The Null Device Blog

It has been an annoying past few days in the studio.

Some things have gone quite well, of course.  I’ve re-engineered backing tracks to make them cleaner and punchier in the live environment.   I’ve been able to do this quickly and efficiently with the new machine, since I don’t have to freeze tracks to be able to play back my mixes.   I’ve also got a new rack of DI’s en route, thanks to a lovely tip from Mr. Wade Alin.  They’re not Radials or anything, but they look to have better build quality than the ones I’ve currently got.    Also there’s a new ATA rack to put them in coming.  I decided that the 6-unit full-depth rack I’ve got is entirely unnecessary for my 3 units of shallow-depth gear, so I’ve got a 4U Gator on the way.  Also, being ATA, I feel a little safer about it than I do about my current rack.  Plus that extra space leaves a little room for expansion.

The things that haven’t gone right?  Well, yesterday I opened a newish track that I had recently transitioned over from the old system.  I hit play and…it sounded really weird.  That wasn’t right.  I popped open a few of the plugins I was using and noted that every.  Single.  Instance of PODFarm Plat had switched back to its default setting, which happens to be an emulation of a Fender Jazz amp with reverb.  Basically, the entire song sounded like each part was being played from inside individual cardboard boxes.  And I used PODfarm a LOT on this track to get grungy synth distortion, so the track was pretty much hosed until I could fix it.  I spent much of the afternoon switching as much as possible over to Logic’s native Amp Designer.  It doesn’t always sound quite as nice as PF for some of the emulations, but I can at least be assured it’ll work next time I open it.  I get to look forward to the next few days of recreating settings and rebuilding tracks.  Grumble.

A nasty headcold coupled with my usual overactive sinus-based ick has kept me from recording any vocals for the past week and a half.  This is particularly annoying, since I have stuff stacking up I want to record/rerecord/fix.

Aaand finally, I plugged in my MOTU 828 (mk1) yesterday, to test out my backing tracks and…kernel panic.  I rebooted, and…kernel panic.  I unplugged it and…kernel panic.    Some online searching demonstrated that hey, whaddya know, the new MOTU drivers under snow leopard don’t like the old 828 all that much.  I dug out one of my archived installers and put an older driver on, and it seems stable.  For now.  Nonetheless, this makes me kind of twitchy about relying on a nearly-10-year-old audio interface.  I do have plans to get a new one but…not for a while yet.    I just bought a new car, I’m a little low on petty cash.

Sigh.

Friday night was the late-night, barely-controlled chaos that was a Caustic show.  I mention that merely because I was rocking the theremin and some keys for that gig.  I also mention that because it meant I didn’t get home to sleep until well after 2am.

Ordinarily, a Friday night gig would just mean “sleep late on Saturday.”  This however was not an option, because bright and chipper on Saturday morning I had a carnatic classical trio coming by to record.  It was an unusual configuration, too – saxophone, mridangang, violin, and the omnipresent electronic tampura/sruthi box.  (I offered to delve into my surprisingly vast library of tampura samples, but they opted to pass.

Over the course of two days, we recorded well over two hours of music.   They played as an ensemble, which meant I had to be diligent with my microphone choices and positioning.  Also, because there were six inputs and my ULN2 only has,  well, 2, I had to do some fancy routing and device aggregation in order to get everything set up and sounding good.  These guys had to play as an ensemble, so I couldn’t simply isolate and multitrack them as I do with my own stuff.

These guys came in from parts distant – the sax player was from north Chicago, the violinist from west Chicago, and the mridangam player was from Washington DC.  I was referred to them as someone who could record carnatic music for a reasonable price and not screw it up, I guess, but I had to keep asking in slight disbelief “uh, you guys know that this is just a room in my basement, right?”  I can see people coming from, say, Milwaukee to record in my basement, but Chicago?  DC?  They apparently were fully aware of this and wanted to go ahead anyway.  It could be my remarkably affordable prices.

