I just posted the latest EM Cast (EM’s twice-monthly podcast), which features an interview with session drummer Shawn Pelton, whose resume includes recordings with Sheryl Crowe, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Shawn Colvin, and many others. Pelton who is also the longtime drummer for the Saturday Night Live band, talks about getting drum sounds in his apartment-based studio in Manhattan, the difficulties of soundproofing a room in an apartment building for acoustic drums, the mics and preamps he uses, why he records and edits in Ableton Live, the Drumagog plug-in that he uses to augment his drum sounds, the challenges of working remotely, and much more. I’ve also posted a short video tour of Pelton’s studio, where he shows off his drum mics, and mic positioning, and even plays a little bit.
I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and get acoustical treatment for my studio. After years of opting to invest any available funds I had on gear, hoping my studio acoustics were “good enough,” I’ve finally come to the realization that they aren’t. As an EM editor, I’ve edited or written many stories in which acousticians are quoted talking about how much easier mixing and recording is with a properly treated studio. And frankly, I’ve gotten tired of being unable to accurately judge the frequency response of mixes in my studio. Sure, I do the “listen-in-the-car,” “listen-on-other-systems” routine, but for once, I’d like to be able to hear a mix in my studio and know that I’m hearing at least a reasonably accurate sonic picture. The final straw was when a mastering engineer, who’d been working on a CD of mine, told me that the high-end in my mixes was “harsh.”
Having made the decision to treat my studio acoustics, I decided to look around on the Web for more information, and I found plenty of it. After spending just a short time Googling the subject, I was able to come up with the links below. I’m sure I could have come up with a lot more, given enough time. Anyway, I thought I’d share some of them with you. If you’re considering treating your studio, these will give you a good starting point for your research. BTW, I’ll let you know how things go with my studio. I hope to have something to report in a few weeks. Here are the links:
It‘s been just over two weeks since the third and final day of Summer NAMM, and it‘s about time I wrapped up my show blog, don‘t you think? I ended up spending an extra night in Texas after American Airlines canceled my flight, ostensibly because of a storm that struck and was gone within an hour. Once upon a time, airlines would have comped my hotel room under such circumstances, but those days are probably gone forever.
Alesis showed me some previously announced products that just began shipping, a couple announced products that still aren‘t shipping, and a couple new products that won‘t ship for a while yet. In the first category, the DM5 Pro Kit is an electronic drum set complete with sound module, and it streets for about $599. You can read about it here. The i|o Control is a compact FireWire audio interface and control surface, and the MasterControl is its bigger sibling; they were both announced in January, but neither is close to shipping. Probably the coolest new hardware from Alesis was the Performance Pad, a variation on the ControlPad that has a built-in drum machine with 233 sounds and connections for a hi-hat pedal and a kick-drum pedal. It should be out by the end of the year.
Next door at Akai, the MPK49 isn‘t shipping yet either. First unveiled at Musik Messe, the MPK49 is a USB MIDI keyboard with drum pads, some impressive performance features, and assignable controls that include extra-large sliders. It should finally ship by the end of October.
I was so excited about DigiTech‘s GSP1101 that I forgot to mention the Vocalist Live 4. It‘s a vocal effects and harmony processor that can simulate voices singing in 4-part harmony with only a single voice and a guitar as input. Like the TC-Helicon HarmonyControl, it actually analyzes your guitar chords to find the correct harmonies. It also features reverb, compression, EQ, and more.
Although Summer NAMM has definitely scaled back compared with a few years ago, it‘s still quite fun and interesting. I am amazed at the number of companies that have no new product introductions or only a handful. Most say that they‘re holding off until October‘s AES show in New York, which will be a much larger event than this show is Austin.
That isn‘t to say I haven‘t seen some exciting products. I think the one I‘m most pumped up about is the GSP1101 from Digitech. It‘s a single-rackspace guitar preamp and processor that takes a unique approach to amp modeling and effects. It‘s designed to be used with your existing guitar amp, but its USB port can handle audio, which means you can use it as an audio interface for your guitar. I don‘t have time to give you a lot of details now, but you can check it out here.
I don‘t normally get excited about headphones, but another product I feel enthusiastic about is a new pair from Audio-Technica. The ATH-M50 headphones are the most comfortable, best-sounding phones I‘ve ever wrapped around my ears. They‘re beautiful and reasonably priced ($199 retail), too.
