anomie life

I’ve been playing around with recording software like Adobe Audition and GarageBand for a few years now and I enjoy both programs. But I was starting to think it would be great to learn how to use the software the “pros” use. a.k.a. Pro Tools. I considered a semester long program at Martha’s Vineyard, MA, but I came to find out that they don’t teach Pro Tools… They train everyone on a different program, Reason. Bah! I could plunk down $200 and get Reason right now. (Which I’m actually considering since it’s supposedly a pretty good non-pro tools recording suite)

Then one day when viewing my own blog I saw a Google ad for the School of Communication Arts that teaches Pro Tools classes. And they’re even in Raleigh, NC, near where I live. Granted, even though it is in Raleigh it’s still almost an hour drive.

So when I went to their website I annoyingly had to fill in a bunch of personal information before I could even view the website. They looked somewhat legit and claimed to be one of the few schools that teaches pro tools on the east coast. Well, I found out later in the week that because I filled in that information on their website that someone from the school called me twice that week! I was really busy so I didn’t think anything of it and didn’t bother calling them back.

It was later on that I found out that the Martha’s Vineyard thing didn’t do Pro Tools so I looked into the School of Communication Arts again. Once again, to view their website I had to enter more personal information. So I entered the minimum, name and phone number. I guess I entered my cell phone number because I received a call the next day asking if I wanted to schedule a tour. I figured, why not and so I scheduled a tour for the following Monday.

The tour… Ah… The tour…. I drive about an hour to their campus in Raleigh, which is affectionately known as “The Circus” because their campus is made up of 2 or 3 dome shaped buildings.

As soon as I walk in the door I see the receptionist desk, but I have to wait because she’s chatting it up with a middle-aged student with a sketch pad easel under his arm. I stand there for about 5 minutes until I start thinking maybe she isn’t the receptionist, so I walk around for a minute or two, but almost every room has a code lock on it. So I just return to the entrance. About 10 minutes later the guy finally leaves and the receptionist looks up and asks me what I need. I tell her I have a tour scheduled with Julie at 5:00. She calls her up and says Julie will be there in a few minutes. Since it took so long to get to talk with the receptionist I was already 10 or 15 minutes late for my tour, so I figured Julie had been waiting around for me.

So I just stand around for about 5 minutes and admire the weird paintings and sculptures around. I notice as a few students walk by that most of them look like gangsters…. Hmmm. Odd. While I’m waiting around 2 ladies, presumably employees, walk to the door and stand there and talk for about 10 minutes. Finally, one of the ladies leaves and then the other lady looks over at me and introduces herself as Julie. At this point I was starting to get a little ticked off with the lack of customer service…

Julie then proceeds to forcefully inquire, “Where’s your parents?” To which I easily reply, “at home.” And she asks why and I say because no one said they were supposed to be there. She asks me how hold I am, if I’m in high school, and who I talked to on the phone. I tell her and she says I still need my parents. I tell her, no one said anything about my parents on the phone and they’re not here and I can’t really do anything about that.

While we’re walking she hands me a clipboard and tells me to fill it out. So I continue walking and she quickly turns around, stops me, points to some couches and says, “No. You stay here. I’ll be back.” She walks around the corner and I hear her chewing out Debbie, the lady I talked to on the phone, with stuff like, “IF THEY’RE UNDER 24 THEN THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BRING THEIR PARENTS!!!!!!”

At this point I’m starting to wonder how much of this information form I really want this place to have. I went ahead and filled it all out because I wanted to be as cooperative as possible. Julie comes back with Debbie and I have to explain that, despite my parents absence, I pay for most of my education without student loans or financial aid because I work in good, computer related, positions all year long.

