AudioMinds Newsletter:
Issue #4 - September 1, 2004
Dear Audiominds member,
Welcome to the Audiominds.com September Newsletter! This issue features the third part of Elwood's Physics series, a fascinating interview with Bubbagump discussing songwriting, home recording, MIDI, the music industry and Italian folk dancing, and a Circular Cyprian exercise in the effort to master something new.
It has been a busy month in the Audiominds community. The second Demo Recording contest was a tough one, with sixteen fantastic, diverse entries competing for The Hat. With the temporary loss of the Fasoft forums, we have been happily providing interim shelter to many of those wandering souls looking for a friendly place to discuss digital recording and just hang out. We extend a warm welcome and thank-you to all of those who have joined the Audiominds community this past month, and hope you will chose to stick around!
This month's winner is Gabriel Aulaga, with his entry, "El Diadera Ira." Congratulations! Special thanks to all sixteen (!) who entered into August's contest, and to everybody who took the time to download, critically listen and make the difficult choice of selecting only one out of many very fine recordings.
Gabriel's Gregorian Chant-influenced composition was initially inspired by a tragedy in Madrid, but is also offered in homage to the" victims of the 11th of September, and to all the victims of the most hideous of crimes, terrorism."
For a very thorough discussion of the unusual musical influences of this composition, check out the thread "Kudos to Gabriel and others" in the Music Review Forum.
The August Winners Circle
Chip Burke won the first monthly Audiominds Demo Contest with his entry, “Dreams.” The song was co-written in 2002 with Kristi Strauss, his partner in music and life.
Chip is 25, and presently employed as a systems engineer. He is a familiar contributor to the musician's forums at Audiominds.com and Fasoft.com, under the user name Bubbagump. Chip and Kristi continue to pursue their music, recording in their home studio and playing in the Columbus area. We caught up with Chip on the morning of Saturday, August 7, 2004.
AM: Congratulations on winning the first Audiominds Demo contest. That was an incredibly tight race. The top four songs were all excellent. What do you think put yours over the top in the end?
Chip: I can only really think of two things. First, Kristi's performance was pretty stellar on that song. Second, I think it had a good hook and was fairly pop sounding.
AM: Yeah... pop-ish, but with an incredible twist. You just don't hear that kind of singing on pop stations!
Chip: It was something folks probably hadn't heard before - pop and opera mixed like that.
AM: Who wrote Dream?
Chip: There is a bit of a story behind it. At the time, Kristi was being managed by India.Arie's management, and they were trying to get her on a major label. Those folks had never really heard her bust out the opera before. At one of our meetings, after some chiding, Kristi sang a little opera for them and they about fell over. Her manager told me that he thought that was a great gimmick, for lack of a better word, and we should get a demo together that shows that off. He was to meet with a few folks from Motown and Sony in a week or so to shop Kristi and he really wanted something like that in hand. So we went home and I started messing with ideas. I came up with the basic groove and progression and brought it to Kristi and asked if she thought she could do anything with it. She liked the idea. We sat down and hammered out a melody and song structure based on that original idea. She wrote the lyrics and we both tweaked them. I then went back with melody in hand and turned it into a final arrangement. This all happened in about 2-3 days time in the evening after work. We had a deadline to get the demo FedEx-ed to her manager before he left for New York City for these meetings. It was a long few days.
AM: What is the song about? I get the sense that it is a chastisement aimed at somebody or something in particular.
Chip: No. At that time, it was sort of the beginning of the end of the relationship with this management group. It was early 2002, and they were never behind the "product" as much as we had thought they should be. As with so many of these things, there was lots of big talking, but not a lot of big actions. So Kristi and I were faced with the reality that the few contacts we had in the music industry were not good, and that this dream she was chasing for years was probably not going to happen. Kristi moved to the US from Quebec specifically to chase this music dream of hers. She felt she had good songs and had a salable product. At this time, we were at the verge of things falling apart and essentially this song was our solace. It's not a bad thing to dream big, and if you do you owe it to yourself to chase those dreams. Otherwise, when you are old and gray, how do you forgive yourself if you never even tried to get where you wanted to go?
AM: Indeed. And there is always the question of who you are going to permit to define your success. Society is a fickle lover.
You mentioned in your bio (posted in the Audiominds forum) that you were recording full time and have worked with several major labels. This would be a dream come true for most musicians, yet the experience seemed less than satisfying in the end for you. How did you get into the labels in the first place? What did they demand of you? What happened in the end?
