What I’ve been missing.

There hasn’t been a lot of music in my life lately, other than listening. Work has been very demanding lately, and between that and traveling to do fun things with the family, not much time has been left over for playing. Today I have a day of glorious playing ahead, though, with some good friends up the road in Reston, VA. It’s nice to have a hobby that gives out such a positive vibe and that you can share with other people.

You can also really connect with your tools as well when you play music. This morning I took out a couple of my basses to make sure they were ready to rock’n'roll, and I enjoyed getting reaccustomed to a couple of my favorites. One of the basses I’m bringing with me is a 1953 Fender Precision issue. I believe it’s the Sting signature model, but I can’t be completely sure. I bought it used for a little under $700, and it’s Japanese made as I would expect from that model. (Typically the Japanese made instruments these days are second only to American built Fenders, and only by a slim margin in my opinion.) The serial number seems to support it.

But unlike the mother of pearl signature marker at the octave fret which you see on the Sting model, this one has a black bar. On very close inspection it seems like the previous owner actually painted carefully over the inset, and then refinished the neck. He did a fine job, though, so I had no qualms about buying it. It did make me wonder why you would go to so much trouble to cover up the signature on a signature model bass. Maybe the guy played in a honky tonk band and the Sting signature gave the other band members the willies.

All I know is that one of the other mods he made was to add a Lindy Fraling hand-wound pickup that, when combined with the strings passing through the body at the bridge, gives this axe the sonic nuts. The neck is pretty round and kind of like playing a baseball bat compared to a couple of my other basses, so playing this bass for long stretches can be a little like a wrestling match — you have to muscle it into submission. But the reward is a big fat P-bass sound that’s shaded just differently enough from a stock 1960′s style Precision to give it a unique vibe. Definitely looking forward to playing it today!

Live from Fedora Moonbase Alpha, part 3.

Quite a while ago, I wrote about the dead-simple process for setting up a microphone with Fedora’s PulseAudio sound system. That was part 2 in a series that was meant to discuss creating a better podcast. At the time, I meant to follow up with a piece on how to do some audio sweetening to make your recording sound better to your listeners. Unfortunately, life and work got in the way, and I didn’t get to part 3 — so here it is, hopefully better late than never.

Thanks to John Poelstra for inspiring me to write this. We had a nice conversation about audio the other day, and I figured it would be worthwhile to capture some of what we spoke about, but also to explain better some of the concepts I tried to pass on to John but perhaps didn’t do it well.

I’m going to assume at this point you’ve been able to capture your audio from a reasonable mic source into Audacity using the record function. You should now have an audio capture with a visible waveform in your Audacity window. Before we move on, you may want to save your Audacity project, or maybe just write the audio to a simple .WAV format file using the Export function.

Audacity lets you not only record audio, but alter it based on algorithms that range from the simple to the highly complex. Audacity is compliant with the LADSPA standard and can use LADSPA plugins to perform some very interesting, useful, or even downright disturbing changes on your audio tracks.

Of course, you don’t have to search them out or build them on your own. There are tons of very useful LADSPA plugins for audio programs available in Fedora repositories. One set we’ll be using is the TAP (Tom’s Audio Processing) set. The package in Fedora is ladspa-tap-plugins; make sure you install that using the Software Manager or another tool before proceeding. Also, you’ll need to restart Audacity if it’s already running, so it will recognize the new plugins.

Keep in mind, however, that all the effects in the world won’t make a crummy recording suddenly sound great. A lot depends on the quality of the original recording, and of course that starts with using a decent mic. “Decent” need not mean “pristine” or “expensive” for amateur use, however. There are solid podcasting mics available at reasonable prices, some less than US $100. Here are a couple easy changes you can make on a moderately good recording that will help it sound better.

You won’t find precise settings below, because the recording you make is going to be different from anyone else’s. You’ll need to listen carefully to decide how to alter the settings for each of these effects. Don’t be too drastic — sometimes a subtle touch is all you need to go from “OK” to “wow”!

