A gritty observation

The blog has not been written in for some time: this is not due to a lack of musical activity, rather a flurry of intense musical activity which has left me with no time to update.

Today I was comparing a jazz recording I did to some old Stan Getz/Sonny Sitt recordings.
The difference was in the noise and fuzz - those old recordings were not clean by any means and mine was pristine clean.
To test it out I threw the logic 'clip distortion' over the master buss and I loved the effect! If I turned the drive down the result was better - more character, compression, glue.

So tomorrow in mastering I aim to 'dirty up' my mixes, either by printing to tape or by running through a preamp with a bit of overdrive.

City at War Mastering

My 4-track broke - channel 2 died. So I couldn't finish transferring the old City at War recordings onto computer. But today I got to borrow my friend Alex's, and my very good luck allowed it to be the exact same model as I have, allowing the dbx system to work and I know the playback speed will be right.

I mastered to an RMS of 20-22dB. It will be quiet, but commercial appeal has had nothing to do with this project.

I panned bass, guitar, and drums left and vocals and keys right, allowing me to get 2 channels into logic. I then compressed the vocal channel separately to the instruments to even out the vocals and summed into into mono to bounce.

The CD:

A chordal idea that makes me happy

What links these three songs? (you only have to listen to the first 20 seconds or so of each track to see what I am talking about)

Toto - Africa


MGMT - Electric Feel


John Frusciante - Unreachable


The chord changes in these songs all give me a similar feeling that makes me very happy .... the essence is all three have a strong chord change on beat 4 of the bar that is held into the next bar, preceding the more traditional place to put the strongest chord - beat one.

In Africa and Unreachable, it hits chord I on beat 4, the strongest chord of all!
In Electric Feel, it hits chord VI, also very strong (please note electric feel is on 6/4, and the the others are 4/4)

Any other tracks that do this? Please comment!

Recording speech at Woodford Folk Festival

I spent the last week volunteering at Woodford, a 6 day music festival, recording speeches and forums at the Greenhouse stage. Topics covered the environment, politics, and social science. They were interactive - 4 radio mikes were passed around in the crowd for audience participation. My job was very simple - take a mono feed from the desk, edit it, export as an MP3, and upload it onto the Greenhouse website (where you can now have a listen):

http://www.thegreenhouse.org.au

Prof Ian Lowe gave the highlight of the festival: Has Human Society Reached it's Limits? (To which he answered "Yes, any questions?").


And my view from the audience:


Codecs
My teammate, Ben, and I were going for minimum file size to make uploading easy so we encoded at 56kbps MP3, mono (half the filesize of a stereo file). The loss in quality is noticeable at this bitrate, but it's not a significant loss for speech. 50 minute files were spat out at around 20MB.

Dynamic Range
Most of the forums had many speakers, talking at different volumes through different mikes, so there was typically large volume differences. There were also regular 'pops' on the P's which would put a spike in the recording. I set my levels when recording so the softest sections peaked at -30dBFS and the loudest ones peaked at -10dBFS.

Knowing quality was not an issue and audio of this nature may be listened to streamed from the web on mobile phones with crappy speakers, I wanted a maximum volume RMS, without clipping. The solution was a hard limiter, limiting at -0.3dBFS (with lookahead). I pushed the limiter so the loud sections hit it hard, with up to 10dB of gain reduction, and the soft sections hit it occasionally - with this, the volumes were evened out, and erroneous pops and handclaps were soaked up. An example: