Recording music is an art, and unfortunately one that requires practice to master. Home Studio Corner talks about how recording music is just like a first date in this hilarious article, hitting everything from a musician’s innate paranoia and self-criticism to trusting some random guy on a forum over your own instincts about what you’re doing with your own music. Don’t be one of the failures in the music scene!
Read the full article here:
4 Ways Recording Music is Like a First Date
Ever since the music industry’s inception, there has been this “loudness war” in which an apparent loudness is equated by the populous as “better”, but lately it’s been getting out of hand. However, short of publicly shaming mix masters who commit the crime of mixing everything too loud, what real solutions do we have? Well, we could sidestep it of course – Level checks and level balances are becoming commonplace in music streaming services like Spotify and Pandora – bringing a welcomed change.
What do you think? Has the whole loudness war got out of hand? Read the full article here:
How To Win the Loudness War
Check out the following article about how rocker Neil Young is working on a new digital format for music recordings. Young has applied for patents for a new music system. A subsequent press release from Penguin Imprint Blue Rider Press further explains that Young is creating a system called Pono, a cloud-based library of recordings that consumers could use to hear studio quality recordings from a variety of artists. This would ba an affordable alternative to MP3s.
Always pushing the envelope Mr Young. I salute you:
Neil Young Invents New Studio-Quality Digital Audio Format? – Ology
For today’s daily audiophile roundup I would like to share this article about, supposedly, the quietest roon in the world by Bobby Owsinski and posted on his blog bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com. He writes that you really don’t understand the amount of background noise in everyday life unless you have been in one of these sound proof rooms. The lack of sound actually has made individuals hallucinate as it is such a great change of environment experiment. It seems easy to stay in a room with no sound but it is actually the opposite.
In that case Bobby you should try one of our rooms! You’d love it. Read the full article here:
The Quietest Room In The World
I came across an article about cables for today’s daily audiophile roundup by Steven Stone of audiophilereview.com. He writes that cables do not technically have an exact date in which they expire. There are no active, moving parts to wear down or break like machines do. Professionals in the cable manufacturing business have been trying to determine an answer to whether cables expire for some time. The general opinion is that there is no expiration. What compromises the usability of a cable is the quality of the products used and the process in which it is made.
Read the full article here:
Do Cables Have an Expiration Date?
For today’s daily audiophile roundup I would like to share this post by Kim Lajoie on his blog blog.kimlajoie.com. He writes about the need for a control surface within a studio. Factors that affect your success are skills, tools, and time. If a tool helps save time it may be a wise investment even if it doesn’t produce higher quality product. You have to spend money to make money as they say. He goes onto say that potential clients may value and appreciate your investments more than you realize.
What’s your take? Read the article here and let me know:
Are control surfaces worth it?
Dave Grohl of Nirvana claim and numerous other bands such as Queens of The Stone Age and Them Crooked Vultures won a Grammy for Best Rock Album made an acceptance speech that was obviously well thought out. It was creative and inspiring:
Great Honor
This is a great honor because this record was a special record for our band. Rather than go to the best studio in the world down the street in Hollywood and rather than use all the fanciest computers that money can buy, we made this one in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine. To me this reward means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is whats important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the more important thing for people to do. Its not about being perfect,its not about sounding absolutely correct,its not about what goes on inside a computer. Its about what goes on in here (your heart) and what goes on in here (your head).
Music From The Heart
Music is from the heart. The best musicians have the ability to transfer the feelings that lie deep into their heart and transfer those feelings through their brain and out their hands or mouth. It is an amazing talent and skill and those musicians that possess this skill set are the best musicians in their particular music genre. Look at Jimmy Hendrix. There was a direct connection between Jimi’s heart and hands. He could meld into one instrument on stage and your ears did not hear anything but a complete “experience”. He was producing music with his heart and his hands were just tools for his heart to use.
