Kyle and Briana

the return

2008-10-08T13:53:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been almost a year since either of us has posted on this site.

I just spent my first night in the new apartment. Our furniture hasn't arrived yet, but the place has great potential. The layout is a little weird, but I'm looking forward to decorating. We never really did much with the place on Maui.

Rupert is settling in. He handled the travel much better than I expected; hardly made a peep the entire time. And I know it was seriously unsettling for him. He's had so many changes to deal with over the last month. This morning he's been following us around the house as if he's afraid we'll both disappear somewhere.

I'll try and keep up some (more) regular updates. It'll be a nice break from my job search, which begins tomorrow... dun dun duuuuun :O

Yea yea

2008-01-17T16:25:00.000-08:00

So I know i dont post much. So heres an update.

Lets see.. snorkeling on Christmas. That was fun but cold. It was a bit windy and the sun was hiding... the tourists didnt seem to mind... I guess we are just wimps

Then we went out surfing this past weekend. That was a ton of fun, until it got wind blown. There were a few turtles who came and hung out while we were surfing. That was a ton of fun. I'm still a little sore tho, but it defiantly felt nice to get out an do stuff. Oh and we had some epic badmiton going on.

There is free badminton up in Makawao every other Monday. So ive been trying to go to that when i can. Lots of fun... laid back and stuff. And they provide all the equipment. Fun stuff.

Neverwhere

2007-12-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

I just finished the above novel, an adaptation of a BBC series by one Neil Gaimen; an author known best for his graphic novels. What a strange and round-about way of doing things. A writer of graphic novels takes a television series and makes it into a book. It's nearly as strange as the story itself.

However, I really enjoyed it. There's a very quirky sense of humor and a dark irony running through the whole, and while certain elements are certainly well established in literature already (gawky man becomes unwitting hero completely against his will) the characters are unique enough unto themselves to make it interesting. There are times where his humor borders on the unbearably corny, but having seen the first episode of the BBC series I can see why. (It must have been an awful struggle to beat the corny out of it. I don't recommend the show unless you're in for that kind of thing.) The book was involving, and an easy read too, a perfect chapter-by-chapter bit to read before bed.

It makes me want to go and find his graphic novels, which I've heard have won all sorts of awards and "done for graphic novels what Shakespeare did for the play." That is, he's brought them properly into the realm of 'literature.' And I do like Shakespeare ...

You may have also seen one of Neil Gaimen's other works floating around. One of his other novels, Stardust, has been made into film (rather than the other way around... how boring) I've heard it is also very good, though not as dark as most of his other work.

Rain, Rain Go Away

2007-12-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

Well, the winter season has started in earnest here on Maui. We had brownouts all Tuesday evening, and then Wednesday morning the wind started. 50 mile per hour winds through the valley, coupled with torrential rains. On North Kihei Road no less than 8 power poles toppled over barely 20 minutes after myself and a group of my crew left, soaking and muddy, from the farm there. They closed the road, and it's still closed this morning. By the time we got back to the offices at 9:30am the power was out all over Kihei.

The power went out in Haiku as well shortly after I got home, but was on again in about 2 hours, though we've still been having brown outs. On my way to work this morning my boss called to let me know that while the power finally went on in Kihei at about 8pm last night, it was out again by 9. The road in front of our farm is still blocked off, and as I was talking to him I was approaching the side road I usually take down to the valley. It was also closed. I'll have to wait and see if the samples we had frozen in our -80 freezer survived the power outage. Maybe this will convince someone to finally put in a generator for our lab.

At this point I was going to add a link to the Maui News, but it appears that their servers are down now as well. When I checked this morning for news on the power situation in Kihei they they hadn't been real clear, but it did describe some of the carnage all over the island. There was a mudslide on the North end that carried a house off of its foundation, and two people in another home had to be rescued from their roof by helicopter. In Kihei there's been substantial flooding, and on the Big Island on the Kona side they're having problems with fresh water sources being compromised and water lines busting. Power's been spotty all over the place.

Luckily we're pretty cozy up here in Haiku, aside from the occasional break in electrical service and the fact that we had to close a few of our windows for the first time in months it's been fine. And it's still not snow and ice ;)

Nightmare Before Christmas + IMAX + 3D = Win

2007-11-12T09:55:00.000-08:00

So this past weekend was pretty darn awesome. Bri flew out to San Diego (oh by the way I'm out in San Diego for work at the moment for a few weeks). She got here Thursday night.

Friday we went to a Stars concert at the house of blues. That was pretty cool. Good show, good times. We ended up getting downtown a bit earlier than expected so we had some time before the show in which we decided to go have fun in a hat store, which was quite possibly the highlight of the evening. Bri ended up getting a hat at which point we proceeded to the concert. Kind of an interesting crowd at said concert... there were some pretty die-hard stars fans there.

We got home pretty late and crashed.. and slept in.

We woke up Saturday and Allen took us out to Dim Sum. As usual we ate too much. We then proceeded to the San Diego zoo and spent all afternoon there. We got quite a few pictures which will be posted... at some point... tho unfortunately the camera battery died half way thru. Afterwards we went out to a Cuban restaurant for dinner, and again ate too much. Grabbed some coffee and then proceeded to the movie theater to go see Nightmare Before Christmas in IMAX 3D goodness. I sang along... because you have to.

