SOUND ENGINEERING (STUDIO) A - STUDIO PROJECT

The band I chose to record for this project is local 3 piece "Glamville". Their line-up consists of drummer, guitarist/vocalist and bass player/ vocalist and their musical style could be described as jazz-punk. I knew Glamville would be a difficult recording subject as their songs are very loosely structured and the element of spontaneity is paramount in their musical ethos, rendering it difficult to record one instrument at a time to maintain absolute production cleanliness. In the studio, I compromised with the band to the extent where I managed to separate them physically by placing the guitarist in the dead room and the drummer and bass player in the recording space with baffles strategically positioned. Naturally I still had trouble with spill but the band was happy to be able to lay the bed tracks down together simultaneously. The bed tracks were laid in 2 x 4 hour sessions with another 4 hour session allocated to overdubbing extra guitar parts, vocals and a last-minute piano track. I then spent around 12 hours mixing down, cleaning up and generally earning my keep as a putative sound engineer. Click to below to hear the result.
MP3 MIXDOWN - GLAMVILLE - HERMETIC CO-ORDINATES - CLICK HERE

MP3 MIXDOWN - GLAMVILLE - INSOLUBLE SOLUTION - CLICK HERE

PROJECT PRODUCTION AND RECORDING NOTES PDF - CLICK HERE

AUDIO STUDIES - CREATIVE PROJECT

Program Note
Emu Challenge
Dorothy Pawlowski
03:14

EMU CHALLENGE MIXDOWN MP3 - CLICK HERE

Whenever I think of video game music, I think of the music of the Commodore 64 and (later) the Super Nintendo gaming consoles of the 1980’s. By today’s standards, these machines were capable of producing only low resolution audio, often played back through a small speaker. The result was usually brittle, noisy and trashy.

When writing this, my own hypothetical video game music ”Emu Challenge”, I deliberately attempted to emulate the sound of early digital audio by including “noisy” percussion samples and copying the vibrato-heavy, string-like synthesizer sounds which were typically used for melody instruments at the time.

Emu Challenge

The hero of this video game is an emu who faces challenges within three main gaming zones namely, The Adventure Zone, The Spooky Zone and The Fun Zone. All of the sequencing for the final work was carried out in Pro Tools LE (session bit depth 24 and sample rate 48kHz).

The percussion samples for the work were obtained either from the Garage Band library or manufactured using the ES1 and FM synthesizers in Logic Pro). I obtained sound effects from the web as well as recording voice tags which I felt would emphasise the “game” flavour of the music, editing and normalising some of the samples in Peak LE as necessary. The melodic components were composed in Logic Pro using the matrix editor and ES1 synthesizer, which I found most appropriate to the style of music. I exported the melodies as 24 bit wav audio files from Logic and imported them into the Pro Tools region list, converting the sample rate to match the Pro Tools session sample rate. The Spooky Zone melodies utilised the “swing” function of Logic, as I wished this section to have a less rigid feel to the meter.

After manufacturing, recording and collecting all of this source material, I arranged it accordingly in Pro Tools, mostly using grid mode, and performed mixing, panning, automation and organisational operations as well as applying plug-ins. Although normalised, there were still problems with varying levels between the vocal effects tags and there were no tracks left over to allocate each tag a track of its own (as I had already used all of the tracks available in Pro Tools LE at this sample rate and bit depth), so volume automation was particularly necessary on the two “FX” tracks.

The Adventure Zone

Meter: 4/4
Tempo: 160 bpm
Key: C minor

(In this section I have departed from my original idea (as per proposal) of using C major as the key because I found when I began writing the melody that the feeling of a strictly major key was not “dangerous” enough.)

The Spooky Zone

Meter: 4/4
Tempo: 160 bpm
Key: G minor

The Fun Zone

Meter: 6/8
Tempo: 180 bpm
Key: C major

Production Credits

Voice Tags: Captain I (appears by permission of Sleazy Studios)

MIDI STUDIES A - CREATIVE PROJECT

Other Girlfriend – An original song
By Dorothy Pawlowski
03:48

The concept behind this rendering of Other Girlfriend was to take a simple song that I wrote for a punk-pop band, and re-work it into a suitable format for the dance floor.

I began by writing the bass line using a MIDI track and a virtual software synth (the ES1), as the simple bass line determines the overall structure of the entire song. In order to rewrite the song as a dance piece in the context of a MIDI file, it was necessary for me to write all of the drum beats completely from scratch. To do this I used the Ultrabeat function of Logic Pro, which is a multi-timbral virtual drum machine that occupies only one MIDI instrument track within Logic. I wrote several different drum beats, modifying the preset drum samples to suit my needs, ie: changing them to “fat” sounds with a lot of distortion. When I had the drum beats completed, I arranged them as required in the arrange window and added two more virtual instrument MIDI tracks for melody parts, one with Garage Bands Morph Synthesizer.

