Audioooooooooooooo of voice and such

Well, revisiting old ground once again, experimenting with vocal recordings. I was really keen to try using the hardware compression now that I know how to patch it in but I could only get studio one and it doesn't seem to have a compressor. I also wanted to prove, once and for all that the 414 is a mic of considerable versatility (I had seen an engineer use it for female vocals one time and thought it sounded good). Of course, the 414 was being used by someone else. So, I got my vocalist to speak into a neumann (minus the pop filter as that was being used too) and a 58. I personally can't see any value in the tone of the 58 (unless you are going for something budget sounding). The audio example online is a monologue comprised of six different recordings: The Neumann in cardiod, the Neumann in cardiod with digital compression, Neumann in omni, Neumann in omni with compression, the 58, the 58 with compression. Black Cat Phenomenom NB My vocalist was a bit further away from the Neumann than he probably should have been, that combined with the incessant hum of the air con lends a slightly reverberant fell to the first half. Compressed to MP3 and heard through cheap headphones, the second half through the 58 actually seems to benefit from it's reduced sensitivity and direct feel. Disappointed with the apparent irrelevance of compression on the spoken word (compression didn't really make the voice sound any warmer through either of these mics, it just facilitated an increase in volume) I spent some time recording vocals through the Neumann and, before the night was out, a 414 (the other person finished using it). I think it is safe to say that the difference in sound between the Neumann and the 414 for female vocals anyway is non existent. I have yet to compare male vocals (but in a budget studio the 414 would certainly do the trick). Certainly beefing up the voice with compression through the head phones is potentially a good way to improve the confidence of your singer...I am still loathe to affect the signal being recorded, better to make the digital compression work I think. I wish the effects units in the studios actually effected the voice, if anyone wants to show me how to make them work, please do.

Wk 4 forum

Continuing on with the presentations of work done by second and third years, the idea that the composer is obsolete is now firmly established in my mind. The music that students create using technology rarely has any premeditated design...but it sounds fine, and is applicable to the real world..chances are people would pay for a CD of it (gullible fools). So, who needs a composer nowadays when you can grab and sound tech student from uni and tell them to go through a, b and c arbitrary sound manipulating processes to produce an end product. (Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, it could be the natural evolution of music, I mean, I use this same trial and error, do it if it sounds good technique when I am coming up with riffs..). So, what proof do I have of this phenomenon this week....our friend Freddy was told to make 'sounds' using a guitar (strictly not allowed to 'play' said guitar though). He sequenced and recorded these sounds using software sequencing programs where in real time he was then able to add effects and processing to these 'sounds' (like mass pitch shift, reverb and the such). He made recordings of his output and chose his favourite out of several. This end composition surely is nothing more than the nicest/most interesting sounding out of a collection of potential compositions generated out of the experimental process. But it sounds absolutely awesome, I would not be surprised if I heard it on a TV show, or in a video game, somehow, it has value.

Wk 4 Creative

I'm so behind in this class, it is absolutely brutal!

Wk 4 Audio

I could resubmit my experiments with recording acoustic sound from last year but I am boycotting the process on grounds of wanting to learn something new!

Wk 3 Forum looking at other students wonderful creations

Today in forum, we first years got to experience some of the work that the second and third years have done in their time at Adelaide. By the end of the lecture I found myself wondering about composition, their compositions and the value of a composition…and the composer…. Take John for example… I can only really describe his software as a composition generator. He has programmed software to trigger random samples (the random samples mostly consisted of sample tank strings) and made a whole bunch of recordings. Stating that he programmed this software because he likes large tone clusters, I can only assume that his favourite recording out of 20 featured a lot of these along with the standard build and decay present in most music. Two students on and another piece of software that does similar things…in this instance it was Dave with his ‘self contained sampling unit with on board effects processing unit’. With the samples that Dave loaded in, I can see no value in this thing at all. Potentially, with different samples, the resulting ‘music’ might be more, uh, musical, at any rate, the end result is a product of chance and whimsy. So, what value can a piece composed in this manner could possibly have? If the end result hasn’t been premeditated in some way, if you just land on it by chance, can it still claim legitimacy as a composition and value as a piece of music?

Wk 3 Paper projectiles

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Wk 3 Audio studio 2

Still behind, haven't actually done anything. This lecture did provide one invaluable piece of info....the engineer that can be bothered to listen to what's coming through the cans is the engineer who is a step above the rest. An artist's performance can be made and broken depending on the vibe they are getting from their situation, a good headphone mix is a crucial part of the puzzle. At this point in my recording career, I have only ever listened to the head phone mix through the monitors, always adjusting the levels of the incoming instrument to be balanced or slightly louder and asking the musician for feed back. So, it's really time I learnt to have two or more mixes going, mission for my next recording session.