By George Petersen
Whether working live or in the studio, a lot about audio production involves a bunch of hurry up followed by a bunch of sitting around. No matter how well planned out, there’s always some unexpected delay that creates downtime, whether it’s waiting for a courier to deliver a master or waiting for the lighting guys to finish rigging before the mains get flown. Or sometimes it’s something just as stupid as waiting for the club owner to show up with a key or the classic two hours of punch-ins while that “one take” vocalist lays down a useable track. Either way, there’s a whole lotta downtime to kill.
There are lots of alternatives in this regard–if you’re lucky, you can grab a guitar and jam a bit or work out lyrics to your new hit, but sometimes you just wanna vegge out and do something mindless. A deck of cards is the old tour bus standard, but poker or crazy-eights can get boring after a while. Sorry to get off the pure audio track here, but a couple years ago, my brother in-law Greg and I were in just such a killing time situation and we created a card game that’s easy, fast-paced and fun–whether you win or lose. We called it “Grapeshot” (after the mounds of huge grape-sized pellets that ship cannons would occasionally fire), because the real fun in this game is not necessarily winning, but wreaking out some nasty revenge on other players and causing THEM to lose.
Here’s how it works: Grapeshot is essentially like low-ball poker, where the object is to end up with the WORST hand possible. But here’s where the fun comes in: Instead of throwing away the cards you don’t want and getting a draw back from the dealer, the players pass two cards to the player on their right. This card passing happens one time for each player in the game, so with three players, you deal out the cards (five to each) and then announce “first pass” and then “second pass” and then “final pass” (three players = three 2-card passes), with everyone in the game passing their two cards at the same time.
What on the outside seems like a very simple game quickly becomes fairly strategic. If you begin by passing a high pair (say, aces or kings) on the first pass, chances are those same cards will come back to you–bad idea. But by delaying when you pass pairs or other high cards, you can often select the intended recipient to be any other player, and as the idea is to end up with a low hand, it is often the game’s last pass that delivers the coup de grace, just as a load of grapeshot at the waterline could sink a ship. Best of all, Grapeshot is easy, fast-paced and each game takes less than a minute–just the thing for killing some time while you’re waiting for your Thanksgiving travel connection to get de-iced or just on the way.
Speaking of same, have a great (extended) weekend, eat some great food, spend a little quality time with your loved ones and if you’ve got time to kill, try a little Grapeshot.
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
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By George Petersen
A couple months back, a a friend asked if I wanted to help do a live 2-track recording of a local big band. The group was on a budget and needed a recording that could double as both a demo and possibly a CD they could sell at their gigs. The venue was at Oakland’s Veterans Hall, which is downtown at the top of Lake Merritt, if you know the area. It’s a wonderful old art deco auditorium/ballroom that holds about 600 people and since I’ve recorded there before, I jumped at the chance. Besides, it sounded like a fun challenge.
The real challenge arrived when we found out that the recording was NOT in the beautiful upstairs ballroom, but in a low-ceilinged, basement cafeteria where the band rehearses. So much for spending hours mulling over the exact positioning of the room mics! Speaking of mics, we kept it simple. We left the tube Neumanns and Telefunkens at home, instead opting for a combination of decent, mostly small-diaphragm condensers, including two Shure KSM109s, two Audio-Technica 3031s and four (oldie but still goodie) TOA K3s. The close-in vox mic was a Rode NT-1A, which on this particular female lead singer gave a sort of silky smooth, 1940′s ribbon vocal sound.
The mics were set up in stereo pairs over each section (trombones, trumpets, saxes, rhythm) with a spot mic on the upright piano and a vocal mic for a couple tunes that had a singer. The section miking arrangement allowed us to have some control over the balance and provided a nice stereo image, rather than going with the “mono-mic-on-each-instrument-pan-potted-into-phony-stereo” routine. This way, each section could define its own blend and by experimenting with mic placement/distance we could create a smooth mix.
We set up a temporary mix position in the hallway outside the cafeteria, and the 10 individual mic cables cleared the door jamb, allowing a little more isolation. The mixer was a Yamaha MG16/6FX–hardly a Neve or API–but certainly clean enough to do the job. The room was VERY live, so adding ambience wasn’t an issue, although we did use a touch of the board’s built-in reverb (!) on vocal.
With not much time and a lotta material to cover, we had the band run through each song, while we set up a mix and then the band did two complete takes of each song for the recording. In all, we cut 12 different tunes. All in all, a pretty good evening’s work. A couple days later, we assembled the best takes, did a quick mastering pass and it was done.
After WAY too many long nights on other sessions auditioning kick mics, punching endless vocal takes or editing hi-hat samples, this recording was a refreshing experience. The whole recording session–from load-in to packing out–was about five hours and we left with some great sounding mixes with some hot performances that everybody liked. And damn, it was even fun… Isn’t that what music is supposed to be all about?
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
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By George Petersen
The old analog vs digital argument is some 30 years old and not getting any younger. I’m not going to bring up that old feud. There are good and bad digital systems, and there are good and bad analog systems.
But often one of the reasons that digital sounds bad stems from user error. Many of us spent years honing our analog recording skills, finding out how to work with the (many) eccentricities of putting electrical signals onto magnetic tape. We knew when to hit it hard, when to ease back, when to bias, when to overbias–you name it, someone tried it. And the results were often quite remarkable.
Then that nasty digital demon arrived. Without years of knowing the inside tricks, we tried treating digital like analog. And we all learned the lesson about digital overloads and that awful, nasty noise digital circuits exude when clipped. Fearing the evil digital dragon, many people backed off their levels, avoided the overs and started making recordings that were well below the dreaded 0dB mark. Besides, with no tape hiss, any recording could just be brought up to 0dB later with a little normalization—the tracks were free of overload distortion, so everybody’s happy, right? Well, not quite, because the resulting sound was often lifeless, sterile sounding and lacked the punch we so craved. When you start recording at -4 or -6 or even -10 dB just to avoid overload distortion, your available dynamic range suffers, and that 16-bit system you had starts putting out 12- or 14-bit recordings. To make matters worse, manufacturers started building digital gear with clip lights that kicked in around -4dB, so as users avoided that -4dB point, the situation became even more ridiculous. Fortunately, 20- and 24-bit digital systems arrived just in time for us to make some 16- and 18-bit recordings.
Unfortunately, even today, there still is no industry standard for what constitutes a digital clip. How many consecutive samples have to break that -0dB mark before an overload is indicated–or even heard by the listener? (One? Two? Four? Six?) I’m not implying that your waveforms should resemble square waves or the great mesas and plateaus of the American West, but the effect also depends on what kind of source you’re recording. Everybody knows that digital overloads can sound raspy and harsh, so while tracking, if a snare hit (an instrument that’s supposed to sound raspy anyway) has SOME clipping, is that really a bad thing?
Meters and those flashing clip lights are provided as a guide. Finding out what your system is capable of simply comes down to LISTENING. Take a little time, experiment with your DAW or reverb and determine the limits of your rig. As anyone who bent a few analog VU meter needles can tell you, sometimes rules were meant to be broken.
When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Check ‘em out at www.jenpet.com.
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