As a lot of you already know, I have been working on moving the stuDIY blog into the video blog realm. I have a few people helping out, but I did this first video solo, just as a proof-of-concept.

I use Windows XP machines with Cakewalk’s Sonar (Hate that ProTools!) and a pair of M-Audio Delta 1010’s as my interfaces. I have had the two 8 in-8 out interfaces for 8 or 9 years now and one of them was starting to act a little wonky. It was an intermittent problem that sounded a lot like a bad cable. Unfortunately I had to completely disassemble my patch bay in order to find out that the problem was in the interface itself. Many users have complained that the electrolytic capacitors have crapped out over the years.

M-Audio is great about fixing their stuff, so I set up a Return Authorization with M-Audio but before sending it, I cracked it open to see what was inside. I ended up noticing a couple of bulges on a few of the caps and I put a black dot on every single cap in the box, so I could see exactly what was getting replaced in the repair.

Here’s the video:

Please let me know what you think of the first rev of the theme song!

HDGXIX

The following is a step-by-step explanation about how to build acoustic treatments that are easy, economical and quite beautiful.

Why We Needed the Treatment in the First Place
At our wedding, my wife and I were given by our friends and family contributions toward buying a Yamaha U-3 upright acoustic piano. We fell in love with one at East Cambridge Piano (which is actually in Somerville now!). A couple of months after the wedding when the dust had settled we paid for the piano and had it delivered to our home. We were both so excited about it coming, but when it got to its new home the instrument sounded really different. The tone was still very good, but the rooms reverberations made the piano really loud and at times unpleasant sounding. An acoustic guitar could never play with the piano because the piano would take over the sound in the room.

Laura, my wife, plays piano and performs in a Latin American fusion group called Son del Sur (Song of the South). The group has a minimum of 4 women singers, 1 male singer, 2 percussionists, 2 guitars and assorted other musical snacks. To be frank, they sounded absolutely awful in the room. The sounds were all competing with each other: the voices covered the guitars, the percussion had no where to go but louder and louder. The musicians couldn’t hear themselves or the people they were playing with. Something needed to be done:

This is what the room looked like when we started:

As you can see from the photos, the room is bare except for the piano and the table. The bay window breaks up the parallel walls from front to back and the closet door and the bed room door create a nice diffusion to break up the side walls. The natural reverb is really quite lovely and for a solo instrument (like a violin, vocal or acoustic guitar) the room sounds great. Unfortunately, anything louder than that and the ambiance turns in a noisy, brassy screech.

Based on the shape of the room I calculated that the most important walls to treat were largest flat wall (opposite bottom photo) and the wall above the piano. The goal would be to start with a minimal acoustic treatment and add more later if necessary. The plan was to build 4 panels, 4 inches thick in frames 2 feet by 4 feet. The acoustic absorptive material is Owens & Corning 703 Rigid Fiberglass Insulation. We would then stretch fabric over the frame and the fiberglass to keep the fiberglass from getting in the air and then getting into people.

Here’s how we did it:

The following 2 photos show the wood stock and 703 Fiberglass that we used to build the acoustic panels. The wood is 3/4″ furniture grade plywood from Home Depot which was $26 for a 4′ x 8′ sheet. We ripped in into 4″ strips with my trusty Makita portable table saw. (very dangerous…don’t try this at home kids…we’re professionals…) The 703 stock is 2″ thick 2′ x 4 panels. I bought them at Kamco in Woburn, MA for $80 for 12 sheets or 83 cents per square foot. This is about HALF the price that you pay when you buy it on the web. Do yourself a favor and find a good insulation supply house! (Eat you heart out Auralex! ($3.75/sq. ft)

Here we are setting up our first 45 degree cut for where the corners of the frame are joined together.

Ty Smith cutting the 45’s with earplugs in but without a dust mask:

Ty with earplugs AND a dust mask…Sawdust makes a bad lunch.

