Criminal Studios’ workstation desk has had a usability problem.

Ardour, my digital audio workstation (DAW) software, has an editor view and a mixer view. Both are really useful for different things, and Ardour will happily display both at once. But both want lots of screen space, making you toggle between them, which is a pain in the ass. Avoiding that requires huge tracts of land, and those big monitors are spendy.

Last week, I realised I could cheat. First, Linux, Windows, and OS X all support multimonitor/multicard displays. Second, for the last year or so, everybody’s been dumping 4:3-ratio LCDs, even newish ones in good shape; nobody wants them. Pretty good ones go for $20ish; I spent $16. Third, old-school 4:3 ATI Rage cards are $15, new in box.

Combine these facts, and $31 buys you:

Huge Tracts of Land

The blue field on the left display is part of the background graphic, made by modifying a standard Ubuntu Studio desktop. There’s no actual special functionality; it’s organisational notation. “Files left here need sorted.”

2560×1024, aw yeah

(Click on either to enlarge.)

By themselves, neither display is good, by any modern definition. I mean, lol 17″ 4:3 LCDs. Would you want to play games on this? Hell to the no. FPS would be wretched, you have this screen divisor bar where the monitors meet…

…but that’s totally irrelevant.

All you need for a DAW is to match screen resolutions and have enough oomph to draw sound level metres moving. That’s about the same graphics power as you need for something like, oh, Word. Getting that functionality cost, I repeat, thirty-one dollars.

It’d’ve been $16 if the old graphics card sitting in the parts box hadn’t been the wrong slot type. Do you have an old PCI graphics card sitting around? Thought so.

After all of two days in this configuration, the usability difference is tremendous and obvious. Being able to have all this extra data in view at the same time is really useful when recording other people, and there’s actually a lot less mousing even as I do more things, because I’m not having to change views and move windows around to get to tools.

It’s so useful, I’ve decided to shell out another $44 for a cheap dual-monitor bracket. But you don’t need that; you can just sit the monitors on boxes to get them to the right height. But I need screen mobility.

See, the studio desk is double-sided. I set things up on the outer side when I’m recording myself or rehearsing. It’s for best access to the DAW controls from the recording floor:

Note location of chair and keyboard; recording floor is to the right.

When recording others, I set up on the opposite, further side, so I’m out of the way, and can see everything they’re doing:

Flipped about

Needing to move the monitors every couple of days? That’s worth a pair of monitor arms. If you don’t have that, don’t bother.

This situation won’t be last forever, because all the good old 4:3 monitors will go away, or get old, or become rare enough to be more expensive. But for the time being, it’s pretty cool. And dirt cheap, so you can spend your money on things that matter.

Like microphones.

Studio washroom:

no, really – the sewer rats are radioactive

Also, the Rainmaker 68000 is working great. Of course, the Lair is in a mountain in a rain forest, so it’s easier here. Still: very promising! I’m looking forward to the field testing – have you ever seen Vegas in a rainstorm? Hilarious.

First: there is no joy in birdtown, my instruments (and electronics and backpack) are still lost. See here for details, if you haven’t.

But that aside: I’ve posted a couple of pics recently about mic setups – I’ve been doing a lot of recording of other people lately, and will be doing more, both for my own projects and others – so I thought I’d talk about them.

First, you should know that there are at least as many schools of micing as there are possible combinations of microphones. On one end, there are old-school extremists who insist you should mic an entire band or orchestra – mostly orchestra, this is almost entirely a classical thing tho’ you occasionally see it in jazz – with exactly two microphones, because you have two ears. The intent is to recreate the listening experience.

In that view, the main job is finding the right hall in which to record, and the proper setup of the band. And while I see what they’re saying, I also think that’s kind of nuts… except some amazing recordings have been made that way, so what can y’do?

At the other end are the people who want to mic every individual performer three or four different ways at the same time. I… don’t get that, either. You need to stay out of performers’ faces. I hate being tied down to mics, as a performer, and…

YES IT IS BACK ON WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU SOUNDBOARD

…yeah. No. Most people are in between those extremes, of course, tho’ as mics have become cheaper, and with the switch to digital, I’m personally seeing less of “less is more” and more of “No, more is more.”

