to pharaphase the words of the immortal tech sargent chen

[solarbird]

Well, that was a hell of a thing, wasn't it?

Norwescon 33 is in the can and epic, in mostly the best but also a couple of times the opposite senses. I am wiped the fuck out. Our music guests were awesome incarnate this year and I particularly want to call out newcomers Death*Star for rawking the goddamn haus because 20 people standing in the hallway listening through the door = awesome. I bought their EP, they bought mine, I wish there had been a little more mixing between the subgroups, and I got a whole list of band names to check out. Damn I wish I'd been able to get a chiptunes band. Next year!

I had a bunch of panels I put in place because I desperately wanted to attend them but then being unable to actually get there, so if anyone took notes at Home Recording I and Home Recording II - particularly II - I want copies! Please! Particularly Home Recording II! The one panel I was officially on as a guest pro - It Ain't All Geetars and Mopy - filled the room, which I loved, and people were telling me later they really enjoyed hearing about all these bands. (I, too, took notes, and now I have a new listening list! Yay! I got more from Alec later. Plus some songs I want to learn. ^_^ But I digress.) I'd brought little plug-in speakers so all of us on the panel could play excerpts from the bands we were talking about, so we'd play all sorts of stuff - some Death*Star (hee), some Frontalot (of course), some Anamanaguchi, some KOMPRESSOR, some she, some South Side, Unicorn Dream Attack, and and and. Lots!

This year's experimental panel - Fone in the Filk - actually worked! I was so worried - particularly after some of the test runs I did - but it worked! It took a long time per song and was pretty labour-intensive for yours truly, but panelist Mickey Phoenix had the seriously good idea of running Mad Libs Filk games while the audience was playing telephone with song lyrics, and the combination kept everybody happy and busy the whole time, and increased the distraction factor, making for funnier telephone. I make a joke at the beginning about making a big mistake by not scheduling it for 11:30pm in the bar, and I'm halfway thinking, "well, we do have Maxi's upstairs, and they do make awfully good kamikazis..." ^_^

I didn't get to all the concerts, particularly not the Friday night concert block, about which I am sad! I did get water up to them, though. (Honestly, sometimes it felt like half of stage management consists of getting water to people. At least half. But really it's not.) John and Jen did hugely great work with sound, and I am so bringing them in next year if I get to do this again. SJ Tucker and Vixy and Tony filled the second-largest room at the convention to capacity, and Tricky Pixy filled the largest, and really, I didn't see a single badly-attended thing in the whole track. (I didn't get to everything, of course.) Sure there were mistakes - most notably speakers not making it up to the Buffy singalong at first - but we mostly fixed them.

I'm really glad I'm not doing this and the daily 'zine again next year. I'm done with publications for a good long while, and the new publications head wants to take things in a different direction anyway, so it's a good time to be done. I have some ideas for NWCmusic 2011 that I didn't get to try in 2010, and focusing just on the music track, I hope I can pull some more of them off.

I had a lot more work to do at convention than I anticipated, and I feel like I was holding a lot of it together at the end of wires and strings, but despite that - and maybe a little because of that - I had a great time. I hope all you guys did too!

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I didn't take notes at Recording II, but a few things did jump out at me: One, once you've got a rough mix, use a compressor to help smooth out individual tracks. Usually vocals. Something like Tricky Pixie's "Tam Lin", where there are really quiet parts and then at the climax Sooj really belts it out... gotta smooth that out. Two, one way to test music is take it driving, and turn it way down. If you can hear the whole song - all the instruments - at low volume with background noise, you're ok. If something stands out? It needs a compressor. (This is Tony's take; Alec doesn't use one; he does leveling manually (which ironically is called "automation", because you're using the software to simulate your fingers on the sliders)...

Also, technique for removing noise: use your EQ's to maximize the noise you're trying to remove, so you can pinpoint it - then dump the EQ the other direction. You may then have to add a second EQ pass to build up around the noise you just dumped so the track doesn't sound flat. (Tony demo'ed this for us. Sounded rather dramatic.)