Squirting glue on the joint:

Spreading glue with the glue spreader that mother earth gave us:

Using 90 degree corner clamps to hold the corner while we nail the frame together and wait for the glue to dry:

More clamping:

Popping in a couple of 8 Penny finishing nails for over kill at the joint:

Waiting for the glue to dry:

This is what a frame looks like after it has been assembled:

Ty stacking the frames so they can dry completely:

A Jecklin Disk was used to record the ambiance of the room before the treatment went up. Look for the actual before and after sound files in a later post…

Recording the bare room:

Assembling the acoustic panels on the table. The 703 fiberglass was pressure fit into the frames and the material was held in place with friction:

These are some panels that have been assembled but the material hasn’t yet been glued down:

The first panel has been hung, one glued panel is drying against the wall and another panel is being glued closed:

Three panels mounted on the wall in their final locations:

An additional panel mounted above the piano to absorb reflections from the top of the piano:

I hope that this post has helps some people control the acoustic in their music spaces. Please feel free to post links to your own DIY acoustic treatment projects.

-Hendrik

Earlier this month I was hired by Janice Bassil, of Carney & Bassil, P.C. , to conduct a series of acoustic tests to determine audibility and intelligibility between different rooms in a Beacon Hill apartment in Boston.

The apartment in question is on both the first and basement floors of a multi-unit building. The first set of requested tests was to determine if a woman’s voice in the basement bedroom could be heard by witnesses in the living room immediately above the bedroom. The bedroom was accessed by a spiral staircase in the corner of the living room. To implement the test I would need to play a woman’s speech through a loudspeaker in the bedroom at conversational level and then measure the level of the audio in the living room above.

I brought a XP-based laptop with Sonar 6.2 installed on it, a MOTU Traveler, a pair of calibrated Earthworks TC25 omni-directional small diaphragm condenser microphones, and 2 SPL meters. The first step was to calibrate the speaker to a “conversational” level (about 60-70 dB). For my source of a woman’s voice, I chose to use a woman reading Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” played back via the D.A.W. (Sonar in this case). I lowered the output of the voice until my SPL meter averaged between 60 and 70 SPL. At this point I placed 1 TC25 about 1 meter from the speaker, off-axis and then placed its twin in the center of the living room upstairs. A partner would measure SPL in the living room while I ran the D.A.W. and measured SPL in the bedroom.
The Traveler uses digital controllers for its on-board preamps, so I was able to set both preamps to precisely the same boost in gain of 20 dB. To calibrate the whole system and to create a baseline for our further tests, I ran a series of simple sine wave tests at different frequencies and different levels. This would help to determine which frequencies in particular traveled better or worse in this acoustic space. My partner and I took SPL readings for each tone which we recorded to compare later the peak and RMS levels in the D.A.W.

Having completed our baseline tests, we began to record the voice, take readings, then decrease the output levels and repeat. The goal was to determine at what point the voice was now longer intelligible and then no longer audible. Signal to noise ratios in the living room where higher do to increased exposure to street noise due to much larger windows compared to much smaller windows in the bedroom.

After completing two additional series of similar tests, we packed up the gear and I headed home to the studio to evaluate the audio we recorded and enter the data that we compiled. I entered the data into an Excel spreadsheet and organized the audio data so that each audio recording could be listened to separately, first the audio from the bedroom and then the audio from the living room. Doing this made it very clear how much the audio dropped in level as the sound moved from the bedroom’s acoustic space into the living room’s acoustic space.

The most powerful example was to recreate the acoustic experience of the test. Using the SPL meter, I matched the reading that I took for each part of the test to the output of the speaker that I was playing the test back on. For instance, if I had taken a reading of the voice reading at 65 SPL at 1 meter from the speaker, I would set the speaker to play back the test at 65 SPL. Then I played back both the recording from the bedroom and then the recording from the living room showing the same reduction in energy that was present at the test site.

