field marshall hrádek

This morning I awoke and for the first time in my life made coffee. I hopped into the shower, dressed, and walked into a kitchen filled with the aroma of our newly acquired bean addiction. I poured it into my cup, dropped in a spoon of chocolate syrup, and touched a few drops of milk to it. Excellent. My newly acquired container, although a little pricey, has been working out well in keeping the grounds fresh.

I have also installed a keyboard tray on my desk to help organize it a little. I am pleased with the way it worked out but I admit that the additional distance I now sit because of the sliding tray makes my 22" monitor seem a little small. My goal has been to make my desk inviting and easy to work on music but I've rarely the time or energy to get inspirational. Ach so.

Posting pics isn't enough. I ran accross this little gem, Dave Smith Instrument's Mopho and I am totally hooked. I am also salivating over a Tetr4 but it costs twice as much as the Mopho. Here's review of the Mopho.

So what is so exciting? True analog sound in a small box without spending thousands on Moogs or similar. I am excited. My only gripe is that it is monophonic. Also in the running are the Waldorf Blofeld and Virus T1 Snow.

Oh man, they call it "gear lust". What I really want now is a Moog Little Phatty.

Oh, this weekend I am going camping with Nate to Lake Ozette. We're hoping to get some fishing in. I am totally stoked to get some fresh air, quiet, and camaraderie.

I like Zzounds more with every purchase I make. They've got free shipping on most orders over a certain amount and they price match. I found AKG 271 MkII headphones used for recording and mixing by the pros for a much better price on Amazon from some unknown retailer. Also, I found the headphone amp for about $10 less. Anyway, Zzounds matched the prices so I didn't have to gripe about buying it from some potentially shady seller or paying more to have piece of mind.

I'd like to be able to start recording with Crystal so this is the first part of that goal. Soon will be a new microphone (I think I'll do the RØDE NT2-A), pop filter, and shock mount.

The music in the following video is fairly formulaic for trance but it's a fantastic find since it, well, combines trance music and a rubber clad performer calling herself Rubberdoll. The song is Markus Schulz - Do You Dream.

Anyway, I might want to slow down with my posting! I have 2 hours a day of commuting on a train with wi-fi, whaddaya expect?!

I will hold back on the new mic until we get some tracks down. In the mean time I can use my Behringer B2-Pro. I'd rather fill out some more hard ware to get inspired by.

While I am packing my giant laptop onto the commuter train and I've pretty much exhausted everything except trolling Facebook and reading some books, I really want to start making music on the commuter train. In steps the Akai LPK25:

I was making music on the ferries using the M-Audio Oxygen v2 while we were living in Bremerton and I was riding the ferry/bus to Bellevue but the tables on the ferries were considerably larger.

This is also much lighter and although the keys are considerably smaller, they still have good synth action. I've also been considering the even lighter Korg Nano series but I've read some disappointing reviews about them.

Ideally, I want to check both out and actually give them a try. It's going to be sweet to set up and have a couple hours a day to work on my music.

I guess what got me thinking about this is that I was actually making some pretty good music on the ferry. Tracks titled Ferry Time, Wade Through Filth, Macht Arbeit, and Sunrise. Good times.

Maybe it's not the crazy hard industrial techno with haunting female machina vocals I wanted to produce but I am incredibly pleased to share that Crystal and I worked out a song last night. She came up with the lyrics and basic structure while she was doing the dishes. I plugged in my keyboard, fired up my mixer and monitors, and started up Cubase and we were able to work through the verses, chorus, and bridge. Yes! Nothing has been recorded or anything... but we've got the chords, lyrics, and basic idea of the song worked out.

We're working on tracks for a Christian rock/pop project we're thinking of. It's awesome to get some traction on this. We're toying with the name Valley Avenue. Still not sure if that's the album or the group. We're sort of in discussion stage.

I've got an old Behringer B2-Pro microphone a friend gave me a while ago. I'd like to upgrade that to something like the Røde NT1-A. Also, I'll need to get a pair of headphones like the AKG 271 and get an ART 4 headphone amp so we can start recording together. My office will definitely need some acoustic treatment. The vocals sound like they're coming from inside a box right now.