Chip: Just to clarify, we weren't recording full time. It was a weekend warrior thing, as it is with most folks. As for the labels, we never got far enough, and that was part of our problem with her manager. He didn't go to bat and beat on these people's doors as he should. We spoke with one of the producers from Boys II Men. We spent time with India's musical director and producer, Shannon Sanders, and wrote a few tunes with him. We never got face time with the labels personally. We did with some of the musical folks, and that was cool, but you knew they would have nothing to do with you if they couldn't make a buck from you. They were helping us out as a favor to the manager.
We learned quickly how cold a world that whole music biz scene is. We also learned that age and looks are as much an issue as the music. Kristi was 29 or 30 at the time, and a major objection we heard was that she is old... How many salable years of her looking good would they get? Yup, it's cold out there. I mean, I think Kristi is a hot momma, but when there is a line a mile long of girls 10 years younger willing to do the job, how do you compete? The music isn't the end all like we might like to think.
AM: No... it is a matter of packaging, and what they jam into that package often seems like an afterthought. But there are the exceptions.
Let's talk about the recording itself some. Where was this recorded?
Chip: This was recored in our spare bedroom which we use as our studio space. It is maybe 10x12 (feet).
AM: Describe the setup, please. Inquiring minds want to know!
Chip: Well, there wasn't much to it at that time. It has grown a lot since. We have no (sound) treatment in that room. Anything I know about treatment is from others studios I have been in and played around in. The basic treatment is a big hanging blanket and opening the closet behind the singer. That's it. I had poor monitoring then, just a pair of Roland MA8s, which are $79 monitors. We have a Yamaha W7 keyboard. Other than that, it was four walls, a desk, a few book shelves, and our PC.
AM: Well, you sure seemed to understand how to use what you had. From the recording to the mix, you have a really nice sound there.
Chip: For the contest, I went back and did a quickie clean up with what I have now. It improved a bit with those tweaks I think.
AM: Sort of a mastering session, or a full remix?
Chip: Kind of half and half. Teej was bugging everyone to enter, so I figured I might dig through our archives and see what we could submit. I thought “Dream” was as good as any, but had some weirdness. I didn't knew half what I know now, maybe less, when I first did Dream. So I went back and changed the reverb on the vocals a bit, and tweaked volume envelopes so things would sit better with one another. I hit the multi band compressor pretty hard. The bottom end was mushy, the low mids were muddy, and the high end was razor sharp. I fixed that the best I could in maybe an hour the night I posted the song.
The big problem I had was that I originally did this on a PII, and that machine was grunting under the strain of so many tracks. Some things were mixed down together and I only could change it with compression and EQ. Maybe I had drums mixed with a synth in a file, for example. The volume fader can't help you here much. And of course, being a dope, I blew away the source tracks that were ping ponged down to save space on that old 5 GB hard drive.
AM: Ouch.
Chip: What I had left was a mish mash. Good thing someone came up with multi band compressors.....
AM: How much of this was played "live?" I know you are a self-declared “midi-holic.”
Chip: Well, MIDI was not my friend back then as much as it is now. I had the same laundry list of excuses everyone else has not to learn MIDI, or why it is a bane on society somehow. I could sequence a little bit, but back then I did almost everything live. The guitars are live, and I did that. The keys I played live. I think the only thing I sequenced were the drums.
AM: Was this recorded in n-Tracks? What did you use for drum sequencing? Did you use any special sample set or soundfont?
Chip: It was recorded in n-Tracks. I have never used much of anything else. I have played with ProTools, Nuendo, and a few others at friends' places, but for my personal work I always use n-Tracks. For drums, I used Cakewalk Pro Audio 9. I think in musical notation, and CWPA9 allows you to sequence using real notes on a staff. That's why I use Cakewalk rather than N for sequencing. The drums sounds are just a custom kit I built on our Yamaha keyboard.
AM: The live stuff - can you give us some specifics on how you were recording then?
Chip: You can hear there is a lot of keyboard in this. The bass, pads, and drums are all keyboard. To record them, I just ran a stereo line out of the Yamaha and into the sound card and recorded away. For the guitars, I used the POD... the original one. For that again, there was just a line out into the sound card. For vocals, we had one single mic at the time. When I got Kristi, she also came with a Shure SM7 - not a bad deal! These are the same mics they use in that studio at the Rock and Roll Museum and Hall Of Fame. So I ran that mic into the sound cards pres. I didn't have any other pres at the time. They aren't SoundBlaster pres; they are a step up. The sound card we have and have used since 1998 is an Emu APS which has built in pres and real balanced inputs. We stuck the mic on a stand, put Kristi's back to the open closet, and recorded away.
