You have, of course, heard of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, yes? If not, you’ve heard their work, assuming you’ve watched much television from the BBC, pioneers of electronic music, of noisemusic, of textured sound, of sequencing – absolutely amazing work. They’re probably best known for the Doctor Who theme, in North America, but that’s only one small part of their legacy.

There’s a lovely documentary called The Alchemists of Sound, about the Workshop. (Thanks to Paul Johnson for referring it and providing the YouTube link.) It’s totally worth your time if you’re interested at all in these early electronic and noisemusic sounds and how they were made.

(Parts two and three.)

In Part II, there’s a demonstration of looping – using, you know, actual loops of magnetic audio tape – and live-synching of components across four tape machines. Delia Derbyshire, one of the pioneers of the shop, takes you through it. Hard. Core.

There’s been a bit of a revival in oldschool sounds like these, too. Really, it’s a direct parallel to chiptunes. BoingBoing has an article you may enjoy up on hauntology, the art of retrofuturist music, as specifically applied to pre-8-bit electronica revival.

Enjoy!

Once upon a time, I was a software developer. Actually, for a while. One of the slogans when I worked at Previous Borg¹ was, “Real artists ship.”

Which also means “real artists work on their art, not just their tools.” Most of these DIY posts are about tools, not the art itself, and really, for me at least, tools are awesome but actually using them to make something is moreso.

So I’ve posted a lot about DIY equipment-making lately and will do so more in the future – but not today. Because some decisions have been made, some plans have been finalised, and it’s time to stop working on tools. It’s time to put up the Big Board² and start making some recordings, because we are finally getting underway with the Free Court of Seattle soundtrack album.

Now, that’s really as much about DIY as anything else, since, after all, I am doing this myself. Therefore, there will still be DIY posts. They’ll just be process instead of toolsmaking. I’m not abandoning you. ^_^ Plus, I have a tools-making DIY post coming up from a guest writer in another month! So watch for that.

And that’s all for now. On the way out have some poster art I did for another band who have a Seattle show coming up in a couple of weeks. Visually, they’re way more about the light psychedelia than I am – I’m kind of the opposite of that, aesthetically – but they like the art so much they’re thinking about doing a T-shirt of it. That’s gratifying. ^_^

Leannan Sidhe Show Poster, Wayward Coffee

1: Previous Borg: Seattle always has a Borg, which is to say, the employer or industry into which you will be assimilated at some point. Once it was timber. Then it was the gold rush supply business. Then it was Boeing. Then it was Microsoft. Currently, it’s Amazon. I worked at Previous Borg.
2: Is the Big Board worth talking about?

You may and may not recall that I built a little optical theremin.

Basically, I’ve been trying to develop an electronic instrument project that could be built, in a workshop environment, at nwcMUSIC at Norwescon. It had to be really simple, but functional. And I can – what you can see in this picture totally works! It could be simplified further just by swapping those three resistors with one of similar value.

But the output is really, really quiet. Sure, I could – and did – add a matching impedance stage and hook it up to my amp, and that worked, but we can’t do that in a workshop.

So I wanted to add a pure amplification stage, using an amplifying transistor. I hooked all that up and: silence. After a few minutes, I realised that I was attempting to amplify a signal with a lower-power source than what I had to begin with. That won’t work.

And I could fix it, either by adding an impedence-matching voltage transformer (complexity rating no) or a second power stage, but it would take it well above my complexity limit for a one-hour workshop.

That won’t work either

So then I thought, “all these components are rated 40v, let’s just double the input power to 18v and see what happens.” And what happens is fire.

Or, at least, a surprisingly enthusiastic outbreak of magic blue smoke. And now nothing works, and now the little battery-powered air filter I built is running.

And that’s why there’s no DIY project today.

See you next week. XD

The Motley Fool has discovered 3D printing. Hat tip for the pointer to L. S. McGill at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, who has already been talking about this, and has important extension commentary.

You can actually read L. S. McGill’s article and get the idea about Motley Fool’s commentary, tho’ I’d recommend listening to the analysis – at least, the first chunk, before you get into the extended David Gardener sales pitch. You’ll know when you get there.

One point the Motley Fool analysis makes is that the future of manufacturing is the same model as music and film. He calls it the destruction of the economies of scale, ending the advantages of factories, and moving manufacturing per se to the end user. He even talks about Star Trek‘s replicators.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt on “23rd century”: I presume food replicators

He further gets that there’ll be “legitimate” download sites for designs, ala iTunes, and alternate sites, such as Pirate Bay.

It kind of astounds me that the same analyst who can get that right, and make that parallel, is not actually able to take a look at what’s actually happening in those comparison businesses.

In particular, how we’re all scrambling to find viable business models that have nothing to do with recordings, and how to build a new recording model that actually pays something to artists, because there’s an entire generation that sees no value in paying for music. (To wit, parts one, two, three, four, five, and six. Parts one and two both talk about the disregard for purchasing music, the rest start to talk about new approaches.)

Regardless, though, it’s about trying to find a way to make a post-scarcity model work. But that seems invisible to this guy. Don’t get me wrong: I’m for this future. A post-scarcity model in manufacturing? Sign me the fuck up. But there are huge ramifications, and this guy doesn’t understand – or at least doesn’t talk about – the fallout.

It won’t be going for coffee.

The good news for us in creative industries is that music, art, maybe movies, certainly performance – all these have alternate paths, many of which we’ve talked about in parts three through six. Bryan Kim at Hipset also recently posted an article on crowd patronage, expanding on one particular method I discussed in part three.

But I think manufacturing will have an even harder time with this than musicians and artists. Product designers may not, but that’s going to be a much smaller chunk of economic input and activity, compared to the mass-manufacturing stage; we’ve seen that in the rust belt. Replication of physical product was never the high cost point of music – but he doesn’t seem to understand how problematic that makes his comparison.

What happens to all those people when factory jobs are mostly just gone? What happens with all the money they don’t make anymore?

