Kicking Butt August 6, 2008
Posted by Gareth in Audio.Tags: bass, Buttkicker, in-ears
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Well haven’t posted for a long time. I do apologize. I have been so busy at work it has just been difficult to get on and write. I’m still quite busy so this post is going to be a short one.
As some of you might know we use in-ear monitors in my church. They are great not only from a sound mixing aspect (no stage noise to combat) but also from a music quality aspect (playing with them sounds much better than wedges). The problem that I have heard is that the in-ears lack low down bass (the kinda stuff most people can’t hear anyway). The bassists and drummers are the main complainers of this so called “lack of bass”.
So, What do you do to add some low end, unhearable, body moving bass? You add a ButtKicker. No, you don’t kick their butts you get the Buttkicker which moves an object (drum throne, floor, seat) to the beat of the low down bass and allows the user to feel it. Check it out here and discover for yourself.
Cheers.
Media July 18, 2008
Posted by crowdedbassist in Uncategorized.Tags: graphics, media, series
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I recently took the opportunity to focus my energy with regards to my service at church and hence the ‘Media’ portfolio on SPD was created. I am in charge of over-seeing all of the media for series and most of the environments. If I’m not creating it myself, I’m the one getting a few valued volunteers to do something for us. This also includes keeping the website up to date and making changes as needed..
So I’ve been meaning to post something for along time but I’ve been a bit busy. so here is some of the stuff i have been working on the last little while.. I must give credit to the media team at North Point Community Church as most of the stuff i have to create has already been done and I am modifying it for our needs. Also to my various image sources as without them i would sometimes be very stuck.
Below is a small selection of the media created for each series, environment or event. We normally need slide backgrounds, bulletin cover, email ad, flyer hand-out and a few other things. But enough of that, here is the good stuff:
So for the series – Fractured – it started with an image and worked around with some text to get the final product:
Then came some stuff for ‘Imagine’ that was an event we hosted with a team from North Point Ministries. It started with a .psd file from NPCC and an image and we worked our own things from it as needed:
Then came a once-off service on Father’s Day and we presented a very special KIDStuf performance. The event needed a ticket designed:
Then came the series ‘Say’. It started with a small image off the net and from there created all the media needed:
An upcoming event called GroupLink needed a ticket designed. I used various elements to create a new image for GroupLink:
There was a need to create a flyer to invite people to be involved in our youth programme over the holidays. During the holidays our church gives the volunteers some time off and asks for help from others not normally involved in the childrens programme’s:
Transformers is the new name of one of our children’s programme and needed an info card for the main info table at the adult service:
The next series on the list was an interesting use of graphics for the series ‘Text’. The flyer was created by John Guest and I created the other media needed. It is a combination of blurred text in multiple layers with a typewriter font:
We are currently doing a follow up to the Imagine event with a 3 part series entitled ‘Imagine v 2.0′. We used the original graphics to keep the connection from the first event and created what we needed from there:
so that pretty much gets me up to date with most of the media things I’ve been doing the last little while.. I’ll try remember to post something again soon when I finish on the next media requirement…
Stereo Findings July 16, 2008
Posted by Gareth in Audio.Tags: sound, stereo, yamaha
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Well we’ve just managed to pull off a fun stereo mix this last week. After some “How can I make the mix even better next week” I decided to do a little research into stereo. I found some interesting articles but best of all I found a website that I never knew exsisted. www.soundonsound.com is a great website and although they are more based in the recording sound field it has some great articles from sound engineers about things that make sense in a live situation too. If you head over too the articles section and click on technique you will find some great articles, more than you can read in a day I’d bet.
One article that really caught my attention was this one http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct00/articles/stereomix.htm. The techniques talked about in this article are worth learning. This last week tried the mono reverb in one channel and it worked very well. We have a Yamaha MG32/14FX sound desk and it has digital effects that we routed to the groups and panned to stereo. Right now the desk is the weakest link in the chain and I see the process of stereo easier with a digital desk but the Yamaha does the job.
