This thing is sweet on drums. I can't wait to try it out on electric guitars next week.

Some new (primarily) drum mics:

CAD M179 x2. I haven't used these yet as much as I would have liked. I've been thinking about trying them on overheads, but I wanted to try out my Audio Technica ATM450s on that job first (which they did really well at). I ended up using 1 M179 as a room mic. It worked ok, but I wasn't overly thrilled with the way the top end sounded--cymbals came out really sloshy. Not a big deal in this case since I'll be slapping a low-pass filter on that track anyway. But I do need to spend some more time experimenting with this mic on overheads and in other applications to see where it works best.

Audix I5 (for snare). I really like the sound of this guy on snare, and it has great off-axis rejection so hihat bleed isn't as big an issue as it is with some other mics. Lots of crispness in the sound and no low-end mud.

Audix D6 (for inside kick). This gives more of that "modern" kick sound with the scooped mids. Placement is very easy. Only thing is, the kick sound is kind of incomplete if you just use this mic, so I've been using a second mic outside the kit (I've been using a Shure SM7B) to pick up a little bit more of the full shell character and some of the mids/highs that the D6 doesn't pick up. I'm really digging the combination of the two.

Last but not least, I ordered a Peterson StroboRack tuner last night. I can't wait until this puppy arrives so I can try it out on guitar.

the humidifier i got isn't anything terribly special...just one of those whole-house drum humidifiers you can pick up at home depot. the unit itself is pretty decent, but it was a pain in the ass to install and the whole process was kind of kludgy. it took a little while for it to start working its magic, but after about 3 days the humidity levels are pretty stably about 10% higher throughout the house. i still need to tweak things to get the studio a few % points higher, but overall things are looking good.

my goal is to have the humidity in the house be between 40-50% year round. for the studio this is mainly to help wood instruments behave well, but i also want the humidity controlled in the rest of the house for comfort/health reasons. nothing i hate more than waking up in the middle of the night in the winter feeling like every drop of moisture has been sucked out of me.

when springtime rolls around i'm going to confront the dehumidifier situation again. i'm still really pissed at the way they installed this thing and i believe it's running very inefficiently as a result. in places with both heating and air conditioning, you're always supposed to do any dehumidification before the evaporator coil and any humidification after the furnace. the reason for doing humidification after the furnace is that the increased temperature enables the air to hold more moisture, and the very process of passing air through the furnace drops the relative humidity significantly.

as for dehumidifying before the evaporator coil, i've learned the hard way why this is important. dehumidifiers are self-contained refrigeration cycles--air passes over an evaporator coil where it is cooled significantly, which causes excess moisture to condense and get drained out. then it passes through a condensor coil, which causes it to heat back up. i discovered this summer that the air coming out of our dehumidifier is actually several degrees warmer than the air going in, and since the output of the dehumidifier was tapped into the supply line, that warmer air was just circulating through the house and making the a/c work harder. when spring comes around i'm going to switch it over to the return so that all of the output from the dehumidifier passes through the a/c evaporator coil before going anywhere else. that should also provide better dispersion of the dehumidified air throughout the house--in the current set up, because of where the dehumidifier is tapped into the supply trunk, one end of the house and part of the studio barely get any direct delivery of dehumidified air.

microphones

sennheiser 421. this thing is great on guitar amps. i like it a lot better than sm57s for this purpose--it has a smoother, warmer sound. it's also great on snare, although positioning it can be a bit awkward sometimes since it's a bit bigger than other commonly-used snare mics.

shure sm7b. rapidly becoming one of my favorite vocal mics. great for rock singers, great for taming harsh singers, great for taming singers with crazy dynamics. several times now i've put it up for a singer along with 3 other mics costing 2-4 times as much and it wins out by a pretty wide margin.

royer sf1. my first ribbon mic, this thing became my #1 choice for several things as soon as i heard it. it sounds INCREDIBLE on violin. absolutely amazing. it sounds pretty amazing on acoustic guitar too. i just went through a long period of being very depressed at the acoustic guitar recordings i was getting with my mics, and this thing was a complete godsend. on playback now i'm finally hearing guitars the way i want to be hearing them. i've been using it on vocals a bit, too. it wouldn't be one of my "go-to" mics, but it works amazingly well in the right context.