Finally I convince them that I could feasibly pay for the whole thing myself if I wanted to and my parents’ opinions aren’t a huge factor in this decision. So before I’ve even seen what their facilities are Julie takes me into her office and explains that they have 4 Pro Tools classes and that they’re $2,000 each, presumably in an attempt to scare me off by the price tag. I guess they figure no person could *actually* pay for their education without going into debt…. I don’t flinch, so she goes ahead and tells me how this could be accomplished in a year’s time by taking night classes. $8,000 later I could have knowledge in Pro Tools! What a deal! (sarcasm)

Finally, I get a tour of the facilities. Their first little “studio” was pretty much just a pro tools console behind a glass window. The second studio was mildly impressive with a pro tools console, a main tracking room, and an isolation room. Nothing very elaborate. I did get to talk to one of the professors, who seemed knowledgeable, and he was unable to list any major accomplishments or job placements their graduates had found. Not too encouraging…

Overall, my first impression of the School of Communication Arts in Raleigh was not a good one at all. The impression I received was that they pretty much just wanted my money. With their insane tuition I guess they assume that everyone has to be able to get financial aid or student loans, and since my parents were absent, Julie didn’t see any reason to actually treat me with courtesy or respect.

Well, School of Communication Arts, I shall not be calling you back. And if you call me, I’m going to either chew out the person on the phone, or immediately hang up. I would much rather use my money to a place that actually cares about me and not just how much money I can give them. “Digital Circus” is a great name for this school because its a joke.

Once I had the mixing ability to record more than one channel simultaneously, I immediately had the problem of needing something to record more than 1 channel with. Specifically, I wanted to record some drums, something that, if done well, requires a bunch of microphones. Well, I love Shure, and all I had previously was an SM86, but its around $100 just for one SM86 or SM57! For drums I wanted at least 6 or 7 microphones, so that would end up being something around $600 or $700.-definitely out of my price range. So I did what any self respecting, budget conscious, person would do: I looked online for the cheapest package I could find. The first 2 cheapest packages only have 5 mics because they don’t include any condenser microphones to use as overheads. So I looked past those and found the Nady DMK7 7 Microphone Package.

I think a lot of people cringe when they think of Nady and just discount it as low end junk, but Nady has actually been around for over 30 years. Not only that, but their founder, John Nady, practically invented wireless microphones by patenting a process known as companding that compresses the signal for radio transmission and then expands it when it reaches the receiver. They are also credited with inventing the first wireless in ear monitor in 1978. Now they’ve broadened their horizons to everything from motorcycle communicators to camcorder systems.

The DMK7 comes with 7 microphones: 4 DM70’s, 1 DM80, 2 CM88 microphones, and a lovely carrying case. The DM70’s are for micing your snare and Tom’s. The DM80 has a bigger diaphragm and will pick up the low end of your kick drum a little better than a DM70. And finally, the 2 CM88’s are phantom powered condenser mics for picking up the overhead, overall sound of the drum kit.

Ever since I’ve been recording drums, I’ve been using the DMK7. Just last weekend when I recorded a 3 track for Flowers for Faye I still used the DMK7, but I actually ended up supplementing it with an SM86 for the Hi-Hat and an SM57 for the bottom of the snare. I found out after recording This Night that my new Mapex piccolo snare sounds like it has the beads lose if only miced from the top. Twice I’ve actually used the 2 CM88’s for recording live vocal recitals and they worked great.

Straight up, these microphones do exactly what they’re supposed to do, they pick up sound. What more could you ask for? And I’ve had mine for over a year now and they’re still going strong. Granted, I wouldn’t ever consider using 1 of these for a recorded vocal (actually, for rehearsals when I run out of mics, they do usually end u[ getting used for vocals), but for recording what your drums sound like, they work great. A lot of times the cymbals sound really harsh, but all you need is a little equalization and they sound fantastic. Having 7 microphones really gives you great coverage and allows you to create a great stereo mix.

Overall, I have no regrets in making a $170 investment in the Nady DMK7. It’s a great way to get a whole bunch of microphones for drum tracking without shelling out gobs of money.

One thing that’s almost a necessity, especially when recording multiple musicians/instruments simultaneously, is a headphone amplifier. Most mixers (such as the Phonic Helix 24) or interfaces have multiple auxiliary outputs on them, but the signals from these are unpowered, which pretty much means the audio is going to be nearly inaudible if listened through headphones. That’s where a headphone amplifier comes in.

The Behringer Powerplay Pro XL HA4700 is a 4-channel headphone amplifier, which means you can take 4 separate auxiliaries from your mixer and have 4 completely separate mixes. This is especially helpful when you’re recording a full band all at the same time because the lead singer probably wants to hear his voice really well so he doesn’t sing off key, the guitar player probably just wants to hear his guitar, and the bass player probably wants his bass and some drums in his mix.

