Homebrewed Music

I’ve been moving my audio processing to REAPER over the last year or so. It’s a powerful and reliable program in a fast moving package, with a very active and helpful user community. All these factors make it a real pleasure to use.

Now for the icing on the cake – the development team has linked in the FFmpeg video libraries and given REAPER the ability to do simple video editing. I’m totally happy with my video editing system since I moved to Edius Neo 2.5, but when I played around with video in REAPER I realized that this is a tool many musicians want and need. (more…)

I use an electronic tuner for my stringed instruments. I use one often. When I tune by ear I do a terrible job, so I much prefer using a gadget to help me. I’ve tried lots of different tuners over the years. When I played mainly electric guitar I used tuners with 1/4″ jack inputs. When I moved over to acoustics, I often used the Sabine stick-on tuners. But things changed when I discovered the Wittman MiniTuner – I started installing these inside all my acoustic guitars. (more…)

I’ve read many times on the internet that condensers are too sensitive, they pick up the mouse in the next room, the refrigerator downstairs, the arm hairs brushing on the top of the guitar. People have suggested that a dynamic mic is better when there’s ambient noise, clumsy technique, or a bad sounding room. Have you heard this myth? Do you believe it? (more…)

Mics are fun. They are a great gear fetish item, because they’re collectible, a bit esoteric but still familiar, come in a wide range of types and sizes, and most of them have a bit of a phallic quality (grin). Even better, when I read about microphones on the internet or in recording magazines it seems that each mic has a dramatically distinct personality, and a big part of the job of a recordist is choosing the optimal mic for any given source and style.

Sometimes when I’ve listened to mic samples I thought I heard these dramatic differences, but after a bit I realized that I was listening to different performances, not different mics. Sure the mics had been changed, but the player was hitting the strings differently and playing different riffs at a different volume – so how could I tell what part of the difference was the mic, and what part the player?

Since then I’ve tried to do some mic tests of my own, and I’ve tried to educate myself on audio testing. At this point I’m beginning to think that the differences in microphones are a lot more subtle than I had been led to believe, which makes a careful test even more important. As I’ve mentioned before, very small differences in volume are registered by our ear/brain combination as differences in quality rather than loudness. I’d like to demonstrate the steps I now take to try to make my mic comparisons, and preamp and a/d comparisons, meaningful. (more…)

In my last blog entry I described the process for merging audio and video recorded on two different devices, for instance, replacing the audio in a Flip Mino HD video with audio recorded on a Zoom H2. This is a very handy technique, and can give great audio quality in the final video, but sometimes we only have camera sound available. So this post will describe the steps involved in separating the audio from the video, processing the audio, and merging the improved audio stream back to the video. (more…)

I have a lot of fun with Flip Mino HD camcorder. I’ve already done a few music videos with it and in my opinion the audio is far behind the quality of the video. Of course, even with expensive video equipment, having the mic on the camera keeps it some distance from the subject. Having a separate mic, much closer to the subject, gives a much better result. (more…)

This is probably about as close to a political post as I am likely to write. I think that listening “tests” that are not conducted as double blind side-by-side comparisons are just wishful thinking. We wish that human hearing were not so totally dominated by the vagaries of our brain/mind, but it is. We wish that we could retain accurate mental images for more than a few seconds, but we can’t. We think we can discount the impact of small volume differences, but we can’t, and the smaller the difference the more likely we are to describe it as anything but a volume difference. We think we can trust our ears but all the evidence gathered from controlled experiments tells us plainly that we should not.

Since my interest in recording began only a few years ago, I’ve always had the internet as a resource for learning about the subject, I researched in every forum and magazine site I could find. And I now firmly believe that most of what I learned there was incorrect. (more…)

I record solo acoustic guitar almost exclusively, but a couple of months ago one of my buddies wanted to lay down a few tracks with vocal and `ukulele. And he wanted to sing and play at the same time. I remembered reading about an arrangement of figure 8 or bidirectional mics that gave maximum separation in a situation like this, so I pulled out the Rode NT2a and NT2000 and set them up. We were amazed by the separation between vocal and uke, even though the mics were only a foot apart. (more…)