Wow,
This is a great run down on the differences between analog and digital recording.
I started out as an all digital kid. Nothing but software and plugins, but recently I've been branching out into more hardware. I'm kinda in love with tubes right now. Mics, preamps, anything you can cram a tube in I'm sold.
I think in terms of recording the argument is kinda silly. If you keep your audience in mind, then doing a bunch of analog tape recording only to bounce it to a CD (or a full digital setup to transfer to an LP) seems like a waste. Why not just use the best of both worlds?
A rack full of crunchy warm vintage gear fed into a 32bit float at a high sample rate sounds just fine to me...
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Sub Pop Jumps into the MP3 Retail Arena
The selection isn't huge (currently about 200 albums), the bitrate is low (192Kbps), and right now you can only purchase full albums (not singles), but they are working on updating all of that.
What's nice is that they include album art, and when they increase the quality of the rip, you will be eligible to re-download the track for free (I'm looking at you iTunes).
What I'm most excited about is the idea that they'll be focusing on rare and out of print albums a staple of their catalog. With iTunes, Amazon, etc focusing on more commercial catalogs, this move really appeals to the "long tail" theorist in me.
Check out their announcement here.
Time Waster: Gracenote Music Maps
What do the Beatles, Led Zepplin, Bruce Springsteen, JK Rowling, U2, Kanye West, Pink Floyd, 2Pac, Carrie Underwood, and Linkin Park all have in common?
Why they're currently the top ten "listened to" audio artists in California, of course!
I have to say I've had this up for a couple days now, and it's a lot of fun to page through the different countries around the world to see what people are jamming to.
Check it out here!
Who'd of thought that Michael Buble, High School Musical 2, and Fallout Boy would be in the top albums for Indonesia...
Why they're currently the top ten "listened to" audio artists in California, of course!
I have to say I've had this up for a couple days now, and it's a lot of fun to page through the different countries around the world to see what people are jamming to.
Check it out here!
Who'd of thought that Michael Buble, High School Musical 2, and Fallout Boy would be in the top albums for Indonesia...
Beginner Audacity Tutorial, WITH VIDEO!
Yes, an exclamation point in the title!
So, I've put together a little video with some basic tips to improving the sound of home recordings using Audacity.
And here it is:
Basically, we just want to clean up the sound of an audition. As an example, here's a sample of the audio used before cleaning:
And after:
Also, since the streaming vid is a little hard to see whats going on (even when you expand to full screen), I do have a high quality version hosted on divshare, but it's big (180MB) and DivShare is moving DOGSLOW right now.
AUDACITY TUTORIAL HIGH-ISH QUALITY
If anyone has any advice on better file hosting (for CHEAP), please let me know!
So, I've put together a little video with some basic tips to improving the sound of home recordings using Audacity.
And here it is:
Basically, we just want to clean up the sound of an audition. As an example, here's a sample of the audio used before cleaning:
And after:
Also, since the streaming vid is a little hard to see whats going on (even when you expand to full screen), I do have a high quality version hosted on divshare, but it's big (180MB) and DivShare is moving DOGSLOW right now.
AUDACITY TUTORIAL HIGH-ISH QUALITY
If anyone has any advice on better file hosting (for CHEAP), please let me know!
Sunday, November 4, 2007
The inspiration behind Futurama's theme song: Pierre Henry "Psyché Rock"
Just a fun little factoid post tonight.
Ever heard of Pierre Henry?
(He looks intense --->)
From his wiki:
(born December 9, 1927 in Paris, France) is a French composer, considered a pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.Between 1949 and 1958, Henry worked at the Club d'Essai studio at RTF, founded by Pierre Schaeffer. During this period, he wrote the 1950 piece Symphonie pour un homme seul, in cooperation with Schaeffer; he also composed the first musique concrète to appear in a commercial film, the 1952 short film Astrologie ou le miroir de la vie. Henry has scored numerous additional films and ballets. Among Henry's best known works is the experimental 1967 album Messe pour le temps présent, one of several cooperations with choreographer Maurice Béjart featuring the popular track "Psyche Rock".
Perhaps one of Henry's most well-known influences on contemporary popular culture is to the theme song of the TV series Futurama. The tune is inspired by Henry's 1967 song "Psyché Rock."
