This Fall brings our music to new changes as Hannah takes up the fiddle and I try my hand at playing Cello!
There will be some serious blogging about all this soon!
Caleb.
More thoughts about digital Audio
So I have been hooked on recordings produced by T Bone Burnett, and I always am struck by the sort of “tone” they have and how things like drums and guitars always have a depth to them that I find lacking in most modern recordings… I was listening to a CD put out by a rather well known major label and even mixed and mastered by some big name guys who’s names are well known in the industry and it was amazing how bad they sounded… To clarify I suppose I must say that my biggest beef with the sound was more to do with the space that was around each instrument… Or the LACK of it! See whenever I play with a band that had drums… The sound of the drums sort of excited the room and made some sort of ambiance from the air pressure that was being moved by the attack, guitars have a natural push to them as the speakers compress the air around the amp itself, while the sound of the room is filled with the sound of each of these sources there is sort of an effect created by this music that if you are all in tune and playing your best sounds rather pleasing to the listener.
Cymbals in modern music also seem to have a brittle sound to them these days that doesn’t suit my ears either… I suppose in a perfect world we would all still be recording in well treated rooms that sounded great, and we would still be rolling tape into a well tuned 2 inch machine… The reality is that as gear has gotten easier to come by; so the lowest common denominator of sound quality has also been lowered to meet the less than stellar sound of the newfound common gear… Now I am not an elitist by ANY means and in fact if you were to look into the studio here on the home front many would laugh at the collection of lower end mics and freeware or else donationware plugins. Tape is not cheap and hard drive space is getting more and more easy to come by so I don’t see digital audio going away anytime soon, and for just the financial reasons alone… However my hope is that someday the sound quality of digital audio (or the lack of it) will one day be tamed to be as pleasing to the ear as tape was in the the 60’s. Of course vinyl and casSet are almost a lost cause as a medium for playback but there is NOTHING stopping the industry from demanding better sounding playback systems in the digital age… The decrease in sound quality will not stop at iPods and and computer speakers but also in the gear used by our radio stations as well.
But my point here with this post is more to do with the fact that so many recordings are now being made with the latest cheaply assembled USB output device from the big box store down the street and while great gear will not always warrant great sound…. A great song recorded on good gear can still be a better listening experience for the end user. On the other side of that we have groups recording on state of the art gear without the skill backing the music itself, let alone the talent in the control room making all the sonic magic.
The following will be a list of my three biggest complaints with the modern recordings I am hearing around the industry these days.
1: Harsh and hyped highs with very rough sounding attack in the upper frequency range, making it hard to listen to music on either headphones and or car stereo systems….
2: Huge production of multi track audio with sounds stacked on top of sounds… I understand wanting a fuller sound, trust me I really do, and The Beatles did some amazing layering with their albums, but really… All those synth pads and distorted guitars on top of distorted bass, on top of the in your face drums… All this backing what I consider the most important part of a song: The vocal… I don’t even know if I wanna get into talking about auto tuned vocals compressed to death and then thrown through a wide range of EQ and delay and reverb and other botched attempts to make the vocal sound “cool”
What ever happened to great lyrics sung by a singer who had decent phrasing and pitch that actually made the song memorable?
3: LOUD LOUD LOUD LOUD LOUD final mixes! See I think that with the amount of electronics we have today we really don’t need to make mixes as loud as we did back in the day because power amps speakers are much more efficient than they were back in yesteryear… Still we are making recordings as loud as we possibly can in hopes that someone will listen. Frankly my thoughts have always been that when the recording comes on and it’s loud from the start I am going to turn it “down” but if it is clean and interesting sound I might just crank it up so I can listen to it! The loudness war for loudest recordings has taken the biggest toll on what it means to have a great recording, when you have to sacrifice sonic clarity in order to be more “in your face” then you need to question what you are really wanting to achieve with your music in the first place.
If the recording “sounds good” then it will get cranked, and possibly louder than the recording that sounds lousy and is hard to listen to at full volume.
I have to say I have not always tracked songs all that well, and my own musical short comings have had their toll on the final performance of the song… Yet every time I push that red button in the studio I try just a little bit harder to create something better than the last take.
My dream DAW
I have been working with computer based music creation/production since the age of 16 I was using Audacity and Gold Wave before moving to Cool Edit and finally moving to Mac OS X and there I learned to use Garage Band
Finally deciding I needed something that would do higher resolution audio I moved to Mackie Tracktion2. Sadly Tracktion which I would love to keep using if it were still being developed for Intel Mac would most likely be my choice still today… It was my understanding that version 3 was very sluggish on the Mac and chewed up a lot of resources….