shure 520dx, aka green bullet, aka harmonica microphone. i have no idea when i might need to record harmonica, but i got this to use for a vocal track i was doing. it sounds horrible, distrorted, midrangy--I LOVE IT! it was perfect for giving just that right kind of lo-fi sound i needed. i've worked on a few songs in the past where i really wished i had one of these, so i'm glad i finally picked one up to have around. it's the kind of mic i'll probably only use a couple of times a year, but when i need it I REALLY NEED IT.

audio-technica atm450. bought a pair of these for a really great deal but haven't had a chance to try them out yet. i've heard from several people that they're really good as drum overheads and other general-purpose drum mics. i've been really unhappy with the sounds i've been getting from the mics i've been using as overheads, so i'm anxious to try these out.

outboard gear

aea the ribbon pre. ribbon mics and my sm7b are very low-put microphones and require gobs and gobs of gain (65dB or more). this pre has an ultra-minimalist signal path to help give really clean gain at those kinds of levels. i did my first recording with it on sunday and had the gain as high as 75-80dB sometimes, and this thing barely added any noise/hiss. the sound is pretty nice and uncolored and it seems like the highs aren't quite as hyped as on some of my other pres. i'll be playing around this unit more in the coming weeks

hear back headphone distribution system. i got this to replace my old furman distribution system. this system lets you send 8 signals digitally over cat5 to person headphone mixers where people can mix those 8 signals together however they want for their own headphones. mixers can also be mounted on mic stands, which makes it really convenient for singers to adjust levels in the middle of a take. i only have 2 mixers at the moment but i'll be picking up a few more in the next month or two.

computer stuff

universal audio uad-1 dsp card. i've been flirting with buying one of these for several years now, and now that i have one i'm kicking myself for having not purchased one like 3 years ago. this thing ROCKS. they've modelled a bunch of the universal audio hardware (1176, la2a, la3a, etc.) as well as other vintage and newer gear. the 1176 and la2a are my current go-to compressors and this thing has one of my all-time favorite reverbs. i've been using this so much i'm maxing out the card and will need to buy another one soon (you can have up to 4 uad-1 cards in one machine).

overall it was pretty easy to install. the only tricky part was the dealing with all the weird wall angles. it was sometimes difficult to accurately measure the angle and transfer it to the piece i was cutting--a couple of pieces i had to do sort of by trial and error and mess up a few cuts until i got it right.

it's amazing how much of a difference the flooring made. it completely changes the vibe of the room and brightens it up a lot since i no longer have that dismal, gray, concrete slab thing going on.

in all the music-related projects i've been involved with the past few years, i've noticed a recurring set of complaints across a bunch of musicians who write/want to write music (myself included):

-"i should write more music, but {i just can't seem to get motivated,i don't think i'm good enough, i never finish what i start, ....}"

-"i'm stuck in a rut. all my music sounds the same."

-"i think i've hit some sort of plateau. i feel like i should be getting better but i'm not."

-"i wish i could bounce my ideas of off people and get help with ideas and suggestions"

this has been on my mind a lot lately and i've been reading a lot of books on this topic. one thing i'm seeing mentioned again and again is this idea of music lodges, which appear to be pretty popular out on the west coast. they're basically just a regular gathering of musicians who are looking to find ways to think outside the box and expand their songwriting chops. it's also a good way for the group to give itself projects to work on as homework and the regular meeting structure provides deadlines to motivate those of us who can never quite seem to start/finish writing a song.

i'm pondering doing a monthly (for starters) music lodge project and helping facilitate whatever might need to be facilitated logistics-wise. this email is a feeler to gauge the level of interest in this sort of thing. here are some ideas for music-immersion projects (i can't take credit for any of these):

-the hat. everyone puts an idea for a song on a piece of paper and sticks it in a hat. we pass the hat around and everyone picks an idea out of the hat. write this song and present it at the next get-together.