Okay, it‘s time for me to hit the show floor for Summer NAMM‘s final day. You‘ll hear from me again when I get back home to Charlotte. Happy travels!
Over at the Roland/Boss area (it‘s much too large to be called a booth), musicians were demonstrating some new toys and others not so new. I was most excited by the Boss RE-20, a digital stompbox version of the tape-based ‘70s-era Space Echo. Also on hand were the ME-20 and the ME-20B, two stompboxes for guitar and bass that essentially pack an entire Boss pedalboard into a compact form factor. Roland‘s new SonicCell is a black box with a USB connection that puts an SRX-expandable synth on your desktop. The SP-555 is a compact sampling workstation offering 16 pads, live looping, lots of COSM effects, and plenty of interactive features. Roland‘s Cube series of amps continues to expand with the Cube Street, their largest battery-powered guitar amp yet. And for drummers and wannabes, there‘s the HD-1, a more compact, entry-level variation on the V-Drums.
When I wandered by Belkin‘s booth (Belkin at NAMM? That‘s news!), I discovered that the TuneStudio is almost ready to ship. Just in case you didn‘t notice all the publicity it got when it was announced, the TuneStudio is an iPod-based recording studio that goes a bit beyond any other iPod-recording device, and it looks pretty neat, too.
Sony had an accessory that will definitely interest owners of the PCM-D1 digital field recorder. The XLR-1 is an adapter that provides a pair of XLR inputs for balanced mics and houses AA batteries that supply phantom power.
Saturday I expect to check out new gear from Akai, Alesis, Audio-Technica, Behringer, Digitech, and others. I‘ll get back to you and let you know if I see anything exciting.
Friday was the first day of Summer NAMM 2007, and the floor was a lot busier than I had expected it to be. So far I haven‘t spotted any really earth-shattering products, but I did see a few very cool pieces of gear and some nice software.
My day began with a press conference at TC Electronic, and the thing that impressed me the most was the Digital Konnekt x32. It‘s a FireWire audio interface that incorporates a digital patchbay and a format converter. TC was also showing off the cool new G-Natural, a multi-effects stompbox for acoustic guitar and vocals. (Why didn‘t I think of that?) TC Helicon did an impressive demo of the HarmonyControl, which converts chords you play on your guitar to MIDI data for controlling harmony generators–again, a very ingenious idea, and no hex pickup is required. In addition, TC Helicon introduced two VoiceTone effects pedals specifically for vocalists.
Next I headed over to Notion Music, where I saw a demo of Progression, a new program for guitarists. It‘s a composition program that provides standard notation and tablature, guitar and bass amp modeling, a chord library, and samples of acoustic and electric guitar, bass, drums, piano, and clav. It also hosts VST plug-ins and imports MIDI files and has features specifically for MIDI guitar.
Another product that impressed me was Focusrite‘s Saffire Pro 26 i/o, a FireWire audio interface that furnishes eight Focusrite-quality preamps, two instrument inputs, 16 channels of ADAT Lightpipe, stereo S/PDIF, MIDI I/O, A/D/A conversion, and a handful of useful plug-ins. If you don‘t need Lightpipe, you can get the rest of the same features in the Saffire Pro 10 i/o and save a few bucks.
Yamaha is here, but I didn‘t see a lot of product introductions that would interest EM readers. The MG series of mixers has been greatly expanded, with ten models to suit a variety of applications, and three of them have USB. Two new arranger keyboards, the PSR S700 and PSR S900, are relatively affordable descendents of the Tyros2. I also saw an inexpensive 12-pound piano called the NP-30 that sounded quite good but had a very light action.
Last week I attended an event put on by the Recording Academy that spotlighted ESession, which is an Web-based company that facilitates the hiring of studio talent (musicians, mix engineers, producers) for remote sessions. The idea is to give clients a choice of “A-List” talent to hire for their home-recorded projects. Not only does ESession’s Web-based interface help you find and hire talent, it also facilitates the exchange and storage of your session files (through FTP), which is key in a remote-recording situation.