Adele
Listen to Adele. This young lady can definitely connect her heart through the brain and into the music. Her lyrics are powerful and concise, but they pale in comparison to her heartfelt music presentation. When she adds her heart to the lyrics through her voice, one can tell from the timbre changes in her voice that this is definitely a heart directly though into the music. She has the tonal range to portray all of the pain a heart feels. I am hopeful that her future life experiences are more positive and that she will then use music to exhibit something these emotionally positive feelings with the same dynamics and emotional connection she has shown us with her Six Grammy wins.
Guitar players start with mastering the acoustic guitar before going to electric. Piano players start on a grand or mini grand and go from there.
Singers sing,sing,sing. Sing with yourself and definitely with others. Begin the process, your process, of direct connecting from your heart through your art. This is what will sustain you and always make your music fun and rewarding.
In Part I and II of How to Sound Proof Your Office, we discussed how first and foremost, we must quantify what our actual noise issues are. We must put a number to the noise. Next, we need to find out if the noise is being generated from outside the office or from inside the office. Depending on the noise source and position, we will use different technologies to minimize the noise issues. We minimize so noise levels do not rise above acceptable levels within an office environment. In most situations reducing pressure levels that allow for normal speech and work related endeavors to move along uninhibited is the acoustic goal. Eliminating noise completely is usually not an option. If our noise is generated from outside our office room, we discussed barrier technologies and their application. If the unwanted noise is coming from within our office room, we must use absorption technology.
Speech Intelligibility
Reflections from our office wall surfaces confuse our brain’s ability to localize sound sources. Reflections also mix and blend with the vocals blurring and smearing our voices inside our office room. Their is a term for this phenomenon. It is called speech intelligibility. We must have reflections in our office minimized and our reverberation times in the office room below certain levels in order to hear speech clearly and “intelligibility”. There are a series of numbers that one needs to look at, but a discussion of them is not necessary. These numbers are easily achieved using absorption technologies.
How Much Noise?
The most important thing we need to consider is how much energy will be generated from within the room. Once we know that, we can definitely choose the correct rate and level of absorption we need to use. Normal office pressure levels from 65 dB to 70 dB can be maintained with using numerous commercially available and affordable products. If you have a dropped ceiling, you can use acoustic ceiling tile that is made to fit in those ceiling types. One can also add absorbing material to the backside of the ceiling tile, for added absorption values. There are numerous wall treatment options for controlling wall surface reflections. Most are some type of fiberboard filled or unfilled with a fabric covering stretched over the face.
Door Must Be Sealed
The door in our office must be sealed, so that when it closes, there is no air leak between all the door surfaces and the door. Even a small opening can allow a large amount of unwanted sound energy to “bleed” into the office. Think about it as a hole in a dam. All the water pressure built up on the other side of the dam or door is forced into that small opening and then into the office room itself. A strong commercial grade weather striping can be an affective seal. Brush type strips are also used that have a series of bristles on them, so that the door pushes them in one direction which adds a sealing action to the joint or opening.
Windows
Windows in our office are the weakest link in the acoustical chain. Windows create harsh surface reflections and allow for sound energy from the outside to come in. Double pane windows with a vacuum seal between each pane is a good start. Triple pane windows are better. This is no place to try and save money on. Windows are expensive and are very important. Make sure your budget allows for some type of window covering, so that one can cover the glass to reduce sunlight and stop unwanted window reflections from entering our office environment.
Office Equipment
Office equipment noise is another issue. One piece of electronic equipment in our office does not generate or add much background noise to the total amount in the room. However, once we have 6 or 7 pieces of equipment in the room, both noise and heat levels can rise. Separating the equipment from each other and moving the equipment to different parts of the room is an option. However, in most office scenarios, this is not possible. Keeping the equipment all together facilitates use and ease of operation. Placing the equipment in sound isolating cabinets is a good option. The professional recording market will have these types of cabinets, since they deal with equipment noise on a regular basis. These cabinets will also have venting for heat and air movement.
If the excess sound energy is coming from inside our office rooms, we must use absorption technologies to reduce the noise levels, so that the work environment is quiet enough for all parties concerned. We can use acoustic tiles for our ceiling and even improve upon their performance by adding absorbing foam to their backside. We can use fabric covered panels for the wall surfaces. We just need to make sure that they are absorbing at the proper rates and levels for speech intelligibility. Windows are our weakest acoustical link and must be treated so. Office equipment noise can be reduced through the use of sound isolation cabinets.
