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Archive for July, 2010
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
This week DUY announced their Z-Room Reverb effect (Windows RTAS; Mac VST|RTAS|AU|MAS/MOTU) is now free.
DUY Z-Room features
- High quality density and diffusion provide an unparalleled sound quality.
- Total control over parameters which had never been available to the user before, with a friendly and intuitive user interface.
- Three modes: Deluxe, Economy and Earlies. The second allows to free processing time, and the third focuses the strength of the algorithm on the processing of Early Reflections.
- An exclusive Rehearsal Mode allows you to set the parameters while hearing the real impulse response of the reverb. This is one of the finest tools to evaluate the quality of the reverb.
- You can choose between several room responses (reverse, gate, hall, room, stage…). All these values can be modified with the Stretch and Pre-delay parameters.
- Processing time is freed when you choose not to include Early Reflections.
- Internal 64-bit processing.
- Independent mixing controls for each of the three selectable bands, as well as for the Direct, Early Reflections and Reverb signals.
- Total control over the iteration depth, with six levels of calculation.
- Over 50 presets are included.
- Z-Room is the only reverb that allows you to control the time base of the reverb’s algorithm.
- Visualization of the Direct, Early Reflections and Reverb signals in the time domain.
Good god it’s ugly, but DUY makes good stuff and you can never have too many options for reverb. Worth a try, if it sucks let me know in the comments.
Get yours here: https://services.duy.net/zroom-free.asp
Via Rekkerd
Posted in Free Plugin Of The Week, Plugins, Software, Virtual Effect | No Comments »
Monday, July 19th, 2010
This is what @theaudiogeek did this week
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Have a drink for me and
@KeyOfGrey it’s our birthday.
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Just got back from the Meetup. Very successful I’d say. 14 home recordists came out.
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Looking forward to dinner tonight with
@chckn8r and
@KeyOfGrey and the rest of the Vancouver Home Recording meetup group.
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I sneaked a peek at
@gmgranka‘s next article. I think he should get a promotion.
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New AGZ post: Synthesizer Basics – Lesson 2 http://bit.ly/bRycqs
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@chuck_russom although the crash is the cause of the swear so I guess its the same thing.
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@chuck_russom you should be owed that money, it’s not your fault. [in response to: You know those swear jars, where you put in $1 everytime your swear? I'm going to make a software crash jar, gonna put in $1 for every crash]
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@KeyOfGrey Sputnik sounds cool with an LA-610 but might be too colored depending on your tastes. I like my P-Solo preamp, uber clean.
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staying up late to watch Anchorman ftw
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New AGZ post: What’s New in FL Studio 9.5 Beta http://bit.ly/bqgZuO
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@theRyanHarvey Interesting idea, never thought of that. How did it work out? [in response to:
@theaudiogeek dude was messing with a weird idea using autotunes throat formant thingy on a snare to tune it]
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Reason 5 looks SICK! Do want!
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@CreateMusicTips well that would be out of character for AVID to do anything on time.
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@gmgranka I think that’s a great idea! U87, sm57, 1176, LA2A, EMT plate reverb, Fender amps, Moog synths would be a few I’d want to read. [in response to: To the people that read AGZ, would it be interesting if I did posts on the history of famous pieces of gear?]
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It probably wouldn’t even be that hard to write. I hope some devs are reading this, I’m too lazy to do it myself.
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I need to write a plugin that will order food for me so I don’t have to stop working. Choose preset: Pizza/burrito/sub etc. then delivery
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PC completely locked up when
@ihazadoodle came over and sat down. Hey I was working on that! I wonder when the last time I saved was…
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anyone else noticed super slow horizontal scrolling in the Pro Tools 8.0.4 MIDI editor?
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Posted in Tweetdump | No Comments »
Saturday, July 17th, 2010
This is a guest post from Geoffrey Granka of Fresh Produce Productions. Find him online at www.freshaudio.ca and @gmgranka on Twitter.
Wouldn’t it be lame if I said, “The history of the Shure SM57 is the history of rock and roll itself”? It’s a good thing I’m not saying that.
The Shure SM57 is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) microphones in the world. Virtually everybody that has heard a recording since 1965 has heard the sound of an SM57; on snare drums, on guitar cabinets, and on the Presidential Podium (that recording of Nixon saying “I am not crook.” was recorded by the SM57). So how did this cheap little microphone become so prolific? Let’s take a look at where it came from:
Before 1965, Shure had already made quite a name for itself in the audio industry. It was the most popular maker of cartridges for record players and had found microphone success in everything from securing the contract though making throat microphones for the US Air Force (allowing pilots to speak to each other over the roar of engines) to miking the man who brought rock and roll to mainstream America: Mr Elvis Presley.
The microphone that was often connected to Elvis was the Shure Model 55. This mic garnered acclaim because of it’s awesome-stupendous art-deco styling, its affordability (ribbons were the predominant microphone type at the time), and its excellent sounding capsule: the Unidyne (developed by Ben Bauer in 1939). Engineers at Shure continued to develop their successful Unidyne capsule to make it better and better as time went by. Eventually a grumpy/ingenious engineer named Ernie Seeler developed the Unidyne III capsule, the very one used in the modern SM57 today. This capsule first found itself in the Shure Model 545, a microphone that looked veeeeeery similar to the SM57.