The fact she can project so well really helped in keeping the direct field to the mic saturated and kept the room sound down, providing a good S/N ratio. The SM7 is a dynamic mic, so she had to be close to the mic because our pres were kinda junky, so I could get a good amount of gain going in. That helped keep the room sound down a bit too. The SM7 is made for broadcast, so proximity effect is minimal despite it being cardioid, that kept the vocals from being boomy and muddy.
AM: You mentioned that when you recorded this, you didn't know a great deal about recording. What do you know now that would have changed the way you did things? How would you approach this song now?
Chip: Well, I wouldn't have bounced anything down now... Or at least not deleted the source tracks. I mean, you could always throw gear at the song, and maybe get an additional 5-10% gain out of it. The one thing I might change is the arrangement slightly. EQ can create space around instruments, but a good arrangement can go even further. There is a lot of stuff crammed into the same frequency space on that song, thus the muddiness I had to clean up with the multi band compressor. Had I changed where things were at a tad, I think there could be a bit more space in that song.
AM: How did you become so enamored with MIDI? Can you point to a specific event that changed your mind about MIDI, or was it an evolution? Why do you think there is such a common negative sense about MIDI in recording?
Chip: I think there is a common negative sense for MIDI for the same reason folks fear or dislike anything... ignorance. Folks have heard a million truely awful Casio or Wave mapper MIDI sequences, and they think that is what MIDI is. MIDI is not the sounds, MIDI is the tool to trigger those sounds. If you have a junky sequence and junky sounds, of course it will sound terrible.
Also, folks see all the buttons and knobs that come with MIDI and get intimidated. They think they need to learn MIDI all at once. We don't learn anything all at once. MIDI takes time and I think in the modern world folks expect McResults. Everything now. It has taken me 5-6 years to really get comfortable with MIDI. That is not instantaneous by any means.
What clicked for me to really pursue knowing it was a few things. First, I figured out that good sounds could be had. I too thought MIDI was what you heard come out of a $10 Casio keyboard or the 2MB soundfont set with the Live cards. I got my hands on a soundfont called DXSOrchestra, which was amazing. From then on, I realized it wasn't MIDI that was the problem, it was my ignorance and cheezy sounds. I mean, you can have a full 90 piece orchestra at your disposal 24 hours a day in your DAW. How can you not be intrigued by MIDI? 80% of every TV show and movie out is using MIDI strings plus whatever else. MIDI is a very powerful tool in the right hands.
AM: So if you were to record this today, would you do more sequencing and less playing, or perhaps play to MIDI and then tweak?
Chip: I would probably play to MIDI and then tweak. I have VSTis I didn't have then, and they may provide a different feel or texture. You hear Mac talk about auditioning sounds being a big part of getting a good sequence, and that couldn't be any more right. I would probably take the sequence and find what sounds really shine in the context of the song, and then tweak the sequence to work best with the sounds I had chosen. Having a sequence makes this process a whole lot faster.
AM: You posted a pretty comprehensive bio in the Audiominds forum, so I'm not going to ask you much about your history with music and with Kristi. In your bio, you go into how kristi sort of pulled you out of a slump and set you back on your feet...
Chip: Yup!
AM: Do you think you would be into music today if it weren't for Kristi?
Chip: Not in the same way. I would probably piddle around a bit. I have this amazing talent next to me all day long. I love to hear her sing. I get goose bumps sometimes when she is in the next room practicing Carmina Burana or some other piece for her choir. I really do a lot of this stuff as an excuse to get her to sing. "Hey, I have another song for you to sing over..." Also, she has gotten me into the whole Italian Folk thing. That consumes a ton of my time, but I love it. The Italian Folk has really gotten me into loving cultures and their musical traditions. From that you can see the lineage and influence folk styles have had on modern music. Anything from Heavy Metal to New Age has folk roots in some culture somewhere. Rock and Roll is essentially the modern mutation of Black folk traditions. Modern Country is a mutation of White folk traditions. You can often tie New Age to Irish and sacred traditions. We all got here somehow and the story as to how we did get here fascinates me. I never run out of ideas, because I can just go back to some piece written in the 16th century and hear something new and adapt it to today.