-20 songs. this is a weekend-long competition which begins on saturday morning. the purpose of the competition is to see who can write the most songs in 24 hours. finish up sunday morning, catch up on sleep sunday afternoon, and we get together sunday evening and play what everyone came up with and find out who the winner is.

-worst song contest. write the worst song you possibly can. we'll take a vote to see who wins the coveted "worst song" award.

-jam sessions with ideas borrowed from improv comedy. for instance, 2 or 3 members jam for the rest of the group. the non-playing folks will periodically shout out instructions which the improvers must follow. or an adaptation of the standard setting/relationship/task improv games for songwriting (e.g. subject/instrument(s)/genre).

-lyric-writing exercises. automatic writing, freewriting, etc. maybe a series of timed exercises followed by going around the room and sharing our results with the group.

those are just some possible ideas--there are tons of others out there. the main goal is to come up with fun and challenging exercises that would be beneficial to all musicians, regardless of their music style(s) or level of talent. it's also a great opportunity for folks to interact with other musicians and exchange ideas.

let me know if you're interested. if you know of anyone else who might be interested, feel free to pass this along to them. if i hear back from enough peeps, i'll see about getting something started in a month or so.

nothing new to report on the construction front...everything's still in a holding pattern there until i finish these current projects. i have made a few gear purchases the past few weeks. for mics i got a sennheiser 421 (great on snare) and a shure sm7 (haven't tried it yet, but lots of people say it's great for singers with harsh high-ends and/or crazy dynamics). yesterday i picked up a sansamp bass driver. i'm still by and large unhappy with the bass sounds i get when it comes to recording, so i'm hoping the sansamp will at the very least give me a few more options.

i've been talking with a lot of different people about a lot of different facets of music lately, which has me revisiting the idea of creating a "forbidden phrases" list, similar to the "no stairway to heaven" sign in wayne's world. i've been wanting to do this for a long time now. current candidates for the list:

• but it's my style
• indie rock
• but rush did it
• i want that john bonham drum sound

but it's my style. this is the musician equivalent of parents saying "because i said so." i tell people time and time again to think of their songs as their children. sure, you provide the seed for a song and have an idea of where you want to take it, but as the song begins to take shape it takes on a life of its own and it may decide it wants or needs to do certain things which are at odds with what you wanted it to do. people who defend their musical stylings too ridigly and emotionally by and large do so as a crutch to avoid actually listening to what the song is saying. it's very easy to become too attached to the words you write and the notes you play, which can lead to not seeing the forest for the trees. words, phrasings, notes, tempos, song structures, orchestration...none of that is sacred. let the song dictate those things, not the other way around.

indie rock. i'm so sick of this phrase. it has lost all meaning, and as a result everyone throws it around with their own weirdly-self-serving interpretation. indie does not mean "i don't have to practice." indie does not mean "i don't have to write good songs." indie does not mean "i don't have to make my voice/gear sound good." indie does not mean "all i have to do is say 'indie' in my description and each and every member of the indie community will become a fan of my music." indie does not mean "any suggestions for improving my music are part of the corporate music world trying to make me sterile." there's "i don't want to be like those fake, plastic supermodels, so i'm not going to buy into superficial notions of beauty," and then there's "i don't want to be like those supermodels, so i'm not going to bathe anymore."

but rush did it. you are not rush. you will (hopefully) never be rush. as soon as you start to come even close, rush fans will pee on you for daring to plagiarize their gods. most people listening to your music these days weren't even around yet when rush was making good music. putting a rush riff, fill, lick, or any other reference/homage to them into your songs will not increase your chances of getting laid. unless you like sleeping with chicks named juno. until you decide to write an album entitled "music for LARPing," chances are high that rush-isms have very little place in your music.

i want that john bonham drum sound. if i had a dollar for every time someone said this to me, i'd have enough money to reanimate bonham's corpse and hire him to play on each project which requests his sound. which, incidentally, is the only real way to get that sound. john was a big man with big arms who hit big drums with big sticks and made big sounds. not only that, he had an incredible sense of dynamics, meticulously tuned his drums, and knew his drums and his playing intimately enough so that he could adjust his playing to the recording environment rather than the other way around. no engineering technique can take the place of these things.

