A Great Mic Pre…

...is a pleasure to behold…listen to, you know what I mean. 

Okay, so we’re all composers so why would we ever need a microphone, mic pre, and A/D converter?  How bout solo instruments?  I know there are some closet tuba players out there.  Trumpet was my primary instrument before I discovered piano.  

See, something interesting happened 2 weeks ago.  A fellow composer was doing a ska piece and was unhappy with the trumpet samples he used.  I suggested we lay some real trumpet down.  One Virtual Glass (esession.com) session later, there were 5 very tidy trumpet recordings on their way to their heaven of mixing. 

My signal chain was decent.  Shure SM-57 (A respectable mike by anyone’s standards) into a Digi 002, right into Logic.  It sounded great and there was much rejoicing. 

But, could it have been recorded better?

For those of you who have not reached front end audio signal chain, ill sum it up.  Mind you this is a very general flowchart.. 

Soundsource (Jack’s Bach Model 43 for Instance) –> Mike (SM57) –> Mike Pre (Digi 002) –> DAW

 If I was actually going to start recording Trumpet, Voice, Acoustic guitar… what would a better signal chain gain me? 

First I started with the mikes.  I good friend and fellow studio owner from New York lent me a few microphones to test drive.  Among them were a Blue Woodpecker and Kiwi, an AKG 414, and an Earthworks SR30.   Okay, Mikes are very well taken care of. 

Now the Mike Pre…  A few days of weighing options as well as some expert advice from my buddy in NY and the folks at Mercenary.com and I had a new Mike Pre delivered, an Arsenal MP-R20.  WOW what a difference a pro Mike Pre will make. 

On to the A/D (Analog to Digital Conversion).  The 002 Still served as this piece in the chain, however, since the Arsenal is such a mean machine, its balanced outs delivered mondo audio signal into the analog ins of the 002.  The result?  A scary vocal track, clear, bright, but not too harsh. 

Now, each Mike, Mike Pre and Converter combination will yield different results. Think of it as a painter's palette.  The gear are the colors, and mixing them in different ways will yield different colors.

In my case, the arsenal was the best bang for buck, it has two channels of API designed pre-amplification, and has a doubled warranty which any business owner can appreciate.  However, my chain may not make sense for another's recordings.  A completely clear Mike pre would have been a John Hardy, or a Great river..  Mikes were also a very important consideration.  In a future blog I will get into that, its a whole weeks worth of entries by itself.

So, whats the synopsis?  A decent Mike and Mike Pre will definitely change your mix, and for the better. 

Till next time

Jack

 

 

Bursts of Sound

There will invariably come a time when you are recording and these sets of circumstances collide:

 1 You are listening to your mix at a (eh em) relatively loud volume, either through headphones or your monitors.

 2 You are fully enjoying not only the fine mix you have crafted for what it is, but also the natural compression your ear has when listening to (eh em) relatively loud music.

  3  Your digital Mixer decides to throw digital feedback through one of your channels.

 The sudden explosion of ear-splitting noise tears through your head, numbing your senses and nearly gives you heart failure.  Biological effects aside, you may have well killed the high end of your monitors.

 As any of my friends and clients will attest, I am a digital junkie.  I enjoy the relatively noiseless and clear work environment gives me.  2 O1vs are the heart of my studio, effortlessly mixing together both digital and analog sources and feeding it back into my Mac, for a mix down to be proud of.

 There is something that the guys at the music store didn’t tell me about these mixers.  The mixer occasionally loses its mind, and routes something wrong, and all hell breaks loose.

 Unfortunately there is nothing to be done about it, other than checking.. (and re-checking) your routing, both real and virtual and maintain your equipment as well, both real and virtual.

 It may very well save your monitors and your hearing as well.

See you next time.

J

 

X 64 Late in the Evening.. Or Late Nite Trouble..shooting

X64 at 1am

 

Do you know that feeling you get when you have worked well into the morning, after a full day of work?  Where you know you should be headed off to lala land so you can wake up the following morning and do it all over again?