If you’re multitracking, the arguments start about whether instruments should have exactly one microphone (because there is one instrument) or two or many (because there are many points from which sound emerges). That argument hasn’t budged, as far as I can tell.

And those are decisions made before you even decide how to do whatever you’ve decided to do.

Personally, I’m too new at this to have a coherent philosophy. But I do have a method: I get inappropriately close to peoples’ instruments and listen for parts that sound cool. Then I figure out which mics I have that I think would do best at capturing those sounds, stick mics there, and try it.

So, some examples! Let’s start with a guitar. This is Mickey Phoenix from Leannan Sidhe:

AKG Perception 200 large-can condenser; Sony ECM-957 small-can condenser

The Perception has kind of a bad rap out there right now, and prices reflect that. It’s well-regarded for certain purposes (drums, female vocals) but you can find a distinct lack of fondness for its musicality.

And I have to say I do not know why. I’m having it do a good job not just on female vocals (as generally agreed) but a lovely job in getting low-end resonance out of acoustic stringed instruments of all sorts.

That’s what it’s doing in a few of these photos. On Mickey’s guitar, above, it holds the instrument’s “sweet spot” really well, nicely grabbing all those low tones and harmonics – things my other mics are not going to grab as well. Meanwhile, the Sony – which has weaknesses but is really good at transient sounds – is aimed right at the fingers, getting all those little “this is an organic instrument” finger and string sounds – and high-harmonics – that give acoustic guitar recordings life.

Mickey has been quite fond of the recordings we’ve been getting this way. He says it sounds like the guitar does to him, which he doesn’t usually hear in recordings. As a zouk player, I empathise with that.

Here’s Jeri-Lynn Cornish on Cello:

AKG Perception 200 large-can condenser; Sony ECM-957 small-can condenser;
small custom interface circuit mostly because reasons

Same two mics again, similar arrangement, but arrived at differently. I tried the Nova first here, as the mic closest to the U87 that I own, and… it just wasn’t right. It lacked the warmth I expect out of cello – and, honestly, while people have realised exactly how good a cheap mic the Novas are (and used prices reflect that, too), it’s not a very warm microphone.

So out popped the AKG again, and Jeri-Lynn liked that; it sounded like she expected recordings to sound. And that’s good, but I could hear something was missing, even if I couldn’t entirely find it. Not at first, anyway; I knew something wasn’t there, but didn’t know what. Whatever it was, it just wasn’t available to be picked up where I had the AKG, so I knew we were going to need another mic again.

Then she started playing a little snippet that I recognised as Bach, and specifically, that made me think of this performance by Yo-Yo Ma of Prelude, Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major – particularly the first 15 seconds.

Yes, I know it from Master and Commander, that’s how I found the video. That movie was awesome, deal with it. XD

That memory comparison told me what kind of tones I was missing. I didn’t even really hear it in the room, so I went looking for it, and when I got my ear in a position to hear what tones were bouncing up off the bridge of the cello, I found it.

I added the Sony first because I’m fond of heterogeneous microphoning, and because, well, this was calling out for a small-can cap. My Oktava 012 isn’t here yet – it should arrive today – and I rather think I’ll be using it more instead of the Sony in future. But for now, the Sony does well enough as a stand-in.

Immediately, you could hear the cello come to life in the recordings. The cello is often compared to the human voice, as a living, almost vocal instrument; part of that is the way it almost seems to breathe. With only the AKG, that sense of breath wasn’t there.

Getting the bounces off the bridge and bringing them up a bit in the mix put it back. Everyone heard it and understood what I’d been seeking.

(This was for a live-in-studio recording; if you want to hear it, it’s streamable here. These are virtually raw recordings; the only seasoning is in second vocals, there’s nothing at all added on the cello. The stream will be 128k mp3, which loses subtlety, but gives you the idea. If you want higher-quality, you can download it. ^_^)

Finally, I posted this picture a couple of weeks ago, but without much explanation; Ellen Eades, of a bunch of different groups, on hammer dulcimer:

ALL THE MICROPHONES

This is the largest number of microphones I’ve ever used on a single instrument. The hammer dulcimer is technically a percussion instrument, so acting on indirect advice from Ellen’s previous album’s engineer, I decided to treat it like one and immersive-mic it like a drum kit. On the Free Court of Seattle soundtrack album, I want it to sound like this thing is all around you, and in these test recordings, it does.