Sunday we got up, ate a light breakfast and headed to the climbing gym. Turns out its pretty close. Climbed for a good few hours... until our arms were so sore could barely open doors anymore. Afterwards we met up with Allen for a late lunch at an Indian restaurant. We went to Fry's to geek out and coffee and then headed downtown to an Irish pub thing for some food and music. Sundays they have some Irish dancing, and then afterwards they have a really good session.

All in all, a great, but exhausting weekend.

On music distribution and dinosaurs

2007-11-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

Obviously digital music distribution is a big deal for someone like me on multiple levels: as a music lover, a musician and a geek. Now I'm sure I could go into some huge post about my thoughts and feelings about it all but instead, I'll just direct you to this link

Enjoy

Living Vicariously through the interwebs

2007-10-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

Found this site and thought it was worth sharing.
God bless the internet.

I always find webcams to be sort of odd. What is it that people find so fascinating about watching other people who don't know they are being watched? Its kinda stalker-ish I guess. I mean webcams have been around for... a LONG time, but this sort of collection is... well kinda crazy.

Which brings me to a point, if I have to have one. Seems to me that the trend on the internet is to group EVERYTHING. We have this sort of collection mentality. This is a perfect example. We used to be able to download songs... now we download full albums. We don't download episodes, we download entire seasons of tv shows. Just look at places like youtube... One site for pretty much any video clip imaginable.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but I felt like I had to write more than just the link.

Surfing

2007-10-01T16:36:00.001-07:00

So I got out surfing this past weekend for the first time in..... months. Not too bad, tho im out of shape. Went out with a friend from work who just started. He just bought a board (a really nice one too) so hes been looking for people to go with while he learns how to surf. Good times. Except for that I forgot sunscreen, so my face is a bit red and ouchy.

Then we ate at Pita Paradise.

I also got a lot of cooking done this weekend, including white chocolate covered pretzels. And today they are supposed to put in a new stove because our oven broke. So yay for yummy foodage.

ah, People

2007-09-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

So I was driving to work yesterday, and there... there on the corner, sitting on the curb in Paia was a man, long gray hair, scruffy old hippy looking guy, full on eye patch, barking at cars.
Great way to start the morning.

What a strange day

2007-09-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

So... yesterday i was sitting at work, minding my own business listening to music and whatnot, and i kept hearing a weird noise. Sounded kind of whiny or something. At first i thought it was someone playing on their computer having weird noises come out the speakers or something, but it continued for a while. I almost made a snide remark about "Who let the baby goat loose in the office" as thats kind of waht it sounded like, but lots of co-workers have children and i didnt want to offend someone if it was their kid making the noise or something. Finally I checked it out...

Turns out, it WAS a baby goat.

One of my co-workers adopted this baby goat as a pet.. and had brought it into the office and tethered it up in one of the cubicles. Strange. Adorable, but strange.

A good book to listen to

2007-09-13T20:59:00.000-07:00

My commute is ~40 minutes each way, so I've taken to listening to books on tape during my commute. (With the occasional language tape thrown in there every once in a while... problem is I can't make up my mind which language to learn. Anyway...)

A friend recommended I try something by Terry Pratchett. The local library happened to have one of his books on cd, "Going Postal" so I checked it out. It was very good. The main character dies in the intro, and there is a wit and sense of irony throughout. It's not high class literature by any means, but it's a fun story and just right for listening to while driving. I laughed out loud in my car on several occasions.

Another book I found on cd at my local library was "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman. Some of you may recognize this as a soon to be movie. It was a good listen as it maintains a sense of movement and action all the way through. It is a little strange, as it is part of a trilogy, and while in many ways its a self contained story, you get the sense all the way through that there's a whole other part of the story that you are missing; that somehow the whole thing is only a set up for more interesting things. I suppose this could be good or bad, but as I haven't gotten my hands on the other books I don't know if the rest of the trilogy lives up to the sense of foreboding you get from the first. The other downside is this is obviously written with a more junior audience in mind. It's not... polished. As long as you understand that going in though you are free to simply enjoy the rather interesting world Pullman has created.

If you're interested in some more serious reading, I strongly recommend "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi. It's the biography of a female professor in Iran in the midst of the social and political upheaval of the 1980s there. It is excellent. I did not listen to this on cd =P

More toys and audio clips

2007-09-06T14:24:00.000-07:00

So yesterday the new audio software I ordered came. I am now the proud owner of the full blown version of Cubase4
They were running a summer special where you can upgrade from the limited edition that came with my mixer thing for waaaay cheeper, so i decided to go for it.

And in honor of the new fun, I decided to post a clip of some of the stuff Ive been working on:

So there ya go. Obviously its still a work in progress so a LOT is going to change. I appologize if the volume levels seem sort of weird. But I figured since i just spent a long time talking about all this stuff, it was time to show that i DO actually use it.

Enjoy

The Home Studio - Chapter 5: The Computer part 2

2007-08-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

Ok so this has been way too long since i posted. Sorry.

Anyway, on with it. Today I'll be talking about audio plugins.
Plugins are little bits (and i say little, but that really isnt necessarily the case.. some plugins are upwards of 50 gigs) of program that enhance the functionality of a host program. They are not designed to exist on their own, but to modify and extend a parent program. This isnt just with audio software but with many differnt types of programs. Web browsers are common host for plugins. Things like flash and quicktime and realplayer all have plugin components that let you watch videos, play music etc from within your browser. Media players are another common target for plugins to allow you to play different types of files. Most of this is handled under the covers and you dont necessarily know its there. Plugins are great cause they allow third party vendors to enhance your programs. With the audio stuff, I can even write my own plugins for it.