 

Interestingly I find myself in the former situation, and not by choice.

 

What I mean is.. Not by conscious choice.

 

See, I belong to a select group of people who just cannot let a problem lie, in this case specifically a computer related problem, until the following day.  I know there are those of you reading this that know exactly what I’m talking about.

 

So, lets rewind a couple of hours.  Around 11PM, while editing a documentary, I realized that the computer I was working on (Dual Core, many Gigs of rama nd disk space) was extremely slow, rendering video at a slow rate, and making my normally fast edit process slowdown to a crawl. 

Naturally I blamed Windows.  X64 at that, because its an easy target of my occasional threatened silicon apocalypse.  Could you see me dressed in EPROMS, wielding my terrible USB Data stick of Destruction?

After much head scratching and task manager perusing, I realized it was not Window’s fault at all.  Turns out the NLE I  was using needed time to “Conform” (or better known convert) the video files I had imported from a capture computer. 

So now, at the very late hour, I must ask myself and you my fellow computer/audio/video geeks.. what did the Video Conform to? 

Protestant?  Catholic?

 

J

j

How Much is Too Much?

How much is Too Much?

 

Last week, I was working with an amazing talent (cindycampo.com) for the TV show I score.  I was thrust back into the role of vocal music producer which I have not done in quite some time.  I noticed two things immediately about how I’ve changed since I made the switch from pop to TV and film.

 

One, Its all in the song.  Sure I try to write pretty hooks with melodies that inspire the watcher, but really, if I go too overboard it conflicts with what’s on the screen.  When doing pop, rock, country, name your pleasure, it’s the song!  Cindy came down with two killer country/crossover/pop songs and tracking them reminded me that its all in the song.  If you can break it down to an acoustic and vocal, or a piano and vocal, and not add any other orchestration, you know you have a hit on your hands.

 

I added layers, chorus on the guitar, EQ’ed the hell out of the backups, but to no avail.  Everyone liked the original rough mix!

 

Even though I’ve done this thing for years and years, I am still reminded that I have a lot to learn about music production.  Sometimes its not how much you add, but more…what you add.

 

 

Best

Jack

To X32 or X64?

X64 or X32?

 

In the midst of the studio upgrades, I added two new systems (we’ll call them powercubes because they are contained in very neat little square micro ATX chassis.

 

Powercube1 was designed to run VST stack, and have some favorite soft synths (NI Battery 3, Garriton Personal Orchestra, Spectrasonics Atmosphere, East West Percussive Adventures & Ra (Rare).  It sports a nice core2 due processor and 4 gigs of ram.  It also enjoys Windows XP Pro 64 Bit.

 

On to Powercube2, the “Beefier” system.  Quad core, 4 gigs of ram, large disk arrays, you get the picture.  Gigastudio 4, 64 Bit was the only program this computer was to run.  Gigapulse NFX, as well as a number of other choice Plug in effects was meant to make this computer an 8 port, 16 channels per port orchestral screamer.

 

I installed X64 on this machine, and installed a high end sound card.  The high-end soundcard had “Beta” GSIF 2.0 drivers for 64bit OS.  The card was not seen, Gigastudio 64 bit refused to open in anything other than re-wire mode, and I was quite miffed.  Tweaks, patches and hacks did nothing to resolve the problem, and with deadlines looming, I broke down and reformatted for X32.  Gigastudio 4 went on without a hitch, libraries load and GSIF (A Very Low latency protocol) works like a charm.  I throw as much MIDI I can at the machine (Using Midi Over Lan (musiclab.com)) and it plays back note on, off and continuous controller data like a charm.  My reason for this posting today is, if you are choosing to compose using a 64 bit OS as your platform, be very aware that very few card manufacturers will support 64 bit in GSIF 2.0 mode.  High-end cards (Higher end than I was using) will almost definitely give you what you need.

 

Next week, I will explain the whole Gigabit Ethernet debacle.  I fully accept the “Experimental” in what I am doing, and I hope that in some small way you are benefitting from my experimentation.