At this point I wished to add some audio tracks in the form of vocals. I decided to do this in Studio 2 but had some difficulty getting an audio signal into Logic there. In order to overcome this, I recorded the vocal tracks in Pro Tools and later synchronised them back into Logic in the Audio Lab. After arranging the main vocal tracks appropriately, I chopped smaller samples out of them and used these for effect in the “middle 32, breakdown” section.

I then established a Rewire track using Reason as the slave, feeding it back into Logic on two audio channels and wrote another MIDI track with “effects” type sounds to control this.

Finally, I applied plug-ins to channels as I felt necessary and automated these as well as volume and panning, particularly on the vocal channels which had level discrepancy issues which I felt could be corrected in this way.

OTHER GIRLFRIEND MIDI FILE

OTHER GIRLFRIEND MP3 MIXDOWN

CONCEPTS OF MUSIC - WEEK 12 - PITCH PERCEPTION

Music is the audible manifestation of maths. Onya Pythagoras. OK, I am officially lost and if maths is the basis of all reality then I am doubly stuffed as neither maths nor reality is my best subject and I reckon I just might have my head up my hem hem. Anyway, Pyth apparently surmised that each of the 7 planets in our solar system would produce a musical note dependent upon its distance from the “centre” (being Earth in this hypothesis): like the different lengths of resonating strings, for example. This was called “Musica Mundana” or as we would say "Music of the Spheres" and would be indiscernible to our presumably too-worldly ears. What a beautiful idea. There IS a harmonic and numeric relationship between all things from the greatest in scale to the smallest; it has been well-documented in any number of mystic publications and websites but it still has credence for all that. Some people become obsessed with these relationships and are consequently and unkindly regarded by our society as cranks. I think it is well to notice the numeric underpinning to cosmic structure but do not let the the desire to understand it dominate your life, for what is... is.

Here is a source of entertaining misinformation about Pythagoras

References:

Stephen Whittington, Lecture, Concepts of Music (Aural), 05/06/08

John Boyd-Brent, Harmony and Proportion, http://www.aboutscotland.co.uk/harmony/prop.html
Viewed 10/06/08

SOUND ENGINEERING STUDIO - WEEK 12 - MASTERING

This week it all came together in one neat package – mastering. I can see why this job is generally left to professionals after I spent 4 hours yesterday manically tweaking compressors and EQ’s attempting to get every possible dB out of my mixdown. Obviously, mastering is a balancing act between totally squashing the dynamics out of the music and pumping up the volume and I think it’s important to keep in mind something that Luke told us in the context of mastering in MIDI studies, that is: the Genre Test. Some kinds of music need dynamic nuance far more than others; so dance music can probably suffer having the crap compressed out of it in the name of volume, where chamber music probably shouldn’t. I think also that one should keep in mind the final medium: what’s the point in maintaining a full dynamic range when the eventual playback medium won’t support it? Personally, I’m finding the mastering process frustrating and difficult but I presume that a degree of skill will come with practice. All of our assessment projects will have to undergo some form of mastering, I suppose.

References:

David Grice, Lecture, Sound Engineering Studio, 03/06/08

MTF - WEEK 12 - STUDIOS

This week’s session involved having a decko at various music recording studios about town (sadly, I don’t see any of them advertising for staff) as well as an advertising audio-production-and-jingle-writing establishment. Anyway, they all look like fun places to work and I wish I did. Co-incidentally, I was treated to a personal tour of one of Adelaide’s commercial TV studios over the weekend, from an audio production perspective. At least, that’s how my friend presented his job to me but it seemed upon investigation to be vastly more complicated than that and he (my mate) wears a large number of technological hats simultaneously. Now THAT looks like some serious fun, however, the centralised nature of TV production in Australia renders this field of employment opportunity somewhat dubious... bummer. I’m starting to think about what I shall do with myself when this course is over. The possibility of working out of an existing studio as a music recording engineer seems a bit intermittent, particularly in Adelaide (and in light of what we have been studying in this subject) – am I good enough? Will it bring home the bacon? What other options are there? I think I would like to be a highly-paid academic...

References:

D. Grice, Lecture, Music Technology Forum, 03/06/08

MTF - STUDIO PRESENTATION (MIX)

The audio files that I chose to remix originated from Peter Gabriel’s alternative rock/ new wave song “Shock the Monkey”, (released 1982 on Geffen) which was produced by Peter Gabriel and David Lord.