He also mentioned that if you have the budget, sending your not-quite-ready-for-prime-time mix to a professional mastering guy (e.g. Jay Kinney with AudioLogic, locally - IIRC he did Gaia Consort's stuff) can be worth the $3-400... if you have the budget. Such things *can* be done in software, but part of it is also time in grade and having good ears... (and to hear Chris Bingham tell it, you haven't heard a CD until you've heard it through a $30k set of speakers... ) Tony himself (says Vixy) also has "dog's ears"... he can make some *really* subtle changes...

(Personally? Tony's a pretty good teacher and would probably be happy to let you sit in with him... just ask. He said himself that he learned much of what he knows by sitting in with Jeff Bohnhoff, who's the master of mojo when it comes to recording filk, at least on this coast...) (That reminds me, I need to order Grated Hits - they did a parody of Bohemian Rhapsody that took 250 tracks to get everything down. Somewhere Freddy Mercury is either cheering or imitating a steam turbine....)

[solarbird]

Excellent, thanks. Of course, if anyone has more, I want to hear it! ^_^

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I skipped panel II for a couple of reasons, at least one of which was, listening to the requirements for a good technical home recording in panel I left me thinking I was never going to be able to afford to do this stuff. I was looking for "what can you do with a USB microphone and a laptop" and the answer appears to be "not a lot other than try and find a level where you will neither clip your signal nor boost the ambient noise unacceptably when you boost the signal." Not that the information wasn't interesting and well-presented -- it was, populating the panel with Vixy, Tony and Alec was genius -- but at the moment money is at a premium, and I had to think long and hard before I got the USB microphone.

[solarbird]

...I think that's not so true. I'm hearing about some things from HRII that you could still use in a monophonic minimalist recording environment. I mean, sure, there's a lot you can't do, and that matters, but things like technoshaman's first two paragraphs above really would work just as well on any recording once you've made it, including single-mic laptop.

I don't know what you're using to record, but if you're willing to record separate tracks (as you should be, really, if you want to get tricky with things), and are willing to deal with an absolutely hellacious learning curve - seriously, it's brutal - then you should look into Ardour running on Ubuntu Linux. It's crazymaking a lot of the time, but it's also very powerful software and you can do more than you might think with it.

Alec told me later that Tony had some ideas in HRII that he'd never heard of and he was looking forward to trying in his studio. That's exactly the kind of cross-pollenation I'm trying to encourage! But really, placing them together was just a matter of asking, "okay, who does this well and is available?" Plug those in, and the answers just fall right out. ^_^

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

I have two things I want to work on. The first is a CD that I plan to use as sort of Christmas card, consisting of stories like "Gift Of The Magi" combined with old American carols like "Mary Had A Baby." The second is a set of scratch tracks with an eye toward eventually working on a CD.

The thing is, I don't have the money for any kind of room conditioning, or for things like cardoid microphones or input panels or any of that. All I have is a laptop, a Logitech USB microphone and a banjo. I do have both Windows and Linux at my disposal, and Audacity runs on both. My friend Phil (the one who wrote "Powders and Signs") made some suggestions as to how I can get a little bit better recording out of what I have, including how to multitrack in Audacity. Never heard of Ardour -- I'll have to look into it.

[solarbird]

The thing is, I don't have the money for any kind of room conditioning
Ah-ha! Here, I can help. Because you don't need lots of money for this. At the cheapest level, what you need is FREE. You need:

1. Free old shag carpeting on Craigslist that you can get clean enough that you're okay with it being around (takes a while), and:
2. Something you can attach it to so that it hangs vertically. Discarded plywood from construction sites, scrap lumber nailed into rectangles, card tables, discarded hollow doors, things like that.

Sure, I go all out and get new remnant carpet and PVC pipe to build frames and modular systems and such (see this post for details) for my cheap-ass sound baffles, but you don't have to. You can do it for free. You don't even need to make frames. Got a card table? Drape carpet over it. Wrap it 'round and tie it down with some twine if you feel ambitious. BAM - small sound baffle - a pretty decent one, and awesome for the price. Grab a discarded hollow-core door from a construction site and some free discarded carpet from somewhere. BAM - large sound baffle. Cost: zero! Plus the twine or maybe some tacks if you want to pin the carpet down well.

