Gizmodo has the scoop on an ultra tiny audio "workstation" from the Trinity Audio Group.
It uses a custom touch screen version of Linux called Transmission, and the stats are a little weak (500MHz proc, 256MB RAM, 40GB hard drive), but when you're focused on ONLY audio, something like this could come in handy. Anywho, it also comes with wifi, USB, XLR, and 1/4" inputs, nicely done there.
These were the kinds of devices I was hoping to see when UMPC's started coming out. Rather than try and compete against laptops as jack-of-all trades devices, why not go niche? If the pricing isn't insane, I might have found a decent reason to leave the Thinkpad at home...
I do quite a bit of business teaching people how to record themselves. Working in voiceover, this is becoming more and more necessary. Not that VO artists need to be full on recording engineers, but having a basic understanding of how to make their voices sound presentable is becoming more important. At work we recently worked on a promo job where the budget was so low, that to pay for union talent they had to be able to record themselves, and send the audio back as quickly as possible. They didn't care about whisper rooms or ISDN, just a decent clean recording and a good performance. The job would've covered 30+ national promos.
Not a bad incentive to invest in some recording equipment!
My favorite setup to recommend is an external soundcard and condenser microphone. For newbies I tend to start low, say a USB MobilePre and MXL 770 (I can't say I'm a big fan of USB mics, as they don't give you anywhere to go, say you want to upgrade the mic or soundcard, you're starting from scratch all over again, not to mention adding a mixer, preamps, or monitors). Good flexibility, good sound, and all starting at under $300 (including stands and cables).
So, why not use a more expensive mic?
I get this question quite a bit. Every VO actor seems to have dreams of recording at home on a U87 or some vintage ribbon mic, and expensive mics are great, but an expensive mic wont make something sound "good-er". You get an expensive mic because it has a particular character that you are wanting to use. Personally I prefer the sound of an AKG 414 to the U87 FOR MOST PEOPLE. This is of course totally subjective as no one's really going to sound "bad" on either of these, but the Neumann will run you two to three times as much. Will you sound two to three times better?
It's all about bang for buck. For a newbie at recording, who wont understand about monitors, mixing, preamps (where mics really start to shine), and sound proofing/isolation it makes little sense to spend more than a couple hundred bucks to start experimenting. This kit can get really expensive really fast.
So all that being said, I've setup a little experiment. I've taken 3 of my favorite mics (and one beater) set them up under the same conditions, and two at a time, recorded the same piece of text (the first paragraph of 'Under Milk Wood' by Dylan Thomas, one of my favorite plays). All mics were connected directly to my Firewire 4-10, with gain set at half for each. Mic diaphragms were set approximately 10 inches from my face. After recording I punched each track through Sound Forge 9 and boosted the volume about 300% (exactly the same for each), then mixed each down to an mp3 @ 320kbps.
The mics we'll be hearing are:
*The M-Audio Aries @ $120 - Hand held condenser mic I got for free with my soundcard.
*The M-Audio Solaris @ $300 - This was the first multi-pattern condenser I've ever purchased, and it's served me very well for years.
*The Neumann KM184 @ $700 - I inherited this mic, before I was serious about recording, from an internet news "broadcast" station I worked at briefly in college. None of us knew about phantom power, so this mic "never worked". Years later I figured it out, and this has been a great utility and over head mic.
* The Sennheiser MKH 416 @ $1400 - This is THE L.A. mic. Originally used for outdoor broadcast, it also found a home in studios thanks in part to it's laser like focus.
With introductions out of the way, let's take a listen! While listening try to keep your headphones or speakers set to the same level. Each clip is about 40 seconds long.
M-Audio Aries:
M-Audio Solaris:
Neumann KM184:
Sennheiser MKH 416:
Wow! The Aries sounds not great at all! To be fair it is meant to replace dynamic mics like the sm57 (which I originally planned on using but sounded even worse), and even though it's phantom powered, the Aries really is meant to be passed through a preamp just like the Dynamic mics it competes against.
The Senny 416 sounds great. This thing is meant to be attached to video equipment or thrown on a boom, run off batteries, and get ONE person's voice even in noisy environments. Little wonder it handily beats the living crap out of the budget "studio" mics, and at twice the price of the Neumann, it had better.