The post-scarcity environment won’t look anything like our current economy. Just ask some of those musicians you’re referencing – and that’s the upside, for producers. Ask the American “rust belt” for the down.

Maybe it really will look like Star Trek, eventually. I sure hope so. I even kinda think so – or, at least, that it could – and that’ll be awesome. But you’ll see your financial world torn apart, on the way there. Be ready for that – or, at least, as ready as you can be. It’s a great destination, but one hell of a bumpy road.
 

This is Part Seven of Music in the Post-Scarcity Environment, a series of articles about, well, what it says on the tin. There are no barriers to availability now, and copying is free. What’s a musician to do now?

Hey, DIYers! Today we have something special for you.

This series has always been about sharing information and people doing things. It’s part of the punk aesthetic, it’s part of particpatory culture, it’s part of maker culture, it’s part of the filk aesthetic – and a part I really like.

So I’m really pleased to feature this post by Jeff Bohnhoff, who will be writing about room conditioning. I’ll let Tony Fabris of the band Vixy & Tony introduce him for you, since he does such a good job of it:

Jeff and his wife Maya have been in rock and folk music all their lives, and have been producing record albums for more than 30 years, so they know a thing or two about both home studio and pro studio recording. Jeff works at Apple as part of the support team for their flagship pro audio recording product, “Logic,” so he knows a thing or two about audio recording software.

He’s produced dozens of amazing-sounding albums, both for himself and for others, so he knows how to get good sound. He also happens to be a brilliant parodist, and Jeff & Maya’s parody albums are characterized by hyper-accurate reconstructions of classic pop songs. He also taught me how to play guitar.

Now, without further ado: Jeff Bohnhoff.

The Sound of Your Studio
by Jeff Bohnhoff, Mystic Fig Studios

So, the topic du jour is acoustics. Specifically, the sound of your studio.

We recording engineers have a natural tendency to geek out over gear – whether we purchase it, make it, or improvise it from inexpensive bits and pieces. Gear is fun, and it’s an important part of making good recordings, but it’s only part of the picture, and not even the most important part.

In fact, better mics, preamps, etc. may lead to worse sounding recordings. “What?!” you say, “how can that possibly be? That Jeff, he’s CRAZY!” Well, okay, guilty as charged, but I stand by the statement. Here’s my reasoning:

When you put a microphone into a room and record something, the acoustic signature of the room is like a fingerprint that covers everything you record. It cannot be removed with any amount of EQ or processing – believe me, I’ve tried. Sound recorded in a bad room is like a white napkin handled by your mechanic after he’s swapped out the oil pan on a ’62 Rambler. The fingerprints are greasy, and will not wash out. Period.

The sad truth is, that your room probably sounds bad. Probably really bad. Most bedrooms, garages, dens, etc simply were not designed to be acoustically pleasing. With the availability of relatively inexpensive, good quality recording gear, this is the main difference between most home studios and commercial facilities. Good facilities have rooms that are designed from the ground up to sound good; everything from the dimensions of the room, the construction methods, to the materials and treatments on the floor, walls and ceiling are designed to eliminate room resonances, slap-back, bass build up, and so on.

So, assuming you are recording in your spare bedroom, why does using better gear – especially a better mic – often lead to worse sounding recordings? A better (i.e. more sensitive) mic “hears” more detail, and picks up more spatial information from the room it’s in. It’s typically more accurate, and does a better job of revealing everything about the source you’re recording and the room it’s in, flaws and all – sort of like the way your HD TV lets you see every pore and blemish on the face of your favorite reality star on Lifestyles of the Vacuous and Incredibly Boring.

Okay – we’ve established the problem, now what’s the solution? Unfortunately, there is no easy, complete solution or panacea. However, there are some practical steps you can take to improve things. First some ideas that involve no modification to the room:

1. Understand the pick up patterns of your microphones and how positioning affects the sound.

   Most mics have a cardioid pattern. This means they are most sensitive directly in front of the mic, with lobes that extend part way around the back, and almost no pick up directly behind the mic. The shape somewhat resembles a heart, which is where the “cardio” in the word cardioid comes from.

   
   Cardioid pick up pattern. You’ll see this on many microphone spec sheets.

   The advantage of this pick up pattern is that it hears less of the room than most other patterns, and so can be more useful in challenging acoustical environments. The downside is that cardioid mics exhibit “proximity effect,” which a bass and low mid frequency emphasis when the source is closer to the mic.

   This can be a problem because many small rooms sound very congested and bassy to start with, so even though getting closer to the mic means the source ls louder relative to the room sound (taking the room more out of the sonic picture), the closer you get to the mic, the more low and low-mid cruft you have to deal with.

   Hypercardioid mics (not terribly common) pick up even less sound from the side (but slightly more directly from the rear), but exhibit an even stronger proximity effect than cardioid mics. Omnidirectional mics, as the name implies, pick up equally well in all directions. This means they “hear” the room very well. On the plus side, they have no proximity effect at all. Mics with a figure-8 pick up pattern hear from the from and back equally well, or close to it, with little or no pick up on either side. In my opinion, these are the hardest to use in a challenging room. They “hear” a lot of the room, and they exhibit a fairly strong proximity effect.

   The key here is to experiment with your mics, and find the best pattern and distance from the mic to minimize the problems with your room. This will vary from room to room, mic to mic and even song to song. You may find that singing a foot or more away from a cardioid mic works best for you, or perhaps singing a few inches from an omni mic will work better in other cases. Just remember that the closer you are to the mic, the more source and less room will be recorded. Likewise, the narrower the pick up pattern, the more source and less room, but getting too close may result in too much low mid and bass. Experiment!

2. Understand your room.

   Rooms do not sound uniform at all positions. If you set your mics up, and just can’t get a sound you like, try other positions in the room. You just may find a location that sounds good, or at least better. If that means contorting yourself into the corner by the bookshelf while standing on one foot, well this is for art, buddy, so suck it up!

