was supposed to do what you mention above), I never used it, but heard it was bug-gy, and it got dropped.


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## gsilbers (Apr 19, 2016)

peksi said:


> VSL slaves are the way people are going and have been for a while for larger setups. This raises a question towards Steinberg and others: if it is really impossible to overcome the multi CPU barrier then why an earth have you not done a thing to cater musicians with larger setups? Why must there be a third party software to do all this while the inventor of VST sits by?
> 
> To the composer it could be as easy as installing a slave Cubase software (or better yet an appliance) to each slave, start Cubase on the master PC, let it auto detect slaves and start composing. I would presume it is doable for Steinberg and others if Vienna has done it as well.
> 
> Or did I miss something?



computers are powerful enough for 90% of producers, composers, enthusiasts and sound engineers.
then there is the minority who uses huge templates and 2+ computers.


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## AlexRuger (Apr 19, 2016)

Yeah, Steinberg could do it but it doesn't make much sense financially. And it's not like they own the DAW market, or the plugin market (there's AU, MAS, AAX, etc...) so the fact that they developed VST is unfortunately a bit moot. Look at VST3: no one besides them has adopted it, and it's amazing.

Also, they're knee-deep in R&D on another program at the moment (the new notation program), so even if they're willing to develop something like this, now isn't the time.

No reason you couldn't run Cubase on a few slaves and communicate via hardware MIDI and audio though


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## peksi (Apr 19, 2016)

AlexRuger said:


> Yeah, Steinberg could do it but it doesn't make much sense financially. And it's not like they own the DAW market, or the plugin market (there's AU, MAS, AAX, etc...) so the fact that they developed VST is unfortunately a bit moot. Look at VST3: no one besides them has adopted it, and it's amazing.



VSL has made sense financially? And they've had to do it the hard way using only the open VST APIs. Steinberg already has their hands wet in the core system which enables them to do transparent integration. I don't see a reason why not do it. 

They did Cubase Connect. How many here uses it?


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## AlexRuger (Apr 20, 2016)

Well, sure, yeah. Cubase Connect is stupid and pointless. No arguing there.

But VSL has made loads of money on VEPro, I'm sure--it's the only game in town. How could they not make a killing with it?


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## garyhiebner (Nov 17, 2016)

SillyMidOn said:


> No you didn't. You are totally right.
> 
> Logic had logic node (which was supposed to do what you mention above), I never used it, but heard it was bug-gy, and it got dropped.


Yeah its a pity about Logic Node disappearing. It sounded promising. Cos them you can have your project setup on one machine and push processing to other machines. Would of been less setup if they carried on supporting it.


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## Ashermusic (Nov 17, 2016)

garyhiebner said:


> Yeah its a pity about Logic Node disappearing. It sounded promising. Cos them you can have your project setup on one machine and push processing to other machines. Would of been less setup if they carried on supporting it.



Nah. It could only host Logic instruments and most of them are not so demanding. Never used it, don't miss it. VE Pro is so much better.


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## garyhiebner (Nov 17, 2016)

Ashermusic said:


> Nah. It could only host Logic instruments and most of them are not so demanding. Never used it, don't miss it. VE Pro is so much better.


Yeah its a pity it only did Logic instruments. Imagine they took it further so that you could use the node for 3rd party instruments. then all you would need to do is get an extra Mac and just install the Logic Node app. That would be all.

But that aside, VEPro is definitely the way forward with regards to offloading your instruments onto a slave machine.


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## Ashermusic (Nov 17, 2016)

Imagine my grandmother had wheels; she could have been a bicycle


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## IFM (Nov 17, 2016)

I have one big Mac Pro and one medium PC Slave. I recently tried moving the entire production to the Mac Pro with the introduction of Play5's better Mac memory handling. 
In LPX, the system is very stable even using bow change patches on HS across all five sections. CPU usage was very stable.

When I tried this with Cubase it didn't work out too well unfortunately. I could also just make my Macbook a slave as it has a 2nd SSD and enough ram to host HB and some others. It is nice though to just power up the much quieter Mac Pro as the PC had to have fan control software to tame it despite being in a machine room.