So Im here to talk about audio plugins in specific. There are a couple of different formats, but the main one.. and the one i use are called VST plugins. VST stands for virtual studio technology. There is also a VSTi where the 'i' stands for instruments. Which leads me to the two types of VST plugins you have:
1) Effects
2) instruments

First of all effects. Effects are designed to modify the sound. So you record a clean signal coming in, run it thru an effect and get a modified sound coming out. Now the software comes with a bunch of built in VST effects, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other effect plugins out there. Common effects include Echo, Chorus, Reverb, Flanger, Distortion, Rotary Speaker, Vocoder, etc. Basically all those guitar pedals only done in software. You can see some of those in the pictures. So say I record a vocal track. I want to add some reverb (a very common thing to do) I just load up the reverb plugin, adjust the knobs and away I go. Now the plugin has not acutally changed the original recorded sound file. So i can tweak and tweak, maybe swap it out for a chorus plugin instead. The only time it actually changes stuff is when I compile the whole song down to the single file.

Now, of course you can do even more. You can string together multiple effects to create really weird sounds. Send your voice thru distortion then a flanger. Or whatever. One thing I like to do, is take a midi sound of something... normal, like a wood block. Now the woodblock doesnt really sound like a real woodblock, but whats fun is to take it, play it about two octaves too low, and add some reverb and flange to it and mess with the EQ a bit. Now you have something that sounds like an echoy tonal drum percussion type thing. It sounds neat, and not at all like anything that really exists. Id also like to point out that you can apply plugins to as many or as few tracks as you want. Assigning reverb to a vocal track and distortion to a guitar track is an everyday type occurrence. Then maybe after that you want all the tracks to have a flange effect, its all possible.

Next up we have VSTi. Instrument plugins. Basically, an instrument plugin doesnt modify an incoming sound, it simply produces one. There are sort of two types of instrument plugins. Samplers and synths. Synths produce sound using some sort of an algorithm. Take a sine wave, add overtones, add some sort of effects, modulation, etc and produce the sound. Samplers use pre-recorded sounds and plays them on queue. The grand piano plugin i talked about in a previous post uses sampled grand piano sounds. Now sampling is where you start getting into those really huge plugins, as you have to store all that information. For example, there is a grand piano plugin that samples every single key desperately on 3 different grand pianos, and not just once but multiple times at different loudnesses and plays them back corresponding to what you do on your keyboard. All those sound clips take up a LOT of space. Sampled sounds are great for when you want to emulate something you dont have. Like a piano, or a drumkit or something.

Now there is actually a specific piece of software called a sampler that lets you create your own. You record small clips of things (say a drum hit) and assign it to a key (say.. middle C) so then any time you press middle C on the keyboard, it sounds the drum hit. You can make them velocity sensitive, so the harder you press the key, the louder it sounds. You can also modify the attack, sustain, and diminish of the notes. So you can sample a flute. Then set the attack so when you press the key on the keyboard, you get the breathy attack a flute woudl have.. set the sustain in the middle, so it will just loop over the middle section of that nice stable tone as you hold the key down, and then the diminish, you can set it so it kinda falls off after you let the key up. Very handy.

The one downside about plugins is they can all add up. Most commercial plugins (especially the instruments) run $100-$400 or so, sometimes more. And if you are collaborating on stuff with someone else, you almost need to have the exact same set of plugins and things. The good thing tho, is there are many free plugins out there. Freeverb comes to mind as one of the best reverb plugins out there, free and opensource. And like I mentioned before, the plugin architecture is open, so anyone (including you or me) can write new plugins.

The Home Studio - Chapter 4: Keyboards/MIDI

2007-08-04T14:06:00.000-07:00

So who in their right mind would buy a keyboard that doesnt make any sound whatsoever? This guy. Thats right, the keyboard you see here doesnt produce any sounds. This may seem odd, but its actually quite reasonable when you think about the fact that a full blown computer can produce the same sounds as most keyboards and more. Plus it means i can keep everything in software which makes it easier to manage.

This is all accomplished through MIDI which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. What happened is.. several years ago when digital stuff started happening, some of the big wigs in the music biz started developing digital musical instruments. And they were like "hey... wouldnt it be nice if the stuff we made was standard? so I could use a Yamaha keyboard with a Roland module?" So they got together, drank some beers, ate some pizza and came up with the midi specification.

So midi consists of two parts really. You have a controller and a synth module. They are connected traditionally by a round cable. Its important to note that NO SOUND travels thru that cable... at all.

What happens, is you play a note on your controller (like my keyboard). The controller sends a signal across the cable that says things like "note Ab was played with a velocity of 73" and then when you lift your finger "note Ab was released". All sorts of note on, note off, how hard you pressed, overall volume, sustain pedal, information is passed over the cable as you play. Then what happens is some sort of synth module interprets that information, and produces the sound. Now in your normal casio or Roland keyboards all this stuff can happen internally, or you can add external sound modules to them. This lets you cycle thru it sounding like pianos, wind instruments, synthesizers, drums, you name it. And because the information is only stored as basically digital sheet music, you can easily switch instruments.