Here’s a final note about a setup tweak in Audacity: I find it’s really helpful to change the interface preferences so the VU meters show a wider signal range. By default, they go down to -48dB, which isn’t enough to see what’s happening with noise, especially when you’re working with digital audio that’s capable of a high dynamic range. Open Edit, Preferences and choose Interface in the dialog. Change the meter/waveform range to at least -96 dB, which is the range of 16-bit audio. (You can choose more range if you like, but at our level of work, it’s probably not necessary.)

Noise

First, let’s eliminate some noise in the recording. Do try to minimize noise by making your recordings in a quiet room, away from loud equipment like computer fans, air conditioners, your snoring dog, and so on. But I’ll assume you’re not doing your recording in a pristine environment like a treated studio. So you’ll likely have some significant noise in your recording. (If you are recording in a treated studio, good for you! But don’t lord it over everyone, though — remember no one likes a know-it-all.)

At the beginning or end of your recording, locate a section where there is no speaking or substantial background noises, such as from a squeaky chair. Use the mouse to drag through that section of your recording. You only need a second or so for this process to be effective. After you make the selection, you can hit Play to just play the section in question, to verify there’s no sudden noise other than the ambient environment. Watch the playback meters, and hopefully you’re seeing noise at somewhere around -70dB to -60dB or so.  That’s actually quite noisy, but hey, we’re all friends here!

Now from the menu select Effects, Noise Removal. In the dialog, select the Get Noise Profile control in the frame labeled Step 1 to analyze the ambient noise in your selected audio area. This should be a very quick operation, and the dialog disappears. Audacity has stored a frequency profile for the selected noise for you to use in the next step.

Now use your Home key to move the time cursor and deselect the audio. This means the next process will run against your entire track. Select Effects, Noise Removal again, set the appropriate parameters for Step 2, and then select OK. If you’re not sure what to do, the defaults (24dB reduction, 150Hz frequency smoothing, and 0.15 seconds attack/decay time) are not bad for beginners, so feel free to try them out. You can use Ctrl+Z to undo each attempt after trying different parameters. What you’ll see is that after running the noise removal once, if you play a “silent” section again, the noise floor will be much lower!

Amplification

Now it’s time to boost our signal. Unless you’ve taken a lot of time to set up a gain structure for your audio input hardware, your signal’s probably pretty low. Your speaking voice may only be peaking at -20dB to -15dB. That’s very quiet compared to everything else your listeners hear on their speakers, where music typically peaks at almost 0dB (and way too often, if you ask me, but that’s an entirely different topic for another article and another time).

Use the Effects, Amplify control to boost the volume of your audio track. Set a new peak amplitude of close to 0dB. I often use -1dB or -0.5dB. Select OK to apply the amplification, and you’ll see the amplitude of your signal (the “width” of the waveform) grow significantly. Before you go any further: TURN DOWN YOUR SPEAKERS! If you’ve been recording and listening for a while, you’ve likely turned them up a lot to make up for the lower signal of your earlier recording. Now is a good time to lower the volume, so you don’t blow yourself out of your chair by playing your newly amplified track.

Note: Depending on your recording situation, the equipment you’re using, and the recording you’ve made, you might want to use a high-pass filter or an EQ to gently roll off very low frequencies, such as under 80 Hz. If you’re recording a voice in a quiet room, signal under that level usually comes from bumping the mic or whatever it’s attached to. If it has a lack of shock protection, that bump sounds like a booming impact in your recording. Rolling off those low frequencies can lessen the effect. Of course, you’re always free to re-record and edit to fix a particularly glaring problem!

Adding some warmth

Now, if you’re heavily into music or audio, you might have already taken care of this step in your original input. In that case you probably didn’t need a lot more amplification of your track, either. But if you didn’t warm up your recording by running through a tube preamplification stage (preamp), you can fake it to some degree using an excellent LADSPA TAP plugin called, appropriately, TAP Tube Warmth.

In your Audacity menu, choose Effects and look at the bottom of the menu that appears. You’ll see numbered lists of plugins. Unfortunately, there are so many plugins available they won’t all fit in a single menu, so they’re numbered by Audacity when it starts up. Look through the list for TAP Tube Warmth. This plugin will add some of the subtle, pleasing harmonic overtones that help make good announcers — the Leo Laportes and Bill Goldsmiths of the world — sound so pleasing to the ear. Of course, if you sound like Gonzo the Muppet, TAP Tube Warmth may not be a total solution, but it might help!