After presenting my findings to my clients, I was asked to appear on March 24th at Suffolk County Superior Court to testify in the rape trial of Gary Zerola. I answered a series of questions from both the defense and prosecution and played the audio demo of my tests as I explained previously.

So, convinced as I was that I needed a TI based chipset for firewire on my Dell 6400 Crap-Top, I purchased the SIIG ExpressCard Firewire adapter. I was actually able to get the laptop to track audio with the MOTU Traveler! I was so happy that I had a functioning machine that I immediately went to do some mobile tracking.

So here’s what was working (sort of):

If I used a Lacie Extreme External Hard Disk using the USB 2.0 Interface I could record up to 5 or 6 tracks of 24 bit 88.2 Khz audio at a time. USB interfaces are not known for their ability to move a lot of data and are VERY rough on your CPU cycles. If I tried more than 6 tracks at a time, the CPU would get pinned at 100% and I would get drop outs or other unacceptable problems with audio.

Here’s what wasn’t working at all:

When I switched to using the Lacie External as a firewire drive I was unable to get even 2 tracks of audio without drop outs. I found out about this at a mobile recording gig. Both my customer and I were SUPER pissed.

I submitted a Tech Request to MOTU and here’s what I learned:

Reprinted from my MOTU Tech Support Response:

Hi Hendrik,
Due to the firewire implementation of Windows XP Service Pack 2, firewire audio interfaces may not work properly if multiple firewire devices are being used simultaneously.
You can remove Service Pack 2 as follows:

Go to the Add/Remove Programs control panel.
Locate Service Pack 2 and remove it.

If you cannot remove SP 2, you can minimize this behavior by disabling inputs and outputs if you are not using them, such as the optical ADAT I/O. Also, we have found that while the behavior is still present in Vista, by changing your host’s Buffer Size you should be able to find a setting which allows multiple devices to work in your system.
Additionally, there is a second Service Pack 2 FireWire issue which may compound this. Microsoft has offered a hotfix that may resolve this. Go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 for more information and instructions for installing the hotfix. This does not affect systems with Vista.

This would seem to suggest that there is no good way to record mobile on a Windows XP Service Pack 2 computer. Firewire is only the real choice for an external disk. If you want to record, then you’re going to need to use the internal drives.

Give Apple another point on this one…

Most rock acts that call looking to book studio time at Indecent, are really interested in what kinds of drums sounds I am able to create. It’s very hard to talk about these types of sounds over the phone without listening to audio samples. This posting shows off one of the typical drum mic set-ups that I like to use. Every project has a different flavor, and so every drum/mic set-up has its own unique approach. However there are some techniques that I consistently employ to get the most typical sounds for rock and pop music.

The photos from this particular mic configuration are from the drum tracking sessions for a 5-song project that I am producing for Sierra (http://www.sierrarocks.com/) , a folk-rock artist that I heard for the first time several months ago. Our goal was to get a pretty natural, acoustic drum sound that wouldn’t be out-of-place on a singer-songwriter album based on acoustic guitar and vocals. I already knew that I wanted to work with Penny Jane Larson (http://www.myspace.com/pennylarson) on the record because Penny and I have great chemistry in the studio and and she’s just a great f*ing drummer. Sierra and I worked up tempos and some feels in our pre-production work and sent MP3’s to Penny so she would have an idea of where Sierra was coming from.

Penny and I decided to use the “small” house kit at Indecent, which is a 7-piece birch Premier kit with a 20″ kick and 14″, 12″, 10″, and 8″ toms. Penny only needed the 14″ and the 12″ so we didn’t bother to include the other pieces, because they would just ring, rattle and cause problems. Penny brought a copper Slingerland snare drum that sounds very woody and warm. She used that drum for everything that didn’t require side-sticking and she opted to use another snare with hardwood hoops for the more mellow stuff. I have the Evans EMAD system on the kick drum and Evans 2 ply heads on the toms. Penny did a great job tuning and damping with duct tape and tissue.