Ending off this post I think about how a sound engineer needs to know his equipment backwards and to use it like it’s an instrument. Knowing your instrument makes you a better musician. Knowing your sound desk makes you a better sound engineer, to an extent. So here is the link to the Yamaha MG32/14FX’s manual and I expect all my sound engineers to download it and read it! Get it here.
Things I like! June 25, 2008
Posted by Gareth in Audio.Tags: Avalon, Digidesign, Isolation Boxes
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Well, seeing as my first post was about the placement of a kick drum microphone and seeing as that week following the post ended with the microphone on the floor. I decided to post about things that couldn’t go wrong (because they don’t exsist in my immediate vicinity). Things I like!!! (Maybe only a few though).
DigiDesign Venue
This beauty is a marvelous digital desk that… well… I just can’t explain how awesome it is. If our church got this desk I would fire all my sound guys (sorry guys) and do the sound every week. Just some of the awesome features on it include; Dual-optical snake (that’s it two wires from front-of-house to backstage); millions of plugins for things like compressors, reverbs, gates, etc; Probably one of the best interfaces of any digital desk; and has record/play from and to ProTools via a firewire cable (this is my favourite feature). The latter feature gives the sound guy the ability to record a clean signal from each instrument seperately into ProTools then playback each instrument into each channel of the desk it was coming from. Picture this, band comes on stage plays a few songs which gets recorded to ProTools via the desk then the band leavs the stage and the sound guy plays the audio back into the desk and does the house mix from the recording. Just imagine how much you will learn as a sound guy. Unbelieveable, to see this desk goto the link and follow the instructions. http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?navid=20&langid=100. Click on the Interactive Overview
under D-Show heading and be amazed. (Site can sometimes not work I’m not sure why).
Isolation Boxes
I’m looking at actually making these quite soon and a freind actually asked for plans from these guys. It’s like a sound guys dream to have no stage noise and well these do exactly that with guitar amps. Take a look at the link for more. http://blog.northpointmusic.org/?p=51.
D.I. Boxes
If you looked really closely at the picture before you noticed a shiny box above the Isolation box it looked like this.
That my freind is the greatest D.I. box ever (Okay maybe not the best). This thing is at least up there with the best. As far as D.I. boxes for bass guitar go this is highly rated by some of the best in the industry. It has a tone shaping circuit and preamp (boost) circuit. There are more features but you can check them out on this site. http://www.avalondesign.com/instrudi.html.
Blogs
The links below are some of my favourite blogs about sound and production. Hope you enjoy the reading. Cheers.
http://www.churchtecharts.org/Blog/
http://www.recordingreview.com/blog/
http://blog.northpointmusic.org/
The Kick Drum (Part 1) May 22, 2008
Posted by Gareth in Audio.Tags: Kick
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Well this post will be about setting up a kick drum sound using microphone placement to better your kick drum sound in a live environment.
Let’s first assume (because this is such a broad area and because I have only so many resources and hours) that we are not interested in the beater head material used (wood vs. plastic vs. metal), whether the drummer tuned it properly (if drummers can actually hear a note). But that we have these guidelines; we only have one microphone (because two is a whole other story but I’ll do a post on that in the future), and our kick drum front head has a hole in the end. like below.
The placement of a microphone to “mic’up” a kick drum has some guidelines on the positioning. The first method requires you start by placing the microphone on the opposite side to the drummer on a stand and near the sound hole facing the opposite skin where the beater would hit. Like this.