In Part I of How To Sound Proof An Office On A Budget, we focused on determining what our real noise issues are. Is the noise inside our room coming from outside our room or is it coming from inside our office. What is its rate and what is its levels during our work day. How far above the norm are the levels. We discussed how to obtain two numbers that we could use in the selection of certain material types with certain densities for minimizing our noise issues.
Outside Noise
If the sound pressure or noise is coming from outside our office, then we need to place a barrier of some sort between ourselves and the noise source. This barrier or wall will have to have a certain mass or density depending on how much noise is generated from outside sources and interferes with the noise levels in our office room. Lets say we have 10 dB more sound pressure generated from outside our office than we want. We need to put up a barrier. That barrier will have a number attached to it. The number once the barrier is assembled is called a STC or sound transmission class rating. The number determines how much sound energy the structure inhibits or losses. The higher the number, the better, but we do not need to have a high STC number in our barrier or wall. We need to have the wall number be at the level we need to stop 10 dB of sound pressure. This will require a STC rating of at least a 45.
So Many Choices
There are numerous material types we can use to build our barrier. We can use drywall or U.S Gypsum board. It is inexpensive, well relatively so, when compared to other material types. It is also available in different thicknesses. Multiple density fiberboard or MDF is also available in numerous thicknesses and has a higher density than drywall. It is also easier to work with because it will not cover you with drywall dust during installation and outside finishing. Plywood is another type of material that is available in numerous thicknesses. It also has a good surface for finishing. It also has the highest cost when compared to MDF and drywall.
CLMD What’s This?
To achieve our barrier STC of 45, we need to use a fancy process called constrained layer, mass damping,(a bunch of different materials glued together) used in the construction of our barrier or wall. Lets use MDF. We need to have different thicknesses of MDF, so that we can sandwich them together in a way that reduces vibrations. We know that sound or noise outside our office is produced by vibrations and those vibrations enter our office air space as air born vibrations. To stop those vibrations, we need to build our barrier or wall in a manner that reduces vibrations that strike our wall’s surfaces. If we take a 1/2″ piece of MDF and attach it to a piece of 3/4″ plywood, we have assembled a “sandwich” that is made of two different materials each with different densities. If we “glue” these two pieces together with an acoustical sealant of another common commercially available product such as Green Glue, we have created a barrier composed of different layers of materials that are constrained, thus mass damping occurs.
How To Install
We now have to isolate our new barrier wall from our existing wall structure. This process will add another layer of material (air) between our new wall and existing wall. We will attach a isolation rail to our existing wall and then attach our new wall to the isolation strip. We must not touch any side wall, top or bottom wall, with our newly created constrained layer, mass damped, wall. We will recess all new wall edges from the existing wall by 1/4″. This 1/4″ trough will be filled with acoustic sealant. Once again, as with our vibration reducing wall structure, we are isolating two surfaces, the new wall from the old wall, using an acoustical sealant. We were separating each wall surface from each other with another material, so that the vibrations have to travel through numerous material thicknesses which slows them down at predictable rates and levels.
Reducing outside noise levels in our offices, requires that we first determine what our actual noise levels are that are disruptive inside our office room and then build a barrier between our office and the noise source. We need to build our barrier in a special way that minimizes vibrations using special construction techniques. We then need to install our new wall using another vibrational isolating technique which minimizes vibrations also. Part III, will focus on How To Sound Proof Our Office using sound absorption.
For today’s daily audiophile roundup I would like to share another article written by Bobby Owinski on his music blog music3point0.blogspot.com. Pay to play has long been part of the city club scene. For the exposure of playing a club the band must sell tickets for their shows, that is the only way the band can make money. It is not popular with musicians and now the practice has spread to internet radio! Some streaming radio services charge bands for a place on their playlist.
Is this getting out of hand or what? Or is it just another fair means of making a buck? Read the article and let me know your take:
Now It’s Pay To Play Radio
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