AM: It is an amazing thing to be able to be able to work with an incredible talent, but I like to think there is a synergy there too. We all bring something unique to the mix.
Chip: Good begets good.
AM: Do you co-write and co-produce most of your material? You describe yourself as the “tech guy.” How much of a role does Kristi play in the production end?
Chip: Well, there are usually two scenarios. Kristi locks her self in the bedroom and emerges a week later with song for me to produce. She usually doesn't have arrangement ideas. I don't know why. So I'll make a few mock ups and see which she latches on to and go from there. The other way is I find some little groove or progression I really like and go to her with my ideas of it says to me. She then will work up some melody and lyrical ideas. I'll take those and chop them up we go back and forth until we are both happy.
AM: But you are basically the guy at the board during the recording and in the end?
Chip: Always.
AM: What are you doing now as far as recording or performing? What are your plans and dreams for your music?
Chip: We have a band together playing our original material like “Dream.” But that presents a lot of challenges. If folks don't have a personal interest in the band or can't make money off of you, they don't hang around very long. Original music in Columbus, Ohio is not where you make much money. If we take home $20 each in a night, that is huge. We are very lucky that we have a guitar player who has great ideas and believes in the music. Bass players have been hard to hold onto. So we are trying to get that band going. Getting gigs is dead easy for us. We played out a few times and the buzz was there. We had gigs coming out of the trees at us. We just need a few musicians who are in it for the right reasons.
The Italian Folk thing also eats up a lot of time. Our local Italian Festival is coming up and I do a lot of the music for it and our performances. We are in an Italian Folk Dance group, (Think River Dance but Italian,) and we perform five or so times at the festival. Our show involves the dance and Kristi sings. It is a hoot, but a ton of work.
We also are working on a Christmas record. Kristi has a student who is an amazing talent and is a tenor. I am working up arrangements and will be recording them in duets for this record. It will be all MIDI orchestration and very classical sounding. This is a huge undertaking for me, because I have no orchestration knowledge or experience. We did some gigs with this guy last Christmas and we had a blast. He and Kristi really work off of each other well. I can't wait to get some of those tracks finished.
We hope to maybe get local distribution with this record as a charity thing - have it sponsored by some of the local radio or TV stations and Target or whatever and give proceeds to some charity. This would mainly be a PR thing for Kristi as a performer in town.
AM: Any final words for our "listeners?"
Chip: I think the big thing other than the obvious "Trust your ears" is to keep an open mind. Not only keep an open mind, but to examine yourself and ask, “Do I really have an open mind, or do I have prejudices I just choose not to see or acknowledge?” I find a lot of folks have very preconceived, rigid ideas as to what music is or isn't, what recording is or isn't, what good gear is or isn't. A Neumann is good, but it isn't always the best tool. You may love Metallica, but that doesn't mean polka is bad. We need to be flexible as home musicians and not think ourselves into boxes. It used to be you had 20 studio guys at your disposal and they all had their own take on things and could contribute amazing things you would never think of on your own. As home recordists, we do everything from start to finish ourselves a lot of times. Folks get into ruts easily and everything they do sounds the same. By having an open mind, listening to everything and anything, and trying to find what redeeming things exist in that music that can be applied to your situation, folks can avoid sounding like just another guy. There is nothing new under the sun in music. An octave is an octave, and a verse is a verse. We just need to find ways to make it new and interesting for today, and looking around at the rest of the world is a great way I find to keep me fresh. I've never heard Bulgarian yak yodelers before, but how can I adapt what they do to my music to make it unique and fresh? Be curious and see what else is out there. Listening to your Paul Simon CD for the 100th time won't tell you anything new.
AM: Well, I really want to thank you for taking the time here this morning. I have heard something about the next Audiominds trip meet being to Columbus, to this amazing little home studio where they serve the most exquisite meals...
Chip: Heh, just make reservations. Not to be cockey, but Kristi and I can cook. I mean we can COOK. We are total food nerds.
Chips and Kristi's winning entry can be found linked in the Audiominds.com forum, along with Chip's bio. Kristi Strauss's website is
www.KristiStrauss.com
The Physics of Oscillations and Waves - Part 3 (A Cretean gig)
Welcome to the third installment of our physics series, this time live from Sissi on
the Island of Crete (in Greece). The last time, we learned about one of the most
important elements of accoustics; the speed of sound. We also learned how to use it in real-life recording situations. I hope you played around with the numbers and made yourself familar with them, because this time we'll dig into that knowledge and install some speakers for a gig. But before we do that, we should tune the guitars.
