The Null Device Blog

I can’t get over how good these preamps are.

The downside, of course, of having clean, high-gain preamps on a non-terrible mic is this, though: I am picking up EVERYTHING.  Vocals, yes.  But also the water heater running two rooms over.  And the cats chasing around upstairs.  I’ve got a fair amount of acoustic treatment, and there are things like “walls” in between me and the noise sources but…damn, high gain indeed.

I did a vocal take of something I’d already recorded…wow does it already sit better in the mix.  It’s a subtle change but daaaaaaamn it makes a difference.

The other downside is that now I want to sit around and twiddly with my new gear, but it being thanksgiving, I have other filial duties to attend to.

The ULN-2 arrive earlier today.

I was, of course, sitting at my laptop constantly refreshing the UPS package tracking page, unwilling to take a shower or turn on the TV for fear that the UPS man would arrive, I wouldn’t hear him or be able to get to him and he’d leave without delivering.

That didn’t happen.

Granted, I was out shopping when he did arrive, but I had Wendy on point for it so we had it covered.

It’s racked, configured, drivered and set up.

And OH MY GOD is it beautiful.  I never though the output of my 828 was muddy or anything – until now.

The mic pres are a thing to behold too.  I did some dry recording with them and got a very nice, round, full sound out of my Rode.  It’s even a nicer sound than on my dbx channel strip, which has a tube in it.

The new DSP “character” assignments are really sweet, too.  Subtle (except for the “softsat” one) for the most part, but they do impart a noticable difference in timbre to the recording.  And since it can be put on any channel, I can do things like run the mic through a “Classic British Tube Preamp” while bussing most of my output through a “American Solid State.”

This is some seriously awesome stuff.

Playing the Inferno is always a safe bet for us.  It’s home turf.  It’s where we got our start.  We know its quirks, we know pretty much what to expect from the sound system and from the crowd.

And that’s pretty much what we got.  We had a few more swoony dancing girls up towards the front, and the percentage of people singing along was higher than normal (and Ryan Bannen even knew the lyrics to the new track).  I got a startlingly large response when I gave a smartassed shoutout to sidechained compression.  I guess there were more audio nerds in the audience thanI expected.

What I had forgotten was just how spoiled I am by smoke-free venues.  The Inferno, by right of geography, is in a small island of not-Madison within the Madison city limits, and as such it is not beholden to the smoking ban enforced throughout the city.  As such, before we even went on I felt like someone had rubbed my vocal cords with sandpaper.  I have no tolerance for tobacco smoke anymore, apparently.

I of course remembered the vagaries of the sound system – due to the low stage and the room shape, it’s pretty much a guarantee that if there’s anyone there, ambient crowd noise will drown out any monitor mix.  Seriously, Adam had those things cranked pretty good for us during soundcheck, and yet during the performance I could hear people in the crowd talking to each other  – while not hearing a danged thing out of my monitor unless I pressed my ear down to it.  Casual fans may notice my hunched posture during part of the show as I strained to hear the violin in the monitors.

Also, few clubs are really set up to host 5 electronic bands in one night, with all their inputs and DIs and mics.  Inferno does a decent job of this, but there’s still a lot of patching and repatching that has to be done between acts.  It’s not terribly difficult during soundcheck, but between bands, when the lights are down, the noise is high and the fog-machine has been running continuously for two hours, it’s a lot more difficult.

Still, all things considered, our technical issues were pretty minor.  The keyboard decided to transpose itself up an octave, for reasons that are still unclear to me, and I couldn’t figure ut how to untranspose it on the fly.  Jill just played around that – in fact I think it sounded better in a few spots.  I hit a few *seriously* awful notes towards the end of the set particularly, as my voice started cracking.  I’ll just blame the cigarette smoke for that.  Yeah.  It was the smoke.

I’d also gigged with Caustic that night, which was even more chaotic than usual.  “Emmanuel Lewis Handjob” was just fun, though.  And “Lady Business” just went completely off the rails.

I slept most of Sunday.  And a good portion of Monday too (I took this week off).

A post or two back I was agonizing over the choice of audio interfaces.  I’d ruled out the Metric Halo stuff because it was too expensive and I was ticked off that they’d put in a DSP card that was basically mandatory and caused their prices to jump.

Then I did some reading and research.

Yeah, I bought one.  A ULN-2 should be arriving at my door next week.  I had to do some budgetary re-arranging, wait a few extra paychecks, and put off a few other studio purchases (my Oktava 219 remains unmodded, alas) but I think this will seriously be worth it.

It’s going to be different for me, since the MH workflow is different from what I’m used to.  My 828 has been fire-and-forget in a lot of ways – since it’s basically just ins-and-outs there’s not much to really do other than plug it in.  The ULN, however, has internal routing to be set up, mixing busses, firewire sends and returns, and channel strips.  It has half as many inputs and outputs as I’m used to having, too, but then again, I’ve never used more than two at a time for anything so this shouldn’t be a problem for me.  It has 18 more internal send busses than I’ve ever used, so that will be different.  If I want to use the DSP I need to start realtime bouncing instead of offline (I can live with that, I think).

But my god – I’m getting a pair of preamps that every review has classed up far beyond the dedicated preamp I currently own.  It’s got circuit emulation for getting that vintage console sound (if I want it).  It’s got an 80-bit internal mixing path so I could conceivably use it as a summing mixer.  It’s got digital converters that make my current set of ADCs/DACs look like crap. 

This is turning into a much bigger upgrade than I’d expected, but it should make a HUGE difference in my abilites to record.  Having 2 high quality, low-noise matched mic pres will improve my ability to record acoustic instruments in stereo – I can do it now, but at least one of the channels is going to suck comapred to the other.  The character/circuit emulation stuff is awesome for enriching the sound.  I can set up internally routed monitor mixes, meaning I can send stuff back to a set of headphones that has a nice loud and slightly-reverbed mix without having to put the effect on an input channel in logic.

Of course, I will also need to spend a lot of time deep in consultation of the manual to figure this all out.  But I haven’t been this excited by a new piece of audio hardware in quite a while. 

Ironically, the Caustic CD will probably be the first to benefit from all this, since I’ll be mastering that sucker next week. 

Squee!

I’d been working on a track for a while – it was sort of a Pendulum-ish drum-n-bass song, with my usual indian influences.

It wasn’t gelling, though.  It sounded a bit pedestrian and derivative, and the army-of-dhols in the intro and fill didn’t match the 2-step beat well.

Sort of by random poking I re-quantized the drum lines with a heavy swung 8th-note groove – nearly an 8th-triplet swing.  The end result is almost show-tune-ish.

This worked surprisingly well.  The track had groove and the dhols matched the beat nearly perfectly, too.  The track was radically different, though – it didn’t have the frentic energy of the original 2-step beat, but I think the tradeoff was worthwhile. 

A few tweaks are still needed – some of the sounds don’t quite match up yet and the vocal processing isn’t quite right – but it’s certainly gone from a predictable track to one that’s got a little more originality.

This makes me happy.