DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Nobody needs that much root beer.

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posted to channel: Food & Cooking
updated: 2005-01-30 07:22:01

It’s poetry, it’s art, it’s disturbing as hell: SimpleLife.com’s Pesticide Statistics

The Simplelife site provides original sources for the statements in the above list.

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posted to channel: Conservation
updated: 2005-01-21 22:12:26

The guitar was a Fender Stratocaster played through a Marshall head and a 4x10 Marshall cabinet. Two mics were pointed at the same speaker. The following excerpt demonstrates the difference in sound between the two mics.

It’s a 4-bar passage featuring guitar and drums. For the first pass, the SM57 channel was solo’d. For the second, the Beyerdynamic M-380 channel was solo’d. For the third, I mixed the two: the Beyer is panned hard to right, the Shure about 30% left, and the volumes adjusted so the two channels sound equal in volume.

No effects or EQ have been applied; these are the raw guitar sounds.

Ode To Soup — Guitar Sounds (4 bars SM-57, 4 bars M-380, 4 bars mixed, repeat)

The most startling effect is the width of the stereo image as compared to either solo mic. I think the SM-57 sound is good on its own, but I like the stereo version better.

Tags: sm57,, recording,, guitar,, m380
posted to channel: Music
updated: 2008-05-06 03:24:02

My guitarist friend Steve recorded four takes of the main guitar track for my song, Ode to Soup. Then he recorded two harmony tracks for the second half of the chorus, plus a “powerchord” track for two of the verses. It’s an awesome arrangement, and really took the song to the next level.

But it left me with about twenty tracks of guitar to mix down. (Remember that the guitar was recorded with two microphones, doubling the amount of data to manage as well as the number of edits needed.)

The fourth take was labelled the “keeper” — meaning that at tracking time, we felt it was the best of the lot. But no single take is perfect, and even more importantly, what seems perfect in performance rarely stands up to the scrutiny of repeated playback. When I was finally mentally prepared for the task (read: I’d futzed with everything else for a week without making any substantive progress) I listened closely to all four takes and made notes about what I liked in each. What I found surprised me: I had indeed captured guitar magic, but it was spread evenly across all four takes.

Combining them was a challenge. I used a technique advocated by ProTools book author David Franz, whose Digizine article about creating a comp vocal track describes the process. It can be used for any instrument, including multi-tracked instruments. It could even be used to edit drums, although you’ll develop RSI in the process.

The trick is selecting exactly the same material from two tracks and pasting it into two other tracks. Selection accuracy is key; if I pasted the chorus from the Beyer mic even one sample off from the position of the SM57 version of the chorus, the guitar sound would change, or could even be out of phase. I needed the comped SM57 track to be identical, in terms of edits and transitions, to the Beyer track.

Of course, it’s not as easy as simply copying and pasting. Each such edit brings an opportunity for a bad transition. Crossfading between passages fixes many such problems, but in several cases the notes didn’t line up — Steve improvised some of the sections, and the basic material was different. I used ProTools’ TCE — time compression and expansion — widget to stretch out some passages to compensate for notes I’d clipped out.

The longest such edit happens right before the first harmony section. I needed to replace about a half-second of audio to make the edit work. Stretching a note that long with TCE seems to make it go flat. Also, because I had to repeat the edit for the Beyer mic track, the stereo image moves around. The combination is either a neat effect or a mistake. But I guess that happens a lot in recording, and you don’t know until the 100th listen which it is.

Pictured is my workspace in the midst of the guitar comp.

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posted to channel: Music
updated: 2005-01-20 23:48:13

So the plan was that I’d host a 2-day recording session for my old bandmates.

My wife would be 38 weeks pregnant at the time. This is no minor consideration, as anyone whose wife has ever been 38 weeks pregnant can attest. Extrapolating from the strength of her nesting instinct a few months prior, we realized it would be a bad idea to try to host this session at home. There’s no low-impact way three guys can record music in the basement; she’d be uncomfortable and disturbed, which is generally considered a bad thing by all the experts (where by “experts” I mean spouses of women who at any time have been 38 weeks pregnant).

Fortunately my band’s studio is just 10 minutes away. There, we’d have lots of space to work and the freedom to make as much noise as we want. But once I’d set up my gear there I realized we’d be miserable (for a variety of reasons noted previously, so the last-resort option came to be the only option.

Next I needed gear. My band bailed me out in world-class style: Norm offered his entire inventory of vintage guitars, amps, and combos. One Dave offered a nice acoustic guitar. The other Dave offered his Marshall TSL (“triple super lead” !) head and a 4x10 cab. Suddenly I had more guitar gear than I knew what to do with.

I would also be recording vocals. Ask 10 engineers the best way to record a vocal and you’ll get 10 different answers, each citing some esoteric microphone and tube-preamp combination, plus a complicated chain of compression, EQ, expansion, and pitch-correction devices. I’d have no such gear, but I’d be recording vocals anyway, one way or another. My total investment in a high-end vocal chain amounted to $15, for a pop filter. But: it’s a really nice pop filter.

I bought a Shure SM-57 too. I don’t like to use them on my drums, because they’re too big to fit anywhere, but I figured any real engineer would have at least one (if not six) in his bag. I’m not a real engineer but to the extent that I can afford the bag of gear, I hope to sound like one.

The Marshall gear went into the nursery, the same room the drums had occupied for six weeks. I lined one corner with seat cushions and Auralex foam, pointed the cabinet into the corner and dropped two mics over the top: my new SM57 and an old Beyer M-380, a big bidirectional mic that has great, round low-end response and a distinctly different sound than the 57.

In the next room, we set up a large work table to hold my laptop — it’s still astounding to me that a midlevel G4 Powerbook can drive a recording studio — a spare CRT, Andrew’s nearfield monitors, and my rack. The idea was to get some separation between the console and the tracking room. Or, in another sense, to turn the nursery into an iso booth for the guitar cab.

I wired two C-1000S mics on boom stands, for vocal and acoustic guitar. If I were a real engineer I would have sound-checked two or three other mics for both applications, but we wouldn’t have time.

Finally, I ran all the mic cables from the nursery into the den, and a daisy-chained series of headphone extension cables from the den into the nursery: instant recording studio. We had no window between the rooms, but we found that shouting through a closed door worked just as well.

Although this session was primarily to record Steve’s guitar and vocals, Andrew brought 11 strings worth of Ken Smith basses, which I photographed just because they look so cool.

Tags: beyerdynamic, m380,, sm57,, marshall
posted to channel: Music
updated: 2008-02-26 16:52:31