The key thing is that you don't have to condition the room, you just have to condition the area right around you. Put baffles between you and noise that you can't shut off. Put a baffle in front of you and another one behind you so you reduce odd sound interactions. (If you only have one baffle, put one in front of you, and a tall couch behind you. Put a blanket on the wall. Done.)

One thing I do is play into a mic pair right in front of a sound baffle. You can see this arrangement here, more or less. The computer's stuck over in the closet, so it's quiet. Having the baffle right in front of me means a big chunk of sound gets absorbed right after it goes by the mic, so there's very little bounce.

Meanwhile, behind me, I have a big couch, a card table covered in a comforter, and two other baffles placed over the window to stop outdoor noise. And it works! I have a lovely, lovely quiet noise floor and no odd echos and sound interactions and very clean recordings.

Ardour is much harder to use than Audacity, tho' it does some things Audacity doesn't, and they're things I need - but honestly, Audacity does a lot, really.

What USB microphone do you have, exactly? Logitech makes a couple. Also, pawn shops can be great places for cheap used microphones. It's a crapshoot, always, but you can get lucky. I got both my large-can capacitor Novas at Pawn Fathers, up in Lynnwood, for substantially less than retail.

(Maybe I should schedule myself on one of these panels sometime. I'm not bad at doing this stuff on the cheap.)

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should schedule myself on one of these panels sometime.)

Um, I would say right off that that's a big 10-4 there, partner. :)

The mic I got was a Logitech 980186-0403. It got pretty good reviews at Newegg.

Pawn shops are a good idea; I'd need someone with a car to help me out, though. (Come to think of it, Trading Musician would probably be worth checking out. I haven't been there in years.)

[jenk]

FYI, secondhand works for skydancer - most of his rig is reconditioned or secondhand. :)

[mdlbear]

I made my CD using Audacity on Debian. A bit less of a learning curve, though still pretty steep.

[solarbird]

Wow, I haven't been getting comment notifications for a while!

I started with Garage Band, and then tried Audacity as sort of a comparison to see what it was like, since it came recommended. Sadly, the clicktrack pseudoimplementation on Audacity quickly made me go, "um - no" and I punted on it. (I had some use for an actual clicktrack; Audacity's hack is cute, but, um, limiting.)

Really, if Audacity would've been okay, I'd probably have stuck with Garage Band, to which it is fairly similar, and which has a much less steep learning curve than either Audacity or Ardour, and the instrument support is pretty good. (My housemate Paul has a bit of a Garage Band library, and I could've borrowed sounds.) I'm glad it works for you tho' - it certainly works for a lot of people, most notably Tom Smith, who uses it on most of his CDs.

[mdlbear]

The big problem with USB mics is that they have 16-bit converters, which means you have to watch your levels very carefully. With the same mic cartridge and a separate interface you can get 24 bits, which gives you a lot more headroom.

[solarbird]

...actually that's not technically correct, which as we all know is the best kind of correct. Yes, the USB mic standard device is 16-bit, but the 16-bit vs. 24-bit question is a matter of resolution of soundwave, not total dynamic range bandwidth. I strongly suggest that if you tried particular instances of these two things and found a large difference in response that it was more a matter of the two particular interfaces you tried.

(I have both 16-bit and 24-bit interfaces in the same hardware, and there's no difference in overall levels, which is a useful control, since everything but the D/A setting is fixed. But really, if the actual delta between one bit level and the next (say, 0xFFF0 and 0xFFF1) were identical in 16-bit and 24-bit, which is what you'd have if the purpose of 24-bit was to give you more headroom, then a 16-bit pickup would be inaudible, as a 0xFFFF signal (16-bit maximum peak) would be 1/256ths of maximum output in the 24-bit range (0xFFFFFF), which, given a linear response curve, would be something less than half a decibel at something like real-world-range-output amplification, and much less at normal listening levels. The extra 8 bits go on the LSB end, not the HSB end, giving you a lot finer resolution in the curve, but not extra headroom, really. I suppose this means you could record at lower levels in some theoretical sense, but that still leads to the lower S/N ratios that you need to avoid to start with.)

