Monday, July 20, 2020

Moving the Blags

I'm re-consolodating my blogs. 

I know, you wanted them separate. But my little mind just doesn't work that way.

All my blogging -- politics, music, theater, film, etc., will be at 



Saturday, July 11, 2020

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Pultec EQ

  1. The first group controls the low frequencies and has three controls: boost, attenuation, and frequency select. This section is a shelving EQ.
  2. The second group controls the high frequencies and has three controls: boost, bandwidth, and frequency select. This section is a parametric boost EQ.
  3. The third group also controls the highs and has two controls: attenuation amount and frequency select. This section is attenuation only shelving EQ.
Panda panda panda.

I have this fantasy about making something like a Pultec EQ pedal for guitars.

Duncan amps makes a tone stack calculator.

The Riff Step is a Digitech Whammy sequencer.

If you want your MXR Carbon Copy's output to be 100% wet, you gotta cut R48.


Sunday, February 23, 2020

Lighten up

I'm kinda over using heavy strings. As a teenager I played absurdly heavy flatwound strings. I still have my Hagstrom electric -- it won't even set up properly with the original bridge and anything short of some stupid heavy strings.
Right now most of my guitars are 10's with heavy bottoms. But it seems that the "heavy is better" thing is a myth (one that I bought into just because I was very used to hard-to-play instruments.) Billy Gibbons, Jimmy Page, BB King, Brian May, I mean a lot of guitar players known for their guitar sound use(d) pretty light strings.

And of course it is impossible to do a double-blind comparison. But it seems the biggest difference is feel anyway. Of course, one big difference between me and (say) BB King (the only difference, really) is that he was a vastly better guitar player than I am.
Cat is unimpressed as long as I'm not using cat-gut strings.

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Nobody knows

Pulp-O-Mizer.


Sonanaut.
 Polymer jerboa.

In theory, you can use stereo or mono files for "3D" sounds in FMOD. But there's a tool to widen the surround field. Honestly, I'm not sure how it works. It's the 3D speaker spread thingy.

PRS.https://www.prsformusic.com/

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Goose convolution Buttery Barmaids

BTS on sounds for Untitled Goose Game. The buried lede is that Em Halberstadt seems to use an AKG 414 for recording sound effects. I got a 414 to work well for me once. It was probably an older one.

Fog Convolver is a convolution plugin. 
New Interfaces for Musical Expression.
Free Impulse Responses.
AirWindows impulse responses.
OpenAir impulse responses.

Austin Wintory videos. (The composer of ABZU.)
The Buttery Barmaids.





Monday, October 7, 2019

Mic Making

Fantasizing about building microphone(s). The Schoeps circuit seems to be the way to go. It's a simple circuit but it weirdly has a lot of stuff on it. And the kicker is that the kits are weirdly expensive.
DIY has a whole thread on it.




The Mouser BOM puts the price of everything other than the 2N3819 $23.91, but the 2N3819 is only a buck-fifty.
A two-layer board for a LDC is $16.40.

Order from OSH Park

Pre-built boards fully populated with XLR's are just under $70.

That means that assembling it together from parts is about $40. If you were to just point-to-point it, then about $25.

Or, alternatively, buy a donor mic and party with it.

Mic-parts sells their kit for $129.

I think point-to-point in a wooden case is the best notion.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

That which was

Using GitHub with Unreal.
I don't know. I think 1987. Andrew Bellware, Todd Johnson. (Todd thinks this is 1986.)

Krakli Software makes VSTi emulators. Free.

Ajax Sound makes a program called Cecilia. Also free.

Monday, June 24, 2019

From the past?

I don't know if I ever published this. This is clearly from before my brother passed away.
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Fun facts:
The distance from the neck pocket to the bridge on a standard Fender instrument (of any conversion-neck scale) is 7 1/8"
Bridge posts are 2 7/8" on center.

Floyd Rose "fastloader" from Guitar Fetish.

The online tuning fork is a thing you just need sometimes.

Specs on humbucker heights.

Totally un-attributed:
Action on a guitar is usually measured at the 12th fret. It is recommended that the action on an electric guitar should be 1/16" (1.6mm) on the high E string and 3/32" (2.4mm) on the low E string when in standard tuning using standard gauge strings.

Via this Reddit post is DaBeatleMen1, a YouTube tutorial channel of Beatles songs.

Dorkus with new Warmoth neck.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

St. John's

https://www.soundtheory.com/home

So. I got the Gullfoss plugin. Lemme start with the problem that's been stressing me out in much my live audio life: the harshness at 2.6kHz.
This is a prototype of my new Zoom F8 portable rack. The idea is to hold and protect the F-Control faders and to hold batteries and the like.


  • Nobilified. Hand-painted versions of you as royalty.




The Zoom F8 can also speak directly to a computer as an audio interface. But that does mean the F-Control won't work with it. 
Russian Chamber Chorus of New York and the Nikolai Kachanov Singers, under the brilliant direction of Nikolai Kachanov, performed a concert at St. John the Divine's at 112th and Amsterdam.
We did three pieces -- the world premiere of Efrem Podgaits' Morning Birds, Nikolai Kachanov's Benevolence, A Choral Cycle, and Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel.
Morning Birds has flute and cello. Benevolence was just choir. Rothko Chapel has viola, celesta, and pretty substantial percussion (with a couple tympani, concert bass drum, tenor drum, woodblock, gong, temple block, and vibraphone.)



Russian Chamber Chorus setup at St. John the Divine's. 
So, typically St. John's is just an acoustical nightmare. It has something between 6 to 8 seconds of reverb time. It's huge. Nigh almost 600 feet long. I'd only heard concerts in the chapel and in what is called the "cross."
The inside of St. John's, with my notes. I think the cross or "crossing" is wider than pictured here.
The reverb in that space is no joke. And there in the cross it's just crazytown. So I was a bit stressed about how this concert was going to sound.



But we weren't in the cross. We were way up in the choir. And the acoustics there are radically different. So different, in fact, that I thought I might have gone insane. But up in the choir the sound is tight, focused, and sounds almost exactly the same all through the choir section.
Plus, you still get that very long reverb -- but it's really attenuated. So you get all the tightness and focus of the choir, but then almost like a ducked reverb, you get this beautiful bloom after every musical cutoff.


I mean seriously, it's like somebody is raising the reverb prefade send at the end of each piece or section. It's beautiful. Honestly I don't understand how the long reverb back in the cross doesn't mess up the sound, it's like it suddenly appears for the last note. It's basically magic.


So I put up 7 mics. A stereo X/Y pair of Schoeps in the back, a middle-center AEA 84 (with a Cloudlifter), a center Blue active ribbon in the front center, a pair of Oktavas spaced left and right about at the edge of the chorus (which is hard to see in these pictures because the full chorus isn't shown and a number of rows of chairs got removed) and a single Rode NT1 in front of the percussion (which was amusing but not that useful.)
The thing is, the X/Y pair is really the whole of the sound. They sound both very close and detailed, and full of lush reverb.

Monday, June 3, 2019

Nut height

According to this StewMac video, these are some optimal heights for nut slots on a 6-string electric.


Obviously, your mileage may vary based on how heavy your strings are and how you like to play. But probably not a terribly significant amount.

Moving the Blags

I'm re-consolodating my blogs.  I know, you wanted them separate. But my little mind just doesn't work that way. All my blogging -- ...