Tiny Desk Concerts

It is rare to experience the kind of intimacy with musicians as can be found on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.  Different bands or musicians come in to this NPR studio, which is really more of an office space than a recording studio and perform a short concert.  The vibe is casual and relaxed, and tends to capture a side of the musicians that is hard to come by.  I only discovered these little jewels just a few days ago and have been glued to my computer ever since, watching such legends as Vic Chestnutt and Jim White, as well as underground eccentrics such as Dr. Dog and Thao Nguyen.  Genius idea NPR.

The one I have posted here is from my current favorite musician.  I discovered him about two years ago and it really pissed me off.  The album, Close to Paradise, featured the combination of electronic and beautiful, organic orchestrations that I had been trying to achieve.  The band I had assembled was talented but did not understand the idea.  Watson, essentially, beat me to it.  His next album, Wooden Arms, proved far more beautiful and strange and has become my current obsession.  This video shows the amazing depth of sounds that this band is able to achieve with just four musicians playing very standard instruments.  Enjoy:

Oryx and Crake (the band)

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally getting to a place where I have achieved enough separation from the recordings my band, Oryx and Crake, made a little over a year ago, to do some mixing. I tried to mix as soon as the recordings were done and quickly realized what a terrible idea this was.  I couldn’t hear but the mistakes, and even what was played well enough seemed to be too loud or too soft at any level I tried.  A year and a couple of rerecording sessions later I think I’m finally ready for final mix mode.  The problem, of course, is how close to the album I am.  I programmed the beats using Ableton Live, played the guitar, autoharp, piano, organ, and some of the guitar, and, most personally, did almost all of the singing across the songs.  You may be thinking that I should have known better to be mixing my own music… even at this late stage of separation.  But I’m going on in spite of this, and in spite of myself.  I love this music, and I’m going to make it match my vision, even if my vision has shifted a step (or a jump) from the one I had last summer.  Stupid… maybe, but I’m having a blast.

Check it out on myspace or facebook.  If you like what you hear, add us as a friend or fan.  I’m also getting back on the promo highway, and so I’ll be sending updates about shows and posting more mixes in the short run.

Traphouse Thriller

I had never worked on anything anywhere close to Traphouse Thriller.  So, when I was asked about doing the production sound for a thriller re-make featuring the rapper Chill “Wealthy” Will, I knew I had to do it.  The concept was good, if obvious, and the rapper had a great voice to boot.  But I have to admit that it was breaking out of my comfort zone combined with the fact that I had just moved to Atlanta and felt this was the proper first project to work on that really made me want to jump on board.  The production sound, it was decided, was not worth the cost (although watching some of the awkward production sound, I kind of wish they had splurged), and so I became an actor instead (That’s me getting chased by a machete-wielding crack-zombie).  All in all, a fun Saturday night.  Now it’s time to get back to my decidedly chamber-rock roots and Wii-mote wanking.  Enjoy!

Youtube Bandit

The idea of using sound clips from Youtube videos has come up no less than 100 times each quarter since I began teaching audio.  Although I am completely naive to the legality of this, I almost always indulge them with the one of the, I’m sure, thousands of ways there is to accomplish this.

Youtube videos are now saved as .flv (flash video) files.  In order to import these into most DAWs, you will first need to convert these .flv files into .mov files. The way I do this is using a Firefox plug-in called download helper.  You will need to download this at http://www.downloadhelper.net/.

You’ll see a yellow box to the left of the screen like this one below:

Click “Installation” inside the yellow box.

Follow the installation instructions.

Before download helper will work, you’ll need to restart Firefox.

One more plug-in you’ll need is a Quicktime plug-in known as Perian which allows you to open the .flv file you download from Youtube.  Go to this web site, http://www.perian.org/, and download Perian.  A lot of my students have forgotten to follow the entire download through to its end.  Don’t forget to click “Download Perian” on this screen:

Restart Quicktime.

Now go to the Youtube video you want to sample.  You will now see three dots next to any video that you can download via Download helper such as below:

Clicking the three dots will begin an automatic download of the .flv from Youtube.

