For your consideration, let’s examine the band Bread. Now, most folks know this band for all the gawd-awful, delicate, love ballads that have been played millions of times by hacks with effing Ovations (probably plugged into Radio Shack adapters), at weddings dating back 30-yrs. But, at their core, Bread was typically an excellent, 2-3 guitar, rock band featuring great arrangements, vulnerable vocals, and a nice tonal sandwich of Telecasters and acoustics punctuated every now and again by tasty, humbucker-fueled, tonal shrapnel via a fellow named Larry Knechtel (RIP 2009) who usually sported a 3-pickup LP Custom. For today’s music selection, I ask you to look past the 70′s aesthetics of the video clip and dig on the tune “Guitar Man“. It is a good song, delivered with an excellent vocal and sweet, wah-wah lead work throughout…and, its all played live, nice and tight. What more could you ask for in 70′s pop?

-Darren

Watch this video on YouTube.

(originally posted here: The Band “Bread”…Another Take.)

Anyway, trackers got their start on 8-bit computers, and as a result they’re a great way to really extract all the capabilities of the classic sound chips. They accomplish this by letting you create your own collection of instrument patches which can each combine all the available waveforms, envelopes, and filters. On the C64, for example, this means you can create your own bass drum sound by combining a white noise sound with a low triangle wave, or perhaps a sawtooth note with an intense volume envelope. Then, you take those instruments and arrange them in a pattern editor, which to the untrained eye looks like a nonsensical grid of letters and numbers. There are several C64 trackers out there, but there’s one I like in particular which is both powerful and relatively easy to use, called Cybertracker.

The learning curve on trackers is pretty steep, but the reward is big: you can crank out music pretty fast once you have mastered the basics. So have a manual handy! To teach myself how to use them, I decided to write a song in a modern tracker, called Renoise. The result is below… along with a download of the original session file which you can examine yourself if you have Renoise installed. I called it “softcrunch” because I was trying to think of a word to describe the “organ” sound at the very beginning.

• Softcrunch
  
  Audio MP3
• Download (license: cc-by-sa)
  MP3 | Renoise Session

(originally posted here: Getting Into Trackers)

That term might not mean anything or be completely foreign to some, but varying sample rates can completely change your listening experience when discovering new music.

I was driving to dinner with my girlfriend tonight and we were listening to Only by the Night by Kings of Leon.   An album soaked in reverb and needly guitars that has a lot of sonic character that really makes the album great. I remember when the album came out it wan’t a big world-changer, but the guitar tone and production was stellar. All of that reverb was lost however because we were listening to a stream of it on my iPhone [that I love dearly] through iTunes Match.

The service has a decent sample rate for an Mp3, but it can’t even stack up next to the full quality of a 44.1 file on a cd. I had to keep switching tracks and finding something that didn’t have a lot of cymbal work or verb just because I couldn’t stand the downsampling of the lesser-quality files on my phone. The end result of the short car trip was that I had to turn the music way down just so I wouldn’t hear the compression in the higher frequencies. The whole disc sounded squashed and bit-crushed to me.

This jaunt in digital file compression made me think of the first time I heard the Joshua Tree on vinyl. Before finding it in my parents music collection I had only heard the entire album in Mp3 version from a digital download. My ears were rejoicing as soon as the first snare hit in that album, I had never heard a snare drum so musical! I began listening to as much as I could at higher sample rates and found that I noticed more in songs when they weren’t as compressed just to save bandwidth online or space on a hard drive.

All ramblings aside, what I’m getting at is this: If you can get a higher quality version of a song, please please PLEASE do yourself a favor and don’t down-sample it just to fit more songs on your phone or whatever media device you use. You’re cheating your ears!

**One more thing as a side note: I guess this is a question I’ll ask of you guys — Do you think that listening to music at it’s full sample rate and bit depth is becoming obsolete? It seems that more and more services are being introduced that allow you to conveniently stream your music over the air, but sacrifice quality in the name of that convenience. I think this is true but am excited for the day when bandwidth becomes cheap and prevalent enough that we’ll be able to stream full quality tracks to the media player of your choice.

(originally posted here: Are Higher Sample Rates Becoming Obsolete?)

Lately I have been thinking of better ways to use my commodore 64 live. I’ve come to the realization that I need a way to send midi information to it. Maybe have the commodore play back through Ableton live so it can be controlled with their really simple setup, or even just be able to set it up to a clock to play a simple loop at a desired tempo. I’m not really sure of the first way to go about doing this but I think the best thing is to just start researching random nerd blogs and seeing if anyone has done this before. My end result needs