Why does this pre-amp SUCK!

Cedub and I were sitting in the studio talking about the current level of power required by our Shure 57s. The 57 is the workhorse of the industry and to this day is often the first mic put on a speaker cab for a guitar (next to the 421), we love ‘em and use them all the time.

The problem with the 57 is that you need a strong pre to make them get the level output that you want into your board. Unfortunately we only have one Amek dual-channel pre and this means that if we want more the then two 57s (or any other mic) then we have to use the pre’s built into the D8B.

Sadly, the D8B’s pre’s are weak and don’t give us the level we want on the 57’s unless you are mic a kit, then a snare or tom will rip through just fine. We have been seeing this issue come up a lot with the interview segments of the show because we often need three mics to get our round table discussions.

The last session our levels were so low (and we had them cranked) that I had to end up doing some crazy compression meets limiter magic to get them to sound decent. Luckily it was just conversation, so you can compress the shit out of it and it still sounds passable (especially at 96kbps MP3).

These kinds of discussions only head in one direction, what kind of crazy cool gear do we need to get in the future. The answer is of course a rack of 8 to 16 Neve class-A (or equivalent) pre’s. We have the rack space and it’s located in a convenient place so we can access and adjust with ease from the board. This will allow us the head room we need and also give us more super clean and clear channels for mic-ing the kit and other requirements.

This also fits into our future replacement board which will more then likely be a controller instead of the mixer/control combo. Other worthy investments will be Apogee level DACs and we need a Big Ben or something like it pretty soon too. Mmmmm… word clock. Anyway, we need more pre’s… MORE PRE’SSSSSSS…

96 degrees and no AC

Out of the blue comes this wicked hot day in the bay, and I mean seriously hot. Like a Texas hot, not a wussy San Francisco hot. We had to wrap up this weeks lab report recording and start the editing and mix down process. The issue with being in the studio is that you are surrounded by a ton of heat producing equipment. From computers, to monitors to amps and tubes and everything is like a little mini heater in the room. Mix that with a hot day and you are going to be in there for a long haul.

Maer dropped by around 11am and we knew it was going to be one of the days right off the bat, he had left his segment copy at the house. Luckily, Joni was home and hooked us up with a dupe of the copy. I plugged the U87 in and fuck if it didn’t freak out and start stuttering and popping again. This is like the 4^th time we had this happen. Chris has had enough at this point and we know this thing is just a fucking lemon. Bah, way too expensive to have a lemon on our hands, most sad.

We swapped out the U87 for the AT in the cabinet and dropped in Maer’s vocals. We then ripped the audio and mixed his segment down. From there I started downloading the uploaded segment that Seth put together and sadly my FTP client is brain-dead and downloaded it as text instead of a binary and that meant I had to re-download. Usually not an issue, but both Chris and I now have the worlds SLOWEST dsl so 70 megs takes an hour or so… *sigh*.

I decided to deal with that later and then I sat down to edit the news, at that point I kept getting DP to hang for a while and I was so frustrated and hot I said screw it and walked away for the day. Later that night I found out that one of the audio segments is corrupted so I had to do a little magic editing to make it work. Overall it worked fine and I think the show is pretty damn good. Oh, and I just got a 23” Apple HD Cinema Display. Hazah!

New Toys

I have been looking that the new MOTU Traveler for a while now… drooling over its amazing ability, portability and the fact that it can be 100% firewire powered. Some days I would just dream about getting a Traveler and an X-Session USB controller and think about hooking up a killer live rig for doing shows.

Last week I was booked to play a gig at the False Walls photo exhibit and house warming for the new False Profit headquarters. Dre asked me to play a downtempo set, which I have a nice little selection for, and then I realized, fuck it, go buy the rig. So I ran to RobotSpeak who happened to have all my desired gear in stock and for an unbeatable price.

At the same time I grabbed a copy of Native Instruments Traktor DJ Studio 2.6 so that I could try my hand at laptop djing. That evening (Friday, day before the show) I dropped by the studio and I sat down and ripped some of my favorite tracks from vinyl. Initially I tried ripping it via the Traveler to the laptop, but found that the laptop was a little chunky to handle the playback so I will need to sit down and tweek some settings later on. Anyway, since I was in the studio I just dropped a stereo line to the patch bay and ripped away.

The next day we started wrapping up show 11 for the Lab Report and I then headed home to play with my new rig. After a few hours of learning how to build beat grids, assign controls to the midi rig, and just getting a feel for it I had to whip up a set.

I had a little bit of success with beat-matching with the tool, but I realized that after 8 years of djing everything was hardcoded now and I don’t really think to myself, this is slower or faster I just do it instinctively. Too make a long story shorter I just put together a set using ambient intro/outros together to make a seamless set, called it a day, packed up the rig and headed to the event.