Ceremony (1969) (in collaboration with English band Spooky Tooth)
In 1997, Fatboy Slim issued a remix of Psyche Rock.
Sounds like a pretty cool guy!
Here's his vid from 1967:Here's the Futurama theme composed by Christopher Tyng (with four seasons of their title card jokes, so dont listen to the whole thing I guess...):
And here's Fatboy Slim's remix:
ENJOY!
Gaming Angels Interviews David Sobolov and David Pizzuto, PART 2
The SEQUEL!
Here's the rest of David Sobolov's and David Pizzuto's interview with Gaming Angels.
Being asked what their favorite characters to perform:
Sobolov: I showed up for an audition for Transformers and they said they were looking for a David Sobolov-type. At the end of the audition I said, "Was I David Sobolov enough for you?" My favorite characters are the delicious villains that are tortured yet powerful and are feeling all this inner turmoil, but then they use it to strike out at people. Again, it's not who I am, but it's fun to play. There was this character called Malebolgia in this game called Spawn. (In Malebolgia's voice) "Down low, and they put the microphone close to my lips and blow it up huge." And it sounds like I could kill a thousand people at once.
Pizzuto:They are the best, in a general sense, the dark twisted guys. It's kind of like a delicious meal that you wouldn't eat every day. I think it's a universal thing with actors, especially if they allow you some latitude and breathing room with this thing, no pun intended, because a lot of these guys are very down low and just kind of wallowing in this sickness and evil. It's a cathartic thing.
Click HERE for the rest of Part 2!
Click HERE for Part 1!
Audio Guy mail bag: Booth for home recording?
Just got this email in:
Thanks J. I get this question quite a bit. Should you be "worried"? No. Should you be considering it? Yes. But with anything else we do, you really need to be honest with yourself over what you want versus what you need.
If you were recording promos and trailers every day, then you would be making the kind of income where devoting a whole room of your house, and getting an ISDN, and hiring a part time engineer (like ... me for example) would make sense. If most of what you're doing is auditioning though, then I don't think a booth is the way to go.
Would it help? Sure.
Enough to warrant the building cost and support? Probably not.
Most people at this stage of the game are much better served by taking a few simple (and cheap) precautions to ensure your recordings are as clean as possible.
Really, it's about knowing your equipment.
Most microphones are directional to some degree. Meaning, they should only pick up sound from a specific side or "face" of the mic. Most vocal mics are cardioid mics (cardioid ... cardiac, heart? Get it?), and they will have a subtle fan or "heart" shape recording pattern on one side of the mic. The other side of the mic will be dead.
Generally speaking, as long as the room you're in is fairly quiet (fairly closed off from the rest of the house), then you should be able to reduce reflection by treating just one or two walls or a corner of the room.
When you have flat hard walls in a room, and you're trying to record, the sound is bouncing all around. So, when you speak, the sound of your voice travels all the way across the room, bounces off a wall, travels all the way back to the wall behind you, bounces off that wall, and goes back into the mic AGAIN. Of course, that bouncing delays the sound going back into the mic, so you get a slight echo or reverberation ("reverb") effect. Now a little room tone is good. It gives the listener a sense of perspective, but hard surface reflection is often the first sign of an amateur recording (kinda like taking your headshots with a disposable camera).
So how do you fix it?
Well there are two main schools of thought on that. You can either try to block your voice from reflecting on the far wall, or you can block the reflection from the wall behind you. Ideally you would want to do both.
I find it's easier to hang a nice heavy blanket or rug, and record with your back to that. It works best if you can set it up in a corner, and make a little "blanket bowl" to catch reflected sound.
There are contraptions that can bolt on to mic stands that should absorb some of your voice's reflections, but they can be a little pricey, and I think some of them are a little too small to block ceiling and floor reflections. They also wont solve the problem of a hard surface behind you. Ideally, again, you'd want something behind you AND behind the mic, but I don't really think that's always necessary.
Keep the mic as far from your computer as you can (and try to point the "dead" end towards it), and if you have hardwood floors, it's time to throw a rug down.