i don't know why so many drummers speak as if bonham was the only drummer who ever existed. yes, he was a great drummer and had a great sound, but there are other great drummers and other great sounds out there. not to mention other genres. unless you're a zeppelin tribute band or write music very much in that style, spend some time finding drummers and drum sounds you like in genres close to your own.

i started running through possible problems in my head. maybe it's the new preamp. but my other pres exhibited the same problem in the old place. maybe it's the room--the response is getting pretty good, but there are still those problematic frequencies i haven't tackled yet. but notching out those frequencies or their harmonics only fixed the resonant ringing and not this harshness. both my old and new audio interfaces exhibited the same problem, and same with both of my mixers. maybe something was clipping somewhere, but i was watching all the meters on all the gear like a hawk on saturday and was deliberately not running things too hot, since i wasn't sure yet how far i could push the new pre or the new audio interface.

i began to focus on the mic. it's a tube mic that i've been using as my go-to mic for vocals. it's probably getting to the point where i should start thinking about replacing the tube. but here again, i've had the same problem with other mics as well. but without anything else to really go on i figured hey, can't hurt to at least try replacing the tube to see if that has any effect.

then later on i wanted to work out some guitar parts and record some rough demos direct, so i grabbed my strat and plugged it in to the great river pre. figured i'd throw something other than vocals at it for a bit to get a feel for how it behaves. i dialed up a good starting gain and put a little bit of compression on my dbx 1066, which has been my default compressor for a while now. whenever i played more loudly i would start to hear clipping/distortion artifacts. so i pulled back the gain on the pre even though i had gobs of headroom according to the meters. things still clipped a bit on the louder parts. i pulled back the fader a bit on the mixer. same problem. i checked my cables to make sure they didn't have bad plugs or anything. but they all seemed to check out. i made sure everything was set to -10dBV. check.

at this point i was like, well, about the only other thing i haven't reallly eliminated is the compressor. i hit the bypass switch and lo and behold, the problem went away. i engaged the compressor again, problem came back. the problem seemed to get worse the more the compressor kicked in. but i dialed the ratio back to 1:1 and even when there was no compression it was still emitting these weird distorted-sounding artifacts. i know the dbx compressors are all famous for having that special "dbx color," but this just seems to have gone beyond the realm of color and into feces.

i had very similar settings to those used on saturday, so i'm pretty sure now that this is the culprit for the problems i'm having in the mix. i'm not sure yet whether this is a feature of the 1066 or if i just have a bad VCA or something--need to do more experimentation with that when i get some free time. if it's been like this for a while, it could very well account for problems i've had in other mixes and was never quite able to fix. my shitty alesis 3630's had the same problem but to a much worse extent, which is why i stopped using them ages ago and finally sold them off about a year ago. the problem on the 1066 is more subtle, which is why i haven't really picked up on it in tracking. but once you start setting up the mix and throwing in eq and compression it becomes more obvious. and leads to the "oh, it's a problem with the way i'm mixing" red herring.

so where am i now? well, i picked up a pair of dbx 160A's last year and never got around to using them except for when i did sound for sunil's live show. these are better quality than the 1066s, so i figured i'd do some a/b tests. i definitely like the ease of use in setting these up and the HUGE level meters are a big win for people like me who get off on blinkenlights. you can ride them pretty hard without getting any pumping/breathing artifacts. i was also able to slam it hard with my guitar and not hear any clipping, distorting, or any other sort of mangling. the only thing i really noticed was that when the compressor kicks in more than a few dB, a bit of the top seems to go away. but the resultant sound is very pleasant and easy to work with.

i also pulled out my presonus ACP-22 that i use here and there. it's an ok unit, but one thing that's always annoyed me is the transformer vibrates, thus generating a bit of noise that's just loud enough to make you go "what the hell's that?" if you're within a few feet of it. i also don't care for the level meters much--the attenuation LEDs are all green, which i hate. they should be red, dammit, the way god intended. no distortion artifacts, but lots of pumping/breathing when you hit it hard, and it colors the sound in a way i'm not sure i like, at least not on guitar.