The AKG perception 200 is on bass bar. All the lowest notes use that as the bridge, so the low tones are heaviest there. An M-Audio Nova on treble bar, to pick up all the high harmonics. Both mics get a lot of both, but the emphasis changes in each ear, because AKG is one ear, and Nova is the other. This means you can hear the tones moving subtly around you as the notes go up and down in pitch. You can also hear the hammers moving back and forth across the strings, just a little.

To level it out and get a general comprehensive feel of instrument, you have the small-can cap Sony again, overhead, like a drumkit overhead mic. That’s mixed to centre, to link the sides, and potted pretty far down. It’s filler sound that ties the bars together.

But I still wasn’t getting enough of the low harmonics I knew the instrument could put out, so I threw another AKG down at the very bottom of the bass bar, at one of the instrument’s sound holes, and mixed that back to centre. And they popped right in. A nice, immersive, dimensional recording. (And I’m not looking to swap out the 957 here; it did a fine job and there’s no need to mess with what works.)

So, that’s how I do this so far. I wouldn’t use two mics where one would do, and I certainly wouldn’t use four where two would do, but, well, I want it to sound right. There are downsides to multimicing instruments – not just noise, look up “phase cancellation” if you’re curious – and you have to work to avoid those. But it can also pull in a lot of great sounds.

This weekend was kind of a disaster. I’m still trying to pick up pieces. My car is in Longview, Washington, hopefully having its axles reattached. Anna and I are back in Kenmore.

And I am missing musical instruments. 🙁

Please click and share this post about the missing instruments. I’m also missing electronics, but those I can re-buy. I can’t re-buy flutes I’ve had for 15 years that I made myself.

Thanks.

Just had the weekend from hell: driving down to Portland for a show, my car decided it didn’t like its new front axles and tried to spit them out. NOT FUNNY.

Along the way to getting a tow from Sears (in Three Rivers Mall) and making it to the train station, my backpack went away. I’m pretty sure it actually made it to the train station, but disappeared after that. I’m suspecting specifically it got left on the bed of the truck, which means it flew off somewhere between there and the towing / service company lot.

There are electronics in it that I care about, but MUCH MORE, I lost two musical instruments which were inside, including the first bamboo piccolo I ever made, which has been kind of a constant companion ever since. Seriously, I am pretty fucked up about this. I wrote so much music on that thing it isn’t even funny, and now it’s just gone.

The backpack is red and grey with black straps. The black straps are a bit worn upon examination. Hanging from the zipper in back are Squid Girl and the bassist from K-On. The flute is in a case made of a red rose ribbon and green backing fabric. I can describe other contents in some detail. This is an old picture before I had anything hanging from the zipper:

The blurry ribbon-thing at the bottom is Popcorn’s sleeve. Here’s a picture of Popcorn:

If you know anyone in Kelso and Longview (all this was within Kelso, not over in Longview), please ask them to be looking out for it. I am offering a reward for the bag and contents, if that helps. Once I have a working car again – which should be Tuesday – I will pick up. Comment here, or contact via the contacts page. Thanks.

So with the heavy recording schedule I have going on right now – such as this new Leannan Sidhe live-in-studio song, recorded yesterday – I needed to make a remote-controlled ON-AIR sign for downstairs, below the studio. I’d tried to make one before out of a digital picture frame I got free somewhere but it didn’t work out for various reasons. I wanted something that was explicit and changed display from OFF AIR to ON AIR, at very least – not just a lamp or something.

And then I had an idea, and put it together Friday night in about three hours. The idea part was just paper and transparencies; the rest just kind of fell out from that. Simple and quick to do, a fun evening project. Enjoy!

Off Air, printed on yellow

On Air, printed on clear, flipped over and aligned

held up to the light

The rest pretty much wires itself! Glue the plastic and paper together with any glue that dries clear. Then…

Take one old cassette case (or any similarly-sized box, really)

Trim, fold, insert

Now build a circuit! I used an old 3v ARCHER power supply that I’d had sitting around in the parts bin since, um, a previous century. But it works fine and (like many of these old things) actually puts out higher voltage than stated (within a tolerance) and all I needed inside was a simple LED lighting circuit.

I added a third LED later

said third LED was stolen from old broken garden lamp

Wire in parallel, not series!

