Several months ago I was approached by two former students (Evan Schlosser and Robie Rowland) at the New England Institute of Art to help them to design a studio in a rented space in Allston.  They introduced me to their partner Arjun Ray and I started consulting with them.  The space was being converted into rehearsal  spaces and construction was already underway in the space to convert it from an office building into a rehearsal room.  We would convert that into a fully-functional professional studio.

After measuring the space and investigating the existing construction, I came up with a design that would isolate the studio from their 3 neighbors as much as possible and that would provide them with 2 large and functional live rooms and  a good sized and well proportioned control room.  My initial design follows but had to be altered some to address problems such as sprinkler and HVAC locations.

The Original Design for Con-Fusion Entertainment's Studio

One of the things that is very nice about the space is the two large windows allowing natural light into the studio’s control room.  I designed all of the spaces to avoid parallel wall to help prevent problems with standing waves and the accumulation of low frequencies in less-than-ideal locations.  The rectangular space is broken up in such a way that the control room gets larger the further away from the mix position.  Both the live rooms have site-lines to the control room as well.  The control room, where the most time will be spent, is the largest room and will allow for comfortable seating for producers, engineers and their clients.

Here are some of the early construction photos.  In the pictures are Arjun Ray, Robie Rowland and Evan Schlosser (The 3 partners of Con-Fusion Entertainment), and Mike, Rick and Robie the Elder.  I tried to create some order to the photos to create a narrative.  At this point, nearly all of the metal studs are in place and drywall is starting to be hung.

Looking at control room from inside the large live room

View out of the control room door

View into the corner of the control room

View out the main control room window

The wall makes a slight job at the studio entrance

Exterior walls filled with 703 fiberglass insulation

Detail of the double wall construction

3 Layer studio window in progress

Detail of finished studio window

Cutting metal studs makes sparks!

Placing the first piece of gypsum board (from the left: Evan, Robie and Arjun)

Arjun sealing the top edge of the drywall

Signatures of the builders on the first drywall

So those are some of the pictures of the progress.  I would love to hear your thoughts!

At this year’s AES meeting in New York City, the AES Educators took up the topic of how to teach our students to recognize and strive for the highest quality audio possible.  In order for us to teach  techniques to attain the highest audio quality,  students must have access to good listening environments. The traditional concept behind building a great listening room is to build a room which is essentially a studio control room.  Unfortunately this is extremely expensive, usually requires an acoustician and often an architect and is way out of the price range of most learning institutions.   What is needed is a clear set of guidelines to convert existing horrible sounding rooms into adequate critical listening spaces as cheaply as possible.

Gone are the days of the listening party, where people would come together and listen quietly to music together.  But the listening party teaches us a lot about what a listening room should be like.  Here are some ideals that we should strive for in the listening room:

1. As Quiet as Possible
2. As Symmetrical as Possible
3. Use DIY Acoustic Treatment to Control Problems
4. The Best Loudspeakers that Can Be Afforded in Good Positions
5. Use the Creation of a Listening Room to Educate the Students

I teach Audio Technology 2 at the New England Institute of Art in a concrete box, which arguably the worst possible environment to do critical listening in.  If memory serves the dimensions are about 17 x 19 feet with 10 foot ceilings with a drop ceiling at about 8 feet.  I will try to use this room as the guinea pig room to talk about these issues. With any luck, I will get permission and a small budget to improve the room’s acoustics so that it becomes a better environment both for listening and for teaching.

- Hendrik

In the spirit of using my blog as a great way of complaining about the general state of the world I offer the following whine:

Today we have a great many adversaries to high quality audio, some of which I have outlined below:

1. The dominant listening device is an iPod with Apple-made earbuds. (eew!)
2. Most modern music productions are over-compressed so that they sound as loud as the other over-compressed recordings. (grody!) This is usually referred to as The Loudness Wars. (Also check out: The Death of High Fidelity)
3. The second most dominant listening device is the car. (very noisy!)
4. The third most dominant listening device is the craptop computer. (Noooooo!!!!)

Many potential clients ask me the same questions before they come into the studio to work on their albums or EPs:

What should I do to prepare myself to make a great recording?

Should I record a demo myself first?

I almost always answer the questions with more questions:

1.  Why do you want to make a recording?

Is it to get gigs?  Sell at gigs?  Try to get licensing for TV or movies? Is it to finally hear the music the way that you hear it in your head? Is it to document your songs accurately to the way you play them or is it to fully realize the full arrangements with drum, bass, strings, urdu?

2.  Who is the audience of the recording?

Record label executives  or your friends and fans?  Are you the audience for your own music or are you trying to sell this stuff?  Are you planning on giving it away as a promotional tool to help build your following?

3.  Are you ready to record in a studio now or do you want to demo the songs to figure out how they should be arranged and performed?

Usually demoing the songs yourself will help you figure out what you haven’t practiced enough, and force you to think about the dynamics and the tempos and the form in a way that you haven’t already.  I always want artists to know the tempos of the songs before they come to the studio.  If they can bring lyric sheet with chord changes that also really helpful as well.

If you have a way to record yourself, I would always do at least some recording yourself to help you figure out what you are trying to do.  The recording equipment can be very simple, like GarageBand, a 4-Track or 8-Track cassette or digital recorder, or something a little more sophisticated like a full-blown DAW like Sonar, Logic,  Cubase or ProTools.