All those packages were great for the time but as my skills improve and my hardware keeps getting nicer I find myself ready to make some some changes…
See I play acoustic music with my wife Hannah, and together we are the Deep River Roots Band.
This season finds us recording new CD and I am really looking into what I want to use to track and mix this album…. Since we are an acoustic band I really don’t feel we need any sort of Midi editing options at all, because we play real stringed instruments rather than synths, and I don’t really need a lot of fancy editing options that are often used in big budget studios…. Fake drums are not needed either so that pretty much in my mind has ruled out Midi altogether… I have only a few needs… I need a DAW with high resolution audio recording and support for the Mac OS as well as support for Core Audio and more importantly being able to select from any of the 10 inputs on my firepod!
I have liked Logic 8 which has been the main DAW for the last two CD’s but as I get more set into the idea of how I like to work I just find it a little bulky with all it’s library of loops and Midi options and scoring windows and editing windows and all the other bulky messy stuff it seems to throw on top of my musical space. Though I will say Logic has some great effects I rarely use more than two or three of the ones that it comes with… (more on this later)
I know the next thing I am about to hear is “Have you tried REAPER?”
My answer is yes I have tried it and so far I find it to still not be stable enough for the Mac but getting closer… I feel it is pretty close to what I would like to end up using but it just doesn’t work well enough to trust my takes to when I have random crashes going on within the software.
Today I took a few moments to set up some templates in both Logic and REAPER in order set up my four main Aux sends and the four tracks or so that we’ll be tracking our vocals and instruments into…
I also made a set of four basic sends for a reverb effect and a tape simulator for adding a little distortion and slight compression. I made a send to an EQ which might see use from my acoustic guitar, but might not… I then made all these sends into a folder track to hide them away from view for when I want to just track everything and forget about being an engineer while putting down the songs to… er hard drive?
I like using Convolution Reverb as well as tape simulators, and a few times I reach for a couple nice but modest EQ tools, there is some compression and limiting someplace in my final stages of mixing but other than that I don’t use a lot of plugins… Sure I love delay and even then I mostly use a sort of slapback effect when doing something with a 50s sort of sound….
But when it comes down to musicality how much do you really need to make a good sounding record?
My need here is something more like a big tape machine inside my computer with something the extent of a 1950s console with just a handful of rack gear to complete my final mixes before they get burned to disk…
Does anybody else think like me? Am I the only person who wants to go back to a simpler style of recording where I might not have the tools to make millions of different sounds, but I have just what I need to make one really good one?
I would love to get some feedback on others thoughts when it comes to this…
Washington DC it’s time!
Well it has been a crazy day for me and the wife… Our morning started early, and the road seemed like it would never end but we made it to Washington to take part in the Tea Party for healthcare reform.
When I started my career as a musician I swore on a stack of funny-books that I would stay out of the political mess that so many musicians get themselves into.
I was just breaking into the scene when the Dixie Chicks sent their musical career into the gutter by insulting the President of The United States…
I do want to say this: I was born in this land, and I was raised here, and this is my home.
Right now we have some people thinking that we need to do something about current healthcare and while I do agree that what we have right now is not working at its best… The plans we are passing in the house at the time of writing are infringements on Liberty and last time I cracked my history book… Liberty is what makes this country so amazing.
Folks now is the time to make a statement, and now is the time to remind our government who has the final say on things.
It’s time to stand up and hold onto what our founding fathers put in writing!
It’s time to defend our freedom!
As I sit here at the desk in my hotel room a wave of emotions is resting on my shoulders… I have ridden a Metro train for the first time in my life and I have seen historic buildings while walking down streets that seem to lead to so many new and exciting places. Union Station was impressive to say the least and tomorrow our monuments and streets are going to once again ring with the bold passion for freedom, and of life and LIBERTY!
I cannot say how much I desire to raise my future children in a free country with a government once again run by the people and for the people.
This is America! The United States!
This is NOT “The Peoples Republic of America”
The sooner we teach Congress that FACT the sooner we can begin to rebuild a system that truly will be able to go on for generations to come.
I have friends who fought hard to keep this a free country.
Friends who have died in this war we fight today who died trying to defend freedom.
We cannot let those people fight and die for nothing.
Get out there and show your American Pride!
And here we go again!
So I am really excited about Fall, because every year it seems like life goes through some major changes, most always for the best.
Last year found my wife Hannah and I adopting our dog Hank, and me settling into the workload of being a factory worker full time.