Plug in to a RF-controlled power outlet box – you can buy these at hardware stores, Radio Shack, places like that. Or you could get all fancy with X.10 hardware and the like, but really there’s no need. Use whatever you have on hand.

Plugged in, Off

Plugged in, On

Installed, Off

Installed, On

A cassette case seemed fitting, being for a recording studio – but really, any container which has at least one clear side will do just fine. If you want to make your own, go ahead – here are PDFs for the paper and transparencies, both formatted for 8.5×11 Letter but you can resize them however you like as long as they both end up the same size:

Off-air PDF
On-air PDF

Whatever paper you use should be pretty light so that the blank areas of the transparency light up well held up to the light.

I also ended up changing the straight-in power plug for an angled power plug so it doesn’t stick out like that anymore, because that was annoying.

How’s that for a 20th Century solution? All made from parts I just had sitting around. Is there a word for modernist-punk, or have we wrapped all the way back around from “steam” to just “punk” again? Regardless, there y’go. If you make one, post pictures. ^_^

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.

I was going to post about the DEVO/Blondie show I saw a couple of months ago because I want to talk about nostalgia acts vs. acts which may have been around a while but are still going, and I bet you can guess which is which here, but I’m just not feelin’ it. So NONE FOR YOU! Today anyway. Later.

Plus I’m crazy busy because today is laundry day and cleaning day and also I built a new remote-controled ON AIR/OFF AIR sign for downstairs last night that I modified a little this morning (I changed the plug so it’s out of the way):

…AND I have someone coming in at 2pm for a vocals recording session, so I just don’t have time.

I’ll talk about the sign in a DIY post on Wednesday or maybe the Wednesday after. It’s REMOTE CONTROLLED! And very, very 20th Century, to echo a comment made on Livejournal about my Big Board and recording organisation system. Yes, yes, it is.

Somebody buy me a free tablet I can just hang on the wall instead and I’ll show you the modern solution that I’ve already built. But that one needs a smarter display, something that can stay powered for hours and listen to a webserver and and and.

More Wednesday. ^_^

Got some guitar to record today – not me, I don’t play that, unless you count bass, which you shouldn’t – so have some fun things.

If you haven’t seen it yet, watch this Air New Zealand air safety video. YES, REALLY. I know. Trust me here.

I posted a video a little while ago about studio treatment, getting the room all nice and under control for recording. It was a DIY thing. I also made this 360° view of my home studio, but didn’t embed it. That’s from room centre. As you can see, it’s a small space! But it works.

STERN MICROPHONE IS VERY STERN. Also very Russian:

Во славу Родины, броситься под немецкие танки!

Finally, since we’re recording guitar today, here’s a 3D printed guitar. Change that to an Irish Bouzouki, take it on the road, you pretty much have everything I ever post about here. XD

Soundtrack album work all weekend for me – I’m going to be editing together some learning tracks for our musicians. What’ve you got?

To my surprise, people responded to an earlier post about process asking to hear about the Big Board, which is the organisational system I use for album recordings. Well, then, okay! Welcome to the Big Board:

Not the Big Bird

(Many of the photos in this post can be clicked upon to enlarge them.)

The Big Board is based somewhat on kanban, an inventory control system based on moving cards around to trigger ordering supplies. In my case, I’m moving post-it tags around to trigger actions and show status. If you look at one implementation of kanban to management of processes, you’ll see something that looks similar – the heijunka box.

The colour codes indicate actions needed. Orange means recording. Yellow means verification and/or adjustment. Blue will mean we’re happy with that individual track. Nothing at all means nothing at all needed; we’re not planning on that instrument on that track.

Since they’re paper tabs, they can carry notes. For example, an orange tag which is scheduled will have the date and artist’s name written on it. An orange or yellow tag in an “other” column could list the relevant instrument(s).

The album side in a little more detail shows ALBUM (in all caps), underneath which are tracks. The next columns are all instrumental parts expected for each track.

Also not the Snuffleupagus

To the right of the album section is the artist section. This is a list of artists, a column showing very general availability, and then their next scheduled date in studio:

And not the Big Band

There is also a corresponding Big Book. The Big Book has pages for each track and each artist. The pages are plastic protector sleeves, into which colour sheets are inserted. The colour sheets for each song page correspond to the tab state of the songs on the Big Board; notes are made either by putting them into the sleeve in front of the colour sheet, or just taping them onto the plastic cover.