After we got the drums to sound really great in the room, I started mic-ing up the kit and choosing mics that I have had good luck with in the past. This first stage is mostly driven by experience. I’m not listening the drum mics at all at this point, but rather placing specific mics where I think that they will sound best. After everything is set-up, then I move to the control room to choose pre-amps and compressors. Basically we arrived at a set-up that looked like this:

In this particular setup (and in most of the setups that I favor), the majority of the drum sound is derived from the overheads and the room mics. Note in the picture the drum overheads are attached to a heavy studio boom stand and are separated using a Jecklin Disk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jecklin_Disk). This provides for a near-perfect stereo effect. I use two omni-directional mics (TC25’s) from Earthworks’ Drum Kit. I place the mics 7 feet off the ground below an area on the ceiling that has been well treated with acoustic foam. This tends to cause the mics to pick up the drums directly and not the reflection of the sound off of the ceiling. The TC25’s are ruler flat and provide an extremely accurate picture of sound in a room. They don’t color or alter the tone of the drums, the room or anything else.

I also use a room mic (notice off to the left in the photo) made by Shinybox. This is a ribbon mic called the 46 MXL (http://www.shinybox.com/ShinyBox46.php) complete with a premium Lundahl output transformer. The Shinybox ribbon competes with mics double and triple its price like the Royer 121, for instance. The mic is extremely warm and pleasant sounding with a pronounced roll-off of high frequencies. The mic has a figure 8 pattern which picks up some of the back of the room as well as the drum kit itself.

The next most important part of the sound is the kick drum. The overheads and the room mic usually get a great snare sound, but most of the time the kick is over-emphasized in my small drum room. There are a lot of different ways to handle a kick drum, but I have been happiest using two mics in the hole on the resonant side of the drum. I usually use an AKG D112 (http://www.akg.com) because it has the classic kick sound with tons of low end. In order to get a little definition I prefer that drummers use either a wood beater or the hard plastic side of the new hybrid beaters. This provides for a certain amount of click. Also in the hole, I point an Earthworks SR25 (http://www.earthworksaudio.com/16.html) small-diaphragm condenser right at where the beater hits the head of the drum. This provides for a much more defined and punchy kick sound. I usually mix the two mics’ signals together pretty equally, or I favor the SR25 slightly.

Snare and Tom mics are only used to emphasize the sounds already in the overhead mics. For the snare drum I use a Shure Beta 56 (http://www.shure.com). It’s basically a Beta 57 with a slightly different body. The mic sounds pretty good, and it has a tight pattern which helps to reject sounds from the hi-hats, kick drum and rack tom. The specially mount on the mic is unfortunately poorly conceived and can make it difficult to patch in a mic cable. It won’t work with the Drum Claw for instance, and usually can only be used with the smallest extension of the boom arm on most stands.

With snares and toms, I try to split the difference between close mic-ing and distance mic-ing. The closer the mic is to the rim of the drum, the more ring ends up in your sound. Pointing the mic at the center of the drum helps. This is where your get the least amount of sustain and the most attack. I try to get my mics several inches up and above the rim of the drum pointing dead at the center of the drum. The further away the mic is from the drum head, the more of the drum head the mic actually picks up. To get a natural sound you want the mic far away from the drum head; to get isolation and a more artificial sound, you get closer to the head.

You can see from the picture above that I have moved the mics further back that most typical tom configurations. The creates a more natural sound, but does allow for more potential bleed from other drums. I usually don’t compress the tom mics to help minimize the sustain and bleed of the other toms. Here I am using a Shure Beta 57 (http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/WiredMicrophones/us_pro_Beta57A_content) on the rack tom and an Audix D-4 (http://www.audixusa.com/products.html) on the floor tom. The D-4 sounds fantastic on lower toms and even on kick drums and bass guitar cabs.