The higher you set the Drive level, the more fuzz you may hear as a result. Try not to overdo it — you want enough harmonic content added to warm up your voice, but not enough to be distracting or overpowering. A setting of somewhere between 3-5 is usually best. Experiment with the tape/tube slider to find a pleasing combination of the sound of tube warmth and analog tape squeeze. Starting with all tube is typically best, and moving to the left a bit at a time until you’re happy with the result. (Leaving it at 10, all tube, is fine too.)

Compression

One of the best-loved and most often used (many would say overused) tools in the audio engineer’s bag of tricks is the compressor. A compressor allows you to reduce the difference between loud and quiet areas of your recording, so your voice feels more present to the listener. Using compression allows you to overcome passages where your voice changes volume drastically, for example if you moved slightly away or toward the mic while recording.

Like amplification, compression can help the listener pay attention to your voice even if they’re surrounded by other loud noises — like listening through earphones while on a subway car. Speaking volume that veers wildly between loud and soft, like loud hiss and poor recording quality, is the mark of a substandard podcast. It’s important to recognize, though, that a voice blaring at a single volume for long periods will make your listener feel fatigued or even agitated, even if they don’t know why. So do listen critically to your work, and avoid over-compressing.

Other sweetening

There are other effects you can apply, but be careful and sparing if you want the result to sound natural. You might find an EQ (equalization) plugin helpful to cut annoying frequencies or compensate for a flattening of the voice. Some people apply a curve to mimic the frequency response of a well-known microphone like the Electro-Voice RE20, although it’s really difficult to get the result to sound genuine. If you don’t have a genuinely deep voice, you may find it helpful to give a slight boost (be subtle!) to the low-mid range frequency.

Reverberation is another possibility, but don’t overdo it. It’s probably not your goal to sound like you’re in Mammoth Cave or St. Patrick’s Cathedral! A little goes a long way to establish a space around your voice. Again, experiment in a good listening environment to see if this is something you like or even need.

Conclusion

Hopefully this will put you on track to start creating better podcasts, or maybe if you weren’t interested in it already, you’ll try your hand at it. A minimal equipment investment can lead to hours of fun. But remember that the most important part of podcasting is that you have something interesting or informative to say. All the equipment, technique, and software in the world isn’t as important as creative expression that makes your listeners respond, laugh, and think.

Good luck!

Banishing frowns.

I know I’ve talked about Clare & the Reasons here before, but this is so worth seeing, if only to get rid of your personal bad case of the Mondays (evil Flash required, sorry):

Getting in tune.

It’s not a bad idea, before you embark on a week-long trip away from home, leaving your wife with the mutant beasties called “children,” to make sure you give her a sanity break. So I sent Eleya out today to go see “The Dark Knight” on her own. I still haven’t figured out what I’m doing about dinner for everyone while she’s gone, but it’ll come to me soon enough. If nothing else, the dog is getting quite a bit slower in her old age. (Kidding. She’s a tough, crusty old hound anyway.)

In the meantime, I’m getting back in touch with my love for The Who. I was lucky enough to catch The Who on their 1996 Quadrophenia tour here in the States — the better shows with Billy Idol, and when the Ox was still with us — and it was a life-changing experience. Feeling a bit nostalgic today, and maybe the glass of saké isn’t helping. So I’ve put “Who’s Next” on really loud, and I’m cleaning up some bugs, and hoping that Eleya will let me sneak out for the late show.

Slipping behind.

The only problem with putting your head down and your back against the stone is that sometimes you almost miss out on the scenery.

Dear Trent, I’m guessing you made out pretty well on that whole Ghosts I-IV thing. Thanks for putting the bastards in their place with another CC-licensed release. And by the way, you’re welcome.

Paul and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Bumpy ride.