But here's where a little know-how comes in. What if we normalized the volume of the Neumann and the Solaris to match the volume of the 416? Would the Senny still sound that much better? Let's see! Solaris NORMALIZED:
Neumann NORMALIZED:
OK! That's much better. The Solaris comes in a little brighter. The Neumann made my voice a little muddy, but now we're much closer in terms of "quality".
Now can we really say the Senny is twice as good as the Neumann? FOUR times better than the Solaris? Or if you're just starting out do you just boost the volume after the fact with a budget mic?
Thin voice? Movie trailer voice? No one mic is going to be the best. Matching a mic to a voice is as personal as the right pair of shoes/jeans/etc. Dumping a ton of cash on a "good" mic is kind of useless unless you've got the time, money, know-how, and effort to put into the surrounding kit as well.
Let me know what you think! Comments always appreciated! Hopefully I'll be able to do more of these as time goes on.
We live in a world infested with noise pollution. We live in a world of bad neighbors, loud cars, crappy leaky headphones, gadgets, airplanes, hustle and bustle.
Rob Scovell over at VOIP and Other Stuff... takes a brief second to examine the situation with our gadgets and the noises they make. I for one agree, that little to no thought really seems to go into why devices make the noises they do. Watch a meeting grind to a halt as Hawaii 5-O starts blasting out of some guy's crotch and you'll know what I mean.
"I'll never forget one meeting I had once at Waikato University. We were sitting around discussing something or other and there was a beep. It came from the table of the chap whose job it was to do innovative things with PDAs and other small devices. When it beeped, he jumped, started looking frantically at the collection of gadgets in front of him, and said, "Whoooaaaaa! What was that?! What am I meant to be doing?". Was it a phone call? A text message? An appointment reminder? Or was a device announcing that its battery was going flat?
That was the first time I thought about sound design. Not design that is sound, in the sense of a bridge being sound, but design of appropriate sounds for appropriate situations. I thought about it briefly, but it never really went to the front of my mind."
When I got my 6700, I IMMEDIATELY turned off all of the stock sounds and put in my own. Song samples that don't sound like songs (the beginning of Baba O'Reilly is an excellent ringtone), simple subtle sound effects (like a TARDIS whoosh), all of these really serve to shape how I used my phone, and helped to deliver information quickly. Ringtones are invaluable in that I know who is there before I even look at the screen.
So read the rest of his article, and at the end he links out to another great read by Max Lord, on the tailoring of sound effects for devices and situations. someaudioguy some audio guy voice over vo voiceover sound effects design floey adr dubbing production
I wish my crotch played the theme to Hawaii 5-O...
Get it? All Caps, since I'm yelling over the noise.
So, I use two PC's. I've almost always used Sound Forge (currently on v9) to do my sound design work. Recently I've been hearing all about how Audition is awesome, and I should totally switch. I downloaded the demo and started tearing into it, and it's nice, but I can't see what the advantage is.
Sadly, AudioGuy is developing a reputation as the "GoToGuy" for cleaning up other peoples mistakes. While I'll never speak ill of working, it bothers me that I can't seem to get hired to just prevent the mistakes in the first place. Lately a lot of my work has been in cleaning up audio for low budget shorts and podcasts, and a lot of that cleaning has been noise removal. Bad mics, improper Lav placement, uncontrollable environment, bad ADR, theres a lot of noise out there. So, throwing some files I'm working on into Audition and cranking up the NR plugin, I have to say I was a little disappointed.
Spectrum view is cool. I haven't seen yet where it really is better than waveform, just brings different information to focus first. Selection of noise to remove is great, but the actual settings to remove the noise just dont do it for me. Compared to the SF/Sony NR plugin, it's just too easy to hollow out the piece I'm working on.
So I put this out there to anyone who might catch it. What NR plugin SHOULD I be looking at? Since a lot of my freelance work involves cleaning, if something can really outperform SF/Sony, I'd love to give it a shot!
A fun little article out of the Washington Post, where the four "Princesses" of Shrek 3 were supposed to be interviewed by William Booth, but with Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri, and Amy Sedaris (my fave) all in the same room, Billy-Boy didn't stand a chance.
Really they're supposed to be talking about their voice work in the film, but not much really gets accomplished, and Bill ends up just transcribing his recordings of the "interview". Still, it is a fun read from four very funny women totally taking a piss.
"You're such a guy," Poehler says, looking at your correspondent.
"You'll always find what you're looking for," Sedaris says.
"And Bill found porn," Rudolph says.