The only other consideration is the hi-hat. Here I am using a single Audio Technica AT4041 small diaphragm condenser microphone. I point the mic straight down on the top cymbal a couple of inches from the edge. This helps to reject the sound of the toms and snare and provides a little bit of isolation for the hi-hats. In the configuration below the mic is also rejecting sound from the two crash cymbals on either side of the hi-hats.

All of the mics went into tube pre-amps except the Shinybox 46MXL which went into a modified T1953 using Burr-Brown OPA2134UA op-amps for all gain stages. The D112 went into an LA-610 with a bit of compression. The Earthworks mics for the overheads went into TL Audio stereo tube pre, and all the other mics went into ART tube pres: 2 Dual MPs and a DPS-II. I opted to record with no additional compression other than the LA-610 on the kick. The tube pres compressed the sound slightly and I was able to get a very natural and warm sound without any extra processing.

Please write if you have any comments or questions!

This is a response to a student question, from Akeem Custis, about how to get rap vocals to sound thicker, warmer and better in general.

First, your mic and preamp are very important. Some mics are warmer and fatter than others. The same goes for preamps. I have gotten some great results with the EV RE-20, which is a dynamic mic. Mic placement is pretty important on rap vocals too. You want to use a cardioid mic to boost up the lows a little with the proximity effect. Make sure that you have at minimum one really good pop filter. I often use two pop filters: one foam “windscreen” on the mic itself and a metal Stedman pop filter as well. Sometimes I use one pop filter in front of the other or different types. Turn the mic slightly so that the mic isn’t pointed directly at the artist’s mouth. This is called an “off-axis” mic placement and also helps with plosives.

Since I don’t know what you’re recording with, I would suggest first compressing the vocal heavily. With the attack and release in auto, use a 6:1 ratio to reduce gain up to 15 dB, then boost the vocal as far as you can without peaking. If you put a boost of 2-5 dB at around 150 Hz that can also fatten up a track, especially in the male vocal range. If it starts to sound muddy, then just back off on the peak filter. Your bandwidth should be between 100 Hz and 200Hz or about 1 octave.

When you add additional vocal tracks of doubling, you can also create phase problems and end up with a thinner sounding vocal than if you hadn’t added the additional tracks. One way to handle this is to pan the additional tracks so that they’re not all sitting on top of each other. This will tend to sound much bigger than tracks all panned center. Usually on rap vocal tracks, the hooks use doubled voices (or tripled or more) panned out. This creates a bigger vocal production to set the hooks out from the verses. Most of the time, the verses aren’t panned out so heavily and there are many fewer vocal doubles.

I have had really good luck with doing doubles, but using different tones of voice to avoid phase problems. For instance, have the MC record the first take of the track in the tone they would use live. Now do a whisper double. This one won’t interfere with the frequencies in the first take very much. Now do a hard aggressive double. Listen to these 3 takes together in mono to see how you’re doing. Mix the different voices up or down as appropriate.

If you have already recorded the tracks, then you can try using a doubler with the additional voices panned out. This will probably cause some of the phase problems that I already mentioned.

Good Luck Mixing!

I have finished building the first cabinet prototype of the Shark Fin Portable PA. I used 1/2″ plywood for the shell of the cabinet and 2x stock wood ripped into specific shapes and angles for the frame of the cabinet. Elmer’s Carpenter’s glue was the main glue for the construction. I used GE Silicone II 100% Silicone Window & Door Caulking to seal the cabinet.

This the bottom panel or base of the cabinet. The wood frame was ripped from scrap 2×10’s that I had lying around the basement. I used the Google Sketchup tools to determine the proper angles to cut all of the bracing pieces. All of the bracing was glued to the base and not screwed so there would be no screw heads on the bottom of the shell to cause the cabinet to be off-balance or wobbly.

Each bracing piece was glued and clamped separately. Elmer’s sets quickly (30 mins), so it didn’t take very long to get all the base pieces attached.