Id also like to point out that keyboards are the most common midi controllers, but not the only ones. Guitars can be fitted with midi adapters, so you can play on the strings but have it sound like a trumpet if you want for example. They make digital drum kits and drum pads. Foot pedals or even the EWI (electronic wind instrument) The ewi is a wierd little thing that looks like an interstellar clarinet. You blow into it, and put your fingers down like a normal wind instrument, but it takes that and produces midi signals instead of sound. How hard you blow changes the volume, if you bight down in can do some sort of vibrato. Kinda neat.

Now my setup is kinda slick. I have an m-audio keystation88, full sized midi keyboard with semi-weighted keys. It plugs into my computer with just one usb cable. Thats all i need. All the power and everything comes over that one cable. Also, it emulates a midi device in the software so i dont need to use a separate midi cable. My sound module is the computer software, so i dont need an extra external sound module. If I want to use one, i could, but right now, there is no need to.

Another interesting thing that came about from all this is when people started going "hey.. since midi devices are just transferring digital signals... what if we dont interpret them as notes, but something else" This is actually what my mixer does. When i move a slider or push a button it sends a midi signal to the computer. But instead of interpreting it as notes and playing sounds, it interprets them as "oh hey, he pushed the mute button, tell the software to mute" I can switch this stuff all around too. If i want my keyboard to control things, I can program it to do that. If i want my mixer to actually play notes... i can have it do that too... but that one isnt terribly useful.

So yea, I can mix both midi and regular audio in my recording. I often do midi drums and piano parts as well as other 'sound effects' and stuff. The nice part is it all says in the sheet music form right up until i export the whole song as a mixdown. Only then does it actually convert it all to sound data.

The Home Studio - Chapter 3: Microphones

2007-07-28T13:50:00.001-07:00

So here are the three microphones I own. There are two main types of mics, dynamic and condenser. The one you see on the left is a Shure sm58 dynamic mic and the two silver ones are Samson CO2 condenser mics, which came as a matched pair. (the CO2 was just fancy marketing and has nothing to do with the gas).

Dynamic and condenser mics differ in the way they produce sound. So first off, I'll tell you about the purpose of a microphone in general. So sound is basically areas of compressed air traveling along. The mic takes these areas of compression and turns it into an electrical signal. This electrical signal is then put thru a preamp, and an amp which then drives speakers to play the sound out louder. Or in the case of recording, it goes thru a preamp, and then an A/D converter (analog to digital) and stored on the computer. This is all accomplished thru my mixer.

So how does a microphone produce these electrical signals?

Well a dynamic mic has a thin diaphragm which moves when sound signals hit it (air moving, moves the membrane). This diaphragm is attached to a coil of wire suspended in a magnetic field. When you move a coil of wire around a magnetic field it produces current. And this is the electrical signal that gets sent down the cable to the preamp.

With condenser mics, similar idea, they have a thin diaphragm which is conductive that is suspended very close to a metal "backplate." A current is sent thru the diaphragm which basically turns the diaphragm/backplate into a capacitor. When air compressions hit the diaphragm, it causes it to vibrate, which produces varying voltages with this capacitor, thus producing your electrical signal. Now because of the way they work, condenser mics require a power source. This is often provided by the preamp or mixer and is called phantom power. Basically phantom power is a 48v power source that is provided right over the same microphone cable. So all you have to do, is plug in the mic, flip the switch to turn on the phantom power and away you go. Sometimes the power is provided by a battery inside the mic as well.
Note of caution: ALWAYS make sure phantom power is OFF when pugging or unplugging the microphone as you can damage the microphone if the power is on.
Also note that having phantom power on the line of a dynamic mic wont hurt it. It just gets ignored

So dynamic mics dont need power, condenser mics do.

Because we are converting between a mechanical (moving air) and an electrical signal, the microphone is said to "color" the sound. This means that microphones (and really any part of the sound path) artificially change the sound in some way. It may add more bass, and sound boom-ier, it may make it sound dull. It may give it an extra snap or something. Different microphones will all sound different, and its up to the studio engineer to deal with these sorts of things. Sometimes you want a perfectly 'flat' response (where the microphone doesn't artificially enhance any one frequency over another). You want a flat response a lot on classical instruments, acoustic guitar comes to mind, and sometimes on vocals. Now sometimes you want it to enhance the sound in some way. Its all a matter of choosing the correct mics (and adjusting the EQ in the software) to give you the sound you want.

Because of the diffrences, condesner mics tend to be more sensitive in the sounds it picks up, and also are more fragile. You generally see dynamic mics used for live concerts as they are MUCH more rugged. The SM58 is pretty much the standard vocal mic for live sound.
Condenser mics usually have a more flat response than a dynamic mic (at least the two types of mics have are certainly this way). I tend to use the condensers for most of the stuff I do. Accoustic guitar, vocals, flute, oboe, bodhran. I use the dynamic mic for the djembe, harmonica, and for micing guitar amps.

Most vocalists will use a condenser in the studio, usually a large diaphragm condenser like the Neumann u87. They say it tends to give it more of a warm and crisper sound (especially when paired with a nice tube preamp).

So here are a few examples I recorded this morning using the differnt mics. I didnt do any EQ or anything in the software other than adjust the volume levels so you can hear the differences. If i were recording these for a real song, I would go back in after and touch it up in the software to get exactly the sound I want.

So here is my acoustic guitar, using a dynamic mic:

Sounds alright, but to me sounds a little.. dull.
Now here it is again using the condenser mic:

Sounds more bright, and full. Gives a little more snap to the strings. I tend to go for this sound more.