This fall finds me again looking for work that pays the bills, but also finds my wife and I starting a new musicial project known as the Deep River Roots Band our website is just going live now and we’re working out all the bugs now…
But what really excites me the most these days is what we’ve been writing and composing these days!
Soon we’re going to be recording stuff again and working out our next CD
I am hoping to blog more and even do some podcasting for this album release, and we’ll be doing some video stuff too! So stay in touch through here, and the website and also on Twitter
Caleb.
What’s been going on!!!!
It’s been a busy summer and the wife and I have been writing some pretty good music together with the hope of falling into a recording and production mode this October as the weather cools off enough for us to do something in a soundproof room with no AC….
DIY has been a big part of the summer with me in the garage building all kinds of gadgets and doo dads for the studio and for our live shows…. I have built a couple Piezoelectric pickups for some of the acoustic instruments and I hope to have some more soldered up soon…
A homemade telecaster is about halfway finished right now, and I am just about ready to wire it up. I have a handful of other odds and ends like a lofi speaker that I built for mono playback in the studio so I can get an idea how things sound in a car….
If we can get our camera back up and running I will try and do more blogging with pictures in the near future as well….
Hope everybody is having a good summer and that the weather is being kind and you all are staying cool!
Caleb.
DIY Microphones part II
So with the cost of a Shure Green Bullet being high enough these days that most blues musicians won’t be able to afford it I decided to throw my hat in the ring for a bit…
I found a few links online about building harmonica mics and reading up on them it seemed that a fairly cheap dynamic element can be used with a simple housing to create that sort of dirty lofi midrangy kind of sound that makes for the blues.
Not having the patience to wait for a week while a mail order capsule could arrive I headed for my source. My father in-law is a truck driver and once a few months back he dragged me off to get his CB fixed for his truck. Once we got to the shop I met Herald an old school radio technician who seems to know his radios inside and out, as well as stocking a lot of vintage tubes that have served me well in the studio also. I asked him if he had any broken mics to get rid of and sure enough there was a small pile around the shop that I could choose from.
After a few minutes I took my choice and headed off to start mic building!
Wiring the mic is fairly simple enough but the housing was a bit of a challenge…
Let me first say though that if you are into DIY you have to have at least one healthy junk pile in your garage/workspace our lab is no different… Bits of pipe looked tempting as well as a few bottles and cans but all were too big to be useful for hand held duty.
But leaning against the wall was a pile of bedroom doors that are waiting to be cut up and used for their premium maple plywood stash… But what caught the eye was the chrome door knob! JACKPOT!
We now had the body for the mic… Next was to take all the guts out of it and pop the press fitted copper plate out of the end… A hole through the back made a nice exit for the cable while the opening newly in the front made access for the capsule to be wired in and then the plate be re- installed with a few holes and a grill cloth installed.
The finished wired up mic ready to go
Our mic turned out rather well in the end and I can’t wait to record some samples with it for your listening pleasure!
Mic building
Hello readers!
I am in the process of learning to build my own microphones and will be posting more info soon!
Hope to keep everybody in the loop with pictures and links as time allows me… For now check out this guy who is making some cool stuff.
Caleb.
Audio production thoughts and ideas
So I have been wanting to do a podcast for over a year now, but sadly I really just don’t see it happening any time soon. Instead I hope to blog about audio production for the home recordist.
I suppose my journey into audio started when my brother brought home a boombox that had a stereo mic in the handle to record to the built in tape player… I remember my brother letting me record something once and playing it back to myself I really thought that was something!
That was around age 5 or so… Ten years later and I was playing guitar in my bedroom using the built in pickup to plug into a stereo and either one: blaring the signal back to myself in distorted hifi bliss! Or recording chord changes to the tape deck.
It seems like one thing leads to another and I had myself a Tascam 414 4 track tape machine and a cheap hand held mic, recorded myself singing and playing guitar, and then of course the next step up was to get into digital recording with my parents computer… I learned digital multi tracking using Audacity and tried to learn it to the fullest effect. My interface was now the record out of my PA amplifier and using it’s built in reverb and EQ into the input of my Soundblaster Live card on the PC.
Over the next year or two I moved to a Compaq laptop and an Echo Indigo I/O soundcard and a small Phonic mixer… I also managed to get my first really good mic! An Audio Technica AT4040 Large Diaphram Condensor. I used this mic for everything in those times and it was a real improvement over the cheap dynamic mics that I had been using before that time.
After a time though it became clear that I needed better gear, better software and better mics… I hope to blog more about the gear choices as I get the chance in the near future, and my hope is that everybody can learn something from this blog and further their own recordings as well.
Caleb.