When I got the piano a few years ago it was horribly dirty. 24 ivories were badly chipped or missing. 3 black keys had their top missing. It had been played with the felt down (it looked like the rod fell out of the pedal bar) so the felt had perfect holes where the hammers made contact.

I've fixed the pedal bar. We cleaned out the innards. A friend carpenter had made me some new ebony tops. Yesterday I took a damp rag and wiped off all the dirt from the keys where the ivory had been missing. I then took a knife and scraped the new tops to make sure they'd glue well. And finally I glued down the replacement pieces. The key was to absolutely avoid water based glues. As I wait for the glue to dry I will come back with nail file and even all the new pieces out.

I am pleased that I'll get to tickle ivories again. I know folks say plastic works fine. I disagree. I really hope they can eventually synthesize ivory. Anyway, after playing a couple tunes I really need to get around to filing down the larger keys. The slight drag causes me to miss notes.

Eric Mau has been a tuner for our family for about 15 years. My parents stopped using him after my sister left the nest but today he showed up to tune my piano. Now, it is amazing how many interesting things a piano tuner will have to say about anything regarding the things he's seen in people's pianos and what was completely uplifting was to hear that the free piano I got years ago actually turned out to be a pretty darn good piano.

It turns out that my piano wasn't played much and that the climate in our state is great at preserving such instruments. The fairly steady humidity level here is good for the wood. I smiled as he lightened up and busted out a box of hundreds of broken off ivory pieces. I can now restore all those broken off pieces.

Tuning took about an hour.

While I made him some tea and we discussed the finer parts of a Steinway Concert Grand Model D, I reminisced about a time when Jerry and Josh showed up with a tuning hammer, A-440 fork, and mute. I provided a Strobo-tuner and we got a pretty darn good Kirnberger III (or perhaps Werckmeister?) tempered piano. It's an awesome story to share: three guys get a bunch of beer and tune pianos to historical temperaments.

The good news is that I've moved several times since then and to totally justify that beer driven party we had actually done everything on pitch. Though, I admit, I chose equal temperament this time around. I guess I caved and went along with everyone else.

Anyway, it's Saturday. I got the porch cleaned. My license renewed. And now I'm going watch Helen while Crystal takes a nap. Later I will run to the store and perhaps this evening I will spend a few hours restoring some keys.

Our sound team moved and now the web team (me and Emily, my PM), sit about 12 feet from them. It's awesome because I can stand up, walk, and start mining their brains for tidbits of solid gold recording engineer info. Today I acquired the knowledge of how to zero my mixer. That sounds silly but it is really hard to find good information because set ups vary so much.

I am going from memory and the remnants of a cheeseburger stained set of notes we came up with while discussing this but basically, here is what I got. I can't say its correct so I share this with no authority.

1. Set the sound card to 0db. Right now I set it to -20db because I wanted more headroom in my control room volume. Silly me! Doing this throws me off at a bad part of the signal chain.
2. Set the main out volume by adjusting the fader to 0db. Alt 5/6 in my case, the inputs are Pre Fader Level (PFL) so I set the out fader to 0db and then adjust the trim on the out until a 1 Kilohertz -14db tone floats at 0db on the meter.
3. Repeat this step for inputs. In my case its line one, the microphone.
4. Set control room volume to 78db with a SPL meter using pink noise.

I am still a bit confused by what I understand about all this but at least I kind of know what to look for. I know the last step is particular for a mixing scenario.

Bad news bears here, a couple recording sessions ago I pushed down PFL and a loud sqwuak came through my speakers. I think I damaged the right monitor and now it buzzes. I admit, I did something stupid. Anyway, I found a place in Tacoma named Sound West Audio that does repair work on Yamaha stuff so I am going to take it in and have my speaker serviced. I'll be happy if it costs less than $40.00; we'll see. I feel so dumb doing that.

I'm currently listening to The Azoic and I:Scintilla who I found recently while looking at some other stuff like them. I'm getting really anxious to put out some tracks but I keep going down all these "inspiration rabbit holes" where I create a project and then dabble in some ideas that lead to something completely unrelated. Last night I started a project and decided to work on a orchestral piece that morphed into electronica that somehow melded Middle Eastern percussive instruments with jazz trombone. I have no idea. But yeah, it happens all the time.