Next I recorded some djembe (African drum).
First off, here it is with the condenser (aimed at the head of the drum, slightly off center):

Sounds pretty good... pretty close to what you would hear if you were sitting in the room. The problem with this way of doing things, is you get a lot of the surface noise of the head. You get the hands striking the head as opposed to just the tone of the drum head ringing. It also sounds sort of tinny to me.

With the dynamic mic I am able to put it right up inside of the djembe. Here is what that sounds like:

You hear that that has a lot more bass to it. A lot more oomf. It cuts out pretty much ALL the surface noise of the drum head, and just gives you tone. But it may be a little too much.

So one common technique is to double mic things. So here is what it sounds like if you combine the two (they were recorded at the exact same time anyway):

So that allows me to give it that nice fat boom tone by using the dynamic as sort of the main mic, but then i can add that sort of surface snap and higher end by turning up the condenser volume.

A lot of times you'll see duel micing with electric guitars. You stick a mic in front of the amp, but then you also run the signal directly out of the instrument or the amp into the mixer as well. This is done for a few reasons. The mic gives you more of the sound of the amp, and often the amp adds as much to a guitarists sound as his playing and his instrument. The problem is that if you are recording a full band at once, you might get other instruments leaking into the guitar mic. The direct line in gets you a cleaner sound. If you want you can then add effects and amp emulation to get it to exactly what you want (or when everyone else is gone, run the clean signal out the amp, and re-record it using a mic). It gives you a little more room to play around. Of course you can use one signal, the other, or a combination of both as you see fit.

Oh yea, micing a drum kit. Often times you use like... 5-8 mics on a drum kit. You usually have a dynamic either really close, or stuffed inside the bass drum, a dynamic for the snare, possibly one for each tom. A condenser up close to the hi-hat, and then usually 2 overhead condenser mics, sort of suspended above the whole thing pointing down. These catch a lot of the cymbal noise as well as the overall kit sound. This many mics allows you get adjust each drum pretty much indevidually. You can get the bass nice and big.. the toms they have a good solid tone, and get the snare nice and tight and snappy.

Alright thats enough about mics. There is a TON more you can talk about.. just in say mic placement alone, or some of the other types of mics... but its already getting long

The Home Studio - Chapter 2: The Mixer

2007-07-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

So, first off, I want to answer the questions people asked previously about the layering way of doing things. Yes My setup allows me to record a part, then record a second (third, fourth etc) while listening to any or all of the previously recorded stuff. I do have a sweet set of headphones I just got, AKG k240s if people are interested ( you can see them in the photos). A side note... Its actually pretty darn hard to do the layering thing. Its really amazing how much each member of the band interacts with one another. You almost have to record each part twice. So the first time thru, you record the most simple drum track.. even a stock drum machine. Then a basic bass part. then basic guitar. Then you go back, delete the drum track, and re-record the whole thing.. so now you can play along with the rest of the 'band' you have created. Then go back, re-record the bass, and so on. This generally yields a lot more of a... human result... otherwise it sounds too stock or something. Its not too bad if you record, say 2-3 people at once, then go back in and lay down some extra tracks, harmonies or whatever over it, But doing it by yourself is tough.

Anyway, now onto the mixer... with pictures:

So in the last section I told you about how all the software works for manipulating audio, but that still leaves the question of "thats nice, but how the heck do you actually get audio into the computer" And the answer is thru my mixer.
So here it is. It is a Tascam 1082 if people are interested. So this guy is my audio interface. Its basically a big fancy sound card. There are TONS of different audio interfaces out there... ranging in quality, price, how they connect to the computer, how fancy they get, numbers of simultaneously inputs and outputs.

So if you check out the back view, you can see all the connections on my mixer. First of all, its a firewire interface. For those who dont know, firewire is sort of like USB only faster. It uses a 6 pin cable that attaches from the back of the mixer, to the firewire port on my computer. ALL the audio is transfered over this one cable. My mixer has 4 mic inputs and 8 1/4 in. inputs. The mic inputs are obviously for connecting microphones, and the 1/4 inputs are for connecting just about everything else, keyboards, running a direct line out from a guitar amp, the outputs of another mixer (say if i wanted to record someones live show, where they already had a sound guy with his own mixer). I can only use 8 inputs at a time, in any combination (the first 4 mic and 1/4 are actually the same input channel, its just a matter of whether or not it goes thru the mic preamp). You can also see, there are 3 outputs, 1 headphone output, and a left and right speaker output (studio speakers are generally referred to as studio monitors). So over this one little firewire cable, I can send 8 channels of better than CD quality audio to the computer, and 2 channels back to the mixer... all in sync, and all independent. So thats pretty much it as far as getting audio into the computer. I bring up my DAW software, plug in my mics and instruments, select which channels I want to record, and hit the record button. And away we go.

Now my audio interface is a fairly fancy one. All the sliders, and knobs and buttons and stuff are pretty much unnecessary. They all work to serve its second purpose in life, and thats to act as a control surface. So my mixer is really 2 products in one: an audio interface and a control surface. Generally these are seperate components. So the control surface has no audio inputs, and the audio interface only has inputs and outputs, no sliders and buttons.

So, what is a control surface?
Think of it as a very fancy mouse or keyboard. It basically controls the DAW software. In the previous post, you saw the picture of the software mixer, with all the sliders for volume of each channel. Well the sliders on the physical mixer directly correspond to the software ones. If I slide the physical fader, the software fader moves and the volume for the whole track is adjusted. If i take the mouse, and grab a software fader and move it, the physical slider will also move. Yup, thats right, the sliders are all motorized.