What follows is a technical description of what went down, merely because I lack the appropriate music theory to describe what happened musically.

I slaved my old trusty MOTU 828 to the ULN2’s clock, which significantly improved the performance of that box.  I also attached by dbx tube pre to the ULN’s SPDIF and clock-sync’ed that too.

The mrid got a pair of 57’s, run into the 828.  57’s are always reliable of percussion instruments.  They were perhaps a little dark and dense on the treble head of the drum, but they still got me a reasonably decent fidelity on the attack/decay range.  And because they have such a forward pattern with good side rejection, I didn’t get much crosstalk between the two mics, or from the other instruments.

The sax got the Oktava.  Sumanth had specifically requested a rather dark sound on his sax, so the combo of the Oktava and the dbx tube pre was a natural fit.  It was pretty warm and punchy by the time it was all recorded.  The mic was a little gainy, so I did get some “room sound” off the mridangang too, but that was to be expected.  If I’d had a good ribbon mic, that probably also would’ve worked really well.

The violin was the toughy – seeing as it’s a much quieter instrument than a saxophone or a drum, and full of all sorts of crazy harmonics, I had to be pretty careful where I put the mics.  I used the pair of Pulsar II SDC’s that I keep around for just such things.  Since I happen to have a violin, I did some experiments with configuration, and skipped doing my initial x/y stereo placement in favor of an almost guitar-like arrangement – one mic pointing at the f-holes, and the other aimed towards the neck.  The biggest challenge was keeping the mics far enough from the violinist so he could actually play, but close enough that they would get good signal and not pick up every stray noise in the room.    I ended up with a bit of a compromise – I got strong signal but still got some spillover from the sax.  There’s only so much I can do about that, short of throwing up some gobos – but then the instrumentalists wouldn’t be able to see and hear each other, which defeats the purpose.  I ran the mics into the ULN so I could up the gain pretty high without too much noise.

Some of these pieces ran upwards of 20 minutes, one coming in close to an hour, which meant to fix things there was a lot of punch-in/punch out and clever crossfading between takes.  They specifically requested a spacious sound, so I’m judiciously adjusting the panning and reverb settings to get it nice and concert-hall-y without being swamped by deep ‘verb.  I’ve still got some more engineering to do on this yet, but it’s sounding pretty good so far.  These guys were pretty serious players, so that helped an awful lot.

I also learned once again that curious kittens often hamper the recording process by headbutting microphones or deciding to get chummy with  the percussionist in the middle of a take.

Recursions is almost done.  I’m in the process of getting the final masters together.

It occurred to me, with a bit of prodding from Matt Fanale, that I’ve never actually talked about what mastering really is.  I’ve blogged passionately about what to do and what not to do, and what gear is good, and what gear isn’t, but…I’ve never actually said what it is and why it’s important.

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My attempt to build something like Realtrap’s Portable Vocal Booth was a failure.

Well, kinda.  I suppose I could say it was too successful.

I’d used my remaining lumber and my last slab of OC703 to build two 2-foot by 2-foot panels, which I wrapped in musiln, then bolted together at right angles, forming a kind of acoustic corner.  I’d hinged it so I could fold it up when not in use.

The hinging provided some problems.  It left me without a good “hard point” from which to mount it to a mic stand, as all my hard points would move.  So instead I removed the hinges and bunged it together with some angle brackets.

This still left me with some problems.  I needed something that I could clamp onto a stand that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the thing.  After several false starts with mic stand clamps, hinged clamps, and 5/8-27 thread mounts, I finally screwed on a crossbar and some drum mounting hardware.  This worked rather brilliantly.  Except it required me to mount it to a drums stand instead of a mic stand.  Fine, I guess, because a drums stand was the only thing sturdy enough to hold it all.

It wasn’t too heavy, honestly, but being 2×2 and v-shaped, it was really unbalanced.  While I could probably guesstimate the center of gravity fairly well (college physics comes streaming back) I’d never get it exactly right, since it’s not a spherical object of uniform density.

