Deck and Garageband and ProTools

Almost every "real" band that records in a studio these days uses ProTools. It's the industry standard. The problem with ProTools is it's pretty much a Windows thing and for years I've been a Mac person. So back in the day my pal Stel turned me on to Deck. We used Deck to record almost all of the DragKing stuff we put out. But nobody else used it and they had crappy support and they've pretty much gone out of business from what I can tell.

But all my files were created in Deck. So I still used it. I even spent about $200 about six years ago to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at the time.

I started recording all the songs that will end up as the Pudge Songs of the Month in Deck when I was working them out about five years ago. I wasn't happy with a bunch of the recordings but I had a bunch of songs done in Deck. But then I got a new MacBook about three years ago with a more current version of OS X. For some reason Deck didn't work right on the new machine. Whenever I would mix down a song it would cut off the first second or two and add a second or two of silence at the end. It sucked.

I tried to contact Deck support but they didn't seem to exist any more. The message boards on the support site didn't have anything new for years. There were no patches or anything to download. I felt like I was sort of stuck.

and then I realized that this new Mac that I bought had Garageband installed on it. I started to play around with Garageband and realized that it was WAY better than Deck. So at some point I had a crazy idea. I would re-record all of the songs that I had been working on in Garageband instead of Deck. Since I was starting up this new band, Pudge, why not make a break from the DragKing past and use software that the rest of the world actually used and was supported?!

So I re-recorded almost all of the songs in Garageband. Doing them over again made them better. I changed things here and there. Re-wrote parts that I didn't think worked before. The original Deck version of "The Hate Song" was a disaster. I thought it had so much potential but the guitar parts and vocal parts sucked.

next month's song is a different story however... more on that tomorrow.