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wMX70 |
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Dorkfest. Recording junk. May include lengthy details of electronic circuitry or the innane. (Just like every other blog) Mostly the whatsit and whosit of whatever audio and recording related things I'm working on but I want you to participate. |
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wThursday, January 30, 2003 |
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kt-
yeah, i need to change my nickname back. takara is the name of the red dirt bike i had when i was a kid. actually, that's the company that made it but i love "my takara" as a 9 yr old.
this blog template is pissing me off. how it loses formatting after the first paragraph. maybe i;ll try and fix that. maybe later.
well, there are a couple things i guess. yes, you're right. your ears are pretty much the most important thing in the equation. but, don't let that get you down. that is a process like riding a bike. actually, it's good to hear you say that cuz i never really think about it - i just hear things you know... but when i stop to think about it, i know that i "hear" things totally different than liam does or rachel, or definietly my coworkers and joe public. but - i mean, that all gets developed over time. i'm still struggling on growing my hearing too. i'm working on trying to hear frequencies better... like be able to hear something and be able to hear what frequnecy it is, like be able to say "that shit at 500 hz is really annoying and needs to get cut"
now going from nowhere to that's probably a big step, but you just have to go one step at a time. listening to bands now is wierd because i've started to hear it on different levels and can't separate the song from the room from the engineer from their choices. the advantage is that it makes me enjoy listening to crap i'd never listen to - because i can divorce all creative judgement from the production and engineering standpoint.
oh - and autotune... avril levigne? totally. the production on that still makes me want to kill. listen how artificial everything is. the vocals are on a plane way higher than the music, which in itself is horribly horribly compressed. my advice is to never listen to anything on the radio as a judge of how to be a good engineer.
for the bonham thing - it's a symbiotic thing to a degree, but i've gotta say, you can't polish a turd. making a good player sound good is kinda easy. making a sucky player sound good is very very difficult. a lot of the "bonham sound" has to do with the way it was recorded (in a castle through a staircase - in other words - the natural reverb of the space reinforced his monster playing) if bonham was all close miced people wouldn't say as much about how huge his drumming is. oh, and another thing. we saw the forty fives last night - and i was used to this huge PA gated drums sound, and then i got the record and it was so different. very natural and 60s sounding. very room mic'ed sounding. exact same players. 2 different engineers/situations. worlds of differences in the impression on the other end. so, yes and no. the engineer does have a lot of choices to make to influence it, but you can't polish a turd.
for autotune - i'm merely speculating, but you're on the right track i believe. you know how in photoshop you can "snap to grid" so once you set a guidline and yuo get close, it pulls the tool in place? it's similar. the levels arent changed, but rather the frequncy is changed to snap to the nearest half-note (or probably whole note - im sure there are a number of options) i believe what's happening real time is that the autotune looks at the frequncy(pitch) of the note that comes in - compares it to a known reference point. (440hz=A 880=A above that etc... each note has a finite and corresponding frequncy) and resamples rounding up or down to that given reference point. i believe one of the additional reasons that autotune "sounds bad" to most people in addition to the complete perfection (which is where the musicality is in the note - the barely perceptable fluctuations) - is that the sound has to go through this intense sampling/resampling process before it gets to the output of the autotune. and of course the whole legion of problems with sample rates and all that come into play there. that is all speculation and conjecture on my part though. i've never used autotune. oh, and autotune i imagine can only be used singularly, like on 1 track at a time. or at least that's how i'd imagine it. i can't imagine the mess that would happen if you put a full mix through it. eeek. what's this about scanning oil? i dont know anything about that?
i'm off to solder some stupid cables to go from my mixer to laptop and tighten up that neotek design.
word.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 3:58 PM
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wTuesday, January 28, 2003 |
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well, i take back everything i said. after last night's escapades, the physical enclosure is hot. H.O.T.T. hot. i'm fucking bob vila in there. drilling, screwing (uh, this is starting to get bad) by myself up there. uh. screw you. my girlfriend told me it was sexy that i built shit out of metal. that's why she stays around. gotta love a girl who can encourage the dork in you.
so i said screw it to the half ass wood and went to home depot and got alluminum to make L shped brackets to bridge the strips in the rack case. now they're monted soildly. then i got a project enclosure from radio shack for the auiod ins/outs. that's pretty solid now.
i went to village discount in roscoe village after nora's fervent praises of the place "you know that shirt i was wearing the other night? i got it there. and liam's sweater he was wearing? didn't he look good? $1.50" sorry buddy, we know your girlfriend buys your clothes for you.
anyway, i found a cool old metal box for 90 cents. and i got one of those old suitcases like liam has to cables and stuff. but anyway, i put the power supply in the box and fed power through an old XLR cable. power works great. rack looks great. one channel doesnt work. the other is kinda fuzzy and quiet.
ahhh... it's par for the course for me isn't it. shit never works when i get it. stupid electronics.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 2:38 PM
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wMonday, January 27, 2003 |
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spent the weekend with extended family kinda but made it to the space long enough to work on racking the neotek strips. it's going alright. on one hand easier than i anticipated, and on another harder. the physical mounting of it all is becoming troublesome, but the electrical part of it i think i have straightened out. cool. looking to find an old lunch box to house the power supply.
posted by
two tickets to paradise at 1:42 PM
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