DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ll be at the 2004 Green Festival in San Francisco on Sunday. Stop by the Online Collaboration Hub on Sunday afternoon and I’ll sell you some, ahh, online collaboration, or something.

Last year’s summary is one of the better things I’ve written: SF Green Festival 2003

Standard mic cables present a routing challenge for drummers. Microphone capsules need to point more or less down at a drum head; therefore the cable points more or less up — interfering with other drums and cymbals. On a tight kit, mic placement is a pain.

Small mics help. But the really helpful thing is to have 90° adapters on the female end of the XLR cable. That way, the cable can be routed away or down, rather than up.

I shopped around. These cables are hard to find. At first I tried to find a simple 90° adapter, male to female XLR, so I could ‘convert’ my mic cables for use in tight spaces. But I believe nobody makes such an adapter.

A soundman friend turned me on to an inexpensive drum-specific XLR cable from Audix, sold here for $18 (at the time that I write this). I disliked this cable for three reasons: at 25 feet, it’s too long; I couldn’t find any information about the connectors, which in my opinion affect sound quality and product life; the cable itself is not a 4-conductor design, which makes it (according to cable manufacturers) more susceptible to electromagnetic interference and noise.

I found a superior solution at Markertek.com. They can make mic cables using Canare “Star Quad” 4-conductor cable and Neutrik XLR connectors, with a 90° female end. The price is about $25 apiece, including a lifetime warranty. Ask for item #SC15XXJA.

More studio-blogging

Faced with another four years of the Bush administration — an administration that has been roundly denounced as the most environmentally destructive in the history of the nation — our correspondent asked: Where should environmentalists put their energies for the next four years?

It’s a good question, and I’m grateful to Grist Magazine for asking it.

Chuck forwarded a Mix Magazine article about the San Francisco recording scene in the 1990s. It takes only four sentences to note all the great facilities that went out of business during that decade — including Brilliant Studios, where JAR spent five days recording our debut CD, and Rocket Labs, where we mastered it.

The fact that JAR could even get studio time at Brilliant should suggest that their business was floundering. I think it wasn’t ever an A-list studio, like The Plant, but they definitely saw their share of bands people had actually heard of.

We mixed the album at Hyde Street Studios, which thanks to a long list of name-brand clients is still in business. We could only afford the swing shift; we arrived at 10pm or midnight armed with donuts and blank cassettes, mindful that anything we consumed that we hadn’t brought with us would end up on our final invoice. We couldn’t afford a “lock-out,” so we had to assume the board and all outboard gear would be reset during the day; this put pressure on us to complete anything we started within a single session, or risk having to start over the next night, potentially unable to recapture some amazing effects setting or vocal tone.

Hyde Street Studios is located in the Tenderloin, which in addition to their famous clients, great facility and staff explains how they survived the proliferation of digital recording tools — that is, their rent stayed sane. The Tenderloin is not a nice neighborhood, unless you’re looking for a crackwhore, in which case it’s perfect. In any case it’s not a place you want to hang around at night, e.g. from midnight to 8:00 AM. The first night, I rode my bicycle there and brought it inside the building. The next night I drove, but I parked five blocks away where I figured I’d have a chance of seeing the car again, whole, the next morning.

Our mixing engineer was Matt Kelley, who went on to fame and fortune (as noted in the Mix article) as a hip-hop engineer, due in no small part, I’m sure, to his credit on the JAR record. Ahem.

We mastered the record at Rocket Labs, which was located about 30 feet from my office window at the time. “I’m going to be across the street mastering my CD,” I wanted to announce haughtily to all my co-workers, but they were too engrossed in USENET or busy updating resumes… the programmer who sat nearest me was rumored to be running a private porn BBS off of his workstation. Needless to say, this company was even more doomed than all the recording studios listed by Mix Magazine. My brief absense was not remarkable.

Anyway, that’s my trip down spotty-memory lane.

I have three more weeks to get ready for my Thanksgiving recording session. Pictured is the new home studio, where I’m spending as much time as I can this month.

I’m using ProTools, running on my old Powerbook. The audio interface is a Digidesign DIGI-002 Rack, inside the case below the mixing board.

The 002 has four mic pres, which I’ve used for the main hats, aux hats, overhead L and R. It also has four direct inputs, which are fed from direct channel outs or sub outs on the mixing board: kick, snare, stereo tom submix. The kick and snare are routed through a dbx 266XL dual-mono compressor, which helps tame excessive volume transients.

The tom mics are Audix D2 and D4. The snare mic is a D1, which sounds better (more woody, less pangy) than my Beyerdynamic M422. The kick mic is an AKG D112. Overheads are AKG C1000S. The main hi-hat mic is an old Audio-Technica condenser, the ATM31.

The room has been a challenge. Freshly painted, it makes a poor candidate for mounting absorptive materials. I know that a room’s upper corners are the first and most important place to treat with sound damping foam, but I can’t actually do it without leaving adhesive scars on the walls or ceiling. So, the foam placement has been a compromise; in lieu of prioritizing corners or achieving even coverage, I’ve put it where I can attach it without damage.

I’ve gotten pretty decent tones so far. I have learned a lot about the mechanics of recording in the past week, as I’ve experimented with mic placement, compression, and EQ. There’s more to know, I’m sure. But if I had to cut final takes today, I wouldn’t be held back by my gear. That’s a good feeling.

Still to do: install new mic cables with right-angle XLR jacks, to keep the cables out of my way as I’m playing; set up two new mic stands to give better control over hi-hat mic placement (the mics are currently hanging from cymbal arms, because I ran out of stands); set overhead mic pickup pattern to hypercardioid to see if that captures less room sound; change tom heads and retune; possibly change snare head. Then, of course, I have to learn how to play these five songs (two of which I haven’t even heard yet). It sounds doable… but I think I’ll be eating take-out on Thanksgiving.

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