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Wake-up to reality

dudermn — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:48:10 GMT

It seemed so long ago. Today is the day music has become a small fragment of the large expansion of human attention. Take it from all the kiddie musicians out their that still look at the necks of their guitars as they try and remember that one special riff that for-ever remained in their thick bloody skulls.

Today is not as fun as it used to be..... Every-one is in a static question of how exactly do we get this music out there, and more importantly how do we get paid. With half the internet, searching for a do-it-your-self genius innovative movement to capture societies adapted culture to the mind-set of the human mind....in its most current situation we begin to believe.
So in the studio we have the average personal musician. Who has the power to pay his way into music. Takes the small time he has ...or she, from employment and play his bloody guitar 5 minutes. A real musician is out there playing it day and night, supported by the government and begging for change, complaining at the end of the day that he only makes 200 a a show, given though the over-shadowed fact that Social-secuirity, or medical psychozisis :) is keeping the bills paid at the crib. Homie.

Language too has come a long skiddadal from typical comprehensive discussion. Skip forward past the boring blur of crud reality, as crude as the petrol that powers it...thank you very much, go hop in your car drive down to jacking the puss...rrr boxx..

Take a swig of cola, relax keep a positive attitude.
You are a sound engineer. Music created by true musicians has graced your ears, the places you've worked in, the tracks you recorded, they all have been ever so tweaked and tampered with and brought forth to a little more of a dream than a product. It is hard to remember this about the position of an engineer today.
So many products clutter the fact that it is really that simple to be good at this, and that easy to be bad.
Color, texture, cream, space, vanilla, blue, sad, jumpy, poppy...words all that describe hamburgers as well as music...
Smooth, hot, elegant, seductive....words that work just as fine on a woman as they do on a recording.
Cute, cuddly, fuzzy..... guitar tone, and pups.
A big C word I like to use in the studio is C$$T but you guys should just use the term creativity. Never forget your position as musical guru for some-one paying a sum of money for a service they ask of you.
The same a normal hobo off the street can come into some-ones apartment and hit record on their limited edition of pro-tools on some mac-pro bought from some pawn shop down the corner in some neighborhood.
Sure the negative effects are close by to you and I and easily some-one could fall into that small pit of despair kept away in the darkness of our hearts... but why think as change in a bad light ? For 20-13 is a time of great ingenuity in an analog moment becoming timeless, digital, and encoded into the data-base of the human library. Sound samples are at our disposable for every single object we wish to have ever recorded, finding it is a story of its own.
Making it is an adventure, experiencing....that is where the rewards come.

Personally death has visited me over the course of my life over 62 times by now. I am 24. By now means is this a bigget...but the sounds of some-of-these experiences have been that of winds blowing me off rocks into an ocean.

Infrasonics.....

But that is a bit of sound technology literated as psyco-acoustic, dont bother with it, the scale of this one is in terms of cities and regions, and it has more to do with energy and vibe than music. But strangely enough just as much with harmony.

So a man comes into a studio and asks of us for help doing various things. Today its not just tape something to a cassette, expect problems in a studio ranging from a failing marriage to recording an audition for a band. Expect groupies in at 3 in the morning and expect some-one to tell you...be-care-ful I see dead people :)
Most of this, is fun and games.... happy and joy. So many people live their lives in the scale of A at 120bpm.... its so easy to get into their lives as a shiny metal god. A robo-engineer. Hype up your name, say things that exaggerate your skill and pray that you have to prove those proposals you made to some bar owner about moving the speakers 2 inches to the left and putting a rotating mirror in the middle of the bar.... Figure it out how to make people question the world around them, make clients close their eyes when they talk to you. Exist as sound.
Sound-scape designer, Atmosphere prophet, Silent light composer, choose your title with a hint of passion and a heart of gold.
Render your files only when they feel steady.... If you make an edit remember, that when you cant hear the edit in the song no-one else will. That is why we say to take time and step away from the mix. What automations you make, what tricks you tweek.... see if you can lose yourself in what you do and forget the time spent in the studio. Remember the lyrics and bring forth the story.