(My goodness, that was a long aside. Perhaps I should rewrite it. But I'm out of typing time, and here comes keyboard break time alarm. Sorry! ^_^ )

[mdlbear]

Well, yes. The 0dB point is the same in both cases. "Extra headroom" in the sense that you can record at a lower level, leaving room for the inevitable peaks, without losing too much resolution in the quiet passages. Another way of putting it is that the 24-bit converters have a much larger dynamic range. The effect is that you can set the levels for the peaks and forget about riding the gain.

Yet another way of putting it is that the 24-bit converters have a much lower noise floor (higher signal/noise), by a factor of 256.

[solarbird]

I was wondering whether that was what you meant but doesn't that do horrible, horrible things to your noise floor? I mean, clearly it's manageable, but...

[mdlbear]

You can overdo it, of course, and analog noise is going to wipe out the bottom few bits. But the extra 8 bits gives you an extra 48dB to play around with. So you can set your levels to put average vocals at, say, -12dB and only use 2 of your extra bits.

(Each bit of resolution gives you 6dB of dynamic range.)

You will, of course, raise your noise floor by a corresponding 12dB, but if your equipment is quiet enough you can get away with it. The Wikipedia article on dynamic range says that "Practical considerations of acceptable distortion levels in microphones combined with typical practices in a recording studio result in a useful operating range of 125 dB"; the theoretical dynamic range of 16-bit audio is 96.

[jenk]

Well...Tony and AJA had a difference of opinion over the use of compression, especially on vocals. AJA hates it, Tony uses huge amounts of it, like 10:1.

FWIW, I mostly follow John's lead and so 2:1 or 3:1 compression above a middle-range threshold. (2:1 ratio means that for every 2 decibels of input volume increase over the threshold, there'll be 1 decibel of output volume increase. So singing louder will still increase volume, just not as much.)

To use, oh, The Girl That's Never Been as an example, you want the quieter vocal moments, like the Chesire's dialog, to come through clearly, but not to have the chorus be blasting out the speakers. Setting the threshold correctly will let you moderate the higher volumes while keeping the dynamic changes.

(In live mixing, John's compressor is why he's not constantly adjusting the sliders on The Girl That's Never Been or Red Right Hand anymore. As a bonus, the computer is probably smoother than manually tweaking the sliders. ;)

Re the increase the bad with the EQ - yes, it's a good trick, and one I use in mixing recordings, but also I would suggest you just play with EQs on each track for a while just so you can get used to how they sound. Remembering this will help when you go to narrow in on things. When John went to teach me to do live mixes, he ran a recording of the He of the Sidhe violin part through his board and let me play with the EQs. Just listening to how adjusting the mid-range vs highs vs lows was really educational, and a single-note instrument like that makes it a bit easier (very pure sounds - vocals are also single-note, though not as pure). The mixing software on the computer lets you do the same thing. If I'm mixing a song I listen to each individual track several times while tweaking individual EQs before I really start figuring the levels between tracks.

-/-

Not sure if Jay at Audio Logic does mastering, but he does recording (for Gaia / BPO among others) and teaches classes on sound engineering. Tony speaks well of the class, and not just because Chis and Sue were the "stunt band" for the recording-with-a-band portion of the class. ;)

[solarbird]

Thanks! I am reading and thinking. I have lots and lots and lots to learn. But one amusement:

Tony and AJA had a difference of opinion over the use of compression, especially on vocals. AJA hates it
That's funny! 'Cause Alec said to try it on mine in one song. I suspect he was referring to his own. Or is testing Tony's advice on me, lulz.

(I'm using it on some songs and not on others; a matter of what needs must, I suppose.)

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

HATED to miss It Ain't All Geetars... would you share crib notes?

Second the bit about getting John and Jen for sound... they leveled the Pixies on the fly and by mid-second-song they were dialed...

And the juried one-shots were awesome and win and pie... I've never seen Sooj *so* *on*... the look she was giving that doumbek player was like lasers... and *all* the feedback was excellent, including the comic relief from Death*Star...

