Vacation part 1 - the roomate is gone

So my vacation is starting to take shape. For the first leg of complete freedom my roomate is away in California. I wanted to create some activities that would take advantage of the silence.

Activity #1: "A food borne illness grows in Brooklyn." Kristin received a frozen turkey as a Thanksgiving gift and a black truffle as an Xmas gift from her work. So we are going to have a full on Xmas dinner this weekend. Turkey is defrosting and by tomorrow night it is getting a brine. Neither of us have cooked a turkey so this is going to be pretty interesting. Definitely going to make a truffled mashed potatoes, and may even baste the turkey in truffle butter. Any other suggestions for truffle oriented sides? I imagine by the time the truffle has run its course I'm going to drop it in olive oil and have an awesome truffle oil for a while.

Activity #2: Demolish what is left of my hearing. I will be recording. A lot. LOUDLY. I want to experiment with both recording live guitars in the studio and using some new mic techniques. Expect some noise up soon.

Two cans and some string

Reeling from the wall to wall akwardness that was yesterday, I remembered as I was leaving the office that today is payday. What better reason to swing by Guitar Center and check out their cans?

They were very cool about letting me try everything out. I grabbed a Seinnheiser pair (can't remember the model number), Ben's trusty AKG K240's and the Beyerdyamic DT 770 pro.

The Seinn's went out first. They were too bright and felt like an improper reference. At first I thought the AKG's were too dark, but then quickly realized I was hearing limitations in my own recording for the first time! The Beyer's were so accurate that at first I was completely taken aback. I started thinking they were TOO accurate, that maybe I need to hear with the hoi polloi. Maybe I really should be mixing with earbuds? Just kidding folks. I am a nerd.

I spent a LOT of time A/B'ing the AKG and the Beyer. I listened to my song "Dysgrace", and "The Dark Eternal Night" from the new Dream Theater. In addition to being very well recorded the new DT is the only album I had on my iPod that is encoded lossless and almost completely uncompressed.

At first I was having trouble noticing the differences between the two pairs of cans, but my patience was rewarded and I decided the Beyers are more accurate and have a subtle extra sense of space and definition.

One pair of headphones, a pop filter, and a free 2 year replacement warranty later (I can't go into GC without the jew in me coming out and wanting to haggle. I always gotta get SOME kinda deal) I was out the door, cans on my HEAD. The nerd equivalent of wearing your new shoes out of the store.

Yes, that picture is me on 2nd Place in Brooklyn happily walking around with huge freaking clompers on my head. My sweet shit lord they sound good. I put on Pink Floyd and "Welcome to the Machine" sounds very close to what I always assumed the true voice of God sounds like.

OK, enough talk, I'm firing up Sonar!

Faux Faust

Graham came over last night to create yet more music for his first feature film. He had cut an entire scene to a Faust song of dubious copyright, so like any industrious director decided we should sorta "re-create" the song for the scene.

At home using Fruity Loops, Graham built the entire drum groove and brought it over to the studio. First thing we did was upload the scene into Sonar. After the video thumbnails set themselves up we matched the loop to the timing of the scene. Then we found a nice analog keyboard sound to match the bass of the original track.

Then we went into our own thing. I'm a huge fan of DI'ing string instruments and building all of the sounds in post. Graham really wanted me to be insipired laying down the guitar parts by recording dirty. And he used dirty tricks to get what he wanted. He brought out of his bag the BUZZ BOX, a pedal he owns and knows I lust after. It is a pretty nasty sounding distortion which also has an octaver that goes two octaves below POORLY. I thought it would be fun to shred so fast that the pedal couldn't keep up and sadly it wasn't very hard. The octaver would chug along behind me at its own pace, sometimes hitting the right notes, sometimes not.

So this is how the guitar parts went. I did two tracks of Kraut Rock noodles completely DI'ed with the Buzz Box. Played back straight back through the monitors without any additional effects the sound was very reminiscent of early Butthole Surfers. I'm pretty psyched with it. As we speak Graham is adding vox, an e-bow track, and editing the whole thing together in his studio on a Pro-tools setup.