Steps like these will work wonders for beginning home recording, and are easy and inexpensive to set up. As you become more successful, THEN you can look at the cost of building a room, or plunking down on a pre-fab Whisper Room type thing (the tinniest starting at almost $3000, whew!).
If you want something modular (that you can put up and take down easily) check out this PVC pipe project from PalmCityStudios.
Here's an article from a Wired blog about a professional marimba player, and what she had to go through to sound proof her NY apartment.
And lastly, heres a great Sound on Sound article about (not) setting up a booth.
Enjoy!
Hey,
Should I be worried about setting up a booth? Most of what I do is auditioning from home, but I do get the occasional gig which would be nice to do too.
-J.S.
Thanks J. I get this question quite a bit. Should you be "worried"? No. Should you be considering it? Yes. But with anything else we do, you really need to be honest with yourself over what you want versus what you need.
If you were recording promos and trailers every day, then you would be making the kind of income where devoting a whole room of your house, and getting an ISDN, and hiring a part time engineer (like ... me for example) would make sense. If most of what you're doing is auditioning though, then I don't think a booth is the way to go.
Would it help? Sure.
Enough to warrant the building cost and support? Probably not.
Most people at this stage of the game are much better served by taking a few simple (and cheap) precautions to ensure your recordings are as clean as possible.
Really, it's about knowing your equipment.
Most microphones are directional to some degree. Meaning, they should only pick up sound from a specific side or "face" of the mic. Most vocal mics are cardioid mics (cardioid ... cardiac, heart? Get it?), and they will have a subtle fan or "heart" shape recording pattern on one side of the mic. The other side of the mic will be dead.
Generally speaking, as long as the room you're in is fairly quiet (fairly closed off from the rest of the house), then you should be able to reduce reflection by treating just one or two walls or a corner of the room.
When you have flat hard walls in a room, and you're trying to record, the sound is bouncing all around. So, when you speak, the sound of your voice travels all the way across the room, bounces off a wall, travels all the way back to the wall behind you, bounces off that wall, and goes back into the mic AGAIN. Of course, that bouncing delays the sound going back into the mic, so you get a slight echo or reverberation ("reverb") effect. Now a little room tone is good. It gives the listener a sense of perspective, but hard surface reflection is often the first sign of an amateur recording (kinda like taking your headshots with a disposable camera).
So how do you fix it?
Well there are two main schools of thought on that. You can either try to block your voice from reflecting on the far wall, or you can block the reflection from the wall behind you. Ideally you would want to do both.
I find it's easier to hang a nice heavy blanket or rug, and record with your back to that. It works best if you can set it up in a corner, and make a little "blanket bowl" to catch reflected sound.
There are contraptions that can bolt on to mic stands that should absorb some of your voice's reflections, but they can be a little pricey, and I think some of them are a little too small to block ceiling and floor reflections. They also wont solve the problem of a hard surface behind you. Ideally, again, you'd want something behind you AND behind the mic, but I don't really think that's always necessary.
Keep the mic as far from your computer as you can (and try to point the "dead" end towards it), and if you have hardwood floors, it's time to throw a rug down.
Steps like these will work wonders for beginning home recording, and are easy and inexpensive to set up. As you become more successful, THEN you can look at the cost of building a room, or plunking down on a pre-fab Whisper Room type thing (the tinniest starting at almost $3000, whew!).
If you want something modular (that you can put up and take down easily) check out this PVC pipe project from PalmCityStudios.
Here's an article from a Wired blog about a professional marimba player, and what she had to go through to sound proof her NY apartment.
And lastly, heres a great Sound on Sound article about (not) setting up a booth.
Enjoy!
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Heroes may end at 11th Episode
As you may know, Heroes Season 2 is planned 22-23 episodes long, but first 11 were labeled as “Volume 2″. 11th episode, which will be air on December 3th, planned to be last episode of Volume 2…Unfortunately, that 11th episode may be last episode of season 2 as well, because of the writer’s strike, again!
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Friday, November 2, 2007
EMI Caught Offering Illegal Downloads
While the RIAA is swift to punish any person caught offering illegal downloads, they're not very swift when a member company like EMI does it. Not only did King Crimson's contract never allow digital distribution to begin with, but band member Robert Fripp claims EMI offered their music for sale even after their contract ended entirely.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
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