DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I’ve been meaning to write about my DrumDial for a year. I’ve been a student of various tuning practices for as long as I’ve been playing the drums (a longer time than I like to admit), so I can say with a bit of authority that this is the first tuning tool I’ve seen that actually works.

Drums can be difficult to tune because it takes a great ear to isolate the head’s basic tone from the sound of the overtones. The drum’s apparent pitch could rise or fall after impact, depending on the relative pitches of the heads and shell. Fortunately, measuring head tension takes you straight to the core problem (“the head is too tight or loose at this lug”), bypassing the misleading symptoms of the problem (“I think this sounds higher but I’m not sure!”).

With the DrumDial, it’s a simple matter to tune all the lugs to precisely the same tension. The result, in my experience, is a well-tuned drum. Without all that incessant tapping.

Measuring head tension makes it easy to adjust top and bottom heads relative to one another. Pitch is elusive, so it’s handy to not rely on it… just use the DrumDial to guide the tuning process. For example, set the resonant head a few PSI higher or lower to achieve the sound you want. It’s easy to make uniform changes, and easy to return to previous settings, because the calibrated meter makes everything objective. You could actually record your favorite tuning strategies, or maintain different ones for rehearsal, big vs. small venues, acoustic vs. miked gigs, etc.

Tuning is faster this way, too, because there’s no need to question “how far is far enough” at every lug. Just watch the dial. It’s no harder than pumping up a bike tire.

There are three things I don’t like about the unit:

• It’s heavy.
• It’s fragile. (Fortunately it comes with a foam-lined box, small enough to keep in a hardware bag.)
• The rim standoff clip is too fiddly and has to be re-attached every time the DrumDial is taken out of the box.

The first two problems can’t be helped, but I can suggest a usability improvement that works around the third one: when I install a new head, I use a permanent marker to draw a ring of dots on the head, about two inches inside the rim in front of every lug. To tune the drum, I set the point of the DrumDial on each marker dot in turn. This way I never need the standoff clip.

All in all, I’ve found this to be an indispensible piece of gear, so much so that even though I’ve cracked the plastic face due to careless storage, I can’t part with the thing for the two weeks it would take to send it in for repair.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (40% off DrumDial)

So I recorded a tambourine overdub tonight. I needed four takes!

I don’t imagine there’s anything I can say about how hard this is that anybody will actually believe, much less sympathize with, but … it was really difficult! I struggled to keep a steady rhythm for the 30 or 40 seconds I needed to.

Most takes started strong, but by about six bars in, they all started to sound like I was having a seizure. And giardiasis. During an earthquake. Shaking a tambourine uses muscle groups that I have apparently never used for anything else.

And I was thinking, ok, so I’ll play 2 bars and just clone them 10 times. But the first beat was hard, too — nailing the downbeat without having little dribbles of jingly tambourine sound ruining the majestic impact of My. First. Percussion. Credit! Never mind the fact that it’s going to be dipped in a bucket of reverb and mixed way off to one side, just audible if you’re paying attention. In a quiet room. Through really nice headphones.

Anyway I have new respect for those hand-percussion artists who spend years learning the nuances of instruments like the tambourine. (By the way, if any of you guys live around here, please get in touch!)

I’ve finally migrated to the new G5. There were a few hiccups, but I’ve worked through them, for the most part.

• The Macally mouse driver wouldn’t survive a reboot. This problem magically went away after I uninstalled and reinstalled the driver.
• The StartupSound.prefpane setting also doesn’t survive a reboot. Have yet to reinstall.
• Despite working the first day, Firefox has forgotten all my site passwords. Not sure what’s up with this, but I have records of them elsewhere, so it’s not a big deal to re-type them all once as needed.

Impressions that must be noted:

• The G5 is quiet. This is a huge deal for me. My G4 was a 500 MHz unit, upgraded to 1 GHz. The upgraded CPU came with a high-pitched whine that I never fully habituated. I’m really happy it’s gone. Having two drives instead of three also helps. Having variable-speed, temperature-sensitive fans in the G5 (note: I assume that’s what they are) means the computer is nearly silent most of the time.
• It’s faster, but it doesn’t feel 4x faster. It boots probably 8x faster, and apps open quickly, but overall it’s not obvious from the performance that it has 4x the raw CPU power plus a faster memory bus, more RAM, and a faster disk subsystem. I’m not complaining, really, because it’s pretty snappy, but there was a bit of a reality check when I got all my apps installed and the machine appeared to lose about 30% off its out-of-the-box responsiveness. This impression is entirely subjective, though.
• QuickSilver kicks ass. The Firefox plug-in actually works — it never did for me under 10.3.9 — so I can access bookmarked web pages by typing the first few bytes of the name. This is no minor feat; I need to reach intranet pages whose URLs are 70-100 bytes long, but which share the first 30-70 bytes, dozens of times per day. Prior to QS I’d need to type big parts of the URL manually (for I have not used the Bookmarks menu for anything in years; it’s too cumbersome, and I really hate using the mouse that much). It may only be 2 seconds per instance that I save, but given that it usually happens when someone has just asked me a question that I’m supposed to know the answer to, those are long seconds.
• MailSmith is still a dog. I want to love this application, and I definitely like most of it, such as its designed-in scorn for HTML email and its tight integration with SpamSieve, but the performance on a dual G5 is just embarrassing, e.g. a one-word text search against my 2004 mail archive takes over 10 seconds.