:beerbangX:

Analog room compression, the spectrum....de rainbow.

dudermn — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:00:07 GMT

A wise dude once asked of me what dooo I know of sound engineering....
To this question God replies.

'I made de fur your walls dampen with, each rock of that cement yoh use, my stone.
Crafted, individually by the tips of my fingers.'

Sound is energy, pure. Use de vibe and de mind wise.
Listen to voices, angels....and the fear of demons.
But remember sound is nrg. Prayers are sound.

Becoming a ghost.

dudermn — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 00:18:16 GMT

Here is what I can say about this long ass journey of keeping a log. ... its hard when your out there getting involved as much more than just a human being in this whole music thing. Hope-fully I will turn into one of those robo-studio guys that just sits and diddles all day and night with-out sleeping.
So far... in Austin I lasted 7 days with no sleep. I made friends who bought me expensive burgers....but if ya wanna read about November you gotta read about October.

I know it should have been up on the first of this month. The article itself was written a-while ago. But.... a ghost is an entity that is hard to embody.

Enjoy the read! The next one is coming up real soon. Double dose of Dude for ya guys and gals!
Cheers !
http://buxs-manhunt.blogspot.com/201...-ghost_23.html

Getting that perfect kick.

dudermn — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 09:44:00 GMT

This is an audio log into getting the perfect sound for your kick drum.
And pretty much throwing everything at it.

The oscillating bass covers pretty much ever single frequency that would be a potential risk for the kick.
This is one of the holy grails of sound.

In this portion of sound from a fellow I met on my travels searching for his Holy-Grail.
Not a bad kick.

Throwing everything he could at it he said this is what my kick will sound like.
Than he discovered that really...not all kicks sound the same.
http://soundcloud.com/dheudeghetlaust/bocanc1

I guess most of yous already know this anyway...

Only happy on Guitar.

dudermn — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 03:48:18 GMT

Well in the on-going logs of the captain known as dude (oh wait thats me). I have succeeded in writing up yet another month.
This time its bigger and longer and un-cut.
http://buxs-manhunt.blogspot.com/
Cheers !

August ended? Already ?

dudermn — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:53:11 GMT

Another log about running around trying to make music happen...Again the title says it all. Though it might be hard for people to read the whole thing... and I did slack on writing up all the details about editing a song (I will add the fully mixed thing real soon.) It does cover a bunch of different groovy things. Enjoy!
http://buxs-manhunt.blogspot.com/201...1_archive.html

...Ya still no gigs this month either...though I tried :(

July has come and passed.

dudermn — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 23:01:43 GMT

While I may have hindered on the idea that nothing was to be written or said about July.
The truth is that after doing an audio log of the happenings of this month the liberty of relaxing a tad bit became apparent.
Writing up Julys events was kinda like remembering an almost decent date. There were some good points but most of it was just dull.

Having a fixed keyboard also made the task of writing flow from 3 days to just 2.... hmm cut out a good 24 hours did it ?
To whom-ever may read it. Enjoy.

http://buxs-manhunt.blogspot.com/

Membrane Harmonic structure.

dudermn — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:36:34 GMT

Soon.. I will write a big article about recording techniques I use on budgets over 500 bucks per song.
And I wanted to remind myself about this small but very important technique that will be also set in an example.

First and fore-most. When recording live instruments on a multi-track as opposed to 1 instrument at a time. Things happen.
Lets talk about the bass drum membrane.
If a mic is placed with-in it and the face is smashed. It will always resonate at the same frequency.
Now a song with a A G D progression has different harmonics in play.

The first step to procure a good recording is to tune the drum to well... maybe A.
After-wards record the song structure that contains A. Than Re-tune the drum and record the measures with G....and do the same thing for the song measures out of D.