3. Isolate yourself from the room.

   Get some heavy quilts or drapes and some mic stands, and make a tent. Set your mics up inside the tent. This will certainly not give a very lively sound, but it may be better than the sound of the room, and you can have a friend over and tell scary stories in your tent. My favorite is the one about the recording engineer with a hook for a hand, but I digress…

If you can’t tame your room with mic choice or positioning, then you may want to treat it, to make it sound better. This is a complex issue, and before I say anything more, I feel compelled to offer a huge disclaimer.

I am not an expert on this subject, and may well be full of crap. Debates on how to properly treat a room rage in many corners of the internet, among real, trained acoustic engineers, so-called experts, and people who have no idea what they’re talking about, but have access to a working keyboard and an internet connection. I make no pretense at being an acoustician, so I will not be offering pat solutions and miracle cures. Quite honestly, just raising awareness that this is an issue at all is my main goal here.

With all those caveats in mind, I would like to mention some of the issues that many rooms exhibit, and will offer some general ideas on how a home recording engineer might deal with them, and links to some resources for further, more authoritative, information. I’ll be looking at two basic strategies for dealing with acoustic problems: absorption and diffusion.

The principle of absorption is that you mechanically trap sound waves, usually with some sort of material that causes friction, and converts the energy of the sound wave into heat. Absorption is great if the room is just too live. You usually want to avoid overdoing it though, or your room will sound as dead as the annual Christmas party at the office of Q.R. Fishwell, CPA.

Bass absorption panels for Mystic Fig Studios, unmounted

Diffusion, on the other hand, works by breaking up the waveform and dispersing it non-linearly back into the room. This can deal with phase issues, room modes and comb filtering, without overly deadening the room. The downside is that diffusors are relatively expensive to buy, and are generally harder to build than absorbers.

As with absorbers, the lower the effective frequency you want to deal with with, the larger the diffusor needs to be. One of the common types you will see is a “skyline” diffusor. These use “wells” of various heights (based on prime number sequences) to break up waveforms. They are also known as “primitive root diffusors.”

This page has a calculator that lets you plug in a frequency range you want to control, and a number of columns and rows of wells, which are 2″ x 2″ wood, cut to various heights.

The calculator gives you a grid that shows what height each 2″ x 2″ block (in reality 1.5″ x 1.5″, because lumber and math apparently had a disagreement at some point in the past) should be in each position to diffuse the range of frequencies you entered into the formula.

This page has some images of diffusers built using this method. These things don’t take a huge amount of skill to build, but it’s a bit tedious and time consuming.

One possibly easy to get source of diffusion is bookshelves. (But they have to be full of books – you do read, don’t you?) It works especially well if the depths of the books are different, sort of a faux skyline diffusor. Place the shelves opposite the sound source for most effect.

Skyline diffusor

Let’s look at some of the problems a typical room might exhibit:

Bass buildup: Bass frequencies tend to collect in corners, and where the walls meet the ceiling and floor. It’s especially problematic in smaller rooms, because you just don’t have the space to get the mics or speakers all that far away from the corners and edges where the bass is being accentuated.

This problem can be treated with bass traps, which are treatments designed to absorb low frequencies. Here’s the thing: when it comes to bass, physics is working against us. Because bass frequencies are long, it takes a lot of thickness to properly absorb them. Most of the foam based treatments you can buy are pretty much useless below 250 Hz or so.

However, it’s not that hard to build some good bass traps yourself. I built a bunch for my studio using instructions from a video I found on Youtube. These traps use Corning 703 rigid fiberglass insulation as the basic material. You won’t find it at your local mega-lumber yard / home store. The best place is from a commercial insulation supplier. Chances are you won’t be the first studio or home theater DIY’er to darken their door, and they’ll be happy to help you.

Rigid fiberglass comes in 24″ by 48″ by 2″ sheets. Each trap uses two sheets, for a thickness of 4″. The fiberglass is laid over a frame built of 1″x 2″ pine that’s covered with a sheet of cheap fabric. You then cover the fiberglass with some nice fabric (something that tastefully matches your studio decor). You end up with something that sort of looks like a very firm mattress. I mounted mine straddling the joint where the ceiling meets the wall behind my monitors and straddling the joints from floor to ceiling in the room’s corners.

Bass traps at Mystic Fig Studios (click to enlarge)

Flutter echoes: These are “sproingy” metallic sounding echoes, especially noticeable with sounds that have sharp transients, like hand claps. These are generally caused by reflections between the floor and ceiling. The cure is to put some absorbers and/or diffusors on the ceiling.

One approach to absorbers would be to build something like the bass traps, but using Corning 701, which is less dense than the 703, and perhaps only using one 2″ sheet. Unless the flutter is really bad, you probably would aim to cover only 40-50% of the ceiling, in a checkerboard pattern. (I know they’re rectangles, but you get the picture.)

If you want to buy something, then the commercial studio foam from the usual suspects is pretty good for dealing with flutter echoes. Note that when I say foam, I don’t mean the stuff that keeps the shipment of vintage Superman comic books you just bought on eBay safe. Sound waves just laugh at that stuff as they pass effortlessly through it. If you have outfitted your studio walls with egg cartons, take 30 seconds to hang your head in shame, and then go immediately and take it down. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

My point is that if you use foam, there is simply no substitute for the stuff that is designed specifically for sound treatment. If you want to go the DIY route, then rigid fiberglass is your friend.

Excessive ambience: By this I mean general undesirable reverberation from the sound bouncing around the room in a broad range of frequencies. Unless your room is tiled, or has very dense wood paneling, this is probably not your main problem, but even a small room may have excessive amounts of bad reverberation – the kind that makes what you record sound boxy and indistinct.

A bit of absorption and/or diffusion on the walls is a cure for this. Again, homemade absorbers and/or diffusors as described above will probably take care of it, or if you like, some commercial studio foam.

Comb filtering: a hollow sound caused by some frequencies being canceled and others being emphasized as the sound bounces around a room. If you graph the frequency response, it shows closely spaced peaks and valleys, and looks like a comb.

Frequency buildup and cancellation in a comb-filtered pattern

Comb filtering was the bane of my audio life for years.