(As a comparison: I wrote an inverted index search engine that can do full-text searches, with stemming, orders of magnitude more quickly than this. Against a corpus of 1.5M documents (37M total indexed words), matching either subject or body, it returns results in about a tenth of a second. The server in question is not significantly faster than this dual 2.0 GHz Mac.

While it’s true my 2004 mail archive has a lot of messages in it, there are a whole lot fewer than 1.5M in there.

Fortunately, thanks to the BSD goodness underlying OS X, I could actually run my inverted index database app on my desktop machine and do my mail searches in MySQL. The UI would suck, though; maybe it’s time to learn RealBasic or Cocoa.)

Anyway, a recent MacWorld article promises Secret shortcuts. Hidden helpers. Mysterious menus… insider power-user tips for OS 10.4, aka Tiger. It’s worth a read. Nothing earth-shaking there, but a few potentially useful things.

I’ve done 99% of the remaining tracking on the last two tunes on my list for this summer’s recording session. I have some percussion overdubs left, and a couple big drum fills in the outro of one song.

As with software engineering, the final 1% of the effort can take a disproportionate percentage of the time, especially in the case of the crazy double-bass drum-solo fills that are called for during the outro of some songs, or really any song at all. The problem is Pro-Tools. In the old days — and I remember the old days; the JAR record was tracked to two-inch tape, and all the music I recorded before that was to half-inch 8-track — we’d just listen back and call it done. Or, sometimes, not even listen back, depending on the budget.

Now, half-speed playback is a keypress away. A visual representation that shows (zoomed in to the sample level) exactly how far out of time every note is, is as easy to get as dragging the mouse.

This doesn’t mean I fix every mis-stroke. What’s a couple ten-thousandths of a second here and there? If it feels good, I call it music. But if there’s a timing mistake I can hear, and I know that for every future playback my entire being will listen, frozen in a state of semi-stress, for that slightly ahead- or behind-the-beat note to sound, as if maybe this time, despite having been burned to CD many years prior, it will magically be in time, then in I zoom in for digital surgery.

For better or worse, I’ve gotten very good at editing multi-track drum takes in Pro-Tools.

All musicians are familiar with the notion that they hear their own mistakes with remarkable fidelity, regardless of whether the general public notices anything. This is actually worse — not only do I hear the mistakes, but I know I could fix them.

Sometimes, deadlines are a good thing.

In defense of Guitar Center, an employee (or someone who claims to be one) anonymously sent the following internal corporate memo. It explains the crazy-low microphone prices noted here recently. Here’s the memo in full:

This month, we are LIQUIDATING our entire Oktava Inventory. Due to various Intergrity issues, Guitar Center has chosen to no longer do business with Oktava. I don not want to take up too much space with the entire story, but if you like more info, feel free to contact me. Here are the most important things you need to know:

1) MKL2500 and MK319:

Both of these mics that you are selling right not are the official, made in Russia Oktava microphones, to the best of our knowledge. We are selling them below our cost because we no longer want to be associated with the problems this company is going through right now. Anything that your customer reads on the interenet is written by people who don’t know the real story, and they are simply trying to protect their interests in selling these products for a lot more money. (note: this is inregards to a customer bringing a print out that has the MKL2500 being sold for $699 US instead of Guitar Center $99).

2)MK012 (all versions of the 012- MK012K, MK012KM, etc)

The majority of these mics that we have were made in China. We had negotiated a deal with Oktava to sell the mics that would be made in China, but we did not anticipate such a differance in the sound quality. There are proabably a few of the Russian ones still out there in ou stores, but there are very few left and I would not spend a lot of the time trying to find them. You can tell your customer, yes, there are Oktava mics, made in China from the Oktava designs. They do not sound the same as the original MK012, but are very comparable to other microphones made in China. They sound fine for a $69 dollar mic!

REMEM, BE COURTEOUS WHEN DEALING WITH ANY UPSET CUSTOMERS OVER THESE ISSUES. WE ARE SEVERING RELATIONS WITH OKTAVA BECAUSE GUITAR CENTER WILL NOT SELL QUESTIONABLE PRODUCTS TO OUR CUSTOMERS.

3) One final note, some of the MKL2500’s may have issues connecting the cable from the mic to the power supply. You mave to fuss with it a little bit, but it should work. If it absolutely won’t work, put it on RO and return it to the DC.

We will NOT e able to repair any of these microphones.

Thanks for all your patience and understanding.

You are all THE BEST!

This memo goes a long way to redeem Guitar Center in my eyes. I think the misleading ad copy on their website was an honest mistake and will likely be corrected soon, because it’s clear that the folks in charge are aware of the controversy and are actively distancing themselves from it. I’m happy to see GC stand by the statement made to me by their Oktava buyer back in May — that Guitar Center would not knowingly sell fake or counterfeit gear.

Regarding the sound quality of the 012 series… if Aidan Humphreys’ Oktava mic test is any indication, these mikes are very comparable in performance, even if they’re not as well-built as the originals. Anyone looking for an inexpensive condenser could do worse than the $70 (sale price) ASM MK012.

Previous Oktava news.