Of course. The small little details such as the Bass guitar rumbling away through a 500 watt amp. May slightly affect the physical performance of the said membrane causing slight distortion from the root notes.
Couple that distortion with affliction caused by the Guitar rig of a 200 watt marshall. Add in a screaming singer and blast him through a 1000 watt p.a. and you just killed all that hard work put into tuning the dang-ong thang.

There is not a theory that can stand for calculating this as you would have to compensate varied faces and pin configurations and sizes and materials...lets not forget materials people put in the drums. Than youd have to compensate the room...and etc. It would be though a very complicated equation for any string-theory enthusiasts to discover.

A simple way to figure out where the bass drum will sit how-ever. Is using a good recording program such as Reaper (acid wont work).
Just record the session (as a scratch take) but run an emphasis on the kick drum being the pro-dominantly captured element for the scratch tracks. Afterwards study the EQ (in reaper setting an eq parameter with your mouse lets you know what note it is.. as it has a niftly little algorithm for calculating that). If A is 440 than 220 and 110 and 55 are your octaves. This calculation is alot easier than if you were to calculate things before youd record.
After-wards.

Consider the changes that need to be done. Lets say the bass drum goes to a B on a Riff that has a C progression and further-more goes to an F on a D progression. If the kick drum is tuned to A.

A-A
B-C
F-D
Getting a mathematical relation-ship would be hard.

But if you tune the kick drum to Asharp. You would end up getting different result. If you tune it to the Fifth of A (either lower or higher) there would be different result again. IE.

E-A
G-C
B-D

Even if this is just for the base harmonic... It still can help a mix sound better.
The easiest way to simulate the whole. Band messing with the kick drum affect is to just automate an eq notch to shift position during cord changes. Automating a pitch shift though might throw the whole mix off.
Using a complicated reverb bus with varied eq automations for the whole mix and keeping this as the kick drum track without any of the dry stuff might simulate the live version of this. But in the end.
Its one of those recording techniques that is more often than not wasteful to incorporate.
Having a studio that sounds great may help. But in the end... It wont do everything. It will be a few different kinds of bass drum sounds.

Than again. Everyone is already going bonkers for sampled drum kits. Who cares if the drum set loses dynamics ?

A blog to long for R.R.

dudermn — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 05:42:55 GMT

So I wrote up a really long post...50000 character article to be exact.
I think it's a waste to not post up here since that was the original thought.

It's posted on a site dedicated to blogs.
http://buxs-manhunt.blogspot.com/201...st-of-all.html

Enjoy.

Me-peg layer 3 Caste Evolution

dudermn — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:26:58 GMT

Soon compressed audio codecs are going to sound like this if we don't tickle our spines and start walking proud. Hawk Software - HawkVoice codecs :)
Of course we can't be a planet of people that stupid. (To make music that compressed). Though we almost started being so.

We may have gotten away with ultra-compression of voice for telecommunication, a phone call back in the 1940s would've sounded like todays am radio stations minus the enhancements. These trends of highly complex digital algorithms for sound manipulation aren't staying away from music. Evidence of this is clear in the loudness war.
The creation of countless DSP, A/D/A, VST, DAW, and the procreated manner of sampled music.
It seems as if we want to make everything as man-made as possible :/
Just as man learned to kill with a rock, the reason for this could be that our ears actually have acoustic chambers that can in theory phase out frequencies, or cut them to rudimentary 3rds, and all manners of physical manipulation. Just as with our hands we manipulated mud to form geometric shapes. It would only make logical sense to create music that follows our rules of acoustic physics, if only for our brain organ to be more comfortable with-in our environments.
It wouldn't be surprising if there is a resonant vibration that, if applied deep enough and close enough to our ear drum a 'hypnotic' state could be induced. Pain is induced by high air pressure levels, so why not pleasure.
Our ears protect themselves from high pressure situations, just as we use dynamic range control or normalize before anything goes up a wire into a set of earbuds. And so we evolved our ears past the breach of the ear-lobe.
Early recordings, couldn't even imitate the stereo capacity of human hearing. Slowly we developed technology further along.
Codecs that layer audio have been around since the days of mp3pro, these attempt to bring back lost 'high bandwidth audio information' kind of the same way the outer most part of the ear is sensitive to wind augmenting or sound. And we've advanced dsp technology and spoon fed protein pills too the silicon business from all this D/A conversion fandango to a rather critical point.
Our ears are evolving, and we are making tools that will just like the spear progress into rail gun prototypes.
And yet all this is in the name of good business.