The video will download directly to its own download helper folder:

The final step is to open the file using Quicktime.  If Perian is properly installed, the .flv should open in Quicktime with no problems.

The file will open in Quicktime.

Next, simply export the file.

The file will default as a .mov.  Save the file to a convenient place and import the newly formed .mov to Pro Tools or whatever DAW you’re working with.

Sample away.

Creating an ADR three beep

To create a three-beep, start by creating a mono Aux track and a mono Audio track and inserting a signal generator onto the Aux track.

Use a bus to send from the Aux track to the Audio track.

Use the signal generator to create two 500 kHz sine tones and a 1 kHz sine tone that are each 50 to 100 milliseconds long.

Next, use the Grid mode to place each tone one second apart (one second is arbitrary… if this rhythm is too slow, go with a faster spacing).

Then highlight the track from three seconds all the way back to the beginning of the session and go to Edit and the Consolidate to create one long region with all three beeps.

The consolidated region should look like this:

This three beep region can now be placed directly before the line the actor is being cued for, so that the imaginary ‘fourth beat’ one second later is their cue and their entrance to the line.

You should copy this region and place it in front of all the ADR cues in the session.  That way the session will run much more smoothly.

For overlapping beep regions, you will want to select the region and press Apple (Command), M in order to mute the overlapping beats.

These guidlelines will save you a lot of time and anxiety in your ADR sessions.

Codec Studies web site

My graduate thesis is focusing on codecs and their impact on audio.  I have set up a companion web site to go along with the paper part of the thesis here.

The Wiitles Max/MSP Vocal Effects Processor

In one of my bands, The Wiitles, we use Max/MSP as a vocal effects processor.  The Nintendo Wii-mote acts as a controller for the effects such as delay, pitch shift, amplitude modulation, and a vocoder.

This video also has significance for me since it brought me to buy a little program called ScreenFlow which is pretty much amazing.  ScreenFlow is the program that allowed me to capture the real time actions of my computer on video.  Very cool.  I have yet to scratch the surface on this bad boy, but, especially once I start teaching sound classes, this promises to be a revelation.

Will Oldham on Movie Music

I love this friggin’ guy…. and wholeheartedly agree with these views on movie music:

“AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas?

WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, “Wow, I’ll bet they spent months or years writing this screenplay, and I’ll bet they spent months shooting this, and I’ll bet they spent months editing this, and now they’re spending no time at all picking these completely inappropriate songs with lyrics to put under a scene that has dialogue.” How does that even work? How can you have a song with someone singing lyrics under spoken dialogue and consider that mood-music, or supportive of the storyline? As somebody who likes music, when that happens, I tend to listen to the lyrics, which have nothing to do with the movie. And then I’m lost in the storyline. Not only is that a crime, but it’s a crime not to give people who are good at making music for movies the work. It’s like saying, “We don’t need you, even though you’re so much better at it than I am as a music supervisor.” Like the cancer that is that Darjeeling guy… what’s his name?

AVC: Wes Anderson?

WO: Yeah. His completely cancerous approach to using music is basically, “Here’s my iPod on shuffle, and here’s my movie.” The two are just thrown together. People are constantly contacting me saying, “I’ve been editing my movie, and I’ve been using your song in the editing process. What would it take to license the song?” And for me it’s like, “Regardless of what you’ve been doing, my song doesn’t belong in your movie.” That’s where the conversation should end. Music should be made for movies, you know?

AVC: So there aren’t many contexts in which you can imagine licensing one of your songs to a movie?

WO: No. I mean, I could see—

AVC: Over the closing credits, maybe?

WO: Right, the closing credits. But again, someone wrote me recently and said, “We wanna use your songs in our movie, and we’ve already got this artist, this artist, this artist, this artist.” And I was thinking, “Well that makes for like, no integrity to your movie. All these different voices combined with the actors’, writer’s, director’s and DP’s voices. That sounds like the worst place to be. That sounds like a music festival.” [Laughs.] I liked it when those crazy, dirty, Rhode Island brothers made movies like There’s Something About Mary.

AVC: The Farrellys?