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## URL (Nov 18, 2016)

Matrox have a nice solution for have all computers in a cold quiet room...but it cost a small amount of...M.
Well Apple have not released a new Mac pro yet so...


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## ChristopherDoucet (Nov 18, 2016)

I'm certainly not one of the "Big Boys", but I have 7 right now and I'm REALLY hoping I'm in a financial position to buy all new slaves soon. I'd prefer 3x with 128gbs vs. the 7 with 64gbs I have now.

Sometimes, its like a full time job, just getting them all working! haha


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## synthpunk (Nov 18, 2016)

Thanks for sharing Alex.

The Spitfire crew are using single 8 core Mac Pro Vader Helmets running Logic X, Pro Tools, and video. It seems the leaner setups lead to less obtrusiveness in the creative process and I have to agree and I am running a single 6 core fully capable of DAW, video, samples, and many synth instances and am quite content.



AlexRuger said:


> It's funny--many of the "big boy" setups I've seen are smaller than a lot of the rigs on this forum. I do tech for a couple of A-listers and have gotten their rigs down to one or two VEPro hosts. I'm sure that when Klaus had 40 slaves, they were Giga machines with, like, 4GB of RAM max. Lots has changed since then!
> 
> I know of and/or have helped set up a couple others that are just running one computer (beefed up trash can Mac Pro or in certain cases a monster of a PC, all of which are running VEPro locally only).
> 
> ...


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## ZeroZero (Nov 18, 2016)

Just so the thread is aware, I have just built a template with 750 tracks using one PC and no Vepro. It's running well using disabled tacks in C8.5. My PC's footprint with this browser open only is 6.2 gb of RAM and my CPU (5820), is showing 11% (task manager), Cubase with a blank project shows 6.6gb RAM and CPU at 13%. When I load Cubase and the template, it's using 7.1 gb, CPU at 12%. I am not finished yet, there are things I can do template wise, that will shrink the footprints, and there are hardware improvements on the way. Nevertheless this template performs fast and is visually uncluttered, I shall post separately about the build.
I post here to say you don't need two PCs' anymore, unless you keep writing Star Wars over and over, in 192 khz. With disabled tracks, and the invisibility feature, you can have hundreds of tracks a click away, have only the few you want showing, little RAM footprint and everything ready to rock and roll in an instant. There is a lot of set up time (weeks) to do this properly the once, but when it's done, its done.

Z


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## zeng (Nov 19, 2016)

For Cubase users;
What is your average "Real Time Audio Processing Load" levels for projects similar to below (it has 4 bars so you can say for ex "1,5 bars during playing" etc).

20-25 VST midi tracks with todays powerful strings, percs, brass patches with fx plugins such as reverbs.
10-15 audio tracks with fx plugins (this is optional, there may not be any audio tracks).


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## mjsalam (Sep 9, 2017)

Ashermusic said:


> Imagine my grandmother had wheels; she could have been a bicycle


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## westlake79 (Sep 10, 2017)

Uh, everyone, did you all miss that Hans himself responded saying he's down to 5 PC's? This forum is too funny sometimes... 

Thanks RcTec for responding!


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## KV626 (Sep 11, 2017)

westlake79 said:


> Uh, everyone, did you all miss that Hans himself responded saying he's down to 5 PC's? This forum is too funny sometimes...
> 
> Thanks RcTec for responding!



Maybe not everyone knows "who's who"


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## synthpunk (Sep 11, 2017)

We're all hoping for him to comment on Bladerunner 2 



KV626 said:


> Maybe not everyone knows "who's who"


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## westlake79 (Sep 11, 2017)

v


KV626 said:


> Maybe not everyone knows "who's who"



It's true, but I love that he snuck in like Clark Kent and no one recognized him with his glasses on.


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## Michelob (Jul 30, 2021)

westlake79 said:


> v
> 
> 
> It's true, but I love that he snuck in like Clark Kent and no one recognized him with his glasses on.


haha


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