Approaching the stage, we notice many guitars and many speakers. The reason for so many guitars is easy enough to figure out, but why are there so many speakers? By the end of this, you'll know what the engineer was thinking.
Tuning stringed instruments with your ears isn't as hard as it sounds. What happens when two sound sources are out of tune? Assuming the easiest case, both sources produces sine tones. The following figures show screenshots from a Windows application I wrote for demonstrating.
This figure shows two perfeclty in tune sound sources. We all know that sound is
additive, so the resulting sound features an equal frequency but stronger amplitude.
What happens if the sources are out of tune? There are several cases to consider:
The frequency of one sound source is k times the frequency of the other with k being any integer. (e.g f1 = 110 Hz and f2 = 440 Hz)
In this case something called "overtones" are created. You can calculate the overtones of any frequency this way:
fo = k * f ; k e N [Hz]
k e N (read: k element N) means that k is taken out of the natural numbers. Natural numbers are any numbers above zero without decimals. There's nothing else to be considered when dealing with overtones.
The frequency of one sound source is any other frequency. (eg. f1 = 200 Hz and f2 = 723 Hz)
The plot looks totaly weird, but it is not hard to understand. The only things you can hear are two different tones, as long as the frequencies don't come too close
together.
The frequencies are nearly the same. eg. (f1 = 440 Hz and f2 = 450 Hz)
This is the most important case so far. The resulting sound will sound somewhat
chorusy (chorus is still something else though. Chorus changes the frequency
difference back and forth over time) which is often describbed as "floating sound". While the plot still looks wired enough one can clearly detect the spots where the amplitude stays close to zero for a certain period. To detect this one needs a little bit of practice. After hearing it often enough, you'll recognize that the whole sound seems to get louder and quieter again and again.
The frequencies even get closer eg. (f1 = 440 Hz and f2 = 442 Hz)
This case is even more interessting. Now the nulls are easy to see and hear.The sound smoothly fades out and in. The closer the frequencies match the longer the fades take and the less often they occur.
The frequency of one source is far deeper than the frequency of the other. (eg. f1 = 5 Hz and f2 = 440Hz)
Ok, I admit this case doesn't have much to do with tuning instruments since not even all electronic synthesizers are capable of producing sounds as deep as 5 Hz, but serves as a great illustration. We see that the resulting wave is a perfect hybrid of both. It is almost impossible to hear this, but the oscilloscope reveals what is going on.
Given the information above, you should be well prepared and now know how to master the guitar collection on the stage. Unless you have perfect pitch, you'll need one external reference tone in order to tune the first string of the first guitar. Perhaps you look over to the keyboards and remember how someone told you that an 'E' is the white key after the two black keys. You hit the key and simply try to match both instruments as close as possible (For practicing, it's ok to assume the first string is in tune and just go from there). While contemplating all the guitars, you remember the audiominds.com newsletter and the examples of possible out-of-tune-cases. The important one is when both frequencies get closer and closer.
When the first string is tuned, taking care of the rest is not too hard. Just play the
note of a string on the next lower string (e.g. playing the 5th fret on the B string)
and pluck both strings together. If their frequencies resemble anything like an
interval, start adjusting the B string until they are close. When they start approaching the same frequency, start listening for the "beats" - the spots when the sound starts to fades out and in. The closer the frequencies get, the longer the fades take and the less often they occur. If you've overshot your mark, they start to appear more often again. Process the other strings the same way. Similar techniques can be adapted for any other stringed instrument. (Tuning a piano is an art unto itself because of the "stretch tuning" involved, so you won't want to try tackling one based on this information!)
(A link to the software I wrote for creating the figures is provided below this
article)
...