The Model 545 was pretty successful because of its great sound and its ground-breaking end-address capsule. Prior to the 545, microphones were more prone to feedback and less accommodating to close-miking because the capsule didn’t get right up against the sound source. This allowed more ambient noise to enter the recording. The 545 found itself in a lot of US studios, again because of it’s low price and superior rejection. The Model 545 was most notably used on Brian Wilson’s voice on a little album called Pet Sounds to track his voice separately while recording vocals shoulder-to-shoulder with the Beach Boys.
Meanwhile, back at Shure Brothers Incorporated, the crazy engineers kept trying to improve upon the 545. Television was becoming a big thing, so they decided they would build a mic for this demographic.
They already had an excellent capsule, but they needed a microphone casing that would withstand the rigors of TV studios. So they did what any 11-year-old child would do and tried out their designs by cooking them, dropping them, and immersing them in salt water. Once they had a superhero microphone that survived the tests, they gave its body (same as 545) a non-reflective coating for the cameras, and removed the on-and-off switch (you don’t want pesky talent accidentally turning off their mics). In 1965, when the uncreative naming people at Shure affixed an SM to the model name to indicate that it was a studio microphone, they were referring to TV studios.
Eventually word of this microphone’s infamous durability traveled into the burgeoning live sound industry, and techs starting bring along these trusty little mics. Studio engineers loved them too, not only because they sounded good, but also because they had extremely high SPL ratings. This meant that they could use these mics to get the sound that was becoming increasingly popular: close miking.
There you have it: the indisputable history of the Shure SM57. Tell your friends.
The Shure SM57; the classiest thing in this photograph.
Sources:
Shure Incorporated Official Website
Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Beatles – Geoff Emerick
Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds – Charles L Granata
Posted in Classic Gear History, Gear, Microphones | No Comments »
Friday, July 16th, 2010
Synthesizer Basics – Lesson 2
Lesson 1 went over the common components of a synthesizer, explained the functions of the Oscillators, and the mixer sections.
Now let’s have a look at the Envelope and Filter sections.
Envelopes
The envelope section allows you to modify the shape of the waveform when a note is played. Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release are the controls you’ll find.
Sometimes there are more than one set of envelope controls. There is usually a dedicated envelope for the amplifier, and then the other can be assigned to filter or something else.
- Attack adjusts the start of the waveform, this will allow you to fade the sound in over time. Think of this as a way to control the volume of the tone from zero to full over a short period of time. From instantly on, to a very slow ramp up in level depending on how this control is set.
- Decay is a time control to set how long before the sustain level is reached.
- Sustain is the level the sound will be while the note is held.
- Release is the opposite of attack. When a key is released the sound fades out over a period of time set by this control.
Here is an example of a tone using a fast attack, fast decay, medium sustain and fast release.
ENVELOPE EXAMPLE 1
Now lets slow the attack way down, set medium decay, low sustain and slow release.
ENVELOPE EXAMPLE 2
Hopefully you can hear each of the controls at work in those examples.
Filter
The filter is a powerful part of the synth, with just two main controls, this can really shape the sound quickly. The filter section is where you will find the most variation. The design and functions and resulting sound will be different from one synth to another in both hardware and software.
The two main controls for a filter to pay attention to are Frequency or cutoff and Resonance. Some synths will let you choose what type of filter, Hipass, low-pass or bandpass.
- A Hi-Pass filter removes all frequencies below the cutoff frequency. (removes Low frequencies)
- A Low-Pass filter removes all frequencies above the cutoff frequency. (removes High frequencies)
- A Bandpass filter removes everything above and below a range around the cutoff frequency.
- The frequency or cutoff control you see in the filter section determines the range which the filter operates in.
- The resonance control will take that cutoff frequency and amplify it making the sound more aggressive.
- Often there is a control to set the steepness or curve of the filter, usually this is 12dB or 24dB.
Here’s an example of the filter in use. First the unfiltered sound, then the filter will sweep down to 10%, then the resonance will be brought up to 70% and swept back up. Then the curve will be changed from 12dB to 24dB.
FILTER EXAMPLE 1
Next I’ll use the second envelope in this synth and use it to control the filter automatically.
FILTER EXAMPLE 2
There’s another way to control the filter, using the LFO, but I’ll leave that for another lesson.
At this point you should be able to make some interesting sounds. If you know how to assign controls to knobs on your MIDI controller keyboard, start assigning some of the parameters you’ll need most often. Attack, Release, filter cutoff and Resonance. These are some of the controls you’ll usually reach for first when tweaking a synth, better to reach for a knob than the mouse.
Part 3 will be about the LFO section and some of the other fun things.
Posted in Synthesizer Basics Series, Tutorial | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Image Line just posted a preview of what’s coming in the next version of FL Studio. Registered users can try it out for themselves right now.
If you haven’t subscribed to Image Line’s YouTube channel, why not!?
Posted in FL Studio, Software, Video | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
I submitted this with my bug report today. It’s really slowing down my workflow getting back into PT after my Reaper vacation. I upgraded my system to Windows 7, I installed everything over again and upgraded to 8.0.4. AVID broke something that was working perfectly fine AGAIN! (recall when 8.0 first came out, scrolling was brutally slow in all areas for 9 months, user Shan had a fix in days. Unfortunately that fix now makes the edit window too fast, because AVID broke it AGAIN!)
Ok enough ranting. Enjoy the gif I made
If you are experiencing this problem on your system (shift+scrollwheel in MIDI editor or Mix Window) please comment on the thread
http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?p=1636716#post1636716
Posted in Commentary; Rants and Jokes, Pro Tools, Software, Windows | No Comments »
RT 