It seems that, we've been developing technologies and sciences rather well. Though an ignorance towards music, or better stated, towards overall sound-quality is beginning to seep into the next generation of children.
Considering that the human body constantly adapts and builds up behaviors and niches. How a child is grown by a complicated web of social interactions, which now are also online, and through mediums such as twatter or more rarely t.v..
The community, or better stated the world is raising the 'mp3-boomers' to build up a trait where the ears aren't as attentive as they could be, though they will have a very high threshold for high air pressure :).
Then the term audiophile begins to replace aristocrate and jester is replaced by hipster. And to make things worse the word musician becomes a separate race of Humos Sapios and a minority at that..

Just like a man with one leg knows the quickest way across town, and how I can eat spicy chilly peppers cause I've spent years building up to eat jalapinos like their skittles. Kids that are raised in a world of compressed audio won't know the difference between todays standards of a good recording and tomorrows ideal.
Even we're forgetting.

So back to the technical aspects, of sound engineering. We hear 1khz through to 5khz very well.
That's 5,000 frequencies that stand out like a pin prick in the ear.
When we go from pcm data to something like .aac we compress it.
Most mpeg layer 3 compression runs at a ratio of 10:1, take that compression and apply it to the rich small spectrum of well perceived by the human ear, and we are left with 500 frequencies.
Take into account ANALOG, which means that there is a decimal point, and the fact that from 1000.00 to 1004.00 you just counted 500 frequencies. With just the hundredth..We all know this goes further.
(To explain:1000.01 1000.02 1000.03, and etc.)
And that our ears are believed to detect up to the micro-pascals level. We lose alot.
Sadly it doesn't stop there, this area of 500 viable frequencies gets cut down even further, because the end audio file has to cover the spectrum of 0-20k hertz (though some start at 15. But because of ISO and IEC standards we don't screwed over as bad as we could if standards weren't imposed.
These ratios are thought out, by smart men, to create a space so that frequencies don't mask each other.
But most current permutations of loseless codecs are proving to mask a great deal of musical content. And usually they mask with the voice and the kick. Who knows why, must be the evolved taste in music.
When mpeg layer 3 was finally up and pushing for market space (it launched itunes dammit), there came out one song that set the guide-lines for how to use the codec.
Toms Diner (Suzane Vega) was engineered by the original coders to do a rather good job of depicting the space availabe. The song shows in detail what an ideal instrument and vocal set sounds like and just exactly how much high end is available for the bass before it starts masking the vocals. It also shows the higher frequency range reserved for effects.
And today (well last week) follow rivers (if you don't know the song I wish I was you) follows the same template as originally created.
Of course the newer encoding ensures that the pianos here have a proper attack. (The song did have pianos right?)