Ok - the guitars are tuned. Time for a break, because now the real hard work begins: setting up the speakers. (You really should set up the speakers first and then tune the guitars! --Ed. ) Before we start breaking our back, it would be best to use our brains to figure out where to put them. Some simple, easy to remember rules will help here:
Nearfield, farfield and Garfield ;-)
Each accoustic source features a so-called nearfield and a farfield. For speakers,
this is easy to understand. Most cabinets use several individual speakers to reproduce different frequency ranges. The simplest ones may contain only one driver or might feature a bass speaker known as a "woofer" and a smaller high frequency only driver called a "tweeter". 3-way systems add an additional speaker for the high mid band. An easy rule of thumb says that the border between nearfield and farfield is as far away from the speaker cabinet as its height. So if it's 12 ft high, 7 ft long and 9 ft deep the farfield begins 12 ft away from it. The difference between nearfield and farfield is that the listener always is closer to one cone than to any other in the nearfield. Depending on the position, the sound and frequency content always changes in the nearfield. In the farfield, the sound of all cones combines well enough for the sound to not change too much at different listening positions. In most live situations, this is a given for the vast majority of all speaker installations. For mic'ing an instrument it's good to know.
What Mr. Haas got to do with it
Mr. Haas had an interesting thought, which is today known as the Haas-theorem. Our brain locates a sound source by the direction from which it is first heard. If you listen to someone who's talking to you from the right side, you can hear him with both ears. But because the distance from the narrator to your left ear is greater than the distance to your right ear, it will take longer for the sound waves to reach your left ear than the right. So your brain thinks: "Hm, the sound reached the right ear first, so the sound source must be on the right side. The sound is also louder on the right side. No doubt the source is on the right. Wait, what was he talking about?".
If you like, you can do a little test with a friend or someone from your family. Have him or her sit between two speakers or put headphones on. All they need to do is to tell you from where the sound comes from. Take two identical signals, (like someone talking,) and hard-pan it left and right. Then make the left one louder but let the right one start a few ms in advance. Most people will say that the source is coming from the right.
Back to our gig and the pile of speakers: It's very important that the audience will
always have the impression that the sound is coming from the stage. We also want to put at least one pair of speakers in the rear of the room in order to compensate for the bad accoustics. If the room is large, we could also put a pair of speakers in the middle of the room and so on. To make things simple, (and because it's only a medium-sized room,) we install four pairs of speakers; one in front of the stage and one in the rear of the room. This is a nice installation because it allows for keeping the volume down and avoiding many problems like mic feedback, too many undesirable echos and angry listeners who can't stand the volume.
But we're not done yet. Everything is fine for the listeners in first half of the room
who is nearer to the stage than to the rear. But everybody else will hear the sound
from the rear speakers prior to the sound from the stage speakers. It's not a good
sign if the drummer starts the greatest solo of his life and half of the audience
turns their heads. So we have to compensate for those time alignment differences. Even the most far away listener in the room must hear the sound from the stage prior to the sound from the rear speakers. What needs to be done is simple. Last month, we learned how to calculate the time it takes for the sound waves to travel a given distance.
Today we'll use those formulas in order to calculate how long it takes for the sound
waves to reach the back of the room. Remember, the formulas read:
v = 331.4 + 0.6T [m/sec] with T being the room temperature in °C
t = d/v (time equals distance divided by speed)
Because most Americans are more familar with inchs, feet and Fahrenheit, here are the same formulas with Imperial units:
Inch -> cm: CM = IN / 2.54... [cm]
cm -> inch: IN = CM * 2.54... [in]
feet -> metre: M = FT * 0.3048... [m]
metre - > feet: FT = M / 0.3048... [ft]
If you want to be very accurate and have enough time, you can make very precise calculations using these formulas, but be adised to be on the lookout for "metric creep" if you convert to inches using the above constants.
I hope you didn't forget to tape that small paper on your console which reads:
346.4 m/sec = 1136.48 ft/sec
This is the avarage speed of sound in a room where the temperature is controlled for human comfort. For our purposes, those numbers and the formula
t = d/v
will do the trick. Let's say the room is 10 ft long. Then we would calculate:
t = 10 / 1136.48 = 0.008799... sec = 8 ms.
8 ms is the time it takes until the music to be heard everywhere in the room. Because of the Haas-effect, we have to introduce a delay of at least 8 ms to the rear speakers. But 8 ms wouldn't be a good delay time, because both the sound of the stage speakers and the sound of the rear speakers would be heard at the back of the room at the same time. We want the sound from the stage to arrive slightly sooner, so we increase the delay to maybe 10 ms or even more. One has to consider that we're dealing with a simplified situation. In real-life, the speakers can be located way above the ears of the audience and so it would take different times for each speaker to reach listeners.