Between this, our doo-wop tune Spray it On, and the general noise weirdness we recorded, I think the soundtrack for this movie is going to kick tons of ass!

The first collaborative session!

My spiritually advanced friend Matt approached me recently with the idea of doing a collaboration under the name Sky Burial. His idea of trying to do some somber ambient noise was very appealing to me and I readily accepted. However I was a bit nervous as this would mark the first time I used the studio with someone else.

Generally up to this point if there is something I wanted to do and didn't know how I would either stop working and learn, or decide it wasn't really that important anyway ;-)

How would I handle fielding these same types of requests from an outside person? What if I have major gear failure? What if I just show myself for the hack I am?

Despite my crisis of faith I am happy to report the session went very well. We spent about 8 hours or so working on one 3 minute song we are calling "Exhaust the Sun." The process was fresh and collaborative, and most importantly creative. Most ideas that we wanted to try I was able to program. Never did we have to really stop what we were doing to worry about process. Our imaginations ran wild and we recorded a heavy, dense, at times terrifying piece of music. The drums are a mess and it doesn't sound very good outside of studio monitors, but I am working on it.

Once I re-program and remix the sketchy parts I am going to put it up on the MySpace and send out direct copies to the usual suspects. I was really happy with what we were able to do, and how the technology worked for us. It may not seem like it from some of these posts, but I am not as into the process and the tech, as much as I am into having the tech just WORK so I can be creative.

On a gear note, however, this was the first time I got to use the AKG condenser mic. It sounded absolutely amazing. The one time Matt started screaming and wasn't thinking about line levels the mic peaked in the most amazing way. The vocals sound like they have a nice tube overdrive on them, rather than a muddy crap out. It saved me the time of having to apply distortion.

Also, Amplitube2 completely kicks Guitar Rig's ass, and is far less CPU intensive. I recommend everyone check it out. I am blown out of the water.

New Additions to the Family!!!

Please help me in welcoming my new 250 gig Firewire800 G-drive and PCI Firewire800 card to the studio.

I have decided there is only one way to solve these wacky firewire problems, and that is with dedicated hardware.

If you see me eating Ramen, don't be surprised...

I am now the proud owner of an AKG Perception 200 microphone, and I got the 8 inch M-audio studio monitors. I'm just hoping my desk can accommodate the largeness of these things! However the 5 inch's sucked. I A/B'ed the speakers against my own music, Holy Wars by Megadeth, and This is Hardcore by Pulp. Since the Pulp record is so rich as it is, Holy Wars was where I noticed the major difference. On the 5" speakers the toms and kick drums simply disappeared, and the 8" speakers sounded like I was in the studio sitting next to Mustaine.

I'm getting there! A nice condenser mic, some monitors to hear how my mixes REALLY sound. Gods of Fire, you fuckers are on NOTICE!

The Studio, an Introduction.

Aside from all the funny secondary connotations of the name, I am calling the blog latency issues because there will occasionally be a bit of a focus on my "home studio." Of course since this is 2007, we are talking about a home computer and a couple of audio interfaces.

Latency refers to the time delay in digital audio systems due to analog to digital conversions, processing and conversion back to analog. The lower you set the latency in your Audio drivers the more instant the music sounds, but if you are running a lot of applications, can make things go haywire. The best way to stabilize a home studio is to increase the latency, which takes a lot of pressure off your system, but will produce a noticeable delay between you physically hitting a note, and hearing it through your speakers.

These posts may be long. Please feel free to skip right by if hearing a semi-techie bitch about his gear is not exciting to you. There is a funny piece right below about how I am considering falling in love with the State of New Jersey. Skip ahead, I won't judge.

So for the record, here is my current system.