The overall structure of the audio is as follows:

 31 x unsynchronised audio files of various durations
 file type mp3 @ sample rate of 44.1 kHz(?)
 no pro-tools session data
 tempo nominally 148.64 bpm (according to supplied documentation)
 time signature: 4/4
 base-key: D minor
 longest audio file: 04:08m

The audio tracks included:

 various live percussion (several tracks)
 bass guitar (several tracks)
 electric guitar (several tracks)
 synthesized brass (several tracks)
 marimbas (and synthesized marimba)
 lead vocals (several tracks)
 back up vocals (several tracks)
 various “filler” sounds (several tracks)
 what sounds suspiciously like a Fairlight CMI

After performing the analysis of the provided audio as detailed above, I researched possible remix techniques. My initial researches in the Elder Music Library were surprisingly fruitless so I tried the internet. Most of the references to remixing that I did find were mostly in various sound production forums and were often unattributed (to “real” people). Eventually, however, I found five techniques that I thought I could reasonably interpret into my remix.


“Now ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.”
- Kenny Rogers, “The Gambler”


I began by analysing each track and decided what to remove and what to work with. I focussed on percussion and tuned percussion type sounds with vocals and some keyboard strings for contrast. After deleting unwanted tracks, I was left with 17 of the tracks to work with. I then decided how I wanted the remix to begin and set Pro Tools in grid mode with the tempo specified as 148.64bpm and the grid resolution set to 1/16.

This is when I applied remix technique No. 1 which formed the most important structural premise for my whole remix, namely:

“...my favorite (sic) thing is to chop up a bunch of loops and totally twist the song...1”

That is, to chop up whole audio files into smaller regions and sounds and restructure them into new loops and patterns. I chopped individual percussion hits out of percussion tracks and the attack segments of melodic tracks and recombined them into new drum beats. I used the same technique to make new melodic parts and bass lines using larger segments of the audio files. Once I had my basic drum patterns and melodic parts, I looped and recombined these to form the basis of the remix. Another aspect to this is:

“...skipping beats...2”

That is, totally removing percussive elements to give a syncopated feeling.

Next I applied a remixing technique where the kick drum track is duplicated twice and the copies are used to trigger both higher and lower kick drum sounds, then a phase shift is applied to the EQ of the duplicates, thus:

“...apply EQ phase sweep to kick drum copy...3”

I simplified the technique somewhat by just duplicating the kick drum track altogether then applying an automated filter sweep to the copy.

Next I applied (my personal favourite) from the “chopped and screwed” school of hip-hop remixing which involves:

“...select time stretch from the menu and time the tempo with the vocals as you change the pitch...4”

I applied this to both “normal” vocal parts and heavily chopped vocal parts.

The final technique which I used was gleaned from an article referring to methods to spoil unauthorised music downloads, like this:

“...shifting channels (sounds like a speaker cut out).5”

My channel shift was applied as panning automation synchronised to the grid.

Altogether, I enjoyed this exercise, not least because I detest the original song and was looking forward to making some improvements to it (hopefully).

References

1 “Uncle Jerr”, Studio Recording Engineer (forum)
http://www.studiorecordingengineer.com/ftopict-1019.html
Retrieved 20/05/08


2 Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chopped_and_screwed
Retrieved 20/05/08

3 Tom Holkenborg, Interview with Randy Alberts, Digidesign
http://www2.digidesign.com/digizine/archive/digizine_august04/protechniques/
Retrieved 20/05/08

4 “Mr. New Material”, Associated Content
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/269048/the_perfect_mixx_how_to_chop_and_screw.html
Retrieved 02/06/08

5 Startling Moniker
http://startlingmoniker.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/mediadefender-remixes-chopped-screwed/
Retrieved 20/05/08

CONCEPTS OF MUSIC - WEEK 11 - LOUDNESS CONT'D

For me, the outstanding part of this week’s discussion was the brief explanation of throat singing and the importance of pitch to the perception of speech generally. I suppose that it’s obvious to some that the vowel sounds of sung speech (singing) carry the pitch but it’s one of those things that I have never before considered and was therefore able to greet the knowledge with a “hey, wow” kinda attitude. Throat singing is an amazingly technical vocal style – check out this website which has a good explanation of some of the styles from different parts of the world and how they’re accomplished, as well as demonstration videos and links to similar sites (assuming you can be bothered of course).

Khoomei types

There is also a reference here to one Arthur Miles, obscure country-singin’ cowboy and a recording he made which features throat singing in a country and western context (dating from the 1920’s) – waaaay cool. So, have I been sitting here mouthing away at different droney vowel sounds in order gain a first-hand understanding of the relationship between changing harmonic series, tone colour and vowel sounds...? You’ll never know.

Listen to some throat singing

References

Stephen Whittington, Lecture, Loudness and Intensity, 29/05/087

http://khoomei.com/types.htm
viewed 03/06/08