glaigle glaigle glaigle
So the studio build continues. Today we reinforced and expanded the mixing desk, adding a layer of MDF to the top shelf, several more braces, and an extra leg in the back where all the weight is. The top shelf, where the speakers sit, is now angled so that the speakers point inwards at a 60 degree angle, so that it is possible for the listener to sit in a sweet spot where the listener's ears and the 2 speakers form an equilateral triangle.
This is ideal, in terms of listening. Plus, this sweet spot is 38% back from the front wall, which is a very good spot. However, I think the triangle is a bit too big, as the edge of the desk is only about 6" out from the wall. I definitely want to get more cotton behind the desk.
After we finished building and installing the desk, I arranged everything out on the new shelf and begin the tedious process of rewiring the studio. The snakes are run, and I resoldered the broken RCA cable for the S/PDIF input on the sound card.
Can you feel the audiogeek love?
I thought that you could....
Anyway, still haven't heard anything yet there. I'm dying to listen to audio through the speakers with the acoustic treatments up. Tomorrow night, I should be at this stage. Not looking promising in terms of getting drum sounds yet, may have to wait until next week....
still stirring
I'm feeling a bit better today. That's good.
I picked up my PodXT Live today. I also ordered a Variax 300 in black. Very cool.
My attentive readers will recall that we ordered acoustic cotton recently for all the studio sound treatments. This material is reasonably new on the scene compared to rockwool and fiberglass, and one of its main benefits is that it is nowhere near as toxic as glass or mineral fibers. It's also cheaper, it turns out, as I discovered when we recently ordered some online.
Little did I know how much cheaper.
I discovered today that there is a local, green friendly business that sells this stuff.... for less than HALF of what we just paid for it online. Doh!
Ah well. Live and learn. We haven't finished our treatments yet (we're only on phase one) and we'll need more. It's good to know that there is a local place to get it a bit at a time.
the (lack of) sound of sweet exhaustion
I'm completely exhausted. I've been flirting with the flu all week, achy, headachy, and slightly congested. But, I've been pushing myself harder than I'm accustomed to this week, and we got lots accomplished on the studio front.
Phase one of the studio acoustic treatments are drawing to a close. All 6 gobos are finished, all 6 bass traps (or more accurately, broadband sound absorbers) are finished, the fiberglass is up in the first treatment spots, covered by blankets, and the entire ceiling is covered in fabric. Plus, the 2 bass traps that hang across the wall/ceiling corners are installed.
All that's left is cleaning, rearranging, and rewiring the studio as we pretty much had to unplug EVERYTHING and move it during this process. So there is still plenty of work to be done. I also have to resolder one connector that broke off during the process. Lots of nagging details.
Another thing is that I'm thinking of modifying the desk, making it such that the speakers can be properly angled (the idea is to have the the shelf holding the 2 speakers to be at a 60degree angle so that they will make an equilateral triangle with the listeners head at the listening position). This week I hope to get to that, since there is already some reinforcing repair work that needs to be done to the desk as it's sagging a bit in the middle.
However, last night was The Big Test(tm). We actually played some music, for the first time in several weeks. That was very cool. The effects of the new acoustic treatments are obvious. It's one thing to absorb a lot of theory, with all the studying I've done on studio acoustics, yet quite another to build something that actually works. Last night was our first clearly audible confirmation as to just how well these treatments work in our studio.
Brent had put new drum heads on the entire kit, all the way around. So the first thing is that the drum kit sounds fantastic. MUCH better than it did with those way-too-many-years-old heads that wouldn't get in (much less stay in) tune. The heads are really nice Evans heads; basically Brent copied the heads used by one of his favorite drummers (John Dolmayan from System of a Down). This is an older, vintage-ish Gretsch kit, and man it sounds good.
The sound of these drums in the room with the panels arranged around it is hard to describe. The best way I can think of is to say the sound is much more focused, since there aren't any (or vastly fewer) reflections bouncing of the walls, floor, and ceiling. The sound actually seems to be coming from the drum, as opposed to the more diffuse sound of the drum-in-a-reflective-box thing. Again, it's hard to describe but it is clearly audible. I had warned Brent that the difference in sound would be subtle, especially to an untrained ear, but his reaction was quite exuberant: "You said this would be subtle, this is a HUGE difference!" Even our friendly neighborhood curmudgeon-in-training bass player appreciated the difference, "this is much more like a real studio."
