Harmony

Sure, if I'm going I'd definitely want to get a DC area carpool going. Google Maps is giving me about a 5hr drive from College Park. So, I guess another 30mins from Baltimore

You could put me down as a maybe. hehe...Google maps shows a "South Park" in the Raleigh area

You know that song I posted on Facebook a little while ago? I randomly decided that it needed a photo to go along with it so I setup the tripod and snapped a few with the timer. The backlighting was an unexpectedly cool effect from my lamp. It was 3am so my eyes aren't closed because I'm concentrating, they're closed because I was falling asleep

Yeah, the big sales are still a few months away. Hopefully this thread will get a little more love then. My setup hasn't changed much, but I do have a couple of new additions: Sennheiser HD 280 Pro and Rode NT1-A. Mmmm, fun.

Hey, happy birthdays!

Why are you thinking of switching from Nikon to Canon for your SLR system?

Maybe I'm listening to something else, but it sounds like samples are just being repeated in rapid succession using an arpeggiator, delay, or manual sequencing. Just pick a synth or a sample with a short attack (for example, one of those sounds like a cow bell to me) then use your piano roll to sequence about 6 notes of them at 64th or 128th beats apart.

Ohhh, I had forgotten about this thread and I've been looking for an excuse to share this. My friend and I decided to try to figure out what this whole "HDR" things is about, and this was one of my first attempts. Not exactly the best use of HDR because I think the dynamic range was fairly limited to begin with, but I LOVE the result! I call it "Tools of the Trade" Nikon D70s, 50mm, f4.5, 3 exposures in 1EV increments

Don't whine about it man, just improve like you said you would. I'd start with that drum loop...c'mon man, it's a 4-bar loop that repeats through the entire thing. Even an excellent loop wouldn't stand up to that kind of abuse.

For Pop/Rock it can't hurt to have this free kit in your toolbox. It's where I took the kick from and one of my favorite free offerings. You need an sfz player (like SFZ) to use it.

No no no, stop living in the past. The future is infinite sampling rate, infinite bit data...i.e. the future is the perfection of analog technologies!

Ha, that reminds me of how my friends and I used to joke that as music becomes more perfected, quantized, and computerized, eventually a "song" will be just be 4 mins of a sine wave at a particular frequency. beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep "And that was the new joint '676.56Hz' from Kanye West III"

Cool, that's my method these days too. I usually pan the signals 80L/80R and that gives me a lot of width and warmth. However, I think if I had a matched mic pair (or even two good mics) I'd probably just skip the line out. That characteristic piezo sound used to appeal to me, and it still sounds fine, but I've heard it way too much and I'm getting bored with it. Of course, another solution is to get one of the Taylor ES guitars with their fancy triple magnetic sensor pickup and skip the mics altogether...<droool>

but....it's music!

Yeah, it was primarily for visual and auditory effect. But also, I don't like to give people these ideas about what "typical" compressors are because then, instead of playing with the thing until they have enough control over it to make it sound the way they want, they start at these "typical" values and then wonder why they can't get the sound they want with the settings that "everyone else uses." It can be counterproductive in a didactic sense. From the little experience I've had with it, I like the sounds of the kjaerhus compressor but my problem with it, as some might guess, is that it doesn't have any meters :-/ Sorta the same thing with the fishphones ones. Spitfish is, however, awesome in every way

You're welcome No disagreement here, but the problem I usually have with the GR meters is that the don't measure true peaks. They use an RMS value (I guess), which doesn't help me at all if I'm trying to use the meter to exactly make up for whatever gets cut in the compression stage. Not sure if that's similar with all compressors or just the ones I've used, but I wish it was standard to have an option to change that.