This is the cool part about digital recording too. With old school recording, you set all the volume levels before you record, then it all gets recorded to tape. If, afterwards you go "oh crap, i think the bass needs to be louder" then you basically have to play the bass track back off the tape, run it thru the mixer again at a higher volume, and re-record it. And of course doing so, you lose quality. With digital mixing, I record once, and then I can adjust the volume, eq, etc all at will within the software completely. It doesnt actually change the 'original' audio file until I save the whole project at the end.

So yea. Control surface. Also has your general, play, pause, rewind, record stuff. I can arm tracks for record, undo/redo functions, mute/solo tracks, and all sorts of good stuff right from the mixer. It even has 8 programmable buttons, so I can make them do whatever the heck I want. Currently Im using them for adding new tracks with one click, and setting up the metronome and stuff like that. Like I said before, all this is really not needed, you can get to everything in the software with mouse and keyboard, but it makes it a LOT nicer to work with. Its just nice to be fiddling around with my bass and go "ah, that was cool" and just hit the record button without having to search around for it. That and it also allows me to control multiple tracks at once. Its just a lot more intuative to grab a bunch of faders and start twiddling with them until you get the balance of the instruments just right.

And one more thing, before it comes up. Like I said before, its got 8 simultainious inputs, and you can see 8 faders (plus one for master volume). This does NOT mean, however, that im restricted to just 8 tracks in the software. I can record 8. Layer another 8 on top again. Layer, say 4 more on top of that, or whatever I want. The mixer defaults to controlling just the first 8 channels (when being used as a control surface). But if i want to control the next 8, i just hit the 'bank' button and im controlling the next 8, and so on. So i can control as many tracks as i want.

I was going to talk about different audio interfaces and do a sort of "if you want to get into recording" section, but this has gotten a bit long, So I'll save it for another post.

The Home Studio - Chapter 1: The Computer part 1

2007-07-22T16:26:00.000-07:00

So here is a screenshot of a typical session. I mentioned before the acronym DAW, which stands for Digital Audio Workstation. Everything I do is done digitally, as in, there are no tapes or reels or anything like that. This DAW software is at the heart of all the recording. There are many different choices for software, and they all act sort of similar so its mostly a preference thing. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, so the type of music you want to make generally plays into which one you choose (as well as mac or PC). Pro Tools, Cakewalk Sonar, Acid, Cubase, Logic, just to name a few. A good free open source one to play around with if you like is called Audacity. I happen to use Cubase.

In the screenshot above you can see there are two windows open. One is sort of the track view, the other is the digital mixer. So the track view you can see I have several tracks.. vocals, bass, guitar etc. Each one of these tracks is completely independent. I can mute each instrument individually, adjust the volume, the equalization, pan (how much is coming out of the left vs the right speakers) and other such things for each track without effecting all the other tracks. All this is accomplished through the digital mixer you see there. If i want to add... say a flute part, all I have to do is click add audio track, select the microphone input, and away I go. I just hit record, and all the previous tracks play back out the speakers while I am recording the flute part. If i dont like what I recorded... Just hit delete and try again.... Or just record over the top of the old one. If you want to, you could just keep adding vocal tracks, and build yourself a one person choir.

I'm going to kind of go off on a tangent here... about how songs are sort of constructed. There are kind of two ways of doing things. I'll call them layering and multi-part. In layering, you build the song up track by track. You record a drum track. Then go back, and record a bass line lets say on top of the drum track. Then you go back and record a guitar part. And keep going until you have your song. This is pretty much what you have to do if you are working solo on stuff (and what im doing most of the time). Now if you have a band you want to record, then you can set up all the instruments and singers and stuff, and record the entire thing all at once. Of course you can mix and match these two techniques. You can record a whole band... and then go back in and add, say another guitar part. Or whatever. When we recorded our jazz album, our Sax player couldnt be there, so we recorded the whole band minus him... just leaving space for him to solo, and he came in the next day, and recorded his parts.

The nice part about the software, is even when you are recording more than one instrument at the same time, they still remain independent in the software.

The softare is crazy powerful. Say, I record a drum part... and its 2 min long. I was doing good.. but i screwed up for a few seconds in the middle. Instead of re-recording the whole 2 minute drum part. I can just set 'punch in' and 'punch out' spots around the part that I messed up. It will play back everything normally... but as soon as it hits the punch in spot, it will switch to record, and then stop the record when it gets to the punch out spot. So you can just record over the few seconds and leave the rest intact.

The software even lets you edit the wave form by hand if you choose. You can copy and paste little bits here and there to reconstruct parts. Cut out some of the breath noises from instrument players or singers. When the cat knockes something over in the next room, and it goes 'crash'... you can just edit that part out without having to re-record the whole thing.

The software also lets you do some crazy stuff like pitch shifting and time stretching. Normally with audio, (think back to record players, playing a 33 rpm LP at 45 rpms) if you speed it up, the pitch gets higher, and if you slow it down, the pitch gets lower. Well the software is powerful enough where, you can speed stuff up or slow it down, without affecting the pitch OR you can change the pitch, without having to change the speed of the audio. Pitch shifting is really nice for when you hit one or two wrong notes in an otherwise good take. You can just move those notes back into place, and call it good, and it wont go off beat.