"Animated porn," Oteri chirps. "The best kind."
This goes on for a while.
Okay, so what is the movie, which is, of course, totally harmless and rated G, about?
It's ok. I can't say I loved it, but if you haven't seen it yet, it is worth a matinee. I wont bore you with a review. There are plenty of those out there.
As this is a blog about sound, I guess I should talk about that.
The sound was good was good, but I can't say I loved it.
Really everything kinda felt generic or sloppy. Sandman was nothing special, just 'sand sifting' sounds. Music and explosions were cool, but I have to say when it came to Venom I was SEVERELY disappointed. Topher is cool and all, but he's just NOT dark enough ... AT ALL. Venom as a character is the melding of the symbiote AND Eddie, two identities working together. They refer to themselves as a 'they' or 'we'. Do they use that for any cool effect? Nope. They tweak his voice, but it's barely noticeable.
I hate to say it, but the voice from the cartoon was MUCH better. Chorusing, pitch shifting, a little reverb and flange to spice it up, made for a great "dual consciousness" kinda sound. Topher needed a little help there.
Sound Forge 9 is good. VERY good. But if you've already got SF8, and say a good sequencer like Acid, then I'm not really sure it's worth the upgrade price. Here's what's frustrating. I've already spent money on 8, and the noise removal plugin. Upgrading to 9 only gives me multi track. I can't really justify that cost, though I really want to have that latest and greatest.
Yup, We're up to SF9. I'm downloading the trial now. True Multi-track, built in noise reduction (finally), iZotope plugins, it looks all good! Here's a brief review from Studio Monthly.
I'm stoked. I use SF more than any other audio program. Sure, sequencers like Sonar have grown up to include an impressive suite of editing tools, but if you quickly and easily want to get in and surgically edit audio there's nothing better than SF.
"MultiInspectorFree is a 31 band spectral analyzer designed to be used in a multitrack environment. Based on the technology of FaderWorks to handle multiple dependent instances of the same plug-in, MultiInspectorFree provides an easy way for simultaneous spectral analysis of several audio signals.
The first instance of MultiInspectorFree behaves like a standard 31 band spectral analyzer. Additional instances automatically send their spectral analysis result to all other instances of MultiInspectorFree. Every editor window of MultiInspectorFree shows the same content. Therefore, after opening all necessary plug-in instances it is sufficient to leave just one editor window open. The width and the color of the level bars are adjusted according to the current number of instances.
MultiInspectorFree incorporates a standard third octave frequency analyzer. The centre frequencies of the bands are based on the ISO 266:1997 standard (20 Hz to 20 kHz). Pink noise will appear flat in the frequency spectrum.
MultiInspectorFree supports up to 4 instances at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz."
Well said! I'm downloading it now. someaudioguy some audio guy voice over demo voice acting recording software plugin vst free
A really good article from the Peach Arch News, Alex Browne interviews Sonal Joshi about her work on the film Happy Feet, where a one year job ballooned into three and a half, but gives her her most prestigious credit. Kinda like my work on audiobooks, it's grueling but ultimately very satisfying.
Here's my favorite bit:
"Dubbing sessions became necessary as sound was adjusted to the movement, and that meant call-backs for the star voice talent, recorded wherever they happened to be at the time. “Robin Williams was in San Francisco and Nicole Kidman ended up elsewhere in Australia,” she said. “We’d have recording sessions over iChat.” A high point, she said, was working with Williams, who was in usual hilarious form for the recording sessions. “It was like being at a party – he’d improvise for hours and hours,” she said. “It was difficult sound-wise; 10 lines of script ends up being four hours of recording. A lot of it ends up being R-rated. We’d have to do a lot of editing but it was a lot of fun,” she said."
Excellent use of iChat. I've been using Skype for phone patching, and I'd never thought of using video.
Bob LeVitus at www.ecommercetimes.com, has a good article up about a SXSW panel discussion on home recording and the value of "real" studios.
Do recording studios and their proprietors still offer value to their customers?
Can a studio and its proprietor enhance an artist's strengths?
Is a "real" studio always the best choice?
It also claimed that audience questions would be answered with practical advice.
A very brief write with some really good common sense advice. I especially like the part where he tells artists to leave the engineers alone while they are working!
Read the rest here. someaudioguy some audio guy recording voice over computer music voice acting studios booth engineer mixing mastering