In that case, one could use the Pythagorian Theorem in order to calculate the
hypothenuse of an orthogonal rectangle. (a˛ = b˛ + c˛ where a is the hypotenuse and b and c are the remaining legs.) The result of this calculation would be used for our t = d/v formula. Unless there is good reason, though, it probably isn't worth the effort. Simply add a few ms to the delay and try it out until it sounds intelligible. Listen for the clarity of sibilants. That's still the best way to do any accoustic engineering, because your ears must be the final judge of the results.
A Circular Exercise In Circling Back To The Question
I know this guy, let's call him "Bob", age 31 years old, he's finally discovered the Blues. No, not the my-life-went-flush-but-I-am happy-blues kind of blues, his discovery is the real music of Charley Patton, Son House, and Howlin' Wolf. And, the connections to music are becoming more apparent in the group lexicon of the music he likes, Jazz, Rock and Bobmuzik.
The battle to get him to check out the Blues was a long one. Seriously, from our sophomore year in high school to about a month ago, his concept of the blues came based upon the empirical evidence of seeing a few lousy local blues bands grind out the 12 bar ugly with the I smell poo-poo faces to match. Then God bonked him on the head, and the rest is all about conversion of concept, analysis of new information, and the synthesis of same.
Oh, if our Bob only had a handy tool like the wonderful dbpowerAMP Music Converter (check it out. Good to have in every studio's arsenal. And, it's free. www.dbpoweramp.com). No, his option finds itself limited to the human mind and it's subset of tools. Records are being listened too, books are being read, questions are being asked. The eyes, ears and tongue (he likes to lick his CD's) are all in play. Glance at him now, and you will find a head percolating with knowledge. Notice how the quivering deflects the light. Yes, that is Bob learning!
We are all like him in certain way, sifting through the great vats of information trying to answer one question after another. The thing we got going for us, we have the Internet and an abundant amount of available sources. You want to find out about an artist? Google it. You want to find out about XY or MS mic'ing? Google it. You want to hear a recording of exemplary recording technique? Amazon it! Still confused about something after looking at the available information? Ask about it on the AudioMinds forum.
Now, if you look at the above order, you see a pattern. I call it the "Mr. Naumann's Mystical Journey From Chaos To Understanding" circle. A real question causes a chaotic moment in your world. The recognition of the existing chaos leads to the formation of the "why" question. You want the answer, but before you can ask the question, you need to understand what you are asking. To understand what you are asking, you need to formulate a specific question, example "Why does my ____ suck/doesn't work/won't coo words of encouragement on command?" doesn't cut it. You need to ask yourself some specific questions here. Why does my ____ make that weird whooping sound and then blurp? That's a question. Now, check your prior knowledge. Any prior experience dealing with whoops and blurps before? No? Okay, now research it. Google up whoops and blurps. Check out some books about whoops and blurps. Find any information? Okay, you found some information about blurping coming from a twill dilated da'oodal quotient. Still, where comest this whoop thing? So now is the time to check a group of seasoned experts. Post it on the forum, "Why do I make whoop?" And give some details, including what you now know about blurp. This prevents long helpful answers about blurp when you now know everything about blurp, it's whoop you want. Hopefully, you'll get a definite answer Ala "You whoop because of a dextrose equivalency imbalance on the aft port thruster, turn your bike lock to the 12 'o'clock position and punt." Or, you might get some information and must start the circle again to find out more about how to de-whoop yourself.
So let us look at the total of the concept here: 1. Experience pain and chaos. 2. React to said pain and chaos, start formulating questions. 3. Compare P & C against prior knowledge and experience. 4. Use available sources to research you P & C issue. 5. Analyze what knowledge you have, process it, and try to make sense of it before attempting to apply it to your situation (ie. synthesis). 6. Still more questions beyond the primary sources? 7. Seek out experts that you can ask your exact question. At this point the question should be less P & C and maybe a little more PITA. Pay fee for re-admittance, enter to the left and this dance may or may not be chaperoned.
Did I loose some of you yet? Bet you wished I just told you about how you should really be listening to Son House's "Father Of The Delta Blues" album. Well, drop me an e-mail, and I'll give you the directions to Bob's apartment. Just watch out, his head has been making this whooping sound which is almost always followed by a resounding blurp.
Until next time, when words will come back to haunt me,
Cyprian Alexzander
Audiominds.com, its site content and its newsletter are copyrighted material
of this web site and the appropriate authors. Please contact us for redistribution rights.