If you have audio already recorded, but it was just going a little slow, then you can use time stretching to speed up the song, without changing the notes. This all has to be done within reason though... If you try and change the pitch too much, or the time too much, you will start to notice it in the sound.

And finally... when you are done with recording all the parts to the song.. adjusting all the levels etc, the software serves one final purpose, and thats to combine everything, and save it as one single audio file.. which then gets put on a CD, or distributed as an mp3 or whatever.

The Home Studio - Intro

2007-07-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

So I wanted to give you guys an idea of how all this music stuff works and all the parts of the home studio and whatnot, so I figure over the next couple of days I'm going to try and write a post about each of the components that make up my home studio, and how it all fits together, complete with pictures. So here it is: (click the picture for a larger image)

The computer - part 1: DAW, the heart of the home studio
The mixer: how music gets into the computer
Microphones: no subtitle needed, but provided for continuity
Keyboard: All about MIDI
The computer - part 2: all about plugins
The cat: causing trouble again

Thats the basics of what I have accrued so far. So check back over the next few days while I go into detail about each of these. Post questions if you like, and I'll answer them as best I can.

Fun with Money

2007-07-18T00:32:00.001-07:00

So we took another big step into adulthood today. We met with a financial planner.

I tried playing with all of our finances myself. Read the book Aunt Carrie got us for our wedding. But I haven't been able to get past the basics of a 401K and a vanilla investing plan. I understand the basic concepts, but I have money fear... And it strikes deep into the heart.

A couple of friends of mine here in Hawaii both use the same financial planner through Primerica (financial planning company associated with CitiBank) They do a free planning ... thingie... and both friends highly recommended it, so this evening we sat down with our planner and laid it all out there. (As a side note, she came to us which was really cool.) She started off a little rocky. Like most citizens of the upcountry region she's a bit of a hippy and came off a little froofy. Phrases like "your financial house" in conjunction with "a solid financial foundation" tend to make Kyle cringe. Once she got past the canned spiel and started getting into things though it was actually really interesting. I might even venture to say *fun*.

Now that she's got all the goods on our financial situation, we'll be meeting with her again on Monday to see what she thinks and to look at a plan for investing. If we invest with Primerica she gets some kind of a cut on some of their services. If not, we strike out on our own. I'm actually looking forward to this in a way I didn't expect I could.

Of course, the possibility of watching my investments grow into substantial monetary gains... yeah, it's exciting.

Christmas in July!

2007-07-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

This morning I was complaining about the fact that the futon cover I ordered two weeks ago had not yet arrived. Not only that, but I got a really weird e-mail a week ago that said it was scheduled for pick-up by the US Postal service, but then never received an e-mail that it had been picked up, or what the expected delivery date was; nothing. Then this afternoon, lo and behold it's magically here. I have to say they have a very confusing system going on here...

The new cover is very nice. I was getting a little sick of the Southwestern print that came stock with the mattress. It was fine when it was in the computer room, but now that it's become the main piece of furniture in the living room it was more than time for something else. A little pricey for what I expected from a futon cover, but the quality is much better than the old one. It's also got lots of pillows now so you aren't leaning against the wooden arms.

That wasn't the only package though. Apparently Kyle couldn't wait for Christmas, so along with the futon was a package with my Christmas present. It's a cute little Canon Powershot. A nice small quick camera just for slipping in my purse. (The picture above was taken with said camera) It'll be nice to have for our trip to Austin next month. One of it's more endearing features is a very sensitive stability control. Very nice for people like me who are a bit on the twitchy side =P

Henson puppets rock!

2007-07-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've been told I need to post more, so this is my public service announcement:

Marking the 50th anniversary of Jim Henson Company, a sequel to the Dark Crystal is being released sometime in 2008 ...The Power of the Dark Crystal

I am a huge fan of muppets and puppets from the Jim Henson company. I am very excited about this movie, and you should be too ;) It's even more exciting that the original screen play writers and the original conceptual designer are doing the sequel. It also looks like they got the original voice actors for Jen, Kira, and Aughra (the witch-like character). I have faith that they will do a good job on this thing.

Pandora

2007-07-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

So, today I'd like to talk about pandora. Pandora is an online music radio (pandora.com) that customizes music to your tastes. Its a really sweet project pioneering music recommendation algorithms. You start by giving pandora the name of a band or song you like. It then creates a personalized 'station' based on what other things it thinks you would like. Then you give it a thumbs up or thumbs down on the songs, and it further refines its recommendations. The idea, is to discover new music you normally wouldnt have sought out. If you create a particularily great 'station' then you can share it with friends and stuff. Check it out

Pandora also puts out a podcast which is also worth checking out. (podcasts are sort of, periodic internet blogs... kinda like this one, only audio instead of text. Usually they have some sort of focus. You can subscribe to these thru iTunes or other players and it will automatically update when a new podcast is up) Anyway, the podcast is sort of a music101. These guys know quite a bit about music. They do a lot with different styles, how different drum beats are different, different recording techniques for vocals etc. Tons of good stuff in there for both music newbies and music pros. Lots of good stuff. Check it out at blog.pandora.com/podcast/

My car gets hungry

2007-07-03T13:35:00.001-07:00

So gas prices just dropped 13 cents yesterday. Yay we are down to $3.60 a gallon for regular. Joy. Gas is weird... it doesnt seem to fluctuate as much as other places... but when it changes, it makes big jumps. Well thats all for now.