Trouble Clef Jam is relatively old NWC tradition, but it's there for a reason... everybody gets to rock out. Particularly good this year was Alec and Creede egging the rest of us on... and House of the Gilligan's Island :)

And the riff about the Emergency Backup Holographic Filk Track Director was an excellent way to do exactly what the one-shot jury said to do - make your weaknesses strengths. Win and pie, my friend, and I'm glad to see you looking forward to next year.

[solarbird]

HATED to miss It Ain't All Geetars... would you share crib notes?
You're not the only one asking - I've got mine, but I'm also seeing whether C0splay kept his so I can combine them into something more comprehensive. I took some notes about his notes at the panel - he knows so much more about the nerdcore scene than I do - but they aren't very comprehensive and I missed a couple of bands I really want included in a writeup if I can do it.

And yes, the whole one-shots panel was simply excellent fun. I grabbed S00j and C0splay afterwards to get their feedback on my half-song performance kicking things off, so I could share in the love too, and took away some good information from that.

As for next year; I'm still recovering from this year! But if the new executive committee will have me back - people forget the whole thing is reconstituted year after year, and staffing is up to the new department heads - then I'll be glad to Play Player 2. I've taken a few notes on things I did not do well (most notably: communication that performance slots include the setup time, so factor that into your set length) and which we need to improve upon in general (setup for the Pixie show was kind of a mess in Grand 3 due to overlapping setup crews; setup for the concert blocks was much too rushed/ad hoc/etc; I had some talks with the Programming Track Head about the setup issues and she's totally onboard with fixing this. John and Jen totally came under pressure, I gotta say.)

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what TS said. Win and pie all the way around. I have more notes for you but I may need a bit of time to put them together, and I'm not sure how soon you want to hear about this year or start tackling the next. But I have ideas . . . mwahahahahahaaaaaaaa . . .

[solarbird]

I do absolutely want your notes and I do want to hear about your ideas. But there's no rush. We'll have the post-con meeting in a few weeks (I forget when exactly), so if you can get the onions-and-roses part to me by then that would be most helpful! But, assuming they have me back, I won't get to planning next year until October or so. Summertime is break time WOOHOOOOOOOOOO!!!

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Sure, I'll get a little bit to you today (hopefully) privately so I (again hopefully) don't forget, and then possibly more later.

[solarbird]

Thanks! You should still have my email address, just toss it there.

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I just sent you an email on a slightly different subject -- I'll send some notes along in a bit.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

We had a great time -- thanks for asking us to perform! Thing you might want to note for next time, if you do this next time: the people setting up for whatever was next in that room, from the con but NOT filk folk, were determined by all the gods they could summon to have that room by five minutes before they were entitled to it. We held them off till the absolute dot of eight, but no longer, which meant cutting two songs since the concert before us ran overtime. You might wanna schedule with a little bit of buffer in between sets, so if one thing runs over there's still time to get the next act set up and miked properly without running ten minutes into a set that has no room at the back end.

I'm a big believer in fifteen minute setup breaks between acts, myself, but just giving you the information. Other than that, everything went great, we loved performing, people seemed to like listening, and you got my favorite sound people running the board, so what's not to like?

[solarbird]

Thanks for coming! I'm glad you had a good time. I've forwarded your comments to SunnyJim, who is coordinating all these comments for the postcon meeting, where we'll go over all this stuff and get it organised for next year! (That way it doesn't get lost. ^_^ )

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Thanks! You did a great set of music options. I couldn't get to most of them because I was too dead after performing, I just went home, but Callie and Steve told me about a lot of them. Norwescon was much the better for your having been involved, and that's high praise for a first-year department head. :)

[mdlbear]

Indeed. I had a great time, for all my griping at the con; if you're running the filk track again next year I'll have to think seriously about whether I can afford Yet Another Con.

The home recording panels were very useful.

[carmiel.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Thank you because this year had one of the best filk tracks I've seen outside of a filk convention.

[solarbird]

Wow. Thank you.

[ttamsen.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It was all your filk programming that convinced me at the last moment to attend my first Norwescon, and it was a blast. I don't know if I'll be able to afford to attend again soon, but I'm sure glad I was there for this one. My notes from HRII correspond with what others already posted, but I think I might have had a couple other snippets -- I'll check my scribblings when I'm back from work.

[solarbird]

wow Thanks!