Since I’m not entirely sure what you do or don’t understand, I’ll take a stab at a few points and hope I say something helpful in the process. If I’m thinking of the right FL compressor, I don’t like it either…it doesn’t have enough visual feedback. I don’t have a free one to recommend, but I’d look for one with an input/output graph, some input/output meters, and a gain reduction meter. Those are really critical IMO. Although it’s not the best, I like the Sonitus compressor that comes with Sonar. I like visual examples, but I’ll give the audio too. I took an acoustic kick and ran it through the compressor at a few different settings. I adjusted the gain each time to have each test run peak at 0dB for a fair comparison. I’ll use the track numbers for reference (from top to bottom) 7: clean kick The top ruler shows milliseconds; this sample is about 500ms long 8: Attack 2.5ms, Release 4000ms, Thresh -10dB, Ratio 30:1 To see how you can get more click in the kick I’ve taken a fast attack time so that you only hear the first couple of ms before the volume is reduced. To effectively get a greater reduction and chop off more of the tail of the kick I’ll progressively lower the threshold. Here you can see that the tail reduces it’s amplitude a little faster than in the clean case. 9: Attack 2.5ms, Release 4000ms, Thresh -20dB, Ratio 30:1 Lower threshold emphasizes the initial click more and you can see an even faster reduction in the tail amplitude. 10: Attack 2.5ms, Release 4000ms, Thresh -30dB, Ratio 30:1 Even lower threshold and you can basically only see/hear the initial clicky attack. What’s left can be eq’d to give a little more punch (for example, high pass at 50Hz, 10dB 3.0Q peak at 100Hz). 11: Attack 2.5ms, Release 200ms, Thresh -30dB, Ratio 30:1 Taking the same settings as the previous example, we could also want to emphasize the tail. Just bring down the release and let the volume come back in. This is helped by adding gain so that the original tail (as well as the rest of the signal) is amplified. Note how you see/hear much more of the tail and you pick up the click and the boom. 12: Attack 0.0ms, Release 100ms, Thresh -34.6dB, Ratio 30:1 An extreme effect would be to kill the decay of the kick altogether and get the click, the boom, and any ringing all near the same volume. Here I’ve taken the attack to 0ms which cuts the volume down immediately. That is compensated for by the gain to get it back to 0dB. The result, as you can see, is a signal that does not decay until after the release time has expired. Now you can hear all of the intricacies, from hi freq to low, in this simple kick. Using those same ideas, you can get a hi-hat to do what you described. However, what you hear in the final product is probably a combo of compression on the hi-hat, compression on the drum track, compression on the entire track, side-chaining, etc, etc…. You would need an expander (oddly enough ). You could also use a compressor with a ratio of less than 1:1 (like 0.1:1), but I don't think I've seen any of those. Above is the old Cakewalk expander. Note that the knee is on the lower left of the plot, as opposed to the upper right as in a typical compressor. What this means is that you are adjusting the level of quieter sounds, as opposed to adjusting the louder sounds with the compressor. You expand the dynamic range with an expander by making quiet sounds quieter. Invalid question! Use it when you need it, how you need it. If you want fewer dynamics, you know how to do that. If you want to bring up the quieter notes in a drum solo, you can do that. If you’ve got a snare that just overpowers everything, you can compress the track and bring its volume down. If you don’t need to compress it, don’t. You don’t always need that tool, just like you don’t always need a hammer to build something.

I'm just getting around to listening to it today, but I got it earlier in the week. Thanks for the fast delivery! Nice work. Love the voice, of course. I'm gonna go ahead and say that, for now at least, "metro underground" is my favorite track. I've been trying to write stuff in this style lately (lyrically and musically) so it definitely caught my attention as a simple and slick example of what I'm looking to do. "This is the end" is pretty cool too. You can't help but smile when you hear the 80's pop intro on track 3 I wasn't paying attention to the lyrics until the I heard the acoustic version though. Good stuffs for sure. How did you record your guitar on that last track, Amy? I can't tell whether its a dual mic setup that gives it that width and richness, or whether you doubled the guitar track. Looking forward to future stuff you two!

Hahaha, awesome. I make a mean George Foreman grilled salmon....just sayin' OCR

excellent.

wha? Drafting letter to editor...

Done. Waiting for pizza....

Usually when I buy things online at 3am I end up regretting it when I get it in the mail a week later. Glad that's not gonna happen this time Congrats on the new album!

hahaha For Logic, I did think about the expensive Mac platform, but for some reason I also thought Logic was a lot more expensive itself. Has it come down in price, or was I just dreaming that it was close to the $1000 mark at some point?

Well, you just about covered it. Except you didn't note the common criticisms. FL is for n00bs. GarageBand is for n00bs with Macs. Logic is for the wealthy elite. And nobody likes the wealthy elite. Sonar is for people who want Cubase, but can't find a torrent for it. Cubase is for people who want Sonar, but also want people to know they paid for it. ProTools is for studio snobs. ReNoise is for people afraid to abandon old technology. Live is for DJ's who think they can produce. Acid is for people too lazy to learn anything else. Reaper is for poor people. (after 30 days it's for poor people who like stealing software) Reason is for people who refuse to think outside the box. Energy XT is for people who aren't hung up on making "good music". Microsoft Sound Recorder is for...um...well...it's pretty awesome actually. I guess we've found our winner.