I brought it downstairs, into the studio.

This is where things went wrong.

It worked brilliantly.  It was also huge.  It dominated one side of the room.  Having a large acoustic absorber on one side of the room basically meant there was an enormous dead spot on one side of me that wasn’t on the other.  The whole room began to sound kind of weird.  I had only a limited number of places to put it too (I may have to move some furniture) without blocking my egress from the room or, more importantly, the cats’ access to their respective litterboxes (and I am not about to change the studio name to “Mouldering Cat Crap Studios).

So that was kind of sucky.

Back to the drawing board.  I disassembled the V and used the hardware to mount the panels on the ceiling.  So I’ve got acoustic panels on the ceiling now.

Oh well.

Long weekends are often stultifyingly productive. Thursday night I started a remix.

Friday was mostly given over to meat. And beer. Courtesy of our bassist-in-residence, Mr. Chuck. However, in the evening Wendy and I went to the CTRLSHFT/Caustic/Babyland show. It was Joe and Maggie’s bon voyage, as they leave for higher altitudes. I’m gunna miss those kids.

Saturday I spent a large quantity of time mucking about at Home Depot. For a while I’ve been of the opinion that I need new/better acoustic treatment for my studio, since my previous attempts have been 1) ugly 2) not as acoustically useful as I’d hoped and 3) did I mention ugly? My previous attempts have been first to wrap OC703 in landscape fabric, which was ugly and hard to mount. Second attempt was to wrap them in canvas and glue them to a board. Problem was they looked silly and the canvas was not especially acoustically transparent, meaning they didn’t really do as good of a job as they could, and they looked funny in the process.

So I bought a bunch of 1×3x8’s – construction grade, not furniture grade, for a savings of about $7 a strip – some angle brackets, and 16 yards of unbleached muslin. The lumber got cut and bracketed into 2′ x 4′ frames. I grabbed all my myriad pieces of 703, many of which I’d cut into smaller traps and the like, re-assembled them, jammed them into the frames and wrapped the whole deal in muslin. The end result looks pretty decent and sounds much better. I made 5 acoustic panels from the bits I found. Then I discovered a sixth piece in the back of the garage, so I have one left over that I now intend to use to make a portable hinged microphone isolation baffle.

I think overall, even with the 703, each panel cost me about $15.

Saturday night, Wendy and I hit Summerfest in Milwaukee, where we got our prerequisite grilled corn, hung out with the one and only Robin (without whom I’m pretty sure Summerfest would collapse into a smoking, chaotic ruin). We had some side-stage passes to Flogging Molly, which was pretty excellent. I was only passingly familiar with them before (“If I Ever Leave This World Alive” showed up on a few shows I watched) but having seen them live, they’re awesome. It’s impressive that they’re all pretty consummate musicians, all the more impressive that they can remain as such without sacrificing any onstage energy. That’s rare. Their opener was a DC fiddle band that was also surprisingly good – and also surprisingly capable of doing “rock leaps” while playing violin, which made me giggle.

I’m totally going to have to try to re-learn irish fiddling. I started once, long ago, and kind of forgot everything I ever learned. I have a book of fiddle tunes I bought in Galway and haven’t really cracked open since. I don’t know if I’m talented or coordinated enough for the crazy Donegal style, but maybe I can learn a Mayo style or something. Plus, I discovered that a jig can overlay a chaal beat quite nicely, so three cheers for cross-cultural fusion, eh?

Sunday, I finished the remix I started on thursday, and I’m very pleased with how it came out. It’s kind of big and orchestral. I like doing this sort of thing, and I think I’ll have to do more. It raises some vexing questions about how to pull this off live, but I’ll deal with that later.

I also spent about two hours playing with mic positioning techniques. For the first time, and only briefly, I got my dhol to not sound like a trashcan. I even got it to sound vaguely taiko-like when mic’ed appropriately. This opens up many possibilities.