So each channel has an “Aux in” input, but the whole amplifier also has a stereo XLR “Main in” and “Main out”. What this allows you to do is take say the Left and Right outputs of your mixer and run them through the headphone amplifier. One might think this is redundant, but its actually very useful. One reason would be if you had a main mix that everyone had and then people could boost what they want. But an extremely great reason I’ve found is to run the click track through this input.

Everyone having control of their click track volume is an amazing plus because the singer probably doesn’t want it pulsating in his ear if he can already hear the drums just fine and the drummer probably wants the click track blasting away so he stays on beat.

The way you adjust this volume is through the great set of controls on the front of the amplifier. Firstly, there’s a master level for all the headphones. I usually just keep this one in center. Next, you have 4 sets of controls for each mix. Each one of these has a treble and bass knob so you have a little control over your personal equalization. It also has a personal volume because the drummer probably wants his volume a lot louder than everyone else so he can hear over his own noisiness. The last knob is a balance knob which allows you to mix between the aux in and the main in (in my case its the click track). Lastly, there’s three buttons that are immensely useful because they allow you to select whether the aux in is stereo and if its mono, select whether its coming in on the Left or Right channel.

If you look at a popular music equipment store, such as American Musical Supply, for a headphone amplifier then you’ll quickly realize that the HA4700 is so far above everything out there as far as value. Yes, many music professionals shun Behringer because they make low cost equipment, but this piece of equipment is just amazing. If mine died after a year or two I wouldn’t care, I’d just go out and buy a new one. Its $120, but most Furman or Samson headphone is 2x the price and it only powers 1 channel!

Behringer’s Powerplay Pro XL HA4700 is an amazing piece of equipment, not just for its great value, but its quality and features. This piece of equipment is a great addition to any home recording studio.

When one hears the name Marshall Electronics, also known as MXL, they probably associate it with Marshall Amplifiers, but interestingly enough Marshall Electronics and Marshall Amplifiers aren’t associated in anyway. With all the trademark and copyright infringing lawsuits flying around lately it really surprises me that these two companies can co-exist peacefully. Maybe MXL found a secret loophole and are surviving because of it. MXL has actually been around for about 25 years. They make LCD’s, optical systems, cables, and, obviously, microphones.

When shopping for an affordable microphone the V57M immediately stands out because its one of the most inexpensive condenser mics period. One might assume that since its at such a low price point then it must be a piece of junk. However, from my experience with it, this is not the case whatsoever.

A second thing that one immediately notices about the microphone is that its actually constructed nicely. Its got a nice gold look to it and you can get a shock mount for about an extra $20. The diaphragm is 1-inch and it has a frequency response between 30 and 20,000 Hz. Since its a condenser mic it also requires 48 volt phantom power.

When I plugged this thing in and recorded a quick vocal I was floored by the sudden change and brightness of the sound. I had previously just used a $99 Shure SM68, but that always sounded muddy and flat. Seriously, the V57M just took that sound and lifted it right out of the mud. The only issue I first had was that I didn’t purchase a popscreen filter, so the ’s’s kept on messing up the takes. At first we improvised by singing through a shirt and then I got clever and we used two small metal colanders. Finally, a few months later I went down to Mars Music and forked out $25 for a nice popscreen filter that clamps onto the mic stand.

I also tried this out on recording an acoustic guitar. We recorded the whole Rain Song using just this microphone for both the acoustic and vocals (tracked separately of course). The acoustic we used was a Tacoma that has a really bassy, rich tone and it sounded amazing on the recording. While we were recording it was actually storming outside so we opened the window and recorded the sound of the rain and thunder. The sound of the rain has often been mistaken for static on the recording, but the mic picked up the low end from the thunder marvelously. It worked great for the Tacoma, but when recording Scott’s brighter sounding Breedlove acoustic a few months later for Standing Here it was possibly a little too bright sounding and we had to equalize in some more low sounds to compensate.

The only real disappointment I had with this microphone was recording a piano. We tried this mic on my mom’s upright Baldwin as well as her Kawai baby grand. Oddly enough, both of them sounded extremely muddy. Granted, one cause of this could possibly be the room, but the sound was still dissapointing.