Almost any microphone will do the trick but here are some that are more suited
Shure Beta 52A (What we currently have)
Sennheiser e902
AKG D112
Audix D6
Shure SM57 (Even this)
Obviously these aren’t all of them (I’m not really going to touch on pressure zone mics) but they seem to be the majority vote on the best sound. For some ideas go here. This site shows many opinions on which is the favoured kick drum mic. Each mic will have it’s own dynamic properties and all will sound different. Placement will depend on the microphone and kick drum. Assuming we have only one mic (you will get more options with two) moving the mic to the edge of the hole on the skin which is on the opposite side to the drummer will create a more boomy, undefined kick sound. As you move it closer to the opposite skin, toward where the beater is hitting, you will get a less boomy (and possibly loose some punchiness) but defined sound coming into the mic. Some people call that definition the “click”. Trial and error is the name of the game to find your preferred sound. I tend to dial in my click with lots of EQ and get the natural boominess of the kick itself (I get big punchiness that way) so I place mine about 2cm inside the hole and use the EQ to get the “click”. Be careful not to let your cabling or mic interfere with the skin (do not let them touch the skin).
The other option for placement (which I don’t recommend unless you have two mics, one for the first method and the second, for this method, to add definition) is on the drummers side of the drums facing where the beater hits the skin. Like below.
This will yield a sound defined as lots of mids and treble. This sound will be tinny, have a whack to it and have very little punch and boom. If you want to add definition to the kick drum but don’t care too much for the low end then this will work great.
The last method (which is also not my favourite) is to place the mic outside the drum, on the opposite side of the drummer in relation to the drum and turn the microphone to face the drum. This sound will get that old 50′s jazz drum feel. It will sound very loose and have almost no low end kinda muddy. If you are looking for the 50′s sound then this could work quite nicely although you will also pickup the sound of the other drums this way.
Well there you have it, mic placement of the kick drum in a live environment with one mic. Obviously I would recommend the first method but even these methods aren’t the full package. You can even use all the methods to dial in your kick sound (if you have three mics to do it) like this guy below.
Experiment and try new things with your kick it can be a very versatile instrument. Next time I’ll talk about EQ the kick drum.
Cheers
Considerations in Green Screen Shooting May 20, 2008
Posted by Phillip Gibb in Video.Tags: Video
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Here are the considerations that had to be taken into account in terms of Filming and Editing the Green Screen footage
- Most important of all – ensure that the the screen is evenly lit. If you don’t have a proper vector scope then plug the camera into you computer and use your editing program of some software like FlipFlop, CaptureMagic, DV Rack or Scope Box. I made use of Final Cut Pro and the built in Vector Scope and Histogram that can be used during capture.
- Light the talent properly. I found this very difficult to do and still had problems. Nothing beats experience.
- Make sure that the talent (in this case Morgan) doe not move out of the bounds of the Green Screen, unless you enjoy the prospect of lots of RotoScoping. Ok lack of movement can be boring, and I think with a wider screen we could have done with more dynamics.
- Do not accept the default functions of the camera you are using. Most likely all cameras have a default setting to sharpen the edge detail in the image. This will cause halo type results around the talent. I had to reduce the edge detail setting to -3, a so-called sweet spot – anything less and the image would soften too much.
- Blur the UV channels. For cameras with colour sub sampling of 4:1:1, 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 the colour differentiation between the talent and the screen will become jaggered. The best way to deal with this is to convert the footage to YUV, blur the UV channels, then convert back to RGB. Or rather use a camera with 4:2:2 or better 4:4:4 colour sampling. Well if you have the money.
- Ensure that the talent is wearing appropriately coloured clothing that will not conflict or confuse the Keyer used in the compositing or editing software.
- As far as Audio goes, I made sure that the rifle mic was really close and static. This was easy because Morgan was not moving around. But one thing that I did not do which is an absolute must is – use ear phones. The mic can pick up so much and you will have to have earphones to be able to pick up those noises; the creaking floor board, the dog bar, the car driving past.
Frequencies May 20, 2008
Posted by Gareth in Audio.add a comment
Any sound engineer should know what instruments fit in what frequencies. Unfortunately, our memories tend to fail us on most occasions. So, I went looking for a comprehensive frequency chart and this is what I found.
But best of all is the website I found the picture on. click here
And it’s interactive so you can scroll through each instrument and it’ll tell you about the frequency and sound it creates.
I my next post I’ll talk more on these frequencies and give my insight on setting up a great mix for your church using EQ’s you would normally find on an analog sound desk. Until next time, Cheers.
