audiot

yeah, i stole this line from Billy Ward, an awesome drummer and producer – go check him out! his stuff’s unreal!

since i’ve just returned from an off-weekend and am already about to record some vocals, i have little time to write. when inspiration hits, you gotta run, so here’s just a quick tip for you guys.

microphones are NOT ears! sounds like a no-brainer, right? but it isn’t. we tend to believe that what gets in (and therefore out) of a microphone is the same as what our ears would hear. but that’s not the case. and i’m not even talking about the fact that lots of mics color the sound, so what goes in is not necessarily what comes out. mics work a lot different than our ears, so don’t be fooled by the fact that both pick up sound. there is a lot of trial-and-error involved before your mic spits out exactly what your ear would pick up – and to make matters worse, to your ear it might sound very unnatural at that moment. i hope i haven’t lost you – it’s a bit difficult to explain. imagine a gun that’s not perfectly “adjusted” and therefore shoots to the right. you could either set it right or aim to the left to hit your target. now, you can’t tweak a mic until it is an ear – but you can change your “aim” until you hit the right sound. and once you have, you might just think “hey, that’s exactly how it should not work at all” – but it does. like aiming to the left and still hit the middle.

so there is logic involved, but then again there isn’t. messing around might be as good as any other approach, but it surely helps to know a bit about mics and placement alternatives – as long as you keep in mind that mics are just stupid. good luck…

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• song no. 7 (audiot.eu)
• song no. 5 (audiot.eu)

yesterday, a friend gave me a link to something really cool i haven’t seen before – not in a browser anyway. they call it the audiotool and it’s really fun to mess around with this. it’s flash-based, so you need to have some flash-whatever-thingy to use this. the site providing this audiotool is Hobnox (i’m not really sure, what it’s about…) and HERE’S THE AUDIOTOOL. i’m still having trouble including links, so they won’t open a new window this time – but at least they’re there :-)

Image via Wikipedia

so here’s some (not really) news from the garden: i tracked five guitar takes so far, clean through a d.i. box and am trying to do some reamping now. it seems to me the sheer unlimited possibilities are the no.1 problem there. when i bought my first real guitar amp, i had two sounds: the normal crunch and the overdrive crunch :-) and no matter what i did, knobturningwise, it sounded great. with software this is different, because now there’s a downside: you have to know what you’re doing or it will sound like crap. and although i did a lot of research recently, know about proper gain-staging, about a decent signal-chain, about how distortion really works and other effects as well for that matter, it’s still more trial and error than it should be. anyway, those little troubles are exactly the reason why i’m doing this the way i do. it’s simply the best way to learn something. but somehow the feeling remains, when i’m done with this soundshaping-mess and am happy with what i created – i just might hit delete, take my amp and a mic and do it the ‘real’ way…..for the heck of it :-)

just a quick note to let you know there’s some more loops of mine at mixmatchmusic.com

check them out at my profile page right here