The show turned out really well, everyone thought I was crazy for trying out a new rig after owning it for about 24 hours, but it was fun. I can’t wait to spend more time learning the system because this will allow me to play a ton of music I have never owned on vinyl (nor able to find), play my friends music and also play my own stuff. Should be a lot of fun.

Our New Mobile Rig

I think I mentioned in the previous post that we used that Audio-Technica AT835b shotgun with the Marantz flash-rom recorder for the Nick Mason interview. Chris and I had been discussing where we want to go for our own mobile rig.

Chris did some digging (such as talking to some peeps at Alice) and I read some interesting articles about what other audio journalist use out in the field. We found out that most people use a decent mic with a crappy mini-disc player. In fact I saw an article on boing-boing were Xeni did a spot for NPR and from the pic it looks like she was using the 835b with a mini-disc.

I though, awesome, I own a mini-disc and we can get a simple XLR to mini-jack cable and there we go. One small problem… it seems that I left my mini-disc player out when my house was broken into and I just now found out it was missing. Do’h! Since we had get something, we looked at the mini-disc market and Sony just released their Hi-HD minidisk.

Chris decided to purchase the new Sony and I would run out and get the mic. This all came to ahead one of our guest for the show got back to us to schedule an interview ASAP (I will announce who it is once we have it on tape). Chris rushed to Sony store to pick up the MD and I called the always awesome Leo’s Pro Audio in Oakland.

A sec on Leo’s. Imagine, if you will, a Guitar Center that has all the most bad ass shit in the world, replace all the fucking wing nuts and asshole sales people with courteous and extremely knowledgeable people and you will be half way to how cool Leo’s is.

So, I call Leo’s to see if they have the 835b in-stock and they are fresh out, but wait… Mike informs me that they do have the new 897 in. Its half the size, only $20 more, and is Audio-Technica’s answer to the $1000 Sennheiser shotguns. See, Mike made the sale. He knew what I wanted and was able to make the sale right there on the phone. 20 min. later I am at the store with the new mic in hand.

That evening Chris gets in from the office and we try out the new rig. After fiddling with the Mini-disc we get it all set up and holy shit does it sound sweet. I was expecting an okay signal but this was FRESH. Clean, great focus on the speaker, I can’t wait to try this baby out for real. Aight… out for now.

Sunny California

If you haven’t checked out the podcast yet, you really should. We have an interview with Nick Mason, the drummer from the seminal band Pink Floyd. It was an amazing experience to meet up with a hero and at the same time be part of a groundbreaking interview for an emerging medium.

I haven’t had a chance to document the day so I will take a few seconds to write down how the interview went and some of the post-interview issues we had to deal with. We were able to whip up a portable rig for the session thanks to my friend Jack Herrington. He is currently working on a podcasting book and scored up some gear to play with and make his own show. For more about Jack and the book check out Show #3.

Anyway, he loaned us his Marantz PMD660 and his Audio-Technica AT835b shotgun mic for the interview. The cool thing about the Marantz is that it provides XLR inputs, pre-amp, phantom power and records down to a Compact Flash card. This means that you don’t have any moving parts, pretty crazy if you ask me.

We didn’t need the phantom from the Marantz because the AT835b provides its own phantom with an AA battery that you have to screw into the handle. That actually could be an issue in the long run. The cap that screws on and off has very fine threads and those tend to wear as time goes on. Also, we don’t know if the battery drains if left in by accident. These are just a few of the things to consider before we decide to purchase it.

On the day of the interview, we were to meet up with Brenda (Chronicle Books publicist) at the Palomar hotel in downtown SF at 2:10pm for the 2:15pm interview. We got there a bit early because there was no way in hell we would be late to that. Chris would be doing the actual interview and I was there for moral support more or less. We wandered over to the Marriott, because they have a bigger lobby, to kill time. Chris and I worked on the questions and then we headed back to the Palomar.

Brenda was downstairs and we headed up to the Fifth Floor lobby (it’s also a super nice restaurant) and Mr. Mason (is it too improper to call him Nick? Eh… I will anyway), Nick was on the phone with KQED prepping for the “Fourm” interview the next day. Another woman was there to also do an interview with Nick for a magazine. She asked who we were with and we said the Fake Science Lab Report and explained it was podcast. We got a nice blank look, and she said “Technology, huh?”. Yup.

Nick got off the phone and we chatted briefly about podcasting and what it is and then we asked where we wanted to do the interview. Chris and I mentioned that the lobby was not the best due to the music playing so he graciously offered up his suite and we headed up to the room.

Chris asked how the press tour was going so far and Nick told us about how this was a piece of cake compared to touring for music. He said that one thing that happened a lot back in the day was that he would get back to the hotel after a gig, look at his room key that said 601 and find out the hotel only has 5 floors (it was the key from the night before).