More Music Goodness

2007-06-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

So, you may have noticed a change in the page a bit. Over on the right I have put up a music player. So far I have uploaded some stuff from my college jazz band Jaztec. I will be putting more up as I record songs and stuff hopefully.
So now you can have embedded music fun.

Electricity + Music = fun

2007-06-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

So apparently this is a tesla coil, that sparks at crazy high frequencies to generate the music. here is the description from the youtube page:

This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear.

So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a "long" piece of fiber optics.

What's not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it's firing.

This Tesla coil was built and is owned by Steve Ward. Steve is a EE student at U of I Urbana-Champaign. He and Jeff have been going to Teslathons, which is where they met.

It's been suggested that a good name for this coil would be the "Zeusaphone". "Thoremin" has also been mentioned, though personally I think we need Theramin type inputs for that.

To answer a few questions I've received, YES, someone did yell "Play Freebird!" after the first round of music.

Solution looking for a problem

2007-06-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

For those of you who dont care about coding.. you may want to skip this.

So the other day a solution was born that needs a problem to solve... generally you should do this the other way around, but the solution was just too damned cool.
here goes:

Say you have an array of function pointers funcArray[] and a number a


while(a != something){
     ret = funcArray[ret](a);
}

so in essence, the next function called is based off the prev functions return value and a value 'a' which may be modified by the functions. Bonus points if functions can add new functions to the array or swap the order of the functions in said array.

now... other than an obfuscated code competition, can anyone think of any use for this? the only thing i can think of would be some sort of real world type simulation where you might have multiple actions something can take (functions in the array) and you sort of step thru it in an unconventional way. Maybe the function order is a priority list or something and can be changed, say things like "eat" "sleep" "run around" and can reorder itself based on which function is most important at that given time... I dunno. Let me know if there are any other problems this may be useful for

Back on the Isle

2007-06-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

Made it back to Maui, though for the second time this trip my luggage did not quite follow me. I had to walk off my flight into LA only to walk straight onto the flight out of LA. Luckily there were quite a few of us on the flight from Chicago heading on to Maui, so they had held the flight. They didn't wait around to grab our luggage though. Last night they told me it was taking a later flight into Honolulu and would arrive on Maui this morning. Not wanting to drive back to the airport today I told them just to drop it off. Delivery guy was going to head out ~9:30am. It's now 1pm and I'm wondering if I shouldn't just have gotten off my lazy rear and gotten the bags myself =P Hopefully they'll show up sometime today...

Unexpected Visitors

2007-06-23T15:35:00.001-07:00

So the other day I got a really weird phone call saying the ship was coming in earlier than expected. Confused, I was, as I didnt remember ordering anything large. Anyway, then I figured it out. I have a friend from school (one of the Troupers (the improv group i was in)) who now works on large shipping boats... last i talked to him, he said he might be making a few trips out to maui on the boat.

So yesterday, we got together for a bit, and hung out at Kanaha beach park for a bit. Watching the windsurfers and kiteboarders. All in all a pretty fun time. Felt nice to get out to the beach too. So it turns out he'll be here for a day every couple of weeks. Kind of fun

Zoom! part 2

2007-06-20T23:14:00.001-07:00

So, by popular demand, pictures of Bri's fancy new car can be found here. Enjoy. These are pictures from before the bumper replacement, but you can still see how happy it is. (Bri's is the gray honda fit, for those who don't know)

The future is NOW

2007-06-19T19:13:00.000-07:00

So I came across this great site... with this gem of a picture. The site is all about what people thought the future might look like. Tons of fun stuff on there,from martini glass swimming pools to baby emporiums. Check it out

Pictures!

2007-06-19T00:12:00.001-07:00

So.. I have a picture site up and running... im not sure if i like it or not.. but we'll see. Mostly right now, its just what i had up before.. re-organizing and whatnot. making progress tho.

here ya go:
http://picasaweb.google.com/kjericks

Zoom!

2007-06-16T19:19:00.001-07:00

Well, most of you know of Bri's car troubles... as in.. getting hit right after we picked it up from the dealership

anyway, the bumper is finally fixed and back home and happy. and it goes zoom

Yay

2007-06-16T09:07:00.001-07:00

So I suppose I should start posting here again too. Just checked out the site myself, as I have been traveling for business and such the past week. Pretty nifty.

I'll post more later when I'm not totally beat from crossing the globe and spending 14+hrs a day in work conferences. I'm in NY now with the family so hopefully I can start sleeping again =P

New Toy

2007-06-16T04:46:00.001-07:00

So i got a new toy to play with... a lovely grand piano. Heres a sample i recorded:

So its not a real grand piano of course, just a new VST instrument (computer midi audio plugin) but darn does it sound good... we have come a LONG way since the old 'casio' midi stuff. So yea not really a song or anything.. just fiddling around

The cool part, is even tho its a meticulously sampled piano, its still considered a midi instrument. Which means, its real audio, hence why it sounds good, but I can still go in afterwards and fix errors, change the temp, add new parts etc just by notating it all on a staff.

well im off for now. But i suspect i'll be posting more on recording stuffs in the future

On linking

2007-06-12T12:09:00.000-07:00

So, the old link still works if you want, but its merely a redirect to this new link: kylebriana.blogspot.com so feel free to update your links and bookmarks and whatsits as this is the address that wont change and stuff.

First Post

2007-06-11T18:49:00.000-07:00

Okie dokie,

Its time to get a site back up and running... so... this should be golden now
It'll probably change around and such.. but... yea