After you have had a chance to record simple versions of the tunes with piano or guitar and voice, then you can think about adding other instruments in a much more concrete way.  Some music might start with a drum pattern or loop and build from there.

After you you have done all this pre-production, it will be time to start talking to a good producer or engineer to help really get the recording process planned and started.  As a engineer, it’s much easier for me to do my job when the music is more fully formed before I start my work.  As a producer, I like to be involved in the music process as early as possible so I can help to shape the form, dynamics and feel of the song while the song writing is in process.

Their is difference between someone who makes beats – meaning composing and performing (or programming) original instrumental music, someone who is really a producer, and a recording engineer that specializes in hip hop tracking and production.

The fastest way to learn to beat making is to make beats with whatever you have available. I have worked with a couple of heads who were complete geniuses with the Playstation software from MTV. Their music was simply amazing. Software that is highly under-rated is FL Studio or FruityLoops. The step sequencer is the easiest way to make music quickly. Read the manual! Watch videos online.  Start working with as many other beat makers that you can find on the net, in your home town. For me, competition made me write stuff that was much better than working by myself in a vacuum. The three big instruments to learn would be keys, drums, and bass. You did not need to work in a studio to do this kind of work. You need a computer, a decent audio interface (Not an M-Box), and a couple of nice monitors. If money is a factor, don’t get a Mac. You get a lot more computer in the PC world and there’s tons of software available.

A real producer puts the whole show together. They hire everyone, often write songs with the artists, choose the studio to work in, find live musicians to fill out the sound. Sometimes that means doing everything yourself. A lot of the time the producer FUNDS the project and gets the biggest share of the profit (if any).  A producer is a big picture person usually with an excellent understanding of the psychology of creative people, motivation, fear, competition and excellence. This is something that comes with lots of experience, a strong musical background, charisma and usually fame or money.

An engineer deals with the tiniest details of tracking and mixing. Moving a mic a half inch, rotating a mic off axis, how to attenuate the peaks of the kick to get it to sound bigger, without making it wimpy. Attack and Release time minutia for compressing drums, bass and vocals. How the sound stage can be used to the best advantage, how to either avoid masking or use it to create new timbres. You need to learn this either in a studio as an apprentice, in a good audio school that has great facilities (I teach at New England Institute of Art in Boston and at U. Mass Lowell both have great facilities) and then leverage that into getting good internships.

Sometimes there are people who really are all three. Sometimes you will find yourself in one role or the other depending on who you’re working with.

The best job to get to learn audio engineering is working for live sound companies as a grunt. You will carry the bass bins, mic stands and a 43 foot console. But you will get to watch the FOH and monitor guys throw down. Live is good because it forces you to learn to do things quickly and it puts you around dozens of musicians every weekend. Not wanting to be embarassed is a very powerful way to learn.  You are always on stage being watched from the time you load in, to the time you strike the stage.

(posted to GearSlutz 7-4-09)

One of the hardest audio processors to understand is the compressor.  Even after several years of using compressors many of my students and readers still have lots of questions about how to dial in the sound that they are trying to get.  Compressors are in the Dynamics Processors family which also includes limiters, expanders, gates and noise reduction.  Dynamics processors work in the Amplitude Domain.  Compressors work on the amplitude of an audio signal, which is basically the loudness of the signal.  Look at a waveform view of an audio signal:

Graph of a Sine Wave with Amplitude and Frequency

The vertical axis shows Amplitude, which in analog (electrical)  audio refers to the amount of voltage in an analog signal. When the wave is above the center line, then the voltage is positive and when the wave is below the line the voltage is negative. Audio (in the electrical analog sense)  is AC or Alternating Current which means the voltage goes from positive to negative and then back again. The further away from the center line, the higher the voltage and the louder the wave will sound.

The Dynamics of music is generally thought to be the differences between the loud parts of music and the quiet parts of the music.  The dynamics of audio includes all of the differences in amplitude along the waveform.  In most pop music, for instance, the loudest parts of the music are the snare drum hits, followed by the lead vocal, then the background music. Notice in the following image the red dots above the waveform.  They are marking the locations of the snare and kick drum hits in the music.

The red dots mark the locations of the snare and kick drum hits.

Notice that there is audio in between the loud hits as well, but that it just has a lower amplitude. Compressors and all dynamics-based effects work on the amplitude of the audio, to adjust and change the differences in voltage.  The loudest level in digital audio is 0 dB Full Scale or (0 dB FS) which means that anything above that level will be distorted or simply just an error.  We can’t change the loudest possible level, but we can change everything that is below that level.

What a compressor does:

A compressor attenuates (decreases amplitude) audio that is above a threshold by a ratio.  The attack time is how quickly the compressor starts to attenuate the signal after the threshold is exceeded and the release time is how quickly the compressor stops attenuating the signal when the audio drops below the threshold level.

Probably the most common use of a compressor is to make an audio signal sound louder without peaking out the signal and causing clipping and distortion.  In a nutshell, the loudest parts of the audio signal (the peaks) are made a little bit quieter so that all of the signal can be boosted by the amount that the peaks were attenuated.