To continue today’s epic streak of bad luck:

• My softphone gave out on me right before I was supposed to speak on an agenda item at a meeting this afternoon. My landline was in use by the wife, and when she got off, the conference system wouldn’t let me enter the room, claiming there was no such conference, which might have been pretty funny in other circumstances, considering I had just come from there.
• Mad rush to finish some marketing work put me at the dinner table just as everyone was getting done. Then they had to rush off to a school function where my daughter had some creations on display, while I went to a LUG meeting.
• On the way to the LUG meeting, alone in the car, I was poking a finger around one of my teeth to clean off a speck of something, when the car hit a bump and I basically abraded my gum all the way down to the soft furrow at its base, guaranteeing myself about a week of annoying pain.

I think I’m going to go pull the bedcovers over my head and wait for next week. In better news…

Crowdsourcing design.

I’m probably superlate to this party, but I hadn’t seen 99designs until today. Pretty cool.

Musical mayhem.

This past weekend, for the first time in months, I was able to get together with some fellow musicians. This particular soiree was an 80′s cover band a friend of mine is putting together, which is at the same time horrifying and a huge amount of fun. He’s more of a traditionalist so there’s not as much New Wave in it as I’d probably prefer. I’ll probably harass him until we can play Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom” with big chunking guitars.

Unfortunately our keyboard player had to bail at the last minute so we had three guitars, bass, and drums. I hadn’t brought my keyboard with me, so I played sound engineer, song compiler, and the extra guitar guy really rich bands bring along to play ostinato figures through a delay unit for texture. It was fun getting away from the bass for a while, and my Variax really came through with some sweet tone.

The sleep of the innocent and just.

I opened Transmission last night before I went to bed, downloading a torrent of free music. And I didn’t for one second feel guilty, because it was Nine Inch Nails’ new CC-licensed album. I was thrilled because instrumental stuff has become my MO for background noise while I work.

This morning, it took me about 20 minutes to order the FLAC download due to site overloading. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to resume the supposedly one-time download thus far, without success. (I’ll probably be able to find it via BT or a more successful friend later on.) Lesson to musicians going their own way: You can’t make money if your site doesn’t work under real-life load. I hope that in the same spirit in which he disclosed the economic fallout from his last Internet distribution experiment, Trent Reznor will disclose the problems he had with the store, and then use this to help educate other independent musicians about how to effectively harness technology for their own Internet sales. On the other hand, not every indie is as popular as NIN.

I’ve long thought that a useful Fedora or CentOS spin would be a simple turnkey music and art storefront using all FOSS technology. Grab yourself some Amazon EC2/S3 space, install “Fedora Artist Store,” fill out a web-based form to set prices and upload your work, and watch the money roll in.

In any case, to do my part to support the model:

Making ends meet.

I’m going to start this post with a plug, but it’s worthy, I swear.

Since some good friends of mine are watching our kids next weekend while my wife and I escape travel up to Massachusetts and New Hampshire to house hunt, I thought it’s only fair to plug a bit for them. Read the rest of this entry »

The answer to all my prayers.

In case you hadn’t heard — maybe because of ear fatigue from records that are over-compressed — Turn Me Up! is leading the march toward a happier world full of clearer, more dynamic music. Watch the short video on the site, and then you’ll know why:

• You can’t find a comfortable volume on your car stereo between click 6 and click 7
• Loudness is not the same as dynamics, and makes your music sound like ass
• How machines are now dictating how people hear music

Circus of Dreams comes to town.

The gig last night at IOTA went great. A little wrung out this morning as a result, but the price must be paid to Bring the Rawk. Our crowd was very large and (thankfully) a little less chatty than the last show there, at which it was sometimes even hard to hear ourselves! The important thing is that they really got into the show, which made it so much more enjoyable from the stage.

The earlier half of the double-bill show was the simply incredible Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams. I don’t know how to describe them except as maybe Loudon Wainwright III meets The Who, or maybe Sufjan Stevens meets Pink Floyd. They were AMAZING.

And as a bonus, they were the nicest folks imaginable. Three of the band members are family members (mom, dad, and son), which I think is as cool as it gets. And it is somewhat circus-like, the very unpretentious family atmosphere they create. We chatted with them for a while between sets and they were thrilled to have finally found a DC-area club that really seemed to get what they were doing. We loved them, and they said they would love to get together with us for another show. Any time!