AMD X2 64 2.4 GHZ 4200+ 2 gig ram running XP Media Center Edition
250 gig 5400 RPM internal Hard Drive (running my OS and apps)
250 gig 7200 RPM external Hard Drive (recording the audio)
Focusrite Saffire Firewire Audio Interface
M-Audio Axiom 61 Keyboard Controller

Software:
Sonar 6 PE w/related soft synths
Waves Diamond Bundle
Guitar Rig 2
NI Pro-53
NI B4

The first few experiments have been, shall we say, less than encouraging. The first hurdle was the Saffire. It would either recognize the signal coming into it, or Sonar attempting to recognize it, but never both. I would get errors that the SaffireControl software was unable to locate the interface. Didn't the weasel at Guitar Center sell me on Firewire because unlike USB 2.0 there is a continuous signal path between the device and the CPU? How come it seems like my interface will only recognize one path or the other, but never both. This is hardly "continuous." As I have come to learn, focusrite.com was one notch below useless, because the information on their site is so poor as to encourage you to do harm to your own machine. Upon independent investigation I discovered that by default, XP SP2 turned everyonejs Firewire ports to S100, regardless of their original spec. HOLY SHIT! So, I did some poking around in my machine and discovered something interesting. The Firewire port that came standard on my HP machine is by default S100 and cannot be raised. Fucking corner cutting. Did they assume no one would ever use Firewire since there are admittedly about 250 different USB 2.0 ports sticking out of my box? Maybe. However the Firewire port that is gratuitously on the back of my Audigy2 card was recognized by my machine as S400. Success!

Now my Saffire is being heard by everyone. This has turned out to be a mixed blessing. I have discovered that the instrument input on the Saffire hates my guitar. At least the bridge pickup. I put a really hot Seymore Duncan in a few years ago. It is about 4 or 5 dbs louder than the stock Ibanez pickup that I keep in the neck position. In a dubious cost cutting measure, most Ibanez guitars that roll off the assembly line have 2 humbuckers that aren't technically wired as such. They are instead wired in series, so you in effect have four single coils. Although I had the bridge wired as a true humbucker when the pickup was installed, I opted to leave the neck pickup in series. I like the sound. I don't mind the clean sound of a single coil. It sounds kinda strat-ish. But anyway. The Focusrite HATES the bridge pickup. If I leave the level at zero it still clips the level and produces a lot of distortion. And this pickup is PASSIVE. I tried switching to a balanced line input which does bring some sanity to the levels, but at the price of substantial tone. You can even hear it when I apply processing. There is no brightness left at all. So I am still working this one out. I cannot lose access to my awesome pickup. I tried distorting the neck pickup and it sounds like a distorted Tele. That might be your cup of tea, but if you are reading this you know the tea I like to brew, and that shit is LOUD BRIGHT AND GNARLY.

So there have been some monstrous latency issues and disk issues I am still resolving. There are mystery clicks I am still trouble shooting and eliminating.

A major victory I had was routing everything through the Focusrite. I tried to be cute and use the Audigy2 as my playback interface so I could use my default speakers. No dice. The WDM driver support sucks for the Audigy, and the Saffire is a bit wonky with ASIO. Routing everything through the Saffire using the WDM drivers, which Sonar greatly prefers anyway, has brought a much greater degree of stability.

Also, taking advantage of zero latency monitoring is helping. Instead of listening to my tracks being played through the DAW, I am listening to the untreated clean signal through the Saffire. For trying to play dirty this sucks. At least there is some built in DSP that you can choose whether or not to apply to what is being recorded. Therefore I can use their really shitty built in amp sim to at least get some life in the performance, but the sound being passed to Sonar is 100% clean and ready for real processing.

MUSIC IS BEING MADE. Samples will be up soon. My bass sounds incredible through it, my guitar's neck pickups sound great, and the Axiom controller has a pretty amazing feel. I love the semi-weighted keys so much I have temporarily given up my M-audio prejudice (and I am trying to ignore the fact that my PC only recognizes the board as "USB Midi Interface" and "USB Midi Interface (2)."

Hopefully by the time the Gods of Fire are ready to record a new album, or some tracks, or whatever the hell you do these days, this bright orange colored room I am typing this in now with wacky angles which hopefully will kill a lot of standing tones will be ready as an over-dub/mixing/post-production facility.

Once I find the battery charger for my camera, I will take some pictures of the room and post them up.