Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

So, a few posts back I mentioned having recorded the Easter Sunday service at our church. To date, I haven’t put a huge amount of time in on it, but I have done some work. I’m learning a thing or two along the way.

1. Even with a Dual 2.5 Ghz Mac G5, it’s possible to slow things down. All you need to do is load up a ton (!!) of real-time effects on each channel (16 in this case). To help with that, you can do several things in Digital Performer. Perhaps the most useful is to pipe channels on which you want to apply some common effect to an Aux channel and put the effect there. That way, you can use a single instance of the effect for those channels that share it in common.
Another thing to do is to disable play mode when you are mixing with channels that you don’t presently want to hear. That eliminates processing overhead on (currently) unused channels.

2. Mastering directly in the application is ok, but not ideal. The bounce-then-print process is one thing, but if you want to apply some effects, volume leveling, etc. it’s probably best to use some outboard software. Again, it’s certainly quite doable, but it would seem that DP is more oriented to the recording/mixing part and somewhat less focused on the Mastering phase. Plus, it doesn’t directly manage creating CD images. So, if you have a collection of songs that are all mixed really nicely and you want to build a Redbook image, you’ll need to look elsewhere. What I did as a fast first pass was to create the roughly-mixed tracks, then imported them into iTunes. Next I built a playlist in iTunes and used the “use Sound Check” to force the volume of each track to be the same. From there, iTunes burned the disk.

So, it’s moving slowly but I’m making headway and learning as I go. It’s fun and the product is sounding better and better.

We had a really well-attended church service for Easter yesterday. Since we want to compile an album of our music to give to visitors, etc. I was asked to record the service. Here’s how it went:

We have a 32-channel Mackie board for the church. I’d guess that in total we use about 20 channels. For the music side of things, we have the following inputs:

a) ~7 vocal mics - There’s the worship leader, 5 vocalists and the pastor who also sings.
b) Percussion mic - used to mic up things like congas and assorted other percussive elements.
c) An electric bass.
d) An acoustic guitar.
e) An electric guitar.
f) An electric piano that we send two channels from in order to layer sounds to stereo mains.

If you add that up, it’s 13 channels of stuff. What I haven’t mentioned are the drums. Ordinarily we don’t mic the drum set (which I play) because they’re plenty loud for the room. However, we wanted to record all the music, so it meant mic’ing them up. To my mind, for a 5-piece kit, you want no less than 5 mics:

1. Overhead for cymbals and ambient drum pick-up.
2. Kick drum mic.
3. Floor tom mic.
4. Snare mic.
5. A mic for both mounted toms. I prefer one for each but we’re talking minmums here.

Given that I have 16 channels and I was using 13, and I wanted to use 5 mics for the drums…I was out of channels. So, we compromised. I ran all the drum mics into a front-of-house mixer (a Behringer UB1622-FX PRO 8-channel desk) and mixed that to a (sort-of) stereo pair into the recording rig. Not ideal, but workable. I tried to give some sense of space to the placement of the various mics, but the proof will be in the final product. We’ll see.

“So”, you might ask, “What did you use the last input for, since you only used 2 of your remaining 3 channels?”. Thanks for asking. I used that final input for a “house” mic that recorded room ambience. We want the recording to have a live feel to it and I was afraid that it would sound somewhat sterile without having room sound mixed in. I’ve done that in the past for a coffeehouse and it works nicely.

Our Mackie board at the church does NOT have 16 spare sends that we can use to route all these inputs to the recording setup. The answer in this case was to run nearly all of the inputs first to the recording interface and then back out to the board. So, all the mics, instruments, etc. were first run to the inputs of my Motu gear and then sent back to the board via each channel’s associated output. All the inputs went through the Motu gear and Digital Performer routing. It worked out great. Setting it up was a nightmare, since it took us 7+ hours to make it all work. I’m glad we did it and I learned some things in the process.

Now comes the fun part. Mixing, editing, printing. I’m looking forward to it!

Not me…(if only!)

It’s the number of simultaneous analog channels that I can record with my system.

I just purchased a Motu 828 MkII. It’s a sweet firewire interface that works in conjunction with my Motu 896 to give me that total. It’s a lower-cost device than the 896, primarily due to the fact that it only has two mic preamps built in. If you want to use more microphone-level signals with it, you need to first run them through outboard preamps. There can be a number of very good reasons to do so anyhow. Probably most important is the signal quality. While the Motu pre’s are good, there are many, many excellent quality outboard models. Some folks like tube-based preamps, some like classic models, some like using hardware simulations of classics, etc.

I also purchased a Behringer BCF2000 control surface. It’s a nicely-priced model with 100mm motorized faders, infinte turn rotary encoders, bank selections, assignable buttons, etc. I’m really getting to hate using the mouse to control faders, pans, etc. My hope is that this will help to make computer-based recording feel more like the analog version…

So, my studio is improving slowly. And, as I said before I’d like to get involved in some recording projects. I’m a drummer with some decent background (been playing for near 30 years off an on) having played live and on recordings. I’ve played with university orchestras, churches, bands, etc. So, if you’re interested 1) see my previous post on the subject 2) contact me!

I’ve been playing drums and diddling with other instruments (very little) for years. In fairness, I’m really just a drummer who is a wanna-be musician.

What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? A drummer…sigh.

Anyhow, I love playing and don’t really get to do as much as I’d like. Sometime, I’d like to collaborate with someone on a distance (or local) recording project. I’m into jazz, contemporary Christian, pop, big band, etc. Steely Dan, Michael McDonald, Jeff Lorber, Pat Metheny, Dave Koz, etc. are some of my favorites.

I have a pretty decent recording capability at home here. I use Motu Digital Perfomer, Apple Logic Express 7, Garageband and other smaller apps like Audacity, etc. And, I can record 24-bit, 96 Khz in up to 8 channels at a time with a Motu 896 firewire interface (unlimited total channels). With luck, my channel count will increase to 16 in the next two weeks or so. I also have a small collection of mics (growing slowly), hardware effects, etc. I use Yorkville studio nearfield monitors. My system is computer-based, using a Macintosh G5 Dual 2.5 Ghz and a Macintosh dual G4 450 Mhz machine and a 466 Mhz iBook for mobile recording.

So, if someone wants to perhaps collaborate on a project, I’d love to hear from you! I want to expand my recording and playing horizons and perhaps this is a good place to get the word out!