The event took place at the XM Radio studios in Manhattan,which are located in the beautiful new Jazz at Lincoln Center facility overlooking Central Park. ESession is a result of a partnership between recording engineer and singer/songwriter Gina Fant-Saez and renowned producer/engineer Kevin Killen. Killen has worked with such artists as U2, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, Paula Cole, Amos Lee, Duncan Sheik, Shakira, and many more.
Other notables on hand at the event included producer/engineers Jimmy Douglass and Dave O’Donnell. The idea was to give the Academy members a look at ESession, which, among other things, hopes to help jump start the moribund session scene.
Fant-Saez and Killen both addressed the gathering, and demos of ESession were given every 15 minutes in one of the studios. I had a chance to talk to them at length about how ESession works. LISTEN to the interview. WATCH a video of Fant-Saez and Killen speaking at the event.
Of late, when I’m recording an acoustic guitar for a song in which it will be either the only instrument or the dominant one, I’ve had a lot of success using a spaced-pair stereo-miking scheme, with one mic pointing at the guitar body between the sound hole and the bridge, and the other pointing at the neck around the 7th fret. I align both mics on the vertical plane and angle them outward by about 20-degrees. Those are rough placements, and I move the mics around a little to find their sweet spots before settling on final positioning. I’ve used this setup mainly for fingerpicked parts rather than strummed ones. For mics, I’m using a pair of Røde NT-4 cardioid pencil condensers through an FMR Audio Really Nice Preamp (which is a great 2-channel preamp for the money). I record them to two separate mono tracks (which I pan L&R) so that I can play around with the individual levels in the mix. I really like the nice wide sound that you get with the spaced-pair placement. I tried using an X-Y configuration, but I found the image was too narrow, especially for a solo fingerpicked part. For those out there who are stereo-miking acoustics, I’m curious to know what configurations are working out best for you?
All of you Mac users out there are surely familiar with the ubiquitous Software Update screen that pops up regularly on your desktop. Using it to update individual apps is one thing, but think very carefully before initiating one of the incremental OS X system updates that are sporadically released by Apple. Basically, within a given version of OS X (Tiger, Panther, etc.) your updating philosophy should be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
I speak from experience, because I recently ignored that concept and paid the price. I’ve been using 10.4.8 for a while now, and all my music software was functioning nicely. Software Update had been pestering me about 10.4.9 for a while, but I held off (I have a Power Mac G5). One of the sequencers I use the most is Pro Tools LE, and I know that Digidesign doesn’t immediately put new Apple System updates on it’s list of approved system versions. So I waited and waited, and then one day last week, I deemed that enough time had passed and hit the update button for 10.3.9. Big mistake. The ironic part was that the program I had the most trouble with wasn’t Pro Tools LE, which ran fine, but rather Apple’s own Logic Pro. Go figure?
I couldn’t even get Logic to open. It kept crashing while it was launching. The problem appeared to have to do with plug-ins, as it was trying to re-validate (using the AuVal utility) all of my AU plugs, but couldn’t get through the list without crashing.
I searched the problem on Google, and found relevant hits on some of the user groups–such as KVR–which told of similar problems. Some people were also having trouble with their PACE copy protection software when running 10.3.9. Several users suggested using Apple’s Combo Update (separate versions are offered for PPC and Intel users) rather than the one offered on Software Update. I downloaded and installed that, but still had the same problem. Then I noticed that Logic was getting hung up while trying to evaluate a particular third-party plug-in. So I went to the Web site of that plug-in developer and downloaded the latest version of the plug. After that, Logic made it past that plug-in but got hung up on another one. I repeated the same process, with the next plug-in and after updating a couple more (most of my plug-ins didn’t need updating), Logic was good to go.
By that point, I had spent hours troubleshooting a problem that could have been avoided by simply staying with 10.4.8. So as a general rule, I advise thinking long and hard before updating your system, unless there’s a compelling reason that you need to do so.
I‘ve been fascinated by the music-brain connection ever since I got my hands on Dan Levitin‘s spectacularly enlightening book, This Is Your Brain on Music (2006, Dutton). So I read Sunday‘s “Glad You Asked” column in my local McClatchy newspaper, The Charlotte Observer, with great interest. A reader submitted the question, “Why are old songs so unforgettable?” The columnist‘s answer, of course, was all about cognitive neuroscience. You can read the column here.
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