 

Till next time,

Jack

When it Rains...

... it pours.

K thats it for this week.

j

Okay okay, i'll tell you what happened.  Right before going to NY this past week, the system drive failed on my primary Gigastudio computer.  Yup, the one that I raved about June 3rd, decided to inform me that it's OS drive was no longer going to cooperate.

Ye gods.  I packed up my bags and my Fiance and headed to NY.  I came back Monday, got ready for work and realized I hadn't fixed the computer.  Oops, minor lapse of memory there.  So, to make a very long story short, it created a cascade of technical badness.  It was open season on hard drives all over the studio.  The MAC lost it's primary data drive, you know, the one where I keep all my current projects?  Thankfully, a rushed trip to Circuit City (among other places, thank you SO much honey) fixed the problem...  But for how long?

This week's fiasco has reminded me to keep timely backups of all data, both past and current.  I also shall be installing some new disk arrays with redundancy so the impact from hardware failures is not significant.

It was nice though to be holding a screwdriver and a pair of pliers again... It's been so long since i've gotten down and dirty with the microchips.

Till next time

j

The Beautiful Sound of Silence

Never in my entire life have I enjoyed the sound of silence more than today.  Trying to think of a proper name for this blog has forced me to compile a list of things this blog will NOT be.

I could go into a convoluted diatribe about how tinnitus destroys my ability to hear perfect silence, but I won't.  I will not get into the intricacies of analog versus digital, warmth versus clear unadulterated signal, that's a whole other blog entry. 

Todays article is a great big duh for me.

For years... I am talking years, I've created music using computers.  MACs and PCs living peacefully together in a long revered silicone utopia melding together to create the perfect fifth of harmony, interoperability, boundless creative potential, audio superiority and redundancy.  However, like any marriage, marrying two technologies has its ups and downs.  But today.. today was an up day.

The short of it, there was a eureka that should have occurred a long time ago but didn't.  In any digital audio chain, there is the inevitable introduction of noise due to analog source and conversion.  The world.. it's noisy.  Recording drums is really noisy if you ask anyone who has a headache.  Tracking vocals is noisy, the mike is inevitably going to have self noise and transmit noise to an analog to digital converter, which introduces more noise and distortion until it reaches the pristine land of digital.  And yet, this still is not the topic of this entry.

When you use a separate computer to playback samples of orchestral instruments as most composers do, the invariable question surfaces, how do I mix that with my main computer sound?  Until today, I have been taking the analog outs of a audio interface from the PC and mixing it into my digital mixer via the analog input.

Noise you say?  Yes I say.  Noisy.

A computer's internal organs, in fact the entire interior of a CPU is a radio frequency play land.  Putting a digital to analog converter in a place like this is truly asking for trouble.  Most cards have breakout boxes attached to PCI cards which put the A/D and D/A as far from that noisy scenario and thus achieving a balance between noise and the need to have analog inputs.  Most current audio interfaces use USB2.0 or Firewire to communicate with it's host computer, which takes the PCI out of the equation entirely.

But there are those composers who rarely if ever require analog inputs and outputs at all.  We write music in our digital audio workstations, we trigger samples which have been expertly recorded in beautiful halls, chambers, churches, etc.  (Yes they still have noise :)  We mix these pieces down through our digital mixers or even right in the computer, no external processing.  And we are happy, and enjoy our noiseless creations.

Not me though.  My PC had an audio card.  It was noisy.  I didn't think to interface it to my main computer digitally.  All it required was a S/PDIF digital audio cable, and the insertion of that noisy computer into a digitally clean world through it's S/PDIF connection.  It was so simple yet so elegant.  My solution was in front of me for years, and only now do I realize I've been making noisy mixes.  Goodbye BNR plug in.  I powered up Protools, turned on the digital mixers, activated Gigastudio on my PC and loaded my Steinway B sample.  Absolutly clear, beautiful signal through my HD headphones.  I nearly wept.

If a $14.95 cable brought me so much joy, I wonder what $30 will do to me.

j