So yes, I'm quite thrilled to see theory put so effectively into practice. In short, the designs work! And as always, Matt and I worked very well together in constructing them. The gobos aren't necessarily pretty, but they are MASSIVE and heavy and effective. Cleanup work, and wrapping up some loose ends, is all that remains for phase one. And I hereby declare phase one a massive success! w00t!
Phase two will be to complete the framework construction of the room by adding more fiberglass and sheetrock, along with 2 reinforced doors. This will much more effectively isolate the room, so that when we record basic tracks, we can put Matt on the other side of the door to get his voice out of the drum mics (and the drums out of his vocal mic!).
Once the room is "finished," phase three will be to add more room acoustic treatments, either more of what we already have (bass traps and gobos) or something that is more customized to this room (which means they'd be harder to move down the road if we ever need to). But, the wheels are turning here, I have some very interesting ideas to acoustically optimize the space we have.
And the best news is last: Freakwitch has officially scheduled April 13,14,15 as the 3-day-solid stretch of recording our first album! I hope to get basic tracks done on those days (meaning: drums and bass recorded for every song). Then we can begin overdubs with guitar (including electric as I'll have my new rig by then) and vocals.
Ever onward!
there's nothing like ...
... physical labor in building stuff. The studio construction continues. We decided to go assembly-line fashion, and 5 gobos are now half done. They are presently bass traps, since the backs aren't on. But we managed to stretch the fabric tighter than on the prototype, which is a good thing.
It's coming along... let's see how far we get Tuesday.
time to go wash...
...the fiberglass out of my hair. Bleah. What an unpleasant task. But I'm happy to say that about a third of the studio ceiling is now fiberglassed and covered with blankets. Eventually we will also cover what's there with some of our fabric.
It really makes a BIG difference in sound. Once we got it up, we'd stand under the fiberglass and make a loud, sustained sound and then walk out under the fiberglass. As soon as we got out from under the fiberglass, we'd start laughing because the sound changes so much! This is cool. It should help us tremendously.
Tomorrow night we get to build the rest of the gobos, then on Tuesday I have to rewire the studio, as we had to move everything out of the way. I also have to resolder one connector that broke while we were trying to unplug the cable that had become corroded. Work, work, work....
my Ibanez...
... in up
on eBay. Go buy it for thousands of dollars.
I won't miss it.
::sniff::
everywhere I look, seeds are germinating
and it's quite a good feeling. Spring is coming.
All the bass traps are built at this point for the studio. We've also built one of the gobos, as a proof-of-concept/prototype thingy. It seems to work as planned. Only 5 more to build. We also picked up enough fiberglass to stuff the ceiling joists, giving an absorptive cloud, above the drum kit and the mix position (about 2/5 of the room). Things are moving!
I've been in a MUCH better headspace lately, too. Now I'm in the mode where I'm enjoying my emotional clear skies, and watching people around me weather their storms. All is well.
new Freakwitch demo songs
There are 2 new Freakwitch demo recordings online:
- Trouble On The Island in
ogg or
mp3 format
- My Own Way in
ogg or
mp3 format
Enjoy, and spread them around!
speaking of housing
Today, there was a
story about yurts in the Maine Sunday Telegram in Portland. I think this represents something pretty close to my ideal when it comes to living conditions.
I can imagine some land somewhere that has a small network of yurts up, like a central, communal, large yurt with a big kitchen in it and smaller bedroom yurts surrounding it.
a couple more things....
A couple more things I forgot to add in the previous entry:
- The book manuscript I typeset recently was just accepted officially for publication. This means that my work on that project is done! Hoorah!
- A while ago I wrote that my Virtual Enclosures article was being translated into Italian and published into an anthology put out by the Transform Italia! people. It's quite a thrill to have my writings published, in another language, alongside such notable writers as Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Of course, sadly these writings are all in Italian, and as such are utterly illegible to me. :-)
- I just wanted to say that I've been having lots of fun laughing with my daughter this week. It's been cool.
a real update
OK, a real update. Obviously I haven't been writing much in any forum for a while, including this blog. This is OK with me; blogging is a cyclical phenomenon and I've been very busy and generally uninspired to write. In no particular order, here are some of the things I've been busy with:
- Freakwitch is still moving forward. We are closer than ever to producing a tangible product of all our work. It's odd, Matt and I have been working on this particular project now for 4 years. And at this stage we have little to show for it at first glance; though a deeper glance would reveal a bunch of well-crafted songs, a tight band to play these songs, and an ever more capable studio to record these songs. The acoustic panels are under construction (we have all the materials now for phase one, it's just a matter of finishing the construction), the band is ready to record, the new headphone system is really working well such that we can all listen while we record, and the energy around Freakwitch just feels better than it ever has. We're getting close!