The problem with these compressed recordings how-ever, is that coarticulation of the human voice, requires very precise timing, frequency replication and further more sound pressure levels with a very fast and dynamic range of play.
As for say, an encoded recording will use the same exact phonics through-out a song. Whilst the human version of the phonic will never be replicated the same. We don't calculate lip resistance or our mouth moisture when we speak that's why the quantitization that occurs on phonics damage the human element of recordings..
Encoded/compressed audio also quantitizes timing as well. This is a problem because if there is a gap of 1-10 milli-seconds between sequential sounds, we will perceive these as 1 continuous sound or loop, everyone but super-man has this handicap. The threshold to hear seperate sounds is past 10 milliseconds for most people. Quantitization may possibly move sound around 1-2 ms also. Someone will say, but that doesn't matter, it's too spread out.
A song has alot of milli-seconds and when you start moving around all of them, it changes the song period.
If these speech acoustic properties are offset from meticulous quantitized compression than the psychological interpretation could be afflicted, that would be the conclusion.
And in most cases it is.
For example, listen to a vynal of Ella Fitzgerald. Than the same thing on youtube. For some people she might seem younger and thinner on the youtube version!
This is because of how and what the human ear perceives. That's why we can approximate the age of anyone we converse with, for example.
The on-going sale of HD and blu-ray and dobly digital extra-plus gold certified is just technology moving along. Just like in the days of memorex.

Even though youtube uses the latest incarnation of the aac filter, which contains multiple object data and has been slaved over for the past 10-20 years, it's still based on a masking theory from 1986 that doesn't appreciate infrasound or room acoustics as much as it should. It's all one big compromise. If we want more music we have to manage it better.
This whole compressed audio thing has been sold to the public very well, few people have ever complained. And literally no-one did a thing about it.
We literally ripped the pages out of books made of sound and sold them for more.
And some of the marketing seems as if it may have been devised by a god with how perfectly orchestrated it's been, or maybe Sony wanted to put RCA out of business ?
The industrial truth, and the legal aspect is more realistic.

The reason for the loudness war, is a simple one at that, some audio is hard to compress, (compress encode not compress make it louder) because of its randomness and sharp attacks.
We have to cut out, to the limits of code. As we close up more than half of the audible spectrum, a song has to be prepared when it comes to mastering maybe summoning into a compressed format.
We have to compensate what will be lost, and bring the levels of what will remain to a place where the end result won't flutter and sound like a wrenched fart.
We set a good level so frames have an easier job of containing volume, we kill transients to create less object data, we add reverb to bring back high-end...and so forth.

The engineering bit is:
576 samples are taken per? milisecond? which then get transformed into 576 frequency-domain samples which get cut down to 192 samples in case of a transient (to keep temporal spread of quantization noise accompanying the transient out.). As in that automation curve you made will lose a point or two during the conversion, simply because there is a limit to how much data can be taken.
And yes transients used to make mp3s sound worse. That's why they have a bad name in music today. And back in the days of wax recording they made the needles jump off the track.

Other problems that have been published about how mpeg layer 3 imposed errors on music have been
1.Bit-rates can cause artifacts/slow-downs when changing intensity of information domains.
2.May cause smearing of percussive sounds, not to be confused with percussion.
3.Due to the tree structure of the filter banks, pre-echo problems are worsen.
4.The combined impulse response of the filter banks does not, and cannot, provide an optimum solution in time/frequency resolution.
5.The combining of the two filter banks' outputs creates aliasing problems that must be handled partially by the "aliasing compensation" stage.
6. Excess energy to be encoded in the frequency domain created by the aliasing compensation decreases coding efficiency.
7.Frequency resolution is limited by the small long block window size, which decreases coding efficiency.
8.There is no scale factor band for frequencies above 15.5 kHz.
9.Joint stereo is done only on a frame-to-frame basis.
10.Internal handling of the bit reservoir increases encoding delay.
11.Encoder/decoder overall delay is not defined, which means there is no official provision for gapless playback.
A quote from an iso is,
"At the present time, methods to automatically convert natural sound into synthetic or multi-object descriptions are not mature:therefore, more immediate solutions will involve interactively-authoring the content stream in some way."
http://webstore.iec.ch/preview/info_...ed4.0%7Den.pdf
And the list of how many 'ghost in the machine' type of BS errors show up trying to make a scale model of the original audio is HUGE!