Overall though, and for the price point of $70, this microphone is absolutely amazing. It will literally take your old dingy vocals and bring them to the next level of clarity. Obviously, a $600 condenser mic is going to sound better than this mic, but for $70 you just can’t beat it.

In a previous post I briefly wrote about the Phonic Helix 24 Channel mixer, but I didn’t really go into as much detail as I think it deserves. So I’m going to write a full blown write-up/review/whatever you want to call it about the Helix 24.

Phonic is a relatively unknown company, but they claim they’ve been around for 25 years. They make mixers, digital interfaces, amplifiers, and speakers, but don’t really have a name in the industry so I doubt many professional sound engineers, especially live engineers, would trust them.

The Helix 24 “channel” is effectively 16 channels and 4 sub groups. I think they get to claim the extra 8 from the Auxes or Main stereo channels. 16 Channels might be seriously lacking if you wanted to use it for live applications, but for recording, 16 channels is plenty. All 16 mic/line channels have a built in preamp with external gain control, so when you change the gain control it affects the signal that the computer receives. Every channel also includes a 3-band EQ which, once again, is kind of on the skimpy side for live audio, but plenty for recording. The signal that goes into the computer is pre-eq anyway so its really only useful for monitoring. Only the first 4 channels have a pad if you have something that’s really loud, but I haven’t found an instrument yet that requires the pad to keep from peaking.

As far as Auxiliary outputs, the Helix 24 is mediocre. It claims it has “8″ AUX Returns, but its really 4 stereo AUX returns and 6 AUX Sends. Effectively, you have easy control over 4 AUX’s for monitoring. So for monitoring you can have 4 different monitor mixes and, if necessary, one person can use the main headphone for their mix. One side note though, if you want to actually be able to hear from the AUX’s you need a headphone amplifier because they’re unpowered signals.

I’ve had this mixer for a little over a year now. The first thing that I used it for was recording Running Blind. I immediately fell in love with the ability to play like I’m in a live setting, but actually have every channel going straight to a computer which can be mixed later. It kind of gives the best of both worlds of digital and analog. The audio quality that comes through the firewire sounds great, but every once and awhile the connection will get a little flaky on me. Sometimes I have to restart the computer or mixer to get the recording software to start receiving audio again. One morning I spent over 2 hours trying to get it working and finally got it running by uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers. That was in Windows and was quite a pain. But I recently acquired a MacBook and I’m hoping it likes OS X a little better. Windows + Adobe Audition wasn’t bad at all, it just had a few reliability issues here and there. But when it works, it works nicely.
One thing that’s great about the Helix 24 is that you can also use it for live sound. Whenever we’re rehearsing we just plug everything into it and use a set of studio monitors to amplify whatever we need. Sometime we plug everything in, sometimes we just plug in a few vocal microphones.

Overall, I really enjoy and definitely don’t regret my purchase of the Helix 24. It does everything I want in a recording/live mixer. And one of the greatest things about the Helix 24 is it’s price point. $729 for a 16-channel recording mixer isn’t bad at all. Mackie has a very similar mixer which they sell for $1250. So you get practically the same thing, but for $500 cheaper. Thank you Phonic for making a very affordable recording console for the musician looking for a way to do multi-track recording without robbing a bank.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about the state of the music industry lately. Because of the rise of the internet the music industry is going through a gigantic change. iTunes, putting songs online, is just the first step for the music industry. Right now iTunes is mostly just a bunch of mp4’s of the major label’s music from their CD’s. The main reason you would be a track off of iTunes is just for convenience (a.k.a. you’re too lazy to go down to a Coconuts and buy the CD).

I think the future of the music industry can go two different ways, depending on how the major labels react to the change in technology. If the labels continue to oppose the change in the industry I think they’ll quickly be bypassed by the artists and replaced with organizations that only do specific functions like marketing, radio promotion, distribution, and tour production.

Or I think the labels can transform themselves into primarily a marketing and venture capital organization. The thing is that it’s become quite affordable to record an album. You can get very high-quality equipment for very low prices (now I sound like a car dealer).
Right now from my reading and observation I see the whole big label music industry as really, really bloated. It takes a huge success to ever recoup the amount of costs incurred by major label backing. Yea, in case you didn’t know it, when you sign a record contract they might give you a bunch of money (an advance) and they might let you record a huge music video. But pretty much all of your album profits are going to go to the label to pay back for ALL of those things.
So pretty much you’re just getting an interest free loan.

