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a STING IN THE TALE

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 6, Issue 7 - September 2006

Leading musician and composer Kipper has worked with some of the brightest and the best. Always willing to experiment, he has embraced the power of technology to help push back the boundaries in discovering new formats. Now he's working closely with Sting, joining him on tour and collaborating on all of his recent albums

Kipper is a leading composer and musician, working with many famous names in the music world. Starting out young in the world of rock and roll, Kipper teamed up with Gary Numan in the era of electronica and then came of age in the film industry, writing scores and compositions for pictures such as 'Notting Hill' and 'Moulin Rouge'.

While these worlds were very different, both offered something special and appropriate at the time. Now Kipper is back in the realms of popular music, working almost exclusively with Sting, collaborating on all of his recent albums and joining him on his recent 'Sacred Love' tour. An early adopter and technology convert, Kipper has sought to experiment with new formats and developments to push back boundaries in his work.

Technology challenge
As technology has evolved and prices decreased, the music industry has made the jump to digital recording over tape. However, guaranteeing rugged portability of flexible storage of digital sound files has proved a major challenge to the industry. Kipper's work takes him from studio to stage around the world. A key criterion driving his choice of storage solutions was for his work to be safely stored, with guaranteed peace of mind, and yet still be mobile.

Portability has always engendered significant risk, due to the wear and tear of constant travel necessitating repeated insertion and removal of disks from the hosting chassis. Kipper needed a storage solution that allowed him to remove drive enclosures regularly. He needed to store whole music projects on individual disks, which comprised parts of his entire sound library. The library is streamed from the hard drive and holds enough scalable storage for samples and works in progress, as well as finished and prototype tracks. Touring with Sting, Kipper needed to be able to take these drive enclosures and the chassis with him. The 'Sacred Love World Tour', for instance, meant 20 months on the road, requiring reliable, ruggedised drive enclosures that could withstand changes of temperature, heavy vibrations and the general rigours of the road.

Previously, Kipper had used a standard FireWire disk enclosure from a competitor. This solution did not permit the easy removal or exchange of hard drives. Swaps would literally entail exchanging a complete hard drive case with another. Furthermore, due to its FireWire connection, the insertion rating was limited and didn't allow constant removal and insertion. Kipper was looking for something more to solve both the challenges of portability and reliability.

The solution
Kipper now uses a Data Silo DS321 Firewire enclosure, with DE110 removable drive enclosures. This solution not only enables the removal, transportation and safe storage of his hard drives, but also offers him top-quality products that exceed MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) guidelines regarding heat dissipation and rotational vibration. Power-buffering features - Softstart - are standard and a necessity when combining with the range of mixing desk hardware. Importantly, while
the data silo is a low-cost solution, it is able to accommodate up to 500Gb in capacity per cartridge. The DS321 has a lockable enclosure that can be either rack mounted or placed under a PC (only 1U) and is also small enough to be mobile - perfect for taking on the road.

This rugged, removable and economic storage solution enables Kipper to work on tracks electronically in the studio, layering as much as he wishes in any session - recording, revisiting, editing and finalising - and then take it on the road for any amount of time and under any conditions, without jeopardising quality of performance or integrity of the data stored upon it.

The result
Throughout the 20-month 'Sacred Love World Tour' with Sting, Kipper relied exclusively on his two DS321, with two DE110 drive enclosures each. Using one DS321 to run the show from the unit and the other DS321 as a backup device. Kipper notes that the equipment has never once let him or the tour down. He also finds that working with removable drive enclosures gives him fluidity between projects. He can simply store individual projects, or sounds, on hard drives and keep them in a safe place while working on something else - or take them with him when he is on the road. Able to create and experiment in his home studio, prior to meeting musicians to record, Kipper can sketch out in marvellous detail exactly how he'd like a song to sound. He can then pull out his drive and go more or less anywhere he needs to take the song to the next stage - be that a recording studio or sound stage.

"I can't imagine working in a different way to this now," he says. "Storage is crucial to preserving my work. Getting down even wisps of melody or a sample to build into a new track is so easy and instantly accessible, even outside the studio. I'm not tied to any one location - which is vital in my job.

"On the road, I've never had to think twice about it. I've never had to worry if the drive would fail or if there might be technical problems. I just pop the drive in and off we go - literally plug and play. Knowing I can rely on that level of quality is a great comfort and brings real peace of mind." ST