I used 90 degree angle clamps to hold the sides of the cabinet in place to make sure that I cut all of the angles correctly. The angle clamps are essential in getting the pieces together plumb and square. The two side pieces are being glued in place and front panel is locked in to make sure that the side pieces are in the right place.

This is the front view of the panels’ alignment being verified.

Now that the side panels have been glued in place, I am gluing in the bracing pieces for the bottom front panel. Notice that the cross bracing has already been installed to hold the side panels apart. After the side panels were glued in I used self drilling pan-head screws to screw the panels onto the frame for additional strength.

This is the view of the previous photo from the inside of the cabinet.

The front panel has been glued and screwed down. The extension clamps were used to pull the sides of the cabinet into square before the panel was screwed down.

The view from the front after the front top panel has been added to the cab.

Another of the same.

Clamping and gluing the top panel to the frame. No screws will be used here so that there will be no screw heads to interfere with the PA’s controls.

This is the caulking I used to seal the inside of the cabinet. This small tube is much easier to work with inside the box. I never would have been able to get a full-size caulk gun in there.

Detail of the sealed seams inside the cabinet.

Detail of the + and – leads attached to one of the Galaxy Audio full-range speakers. Note that I used colored tape to clearly show the polarity of the speaker leads. I used a battery to determine the polarity of the actual speaker because they weren’t clearly marked.

The two audience facing speakers. The bottom larger speaker is the Selenium woofer.

A full view of the cabinet with the leads and the speakers installed.

This is a detail of the panel where the speaker jacks are installed. The top jack feeds the “monitor” speaker and the bottom jack feeds the bottom two “audience” speakers. The top jack is 8 Ω and the bottom with two speakers is 4 Ω. I used on outdoor blank switch cover plate for the jack panel. These cost about a dollar, are very easy to drill and come with a foam rubber gasket.

Full length view from the back before the cabinet is closed.

Front view of the closed cabinet ready for frequency response testing.

The next steps after testing are determining if a tuned port will be needed to extend the low frequency response of the cabinet, adding the amplifier and battery power to the cabinet, and adding mixer inputs and controls.

Only a few battery powered PA’s are available on the market today and most of them have design flaws or limitations. My goal is to create a design that uses digital amp technology (Class-D) that runs on standard batteries AA, C or D, or on a lead-acid car battery, that uses small speakers to give a full-range sound. The hope is to achieve relatively flat response from around 85 Hz to about 18 Khz. Who knows if it will work, but here’s the story of the first round of prototyping.

DESIGN GOALS

1. Ergonomics. The PA should be able to be adjusted and moved easily. The design should allow for the most typical uses of a battery powered PA. The first most common use would be for buskers (street performers.) In these situations the performer usually is riding public transportation to and from the gig, so equipment must be easy to carry or move.

• They are using the PA both as a monitor of themselves and as the “mains” for the audience to hear as well. Most often the amp is placed on the ground slightly behind the performer. I designed the cabinet to be more effective at being both a monitor and a main speaker by angling one speaker up at a 45° angle and angling the 2 mains speakers at a 75° angle.

  

• The controls must be easily accessible when the performer is in the middle of a set of songs. If you have a guitar strapped on and you need to bend over to adjust the volume on a typical amp, the guitar slides off your shoulder. Thus the volume controls (at least) need to be at typical counter height of approximately 36 inches. The design solution for this was to make the controls mounted on a telescoping bar which also serves as a hand truck or wheeled luggage handle.
• The ease of movement and stability of the cabinet was accomplished by adding in-line skate wheels on the bottom rear corner. The heaviest speaker is mounted in the lowest hole in the cabinet and all of the batteries and electronics are packed in the bottom of the unit. All of these items serve to keep the center of gravity very low, as does the sloped back design of the “Shark Fin.”
2. Electronics. The PA system should be battery powered, either with 8 AA, C or D batteries or a single 12V lead-acid battery. The amplifiers that we found that have the efficiency that we needed were made by Tripath, a company specializing in what they call Class-T amps (which basically are just Class-D with a T instead). The model that sparked our choice was the TA2024C as used in the Sonic Impact Original Class T Amplifier.
   