By necessity, I track vocals and acoustic instruments in an isolation booth. (I live on the flight path for a large airport, I’m only about 500 yards from a railroad line, there’s a busy road nearby, and I have neighbors who like to use lawnmowers and other loud tools at the most inconvenient times.) My booth does an excellent job of keeping all those external noises out of my recordings.

Unfortunately, it also has a very boxy, unpleasant acoustic signature, caused to a great extent by the comb filtering that results from non-random reflections causing narrow bands of frequency cancellation and emphasis. It’s impossible to fully deal with the frequency imbalance with EQ, because there are narrow peaks and valleys all up and down the spectrum. I have spent many happy hours playing “whack-a-mole” with comb filtered vocals recorded in that booth. As soon as I thought I had dealt with one problem frequency, another would pop up.

I have to confess that I never found a completely satisfactory DIY solution to this. Getting the room as dead as possible seemed to be the most effective solution for me. In a typical booth, diffusors are problematic, because effective ones eat up too much space. Finally, I ended up purchasing a set of eight stand-mounted tube traps, that flood the area with random reflections that completely eliminate the comb filtering. This is not a cheap solution by any means, but it really does work.

Room modes: based on the geometry of the room, it may resonate at certain frequencies. The smaller the room, the higher the frequencies tend to be, and therefore more apparent. Room modes are fairly predictable based on the dimensions of a given room. This site and this site both show how to calculate the modes for a room. Once you know what frequencies your room wants to reunite at, you can build absorbers and diffusors that cover that range.

Keep in mind that the above is a simplification. But if you take some basic steps to treat your recording space scientifically – i.e. not by gluing random stuff to your walls – you will certainly improve the quality of your recordings a lot.

Endnote:
Here are some links to information from people who know way more about this than I do:

• Acoustic Treatment and Design for Recording Studios and Listening Rooms, by Ethan Winer
• Room Acoustics: Audio’s Final Frontier, from Absolute Sound Magazine, October/November 2004.
• Trapping Bass in Your Project Studio, by Arthur M. Noxon
• How To Setup a Listening Room, by Ethan Winer
• Creating a Reflection-Free Zone
• Everything you need to measure a room, by Ethan Winer of RealTraps, and Nyal Mellor

Jeff Bohnhoff is a musician, audio engineer, and record producer from California. His and Maya Bohnhoff’s latest CD is Grated Hits; their albums can be purchased online at CD Baby. Follow them on Twitter or on Facebook.

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

We’re heading up to Vancouver tomorrow for VCON! We’ll be there for the weekend, hitting Chapters and Siegel’s Bagels and picking up some desperately-overdue cider rations and kicking around town. Mmm, Growers, how I miss thee. If you’re around, yell!

Also, there’s an exciting special event coming up here next week; you’ll want to read about it. More on that below the fold.

Right now, let’s talk Digital Audio Workstations.

First, what are they? Simply put, Digital Audio Workstations are software implementations of the physical hardware you’d use in a large recording studio to record your music. They include virtual mixing board, virtual patchboard, virtual tape recorder, virtual cables, virtual effects plug-ins, virtual equalisation – and depending on the package, even more.

The goal is simple. If you can do it on one of these:

I’ll be in my bunk

…then you should be able to do it in your digital audio workstation (or DAW) software.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as basic recording. Were it, you could get a little digital recorder and be done. What that giant hunk of hardware – or your software DAW – gives you is the ability to record several tracks of sound, separately or all at once.

A DAW lets you play those tracks mixed together in a synchronised fashion, move and edit your recorded sounds, adjust their levels (both relative to each other and in absolute terms), adjust equalisation, add effects such as reverb or distortion or overdrive or whatever you have plugins for, and so on.

Some DAWs include integrated MIDI support; some include sequencers as a core component. Some even support remote boards that give you all those sliders and knobs, so you don’t have to use the mouse or keyboard so much. Those are cool, and easier to use in some important ways, if less portable.

But at the most basic level, you have recording, editing, mixing, and playback. At the most basic level, you have GarageBand.

I will not be in my bunk.

Now, I’m not mocking GarageBand. GarageBand is a great introduction to concept, and surprisingly capable. It makes a whole bunch of tasks really easy, has integrated MIDI support, and includes a bunch of virtual MIDI instruments.

While from a features standpoint it’s pretty limited, and while it handles tracks in a way that implies they’re less generic than they are by naming them after instruments and making them sticky in weird ways which might confuse you later, it’s still a great first experience.

If you just want to get the idea with GarageBand before tackling something more complex? Go right ahead. Because I am not going to lie to you: the learning curve on the more advanced DAWs can be brutal. Particularly on the free/open source ones.

So, what’s out there? Well, if you have the money, and a Mac, I hear great things about Logic Pro. For both Mac and PC you have Pro Tools, which is called an industry standard because it is one. Pro Tools Express is free with some hardware purchases – but it’s also limited enough that I wouldn’t use it myself. Reaper, for Mac and Windows, has fans in the professional community. (And as Tom Smith noted last week, IK Software is having a big sale right now. This is relevant to your interests.)

But we’re about dirtball DIY. Let’s talk building your own kit, and doing it the cheapest way.

There are really two topics here: hardware and software. We’re already talking software, so let’s carry on.

The cheapest route, in dollar terms, is always open source. Linux is free software. You may have to be able to do a lot of internals work – no, that’s not fair; you’d better be ready to rip its guts out – but you can do it.

Afraid? You will be. You will. be.

Audacity is a relatively-simple open-source DAW. It runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, and some Unix OSes, not that you’re likely to run into those. It’s easier to set up and it works. I ran into its limitations in the first hour, but that’s because I already had aggressive goals; it’s the GarageBand of the open source world.