The whole compress audio to make it feed the masses worked in the 90s and early 2000s but, now that hard-drives are getting bigger we no longer have to put up with errors, correlation, rounding, encoding, frame, resolution, and whatever else will complicate a PCM from sounding good.
Now-a-days most portable thing-a-dings can play .wav.
The advance in storage capacity is finally allowing us to hold a .mp3s worth of songs with a lose-none codec (as in raw form). Something alot of people dreamed about back when napster was 'screwing musicians'. But we all know napster was not for music, or games, or books. It was for pictures and movies of kitty cats.

Mastering for lose-less audio however is slowly evolving too.
The term adaptive mastering involves real-time monitoring of the conversion process :)
Pro-Codec Product Overview
Now imagine, this. Your mixing away, got the master running nice and smooth and you plug this up on your out bus.
You make a note of every frame that gets compressed wrong, and you re-code the codec on the script level to follow the dynamics of each song individually. In other words, each encoding is individual to the song.
User - Universal Mastering
That would be ... where we should be today at mastering and engineering but sadly. We are lazy and we didn't get there also it's inappropriate for us to do that much work, considering that we are almost at the stage of listening to full multi-tracks instead of that compressed garbage.

Now though, we are at a point where things are extremely peculiar, we use compression ratios of 1.5:2 !!!!!!
Why the hell !!!
That's millions of dollars spent investing, countless hours coding and testing just for 3.5:1 ?
Would it not make more logical and economical, and clinical sense to just use the raw data without having to compress 3.5?
The industry is milking the .mp3 craze very heavy man. Dolby truehd, meridan loseless, and wavs seem to be fighting it out for dominance now.
Flac may be able to recompile an original iso from it's format, and ogg might be nice, but these 3 goliaths really do sound good.
We seem to have gotten to the point where encoding music is not needed, in terms of collecting, distrubiting, and processing. But we're still doing it....We're still buying it.

A normal person though, gets confused now.
Remember when Hd-ready, and Full Hd came out. Alot of people got coined into buying a tv that lasted only for 2 month, before they felt like they actually needed 1080p and not jut 480p.
Laser-disc vs Vhs, yet another 'war' that claimed a few bucket fulls of cash.
Blu-ray Audio Explained
Mainstream advertising is very deceptive. That's why the government protects us making public ISO information, for example.
Yet if a company wants to sell a product, it must follow these rules, which these rules separate a con from a technology.
Because of simple principals. If your gonna be dumb you gotta be tuff....

So now that we've almost reached the pearly gates of acoustic treatment for our earbud. When my cell phone is loaded with 2 gigs of .wavs of music. Whats next, and how long before songs will be separate multi-tracks loading up into wmp 13 ?
Are we going to develop a sort of discrimination for people who can't stop listening to .mp3s? Just as 12 year old Johnny doesn't understand why grandpa-pa still listens to his old 8track cassettes, or how some people horde cds while others horde blu-rays (and some unfortunates horde hd-dvd). There is a small gap between everyone who has been at a technological for-front.
Luckily we care more about what people listen to more than on what. If grand-pa was listening to Spice Girls on 8 track little Johnny might visit less often.

Reference
alot of wiki
NewMusicBox � The Musical Ear
Apple - iPod touch - View technical specifications for iPod touch.
Techniques in Speech Acoustics - Jonathan Harrington, Steve Cassidy - Google C
MP3 vs Uncompressed
English
a thing to massage your head | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Manfred R. Schroeder
http://www.mp3prozone.com/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114483/
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/0...ill-resonates/
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/consumer/...by-truehd.html
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_9000_essentials/
http://webstore.iec.ch/webstore/webs...art=1&onglet=1
http://children.webmd.com/guide/hearing-loss-mp3s

Yet still. This whole encode music and sound thing did have plenty of German folk working on it. Maybe it's some sort of Nazi comspiracy. :)