WO: The Farrelly brothers. Was it Something About Mary that had nothing but Jonathan Richman songs in it? I like Jonathan Richman a lot, and while those weren’t my favorite Jonathan Richman songs, I liked that whole idea of lacing one voice throughout the whole movie and having it be a conscious decision made somewhere during the writing and pre-production, and not during post-production. “This is the voice that we wanna have, and these are how we want songs to work with this movie.” That’s all I ask for, that a little bit of time and respect is given to the musical part of filmmaking.

AVC: So do you think of your songs as inviolable? If you want to understand what the song is about, then you have to consult the song?

WO: Yes, essentially. Like sometimes we’ve made film clips or video clips to go with the song, but honestly, the only reason to do that is to get the music to other places where people could hear it. And I’ve never done a video where I feel like the images have anything to do with the song, except in the most vague way possible, because I feel like the song is its own complete thing. People who put songs in movies like to think of a song as a sphere that you can cut a huge chunk out of. “Well the movie’s gonna take up most of that sphere, or half of that sphere, or a fraction of that sphere.” When you’re writing a song for a movie, you only have to fill in a part of the sphere, knowing that it’s gonna go with the other content that’s already there. But ideally, a song is a complete sphere like the Earth, where if you were an alien with a huge, huge finger, you could stick your finger into the middle of the ocean and make an impression on it. It’s not an impregnable sphere, but it is a sphere.”

Read whole interview at The Onion AV club:  http://www.avclub.com/articles/will-oldham,26498/

The Wiitles at GDX

The Wiitles performed at the GDX (Game Developers Conference) in Savannah Georgia last Thursday (4-16-09).  We were extraordinarily received by some very cool folks who make game sound their careers such as George Sanger, Jason Arnone, Michael Sweet, and Chris Rickwood.  Below is one song from the performance:

A bit of trivia:  That’s my son Sebastian in the background, who joined us on stage for a bit.

Pro Tools Post Production Operator Certifiable

It’s official.  I am now Pro Tools Post Production Operator Certified (7.3), or certifiable as my bank account tells me.  Pro Tools class was a lot of money for the piece of paper and T-shirt I got in exchange.  I guess that one could argue that it’s the knowledge that I paid for.  So I’m going to comtemplate that here for myself and for anyone else thinking of taking the Pro Tools certification course.

I should begin by saying that, out of all the Pro Tools courses, 210 was by far the most useful and most meaty.  From chasing tape to editing ADR, 210 gave workflow suggestions and tips that I had not previously thought of.  I have already seen some improvement in my post-production gigs.  Additionally, 210 had sections at the end of each chapter called Practical Application Scenarios.  These little tid bits were quite useful and something that I felt was missing from the first three quarters of the overall four-part course.  software knowledge is all well and good, but learning about the ins and outs of any software, especially one as powerful and in depth as Pro Tools can be painfully boring.  So it’s nice to see how and where this kind of knowledge can be useful, for both boredom cures and for long-term retention.

But the real question is whether or not the thousands of dollars you pay for the Pro Tools courses is worth the amount of knowledge you gain.  This is the question for any audio program, of course.  Especially since the long standing common knowledge is that any kind of certificate or degree won’t help you in the world of audio… it’s just purely good sounds (probably more important, however, are good connections).  So then the question becomes, “Is taking this Pro Tools certification course going to give me better sounds?”  The answer is maybe, maybe not.  There are some cool tips and tools drawn out for the student in all of the Pro Tools certification classes.  Many of them go beyond just teaching software and give some theory and some practice tips.  But someone who has been working in the field for several years may find these little knowledge nuggets somewhat elementary.  If the question is something more like, “Will the Pro Tools certification course make me faster and more efficient?”.  The answer to that one is probably, in the case of the experienced veteran, and definitely with the novice Pro Tools user.

However, interested students still need to be advised to do a cost benefit analyses of the course.  It is not cheap.  If you’re the kind of audio professional who is already fast in their workflow, then I’m not sure about investing this money.  However, if you’re like me, and still trying to figure out ways to maximize workflow and please his clients, then it may be worth it.  For me, it was totally worth it… but unfortunately now comes the little task of paying it all back.