That’s why labels don’t sign a bunch of bands. Its a huge investment and risk. If they cut some of the bloat out they can afford to back more bands.

And back to the digital music thing, with the internet you can distribute your songs yourself on your own band’s website and make money. Then you don’t have to give iTunes a cut and you can even sell it DRM-free.

I envision a future in music where there are thousands of bands that are having fun doing what they love to do and making enough money to keep the dream going. Maybe there will be a few less “rock stars”, but a lot more variety. If you can make the cost of making an album go down then you can sell the album for less and that leaves people with more money to by other cd’s.

And then the radio…. well, I could write a whole other post on where I think the radio is going.

I was over at Digg and was reading the comments about a news story where the RIAA said that the price of CD’s should be higher for some stupid reason. It only reinforced my belief that the RIAA does nothing positive for the music industry. All the RIAA does is sit in between artists and consumers to tax every piece of audio they produce.

But what really caught my attention was that someone posted this article about over compression in today’s music. It’s quite long, but a very interesting read. There’s pretty much a constant war between albums to try to have the loudest CD possible. And they achieve this by using compression which pretty much just flattens the sound and destroys dynamics.

The problem I see is that different consumers want different things in a CD. So your typical ear bud listening teen will want something pretty flat and loud. But a audiophile wants something with a large dynamic range with some parts of a song being really loud and other parts being really soft. The typical driver with a CD in their CD player will want something that stays consistently loud too, otherwise they have to constantly adjust the volume to hear the song over the engine.

As a producer/mixer/mastering engineer/whatever I think it would be great to take the “high road” and not give in to the compression-loudness game. But I understand why people would want compression.

I’m very big into distributing music through online means and I realized that this could allow artists to release variously mastered versions of their songs. Although it might take a little extra work, when someone buys a song online they are given a couple different files that have been mastered differently. Then the person can pick which one best suits their listening habits.

When I release my first CD, thats what I want to do. We’ll see if it happens.

It wasn’t until Running Blind that I really felt really proud of something I’d recorded. Even now, I still can’t seem to be able to top that recording in my mind. I’m probably biased though sense I co-wrote it with Scott and played drums, bass, and guitar for the recording. But I think there were a lot of other factors as well.

The first thing that was a major change was the recording interface. I purchased the Phonic Helix Firewire 24 channel mixer (really more like 16). This gave me the usability of a nice mixer, but the mixing flexibility of a computer interface. I could essentially set my personal hearing mix to whatever I wanted and the computer just gets the direct outs of all the channels you’re recording on. Adobe released Audition 1.5 as well which had some nice additional features. And lastly I also purchased an inexpensive, but relatively nice sounding vocal condenser microphone, the Marshall MXL V57M.

That’s the “what” that changed, but another big change was the “how”. The first thing we did was record me playing drums and Scott playing electric for the whole song through. No cuts at all. Just one straight take. We actually got it really fast. All we did was a few practices to get the end right and one run through the whole thing with the metronome. Our second recorded take was the one that we decided to use. After we had the drum tracks down we just proceeded to simply layer everything on top. Scott and I recorded the rest of the instruments and vocals that day. Then David E came over the next day and we played the song for him and he added some of his sweet licks to it.

I’m still racking my brain trying to figure exactly what made that recording so great. I think part of it was co-writing the song overall helped me to produce exactly what I wanted out of the song. Ha. Playing most of the instruments also helped with that. I think part of it was also not being pressed for time or pressed for really anything at all. We were just seeing what we could do and having a good time with it.

I think the atmosphere really can have a major effect on the recording. We’ve recorded the last two songs in my garage, which gives us a much larger space (and we don’t have to carry everything upstairs), but there’s just something so dirty and cold about the garage. I really just wish I had my own studio. Now they’ve put so much junk in the third floor there isn’t even a prayer of making it a usable recording space.

I need a good tambourine… tambourines are the difference between a good rock song and a great rock song.

Every time a new season of American Idol comes on, I vow not to watch, but it seems, no matter what, my TV always finds it’s way to FOX whatever time it’s on TV. For some strange reason, watching people humiliate themselves on national TV is very compelling.