Orange means the files are set up, but all recording is needed. Note the album and song title in upper right:

Orange you glad I didn’t make another muppet reference?

Predictably, an orange page has no notes on it. Yellow means, “we have some recording but need more work.” Here’s a yellow page, with a couple of notes attached:

Tweety is a right bastard, he is. Just sayin’.

Blue means “we’re basically done with this.” There will still be mixing changes and tweaks, but the heavy lifting – and all recording – is over. I have no blue pages yet. ^_^

The backs of all the song pages are blue, because I pre-stock all the plastic sleeves with all colours, in order; then it’s just a matter of removing a top layer – first orange, then yellow – as the work progresses. Since they aren’t written upon, they can and should be reused.

Artist pages are green, and each artist on the Big Board has an artist page. This is also for notes. On Ellen’s page, I have a post-it showing mic choices, locations, and distances for her hammer dulcimer. I also took photos, for backup, but I hope not to need them.

Notes about Kermit’s banjo can go on ANY page

I’ve used systems like this before, when I was a small-press publisher. I didn’t have the book part, back then; it wasn’t necessary because there just weren’t as many notes. But that version of the Big Board was huge.^*

I tried to do a smaller version of the board with Dick Tracy Must Die, just on paper in a binder. When that didn’t work, I tried again in spreadsheet software. That was a total disaster, combining too little space in front of me with too little need and too much trouble, since I was doing all the performing and could just, you know, remember. Plus, I hate spreadsheet software. Worst of all worlds, ahoy!

So now we have my new Revision 3. I’m really liking it so far. It’s uncomplicated, but flexible enough to let me add anything to the notes file without having to retype it or scan it or make it fit into a spreadsheet cell or link a document or write any code, while nonetheless being physically small despite still having a big board that I can check at a glance. I’m pretty fond of this revision.

But we’ll see how it goes in practice as more people get involved. I really do need something, with all the different work going on at the same time, and being second-studio in collaboration with Fae Hollow/SeaFire down in Oregon. It’ll be more than worthwhile if it just helps us keep everything in sync.

So, that’s how it works. Any questions? Fire away!
 

PS: The Big Book also has my cable inventory chart. I don’t need one for mics yet, but will if I keep buyin’ the damn things:

Some of these are VERY custom

*: No, I mean seriously, huge. I’d take it down and put it up because it was too big to leave out. Imagine a physical implementation of page preview for an entire magazine. Yes, actual full-size page drafts in an 8×7 grid. With notes. It needed an entire wall (or more often, floor) and was kind of nuts, but it worked.

I’ve been fine-tuning the studio in preparation for work on the soundtrack, plus I have some other work coming up for Leannan Sidhe – their Roses and Ruin project and some second-studio work on their next full studio album. (Having their main engineer and studio be in Oregon when they’re in Seattle is problematic from a scheduling standpoint, so I’m helping out.)

And I have to tell you something: before the latest round of adjustments, I would never have put the words “Bose” and “precise” in the same sentence together. Not without also including the word “not,” anyway. I even dragged Anna upstairs and into the room to listen and she was all, “…<blink> wow.”

Remember my Bose? I’ve talked about them before. They’re old 301s, from this post where I talk about how terrible they sounded in the living room because of the room’s odd shape – see the link, it’s relevant. They sounded much better in the studio – a rectangular room – but still not the way you’d think they should.

Turns out, the way to get their best performance is to put them in a finely-tuned recording studio. IS THAT ALL? WHO KNEW!? ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

But I put on a test track and was suddenly transported back to my radio days, because they finally sounded like pro gear. I was… not expecting that! It’s not even that they’re just high-end precise; they’re unexpectedly crisp in the low end, too. You particularly hear it in percussion and bass guitar; suddenly, I’m hearing things I’ve never heard before, which means they’re worth having as monitors. For special cases.

Anyway, here’s a video showing the current state of studio tuning. It’s short, and annotated heavily. Enjoy!

Oh, and since people have asked, I will indeed talk about the Big Board, probably next week. Or the week after, I have another topic queued up also. Advance reading (or spoiler, if you prefer): “Heijunka box.”

This post is part of The DIY Studio Buildout Series, on building out a home recording studio.