- I seem to be evolving as a guitarist, feeling stretched and challenged for the first time in many years. For most of my career, I've preferred electric guitar, but with Freakwitch I've pretty much started playing acoustic guitar exclusively. I've always used a thin Dunlop Tortex pick (the red ones), because I like the shimmery sound they give when strumming. But lately, I've been playing more and more with my fingers (as opposed to with a pick). Not so much in a fingerpicking style, but almost closer to a slap funk bass style; I will literally strike the strings with the backs of my fingernails to create a percussive strum. It's not as full of a sound as with a pick, but in the context of a rock band that's not a bad thing. This new style seems to fit in the mix better than the regular strumming I used to do. It's interesting stuff.
- Related to the previous item, as I said I haven't been playing electric guitar for several years. I need to be inspired again with what I can do electrically. Back in the Acumen and Amanda's Boy days, I had quite a nice guitar rig, it was a rackmounted system with 2 bag end speakers. It was loud, but more importantly it was very versatile sonically. Several years back I reached a point where it was just too much. I couldn't do any recording with it because it was so loud, so I ended up trading it in on a smaller, simpler rig. In retrospect that's about when I stopped playing electric. I wasn't inspired to play electric anymore. When playing electric guitar, I like having lots of different tones at my disposal, and my current setup just doesn't deliver that. So I'm considering trading in everything -- all my electric guitars and the effects units I have, including my treasured Ibanez Artist that I've had since I was 15 -- in on a new rig that would give me even more versatility than my old rackmounted setup.
It's the Line6 setup consisting of the Pod XT Live (a pedalboard that provides all the electronic possibilities you can imagine, models of amps and effects and a way to program detailed combinations of them and save them as presets) and the Variax 300 (black) guitar, which can model up to 25 different kinds of stringed instruments. This rig would give me a sonic versatility that I've never had, and plenty of playing room for sonic experimentation. This setup is a modelling setup, which some analog/tube purists despise because they are essentially digital recreations of long-treasured guitar setups. The map-is-not-the-territory argument applies, though my take is that I'd much prefer the versatility to have dozens or hundreds of sound options, rather than one or two "authentic" sounds.
So yes. This is still brewing. I do realize that it is likely to change the sound of Freakwitch, but this is the right time for that. I'll still record the acoustic tracks I've been doing, but experimenting with overdubs for the album with this rig will be a great opportunity to learn the new setup, and also to give more interesting sounds for the album. But if past experience is any indicator, I'll get this rig and suddenly, as if by magic, a skilled lead guitarist who gets what we're all about will materialize and want to join the band. And that's A Good Thing. :-)
- I'm still plugging away at No-S. Exercise is still sketchy, but that's OK. I'm doing what I can given the low temperatures lately, and not worrying too much about it. I do have to say that it's fantastic that my food intake can be this healthy with almost no effort and attention on my part; the new habits of No-S are certainly ingrained by now.
- My own headspace is also clearing up. I'm feeling better about my reality lately, and my mood is reflecting this. That's a good thing, too.
- I've been distracted from my political theory research by the music. And I'm NOT complaining about it. :-)
- Perhaps the biggest news of all, my wife and I are in all likelihood going to purchase our first house. We're still technically in information-gathering mode, but it's looking promising. It looks like for our first house we'll have 2 options: 1)buy some land somewhere with some kind of structure on it (like, say, a double-wide trailer) and live with that until we can afford to build our house or put up a yurt, or 2)buy a duplex somewhere and rent the apartment to a good friend of ours who wants to do it. Our finances dictate one of those two options, or perhaps another option has yet to reveal itself.
- Spring is coming! The light is returning!
So yes. Things continue to move.
No, I haven't...
...dropped off the face of the earth. I'm still alive, just very busy and not much in a place for writing. I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say that things are moving, spring is coming!
More soon (he said hopefully)....