so for the time being i'm going to unplug the 1066 and ACP-22 and just stick with the 160As, as they sound the best out of everything i have right now. but this whole ordeal got me realizing that i've been leaning more towards dbx compressors than perhaps i should, at least from a variety standpoint. i'm down to 3 now, but i used to have 2 166XLs as well. everything in my arsenal right now colors the sound one way or another, so i figured a first step would be to get something a little more transparent. not wanting to spend a lot of dough, i decided to buy a really nice compressor and see if it really is as nice as everyone says it is and as the name implies. they're only $200 new and i got this one for like 2/3 that price, so it's not like i'll be out a lot of money if i don't like it.

the left-hand side of the resonator was an absolute bitch to do, owing to the really tight angle (24 degress on the inside, which meant having to cut everything at its complement of 66 degrees). since things that are capable of cutting/ripping at that angle are few and far between, i had to get creative. mostly it involved rotating the wood 90 degrees before putting it in the pathway of the saw. this sounds easy enough on paper, until you find yourself having to do things like stand a 3-foot piece of wood vertical and pass it along a table saw, or cut pretty much diagonally through a 2x4, which a standard 10" saw can't do. for the frame i had to do the rip cut using the band saw instead. which, as usual, came out very sloppy and i had to go back and plane the hell out of it. i finally got tired of planing and said, "fuck it, it's good enough."

this is what the angle cuts look like on the slats:

i had to pick up a tenoning jig so that i could secure the pieces vertically to run over the table saw. yet another semi-expensive tool that i wsh i didn't have to buy, but it did do an awesome job and if i ever do use it for making tenon joints in woodworking, it has all sorts of knobs and stuff to tweak it out the wazoo.

haven't done another round of room analysis yet, but i do know already that it is not helping with the ringing at 320Hz, or at least not significantly. after walking all around the room and singing that pitch, it sounds like there's only one particular area in the room where the sound energy at that frequency is disproportionately high, so i'm going to tackle the problem by building a smaller, wall-mount helmoltz to go on the wall in the middle of that area.

christa came over this afternoon and we laid down vox for a tune whose guitar part we recorded about a year ago. this was my first chance to do a serious recording in the room as well as being able to give my new great river preamp and RME audio interface a whirl.

the good:
i love the hardware and software interfaces for the RME stuff. they're much easier to work with than my delta 1010's. all the important stuff on the box (word clock, sync source, -10dBV/+4dBu switching, etc.) is accessible on the front panel. the software seems very well suited to handling multiple interfaces, and it's much nicer being able to return to hardware that'll let me have up to 3 interfaces per card rather than having to deal with the one-card-per-interface crap. the clip lights on the box are dope, especially since they kick in a few dB below 0 dBFS, allowing me time to quickly adjust levels before ruining an otherwise good take with digital clipping. other converters i've used either don't have any level lights on the box or the clip lights are of the "if you're seeing this, you're hosed" variety. oh, and of course the converters sound quite nice and are a welcome change from the slightly-harsher-sounding deltas.

the great river pre is...well...great. lots of headroom. christa's a very dynamic singer, and it was able to handle her full dynamic range without me having to be constantly riding the gain or really holding it back. the 6-segment level indicators are a great feature. the sound is great and very easy to work with, at least for vocals--haven't tried anything else yet.

while i was setting things up i was listening to a bunch of mixes, both my own and those on commercial cd's. i'm amazed at the bass response in the room. the bass traps have given an extremely tight and clear low end. i heard some things in my own mixes that i had never heard before and, remembering some of the challenges i had when mixing the low end on those songs in my old place, i had a few "ahhhh! so that's what i wasn't able to hear accurately" moments.

working on actual music in that room after spending a year doing almost nothing but construction work in that space was a very surreal experience. this is going to sound kinda hokey, but instead of having a sort of "i'm sitting here and here's a desk and there's a person over there singing" sense of distinction, i felt myself and everything around me to be more...idunno...liquid, i guess? the room, the equipment, the singing, me...it all just kind of fused together. it's weird having a space of my own where i don't feel like the room is the enemy of the sound. here the room really embraces the sound.