Once settled in the suite we got comfy and Chris started the interview. It was amazing 20 min. of chatting and Nick was just an amazing person to talk to. Both Chris and I would love to spend more time just chatting with him about, well, pretty much anything actually.

Once we got the interview back we started the editing process. We immediately noticed some not so great things about the recording. There was a nasty hum in the source that was in the painful 10-12 kHz range. Very high, very grating. I sat down with the MasterWorks EQ and we soon realized it was not only a nasty hum, but it was also a complex harmonic. After doing some serious detailed notching we removed 98% of the hum but it left the source a little dead and telephone sounding.

To resolve that problem we put the whole thing through a room in the Altverb and this gave a little breathe and ambience to it. Chris had the mic a little closer to his mouth so his level was a little high on the single track (one mic recording) so we compressed up the whole source with the UAD Pultec and shelved the whole thing to lose some of the rumble caused by street noise and trolleys.

That was the other issue with the recoding, due to trucks and trolleys going by we had to leave a few mistakes in the interview that we would have preferred to edit out, but it would have caused some strange edits. Chris decided to leave them in, and in all honesty it’s a great interview and it sounds really good. Fun, fun stuff

In the future we are looking at getting the Audio-Technica and maybe a Sony Hi-MD that can hold up to a gig of data. The nice thing about the new Hi-MD is that they have a USB for getting audio on AND off the disc. We would also get a mini-jack to XLR passive converter cable to do the recording. Simple, cheap, and hell… the NPR pro’s use it.

Checking in again

I was just handed the new Sia album (she sings for Zero 7) that I purchased from Amazon. I had to order it as an import because it seems to not be released here in the states (it appears to be the Chinese version), so of course it cost me an arm and a leg. I heard a version of Breathe remixed by Four Tet on Aurgasm and I just had to get it. I totally don’t regret it. Wow does she have such an awesome voice. Shivers I have...

I want to thank any of my readers that checked out the first Fake Science podcast. We have been getting a ton of great feedback, nice reviews and general warm and fuzzies. At this point we have decided to go to a bi-weekly show and we are hard at work on the next show. We have a killer line-up but I am not ready to jinx it yet and announce who and what but all I have to say is no matter what this will be great show.

As I mentioned in the last post we decided to get away from the stereo mic’ing on the interview/news section and this round we went with an individual mic for each speaker. We have only recorded the news/editorial section so far and we had a Shure 57 on each of us with a bit of compression to manage the levels and recorded it down.

One thing that we noticed was that there was still some ambience in the mix but that was actually due to bleed over from the other mics. To resolve this I edited the section as we saw fit then dumped any track that didn’t have one of us currently speaking. This created a really, really nice and tight presence for the recording.

Some of you may have noticed the overall leveling issue we had with the show. We discussed this and Cedub purchased the UAD Precision Limiter for our UAD-1 DSP card to handle the problem. We are using the UAD LA-2A for general compression on sections of the show and then we will hard limit the entire show before we LAME it down to MP3. Good stuff…

The show is live!!

Well, we finished our first podcast. It has been almost a month since we started and it feels great to have it done. At the moment I am sitting in the studio listening to Steely Dan’s Aja while waiting for the show to upload to libsyn and then I will push the new site when I get back to the house.

Aja you ask? Yeah, well the more I listen to Steely Dan the more I get it. It is some of the most well produced music I have heard. That and the musicians they have are just sick. Cedub is a huge fan of them and he has got me hooked. It is interesting to me because my father listened to them all the time when I was growing up. I remember liking them, but that was all I recall. Its nice to go back and revisit it.

The last few days have been focused on winding up the show in the studio. We had to finish all the bumpers, get Dave in for the interview, get Christopher in for the Ambient Airlines section and then edit and mix the show down. We just did our final pass listening to the show a few minuets ago and we feel that it sounds really good, even at 96kbps.

We did learn a few great things while doing the show. One big thing we learned is that we need to treat the live room. We found this out because we decided to experiment with setting up a stereo mic pair and run them into the Amek 9098 with MS Stereo enabled. The idea is that when you listen to the interview and news segments you get to hear the position of each speaker.

The effect is pretty cool, but the mics have to be a certain distance from the speakers for the effect to work. We first tried to do it in the control room because we have a couch and chairs, but the fans from the equipment was too loud. We moved the rig to the live room and then we found out that the room is just way to bright. You hear the space and it rings in the recording.

Until we can treat the room and put some better sound reinforcement and baffling, we will just use a Shure 57 for each of the speakers. If we want to create a stereo placement we can just used panned mono to create a positioning effect. Well, the show is live on the RSS feed now I just need to update the site. Have a great one everybody!!

ps - for some reason I couldn't couldn't cut and paste this on a Mac in Firefox so I did it from how. The FS site is live now and within 20 min. of pushing the show we had 5 downloads and 1 subscripiton. WTF?!?! We haven't even announced it yet except for the ping the audio blog site. Crazy!!