   I chose two different speakers for the project: 2 Galaxy Audio S5N-8 5″ Neodymium Full Range Drivers at 8 Ohms and the Selenium 6W4P 6″ Woofer. The Galaxy Audio’s are the speakers used in the new versions of the Hot Spot mini-monitors. The idea behind these speakers is that they are incredibly light (made from Neodymium) and they concentrate on mids and highs without getting bogged down in low frequencies which are much harder to reproduce. This makes them great for vocal and guitar detail. The Selenium drivers are their to provide some low end for the audience especially. I will probably need to use a low pass filter to get this driver to be as efficient as possible. I may also use a high pass filter on the audience facing Galaxy Audio speaker.

The next installment of the blog will be the actual prototyping of the speaker cabinet. We will be using 1/2″ plywood for the shell and 2x stock ripped to size for the internal bracing. In a production version of the cabinet, ABS plastic would be a much better solution, but it’s not easy to manufacture plastics in your basement.

It is now free to download and use a high quality 3D modeling software application. Just visit Google’s new 3D modeling center: http://sketchup.google.com/

The drawing above is a scale model of the control room at Indecent Music with one monitor, sans equipment and furniture. Measuring the SPLs in a room and using a model like this helps you to interpret the data you get from your SPL. It also helps you to see how sound might be reflecting in your room. The walls and other surfaces are easy to understand in 3D.

A floor plan view or a horizontal slice lets you write in data points to make the a data model.

It’s pretty easy to see how this kind of a tool could make working in your room easy and and more scientific.

The other thing that I love about SketchUp is that it has a built in tool to get models from Google 3D Warehouse and to upload your own models to share with others. This allows for both online collaboration with colleagues and for collabs with people you don’t know. One of the things that makes 3D modeling so painful, is the need to recreate all of the models that you need to use yourself. Most people end up buying a library of components for use with their own industries. For instance, Kitchen Designers use a variety of different CAD applications to design kitchens, but who wants to model 2300 variants of a Kraftmaid cabinet? So you buy the models from the source.

With the 3D Warehouse, you can check to see if anyone has made something similar already that you can reuse or recycle. Extremely useful. As long as everyone shares, this kind of system works very, very well. Did you notice the model of the monitor? That model was downloaded and imported straight from the 3D Warehouse. I probably saved an hour or more!

It’s September again and all the students have returned to Boston. This Semester finds me teaching both Audio Recording I and Audio Technology II at NEIA. I will also be doing a lot of additional work in the studio on more songwriting and production projects, recording some modern concert music on location at Tufts University and working on getting back in shape for performing again.

Some changes of note at NEIA: The school has given up on digital tape and now we begin an era of recording to stand-alone hard-disk recorder, namely Alesis’ ADAT HD24. The units can handle 24 tracks of 44.1/48Khz and 12 tracks of 88.2/96Khz. The units have decent AD-DA and store data in a manner that is easily moved around and transferred to computers or other devices. They use cheap IDE drives, so you don’t need to archive the recordings onto tape or optical to store the data, but rather just leave in on the disk. Very convenient.

One major adjustment with this new equipment, is that 16 track mixes are now a possibility in Studio F, where previously we were really only able to do 8 track mixes. This also means that there will be more demand to work in Studio F.

I am working on a portable PA device to run off of regular store-bought batteries for at least a couple of hours. I am working with Chris Davis and Richard O’Connell on this project and more information about this will be available soon. We’ll be using a digital amplifier that can run easily on low voltage, like 12V for instance. The advantage of the digital amps is that they weight much less and require much less heat dissipation.