Crystal and I laid down some phat lyrics for a worship song we're throwin' together. Now that she can hear herself in the headphones she really belts stuff out a lot better. It's cool to see us both learning what works and doesn't work in our recording. I am excited to get home and try working out the mixer stuff so I can see how things will sound leveled.

Tomorrow we're taking kitty to Nate's parents. I am looking forward to her getting to have a good home. I'd like to spend time with Nate tomorrow but with Helen puking and her fever hasn't even broke yet today I think visiting them and their new few week old would be a bad idea.

UPDATE: It isn't blown! It turns out that our home phone was interfering with my monitor. It's shielded but I'm sure our old phones weren't all that awesome.

So yeah, the water from last weeks potential flood receded and nothing much to talk about there. My folks left for Antarctica so I will be swinging by their place to check on the cats and stuff. I hope they have a good time for its probably the first vacation where I question their sanity during the time when they decided to go there. I can definitely see the appeal especially during their "tour the whole world and see everything" kick as of late. I get to pick them up when they get back so I am sure I'll get to hear all about it. I went to Costco with my parents, before they left, and helped them pick out a digital SLR so they don't have to keep borrowing mine. The Nikon D60 will be quite adequate for their purpose. I also helped pick out a laptop for my sister. She really needed to connect to the digital world so hopefully she'll be online more often. We'll see.

Nate's son was born this last week. Check out his post about it. He and his wife are both very tired. We congratulate and wish them the best. Every kid is different. We mean well when we try and bestow our knowledge and advice to them but its all hard to gauge if it helps folks. The little guy will grow fast. Helen started crawling and pulling herself up on New Year's Eve. Now she'll crawl around the house. The smiles I get when she sees me break my heart. I love my family!

I just had a couple awesome break throughs on my music production. One example is watching music videos or listening to cuts and trying to reproduce the sounds and rhythms. I was listening to Armin van Buuren's "In and Out of Love", for example, and worked out most of the beats and sounds. Sure, some of this more pop techno or trance has some elementary writing but its definitely an ok place to start. I really like the vocal work on that track. Sharon den Adel's voice is marvelous.

Another break through is figuring out how to make direct monitoring work. Basically, when you record singing the singer needs to hear their own voice. It's really hard to record your own voice with a pair of headphones on while recording. So you directly monitor the voice as you are recording it. That way the singer can adjust their voice while they are singing. I was really struggling to get that to work because routing all the signals through mixers, sound cards, software; there are a lot of places that might be set.

Another cool thing I figured out was setting my brother-in-law's MIDI controller, the Axiom 25, to also control his DAW. I have the 61 so it wasn't hard to transfer some knowledge to his unit's configuration. However, once plugged in, you can set the keyboard up to control various functionality from buttons on the unit like rewind, fast forward, stop, loop, play, and record. Like I mentioned, I got the Faderport to do this and more for me but it was cool to have another bit of expertise under my belt.

I'm man enough to admit I like some musicals. Recently I enjoyed Moulin Rouge! and Phantom of the Opera. I just found an interesting concept for a rock opera in Repo. I haven't seen it; only reviews and trailers... but I am intrigued. It could be complete garbage. It's headlining Sarah Brightman so perhaps it has hope. Basically the premise is that in the future folks are indebted to a company which does plastic surgery and transplants because of some cataclysmic event. Very dark.

I've connected my MIDI controller keyboard and have been actively been working on music every night that I can. I have had a lot of fun putting some hip-hop beats and learning some cool new rhythms. I think having my keyboard out and everything easily accessible has made it more conducive to making music. Right now I have been using quite a bit of Plugsound's libraries. Emulation has been a great way to learning new stuff for me. A favorite example is to take a loop that is something Timbaland might put together and then break it out of the construction set in one of these libraries and learn how they fit together. Talk about reprogramming a rhythmically challenged brain!

Music inspiration. Sometimes I find musical inspiration in the oddest things, like... leather pants. In all seriousness, though, is this revelation that music can be simple. To me it is strange especially since the more complex a tune seemed to be the more I was attracted to it. I hope to shed this egotistical and short sighted approach to music. An example of a simple approach would be the track "Hoffnung Am Ende Der Welt" by Stephan Zacharias for the Der Untergang soundtrack. Perhaps its simplicity is its complexity. The somber tones, the rawness of the strings, the placement coloring of the mix; evokes emotion which I enjoy.