Ardour is my workhorse, and it is a monster. It runs atop specialised sound server software called JACK, and runs on OS X and Linux. If you run it on Linux, you’ll have to grab PulseAudio by the throat, slice off its head, and salt the ground on which it dies. This will not be easy in some Linux variants (Ubuntu, I’m glaring hatefully in your direction) but it must be done. Ardour is monstrously frustrating (at times), is possibly the most difficult to learn software I’ve ever used outside of 3D modelling…

…and it can do anything. But it will make you cry getting there.

MusE has a fair bit of traction in electronica, because it’s really a sequencer. But it also has DAW capabilities, and the stated intent is to expand into the DAW arena. It’s Linux-only. If you anticipate a lot of sequencer use, and have relatively light physical instrument requirements, give it a look.

Rosegarden started out as MIDI and composition software, and that’s still where its heart is. But, as with MusE, it’s headed into DAW territory and added at least some of the basics of the functionality. If you like sheet music composition and MIDI, you may want Rosegarden.

So, what about the hardware? I’ll approach this from the idea that you’re building a new box for this, or upgrading an old one substantially. If you’re not, well, skim this anyway.

Screw you, Best Buy

Here are things not to care about: what the case looks like. How cool anything on the motherboard sounds. (We already talked about external sound interfaces; if you skipped it, go read up.) The graphics card. You’re not doing video: you do not care.

What you do care about: fan noise. Bus throughput, on the hard drive side and on the USB chain side. (I’m assuming you’re on USB and not FireWire or Thunderbolt, mostly because that’s where we are in the technology curve right now.) Raw CPU power. Lots and lots of RAM. If you want to spend some money, throwing some dosh at an SSD drive is not misallocated funds.

Basically, you want to build a lean box dedicated to math – because math drives your virtual effects – and moving audio data around, and nothing else. Every other toy, every other frob, adds interrupts and takes CPU and bus time away from what you’re doing with audio. Rip that shit out.

One particular task you’ll want to figure out is probing your USB bus for onboard devices. A lot of motherboards will share device assignments between on-motherboard equipment and external USB ports. This is technically correct – the best kind of correct – but in high-demand applications results in more interrupts on the bus and slower throughput. This can and in my case did result in higher latency and buffer overruns. Find and use ports which are unshared for your external audio card.

Also, for Linux in particular, you may find that wireless internet will be a problem. It’ll work, but will interoperate badly with your realtime kernel, hammering you with interrupts and popping you out of realtime mode.

Some people ditch networking entirely. If that’s not okay, go wired. If you must go wireless, get an external wireless bridge and connect it via ethernet cable to your wired (and realtime-kernel-compliant) ethernet card. This will solve many weird network problems.

But I said we’d talk about hardware, dammit! So okay! Where do you get performance hardware for cheap?

Well, you shop around, of course. Check your local parts stores, but the cheapest route I’ve found is to get a copy of CPU magazine’s motherboard roundup issue – preferably the last couple of years’ worth – and to go the gaming kit-out sites.

Yes, I know, I just talked about case mods and all that: don’t care. You don’t go for the frills: you go there for the motherboard clearance sales, because last year’s gaming l33tness is this year’s dogshit, as far as they’re concerned, and they just want it gone.

As a result – the fire-breathing motherboard inside my DAW? 75% off retail. The CPU, 60% off. The RAM, sadly, not as much, but still: bargains are to be had, and I had them.

When browsing, though, choose wisely! Look over the supported hardware list for your operating system and DAW and follow them. The last thing you want to be doing is tracking down some obscure kernel bug and finding that it’s only fixed in a downstream revision your distribution doesn’t even support yet, so you end up installing a custom kernel configuration and doing haxx0r insanity, not that I know anything about that.

Fuck yeah, meme baby. Fuck yeah.

And that’s an overview! Believe it or not, that is an overview; there are an endless series of twisty passages you can run down on this topic, all alike. I’d browse a little, pick one, and dive in.

If you’ve already built a DAW, what do you use, and why? What problems did you hit that I haven’t covered? Is anybody out there using Thunderbolt yet? Share your experiences!

Finally, I teased an announcement up top. It’s super awesome. Get this:

NEXT WEEK, we have a special event! We’ll be kicking off a series of monthly guest DIY posts with one from JEFF BOHNHOFF.

You may know Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff from their YouTube hit, Midichlorian Rhapsody, or some of their many albums and awards. Jeff and Maya also built Mystic Fig Studios, and Jeff has engineered and recorded literally dozens of albums in his 30-year musical career.

And next week, Jeff will be stopping by here, to talk about DIY sound control in your home studio. We’re thrilled to have him, and YOU WILL WANT TO READ THIS, if you have any DIY recording interest at all.

Until then – see you in Vancouver!

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

I want to talk a little bit about Facebook. Facebook, the all-encompassing. Facebook, the omnipotent, the omnipresent, the ever-more-integrated. Facebook, the would-be identity validator for the Internet.

Facebook, the Destroyer of Worlds.

I have problems with Facebook. Not just its censorious ways (which aren’t new), tho’ I’m obviously more than unfond. What I have issues with is how it more and more completely replicates the old Real World from which the net used to be an escape.

No, I don’t mean seeing all those lame old “office humour” graphics start to float down my news stream, tho’ gods know that by itself is enough to burn down the server farm and start over.

I’ll be right back! With a rifle!

I also don’t mean the echo chamber aspects, or the preference for soundbite and short form over longer posts, and I don’t even mean the way that they seem to want to replicate CompuServe of the early 1980s – a closed box that you never leave but that you visit first.¹

No. I mean the way Facebook strives diligently to replicate the old corporate-dominant communications structure.

Think about it a bit. Whether you think of it this way or not, Facebook is a fakenet. It claims to be about people being able to communicate with other people in ways they never could before. That’s even in its letter to investors and prospectus; they don’t care about the business model, they claim, they care about the technology and the project.

And yet, it has invented nothing in this regard.

No; that’s unfair. They have. There’s something about it that older, pre-net people understand. They can and do use it, when Livejournal and Tumblr and even Twitter are beyond them. I don’t know how or why, but this is an achievement.