the bad:
those frequency response spikes in the room around 200-350Hz are quite noticeable--they show up when recording and are exacerbated on playback. i started building a helmholtz resonator yesterday but haven't finished it yet. i really hope that will help tame those frequencies, as that will be critical to getting good recordings and good monitoring.

the console desk sits about 6" too high for my liking. taking the casters off will help at least somewhat, but it still won't leave me at an optimal vantage point once i install the console. and i'm definitely going to have to remove those rack shelves along the very top and knock the overall height down to provide a single surface on which to place both of my computer monitors and aux monitor speakers.

i'm not overly thrilled with the speaker stands i got last week. the main reason i got them was so that i could set them slightly higher than 48" and then angle them down towards me with MoPADs. however, they get really wobbly under the weight of my mackies. the connection between the stand and the bass isn't quite what i would call strong. i need to play around with them for a bit in the coming days and see if i can make them more sturdier. once i get the desk height down i'll also be able to drop the monitor height several inches, which should help at least somewhat.

so overall i'm quite pleased so far, although there is still much much work left to be done.

i think they look really dope, plus they're really slim--only 3.5" deep.

i'm also going to install 4 wall uplights throughout the room to help illuminate the ceiling and provide more general illuminance. choosing these is a bit trickier, seeing as how most wall lights are designed to be hard-wired, but i never had the walls wired for lighting, only the ceiling. i've read that at least some types of lighting can be converted from hard-wired to plug with the use of these kits you can buy at home depot and lowes. i'm gonna go check those out tomorrow and see if they'll work.

related to this, over the weekend i found a cool lighting estimator page from GE. actually, i found that page several months ago, but at the time wasn't sure how to use it since i wasn't versed in things like footcandles. but thanks to an email message from tommy last week with a bunch of useful lighting info, i got on the right track and rediscovered that page. the original, less-technical web page i found on this topic suggested an amount of lighting that was about half what GE's estimator says. which very conveniently matches up with my subjective observation that the room is only about half as bright as it should be.

i should clarify in all this talk about lighting that the amount of lighting for any given session will be completely flexible; the ceiling lights will be on a dimmer, and the wall lights will be individually switchable. i also have a floor torchiere i'll be putting over by the console.

the area around 60-70hz (particularly right around 60hz) has been MASSIVELY improved by the traps. the region just above 300Hz no longer rings out like it used to, but it could still stand to be tamed a bit with a helmholtz on the wall. there are still dips leading up to 100Hz, but they're not as bad as before. don't know what's up with the spikes @50hz. i need to look into both of those some more.

overall i'm extremely happy with what i'm seeing.

the booth sconces look fucking awesome:

the lights in the main room are a different story. the lighting is too directional, leading to problems with shadows and being blinded from intense brightness if you happen to be standing in the wrong place. the fixtures are also too domineering. when you walk into the room, your attention is pulled right towards them, and not in a good way. and overall, even though it's 800W of lighting total, it's still very dark in the room. michelle and i are going to spend some time this weekend exploring other lighting options. bah. i thought i was *finally* done with this crap. oh well, these things happen, no biggie.

in other electricity-gone-bad news, i received the RME PCI card today. it's actually a main card and a daughtercard, and the person i bought it from decided to put both cards in the same static bag when packing the box. this is generally a bad idea, and the damage the main card received as a result speaks to that. check out the damage it sustained.

notice the access panel. in retrospect, i really should have put that panel somewhere else, but at the time it didn't seem like it would be a big issue to put it there. no biggie, i just had to make sure the trap dimensions were such that it completely covers the panel.

next came stacking all the wedges inside the frame:

note that the bottom 10 or so wedges are in two pieces. this is so if i ever have to get into that panel i can just pull out the small pieces in front of the panel and pop a short 2x4 or something in the corner to keep the pieces above propped up while i go into the wall.

here's how the wall looks with both traps installed. the pieces that disco cut are on the left. the pieces that i cut are on the right. you can kind of tell that my frame of mind was, "i don't care how these look, i just want to cut them as quickly as i possibly can").

eventually these bad boys will be covered in black fabric so they look all sleek and stuff. but the next step is to do another round of room analysis to see how much these have helped the low-frequency response problems.