A lot of people I know with tender hearts hate the show, especially the audition process, because they can’t stand watching the judges crush the dreams and aspirations of young performers. The judges, especially Simon, can be very cutting, and many times he’ll go as far to not only critique their musical talent but just about anything else that he dislikes about them. In fact, a lot of the times the performers aren’t that bad, but their musical style just isn’t American Idol’s style, which is pretty much pure pop.

I used to not care about the humiliating of the contestants because I rationalized that many of them needed a wake up call if they really thought they were as great as many of the horrible contestants seem to think they are. But this season I’ve seen just about enough wake up calls.

I think its really gone beyond that, and American Idol auditions have pretty much turned into a freak show with the producers parading around the weirdest contestants they can find.

American Idol auditions aren’t as simple as getting in line and waiting for Randy, Simon, and Paula to listen to your performance. There’s actually a pre-audition audition where staff and producers decide who actually gets to sing in front of the Idol judges. One might think that these pre-audition are pretty ineffective since so many terrible people get through, but the fact of the matter is that the producers already know the bad people are bad. Even before getting to the judges, its pretty much decided who will make it and who won’t. The producers only let through the really bad people and the really good people. This has the effect of making the terrible people suddenly get a boost of confidence and make themselves look even more foolish.

This is only speculation, but I even think the producers have a lot of the terrible contestants come back later and sing particular songs in order to create a montage to radio hits such as “Don’t Cha“. I find it really interesting how during this particular montage most of the people couldn’t even get half the words right. Why would you sing a song that you don’t they words to? Maybe because you were paid to sing a particular song and sing it with your signature flare of suckiness that America craves.

One contestant, Nicholas Zitzmann, even has a different shirt on when he sings his version of “Don’t Cha”. Good job producers, you let that one slip by.

Hey American Idol producers, maybe you should make the show a little more positive and a little less about just making fun of all the weird people who show up to audition. I know its tempting because there are a lot of weird people out there, but eventually people will get tired of not even being able to look at their TV screen without a scowl of disgust.

The next step in my audio equipment upgrades was to go back to a computer-based system. I wanted a way to record multiple tracks simultaneously, but also have the mixing flexibility of using a program such as Adobe Audition. I found the AudioTrak MAYA1010 PCI based system, which seemed to meet my needs. This system is part internal, part external. It has a PCI card which you have to install in your computer that then connects to a breakout box with all the inputs and outputs.

It has 8 Line Inputs and 8 Line Outputs. All of the inputs and outputs are balanced 1/4″, which is kind of annoying since pretty much all microphones use XLR. Luckily, I already had a bunch of XLR to 1/4″ cable adapters from my previous mixer. The inputs are so close together that you can’t just use an adapter or transformer without putting the adjacent ports out of commission.

Notice how I said these are “line” inputs. That means that barely have any gain, except for 2 of the inputs. Those 2 support phantom power and have a mic preamp with adjustable gain (through software), which is good because condenser microphones almost always require phantom power. So you can record with all 8 inputs, but the signal on everything except the 2 condenser microphones is extremely weak.

2 of the outputs are also considered “headphone” amplifiers. This just means these are a little louder than the rest. But they’re not stereo ,so unless you get a special adapter, you only hear audio out of one ear. I ended up just using the computer’s audio out for headphones. I did use 2 of the other outputs to provide a signal to the studio monitors, which are already power, and that worked very well.

Practically, the MAYA1010 looked really good, but only having microphone preamps on 2 of the channels was really annoying. If I wanted to record vocals while recording the drums, I had to use one of those two channels, otherwise it was practically inaudible. Being able to hear everything while recording was also very difficult because you have little control of the audio.

We recorded a few things live, such as some quality Robotic Melee. It was just drums, bass, el cheapo casio keyboard, and screaming vocals. Good times Jimmy and Carl…. After making a purevolume site we actually had a few requests to play shows…. It made me sad that anyone would want us to come play that music anywhere.

Scott and I also wrote a song called “Confessions of a Broken Heart” that we attempted to record with the 1010. The problem is we recorded pretty much all the instruments and vocals before we recorded the drums. This made recording the drums next to impossible, especially since most of the instruments weren’t perfectly in time with the metronome. I learned to always, if possible, record the drums first. And then add in the rest of the instruments.