Okay, that part’s pretty cool. HI MOM!²

That’s been a big deal for Facebook, because it lets them reach that older, pre-net market that has a pretty good amount of dosh³. And, more importantly, that pre-net market which is still invested in the old, pre-net world.

And most importantly of all, it brings in those who respond when Facebook actively suppresses content users want in favour of paid content from corporate/moneyed backers.

Why does Facebook have pages? So you can subscribe to them and see what their owners post? No. So you can subscribe to them, they can know what you like for better advertising, and so they can force page owners to pay up in order to let more than 30% or so of those subscribers actually see those page posts.

If you have the dosh, you can do that – and also place ads. Lots of companies do, after all. If you don’t? If you’re small, if you’re indie, if you’re new? Well, screw you, moocher.

Also your eyes

It’s the same old corporatist communications paradigm, now brought online more successfully than anywhere else on the net. Moneyed speech counts more than any other speech, even if you look for one and not the other.

The indie, the new, the not-moneyed, that’s what you want to see? Well, we’ll let you see about 30% of it. That’s the loss-leader. The rest, we’ll substitute in what we want you to see – which is to say, what we’re paid to make sure you see.

Facebook favours the established over the new, the large over the small, the moneyed over the startup, through suppression and replacement. It is, in short, the direct opposite of the free-and-open peer-to-peer ethos of the Internet. It is everything wrong with the old world, wodged into your web browser. It is the old paradigm, reborn.

And the importance of being able to sell you with confidence? Well, that’s why they’re starting to do things like this:

Don’t suspect your neighbour; report them!

So, yeah. Facebook. I have issues with it. Go fig.

1: I know, I know, not all of you do that. But I have stats. A good post will draw 450ish readers. If even one of those reads comes in from Facebook, it’ll be unusual. My blog post read rate is literally <0.1% from there.

2: Actual mom not included.

3: By which I of course mean, sigh, Baby Boomers. And also the lagging edge of Generation X, or some of it.

This week is just not working out for a DIY post. Instead of tossing out a sloppy, short post about digital audio workstations, I’m going to punt it back for a week in order to do it right. We’ll talk about digital audio workstation software next Wednesday, when I’ll hopefully be back on schedule.

But if you’re really jonsing for something fun to build, below is a great video series on building a really attractive crystal radio. It’s AM only, of course, as they all are, but there’s no power required and you really are building your own equipment from the ground up. You’re even building your own variable capacitor, the prettiest one I’ve seen in a crystal radio build:

It’s broken up into 12 short video chunks for some reason. Part 1 is all background, you can skip that if you want and just start here on Part 2, about two minutes in. But if you start that late you’ll miss them showing off a different classic crystal radio design.

uh… yeah, it’s all in Japanese. Is that a problem? That might be a problem. If it is, here’s a slightly different design that’s entirely in English. It’s not as pretty, but there’s a parts list, and! you still get to build a capacitor! By hand! Which is awesome.

This one’s not as attractive looking as the kit above, though, so maybe you should steal the physical design from the Japanese video. You could totally make the radio below look a lot like the radio above without much or any Japanese; once you know the circuit it’s all pretty simple and just a matter of arrangement, crafting, and specific materials. (Copper vs. aluminium, things like that.)

Anyway, once more, with English:

Have fun!

Hello, Thursday! Yes, I know, DIY day is Wednesday, I was busy, with Stuff. I DIDN’T FORGET YOU GUYS! <3

Last week, we talked about microphones! As part of setup for that, we talked about XLR interfaces and balanced signals. If you missed it, go read up on that.

Now, let’s talk about why you really, really want an external sound device, rather than using your super-l33t gaming sound card. I mean, you paid good money for that thing, right?

Well, aside from the connectors and signal types, there’s noise. The inside of a computer cabinet is really, really noisy, from an electrical standpoint. And microphone signals are really, really small. The balanced signal noise cancellation falls over as soon as you hit the connector, so you don’t have that protecting you. And if you’re recording, the last thing you want is unintentional electrical noise on every track.

Having the sound card be outside the box, and converting everything to digital before it gets to your computer solves all those problems. It also lets you have the computer in a closet, where its fan noise and hard drive noise are nice and safely locked away from your microphones, and where it is safely out of the way your crazy bassist who likes to kick things.

Also, from this guy.

But aside from that, let’s talk goals again. We discussed goals quite a bit in monitors and monitor amps: sound equipment is built to particular goals. Onboard soundcards are built to make cheap computer speakers sound better; gamer kit cards are built to make games sound awesome. And those are both really good goals!

But they are not your goals in the studio. You need sound equipment that is precise, and which treats different sounds similarly, across the frequency spectrum. You need AtoD and DtoA converters which are “musical,” which is to say, are accurate and even-tempered. You don’t want help, because you can’t be assured of getting it out in the wild when people are playing your music back.

I mean, if it’s all you have and you really, really can’t afford anything else? Fine. Of course you should use what you have. Chiptunes people can do this pretty effectively, as can anybody not using microphones or live instruments. Use what control you have over whatever sound card you have to minimise or disable all “sound enhancement,” “bass boost,” “loudness,” “surround effect,” anything like that you can find. Turn all that shit off, dig until you’re sure there’s nothing left to turn off, and you can do okay.

Honestly, people, it’s not that hard

But let’s say you’re not doing that. What do you need in one of these?

First: at least two inputs. If you’re willing to stick to recording one person at a time and not recording a drum kit, you can get away with only two. The inputs need to support XLR connectors. Almost all these days will also support TRS (a.k.a. 1/4″ plug, a.k.a. “patch cord”) connections on the same inputs; it’s a combined socket and really clever.

“But Solarbird!” I hear you cry. “You just told us last week, never use TRS connectors!” Wrong, minion! I said, no microphone worth the time will have those, and that’s still true. But a lot of other devices will have them – synth, electronic keyboards of other types, drum machines which aren’t purely software, Weird Shit You Build Yourself – it’s a big list.

Optical theremins do need apply

You can even connect an electric guitar straight to one of these, and people will do that. If you’re a classic rock guitarist and want to sound like Tom Scholz? Now you know. (Okay, it’s a little more complicated than that. BUT NOT MUCH.)

Second: Those input connectors need to support phantom power. Phantom power needs to be switchable (on and off) separately to the device as a whole. And it should be 48v. There are specs now for lower-voltage phantom power, but a lot of equipment won’t work on it.

I see what you did there

Phantom power is a way of throwing DC power on the line in such a way that it’s invisible to the audio signal, but can still be used by the condenser microphone connected to it to power the condenser pickup. We talked a little about this last time.

Third: A headphone jack which includes passive or live or real-time monitoring in the unit itself. This requires some explanation.

When you’re doing multitrack recording – which is to say, recording one instrument, then another instrument, then vocals, all separately – you need to be able to hear what you’ve recorded so far, on headphones. These headphones need to be pretty sound-tight so that what you’re listening to doesn’t get picked up by the microphone again and re-recorded.

But you also want to be able to hear yourself, and good headphones will block a lot of the sound you’re trying to record as well. Trust me, this is important. You further need to hear the sounds you’re playing as you’re making them – like in real life – without any processing lag.

If your sound interface sends the microphone input to the computer and has the computer send it back for monitoring purposes, that will take enough time and introduce enough lag that it will really screw you up. Seriously, it’s like a tenth of a second or more.

So a decent external sound interface will provide the ability to throw both playback and what’s coming in the microphones back into the headset at the same time. Playback and microphone monitor levels should be separately controllable, too.

You’d think somebody would have a picture of a monitor lizard wearing headphones, would you. WELL, WOULDN’T YOU?! All I could find was this rather nicely-rendered Gecko.

Fourth: Studio monitor outputs. These will usually be RCA connectors, but might be TRS connectors. They’re for playing back things you’ve recorded on an amplifier – your studio monitor amp and the speakers connected to it.

Finally: Good quality analogue-to-digital converters and digital cable connection to your computer. You can get away with USB 1.1 equipment if you’re down at two channels or fewer; more than that, USB 2.0 is a bare minimum. Firewire and Thunderbolt are of course both better, but unless you’re working on a larger scale than anybody I imagine reading this will be doing, unnecessary.

Those are the required features. There are other options nice to have; inserts (to add effects boxes live on your inputs, if you feel the need to do that for some reason after input), pad controls for particularly “hot” input, things like that. They’re nice, but less important.

Plus, of course, more input connectors! Why that’s better should be obvious. But I need to point out here that more is not intrinsically better. Every additional input requires duplication of an entire channel of circuitry. Remember back on monitor amps, where I showed how the left and right amplification channels had mirrored circuits? Each additional input has another set of input channels, just like that.

More != Better

Those cost money. At any given price point, there’s only so much money to spend on hardware. So if you have two inputs on a $250 device, you have a lot more hardware money to spend on the quality and feature set of each channel than you do if you have, say, eight channels on a $250 device.

Particularly at our budget, small differences in money make big differences in quality. Let’s take a couple of examples; I have a TASCAM US-800 (eight channel, six with microphone preamps) and an M-Audio USB Fast Track Pro (two channel, effectively).

The US-800 listed new for $370, was discontinued about a year ago, but is still floating around on clearance new for around $200. The Fast Track Pro retailed – I believe – for $280 originally; it’s floating around for $150-$200-ish. Both have all the basic features listed above. The US-800 is USB 2.0; the Fast Track Pro is USB 1.1.

If you do the math against retail – which is our best ratio, for getting at manufacturing cost – you’re spending $46.25/channel on the US-800, and $140/channel on the Fast Track Pro. And that shows up. Some of it is in features per channel; the Fast Track Pro is quite feature-rich for its price and size.

But it’s also audible. You hear it in the quality of the microphone preamps inside.

Don’t get me wrong; the US-800 is good. At lower gain, it’s very good. I use it heavily. It’s fast, it was hell and a half to get working on Linux (hi, I have a custom kernel configuration now!) but it works. But despite being more expensive overall… it’s just plain noisier, at high gain. You simply can’t boost the microphones as much you can as on the Fast Track Pro.

So if I need extra mic gain, and I don’t need more than two inputs, I’ll hop over to the Fast Track. It has fewer inputs and is stuck at USB 1.1, but also preamps that don’t add noise at high gain. As always, it’s a matter of making the right tradeoffs, and picking the right tool for the right job.

To wit

So that’s a basic overview of audio interfaces! We had some great commentary last week on microphones, mostly on the Livejournal echo, but also on Dreamwidth, including ideas for making your own pressure-zone microphone out of piezoelectrics and glass, a lot of commentary on micing bodhran, some thoughts on pickups, and the sudden and strange return to popularity of the ribbon microphone. If you wanted more on microphones, go check out those discussions!

Next week, we’ll talk a little about cheap/open source digital audio workstation software. And, of course, if you have any thoughts or questions on sound interfaces, let’s hear ’em! Some of you guys are recording, what do you use?

Added May 2013: The original version of this article mentioned crosstalk in the US-800. This turned out to be an unrelated wiring problem, and not intrinsic to the TASCAM unit itself.
Added January 2014: The noise issue at high gain got substantially quieter with the addition of ferrite chokes on all power cords. Turns out the building’s wiring is genuinely rotten with RF! A better board wouldn’t’ve cared, but this one does. Still, it’s a cheap fix – $10 for 10 chokes at Amazon.

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

I promised a microphone post today, and even though my arms are all cranky at me for rebuilding the front porch all week, MICROPHONES IT IS!

The porch looks good, by the way.

yeaaaaah, not hardly

First, I have to confess; this is way less DIYish than the previous few posts have been. Why? Because you really don’t want to be building microphones. Sure, you can, and if you want to, go for it! If you’re starting from scratch – actually building a microphone instead of just repurposing an existing mic – you’ll probably want to start with an old-school carbon or button microphone, the sort that were used in telephones for decades and decades. You’ll find yourself wandering down all sorts of crazy paths including flame speakers, which are awesome and totally dangerous.

Also, fully endorsed by the Fire Nation Broadcasting Network. But I digress.

Actually less cool

But let’s say you’re looking for a cheap way to do some recording. There are a few things you need to know. First! You’ll need an external sound card. We’ll talk in more detail about why, in another entry – there are lots of reasons. It’ll need to support phantom power, and other other features, but the most important for right now is that you’ll need an interface that accepts this kind of plug:

XLR Connectors

This is the standard for professional audio. It’s a three-wire cable that carries something called a “balanced signal,” wherein noise spikes picked up by the cable are intrinsically neutralised without any active circuitry. It’s really clever and if you didn’t understand that, don’t worry about it. You just need to know what kind of connector that is.

There’s also a five-wire stereo variant, but I’m the only person I know who has a five-wire microphone, and I had to build my own interface cable to break it into a pair of XLR mono cables. You’ll probably never run into a microphone that uses it.

You will, however, run into plenty of cheap microphones with cables like this:

TRS connectors

Just walk away. Don’t even try. There are almost no microphones worth bothering with which even support this kind of connector. Not none – I own one of these exceptions, I use it for percussion – but this is rare enough that you almost certainly won’t run into it.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s talk about the microphones themselves.

There are several technology paths in microphones. Which is better for you and your recording depends upon environment and what you’re recording. Even old-school carbon microphones are still being made today, for specialty applications! You won’t run into one, unless you take apart a really old rotary-dial phone, but they’re out there.

What you will run into are:

• dynamic microphones
• small-can condenser microphones, and
• large-can condenser microphones

You may also run into ribbon microphones and pressure zone microphones, but that’s less likely, so I’ll leave them aside for now.

Let’s talk about these by technology class. Dynamic microphones are an older technology still in regular use live, and sometimes in studio. As a group, they’re durable and rugged. They don’t mind dampness too much. If you overload them with too much sound, you’re not going to do any harm as a result, so you see them fairly often in drum recording. They’re good at picking up sound in the immediate area of the microphone, but not sounds further away, which has both good and bad points. And at the low-professional end, where we’re talking, they’re bad at picking up subtleties.

The dirt-common models are the Shure SM-57 and SM-58, for instruments and vocals, respectively. They were a huge technological advance when invented, and are beloved by many older performers. The two models both have the same pickup inside, but different enclosures, which changes the sound.

The Shure SM58. You’ve seen this before.

Do you want one? Well, if you play out, it’s good to have an SM-58 in the studio to practice against, mostly because it’s really fond of amplifying your vocal plosives. If you don’t know what those are, put your hand in front of your mouth right now and say “plosive,” or “plant.” Feel that gust of air with the “Pl” sound? That’s a plosive, and an SM58 is pretty good at making those REALLY LOUD.

If you aren’t bringing your own microphone to gigs – which happens at festivals, open mics, and so on – you’ll want to practice against that, to avoid doing it on stage. Also, some old-time country musicians and rock musicians insist upon them, for their particular sound. If you want that sound on your vocals, then, yes! You want one. Absolutely.

But if you’re only buying one microphone? It really shouldn’t be one of these. Their response curve is a little strange, they’re not generally good – not even the 57 – for recording instruments with any subtlety at all. They’re wretched for recording mandolin and not noticeably better on zouk, for example.

You’ll see instruments miced with them on stage, occasionally, but if it’s an option you can avoid? I’d avoid it.

Condenser microphones are far more commonly used in studios. There are, again, multiple types, which we’ll distill into large can (or large diaphragm) and small can (or small diaphragm) types. The difference is centred around the size of the sound pickup diaphragm, as well as the manufacturing technologies used to produce them.

Small-can condenser microphones have traditionally been the more affordable of the condenser microphones out there, but that all changed…

…when a small number of companies all figured out how to make large-can condenser microphones at far lower cost. (See? I changed it up on you.)

This has been a huge boon to home recording, because if you can only afford one, or one pair of microphones? You’re really best off going with this technology. I like the M-Audio Nova (no longer made, but – unlike many of the other cheap large-can capacitor microphones of its generation – retaining its price level in used territory) and the AKG Perception 200. I do a Nova pair for the mandolin, a mix of Nova and AKG for zouk, and vocals – as of recently, anyway – on the Perception.

I really, really wish I’d had the Perceptions for Dick Tracy Must Die.

If you can’t afford specialised mics, this is a really good route to maximixing what you can do with what you’re able to spend. If you dig around, you can find them for $90 or so used… and you won’t do too badly that way. You really won’t. They’re pretty flat pickup response, they have nice sensitivity, and they’re pretty good at picking up the details that make such a cumulative difference in recording.

But! There is a downside. They’re very sensitive. They’re relatively fragile. Loud enough noises can break the microphone, so you don’t want to be close-micing drums with these things. They may and may not survive a fall.

Condenser microphone diaphragm

Small-can condenser microphones tend on average to be more durable. They’re also, as a class, the most precise at picking up transient changes in sound. You can close-mic drums with many of them – where you can’t, use dynamics, like the SM57 again – and they’re great on cymbals and snares. They’re popular for live show recording, and a lot of instrument recording. If you’ve seen a Zoom H4, H4n, H2, or any of that sort of recorder? You’re looking at small-can condenser microphones.

I have a Sony ECM-957 in studio. Unlike the other cases above, that’s not a recommendation; it took me forever to figure out what this mic was actually good for. It was a terrible mic for vocals, and a poor one for most of my instruments – but turned out to be a great close-mic for drums!

And the moral of that story is even the weird microphones will have their uses. You never know where that’ll be, but it’ll be out there.

So! Inventory what you’re likely to record – vocals if applicable, the instruments you and your friends play. Tailor your purchases to that, using the capabilities of the various technologies as a general guide. And if you can only afford one microphone at all, a large can condenser microphone is almost certainly going to be your best overall bet.

Next week, let’s talk audio interfaces! Until then, what microphones do you use, and for what purposes? This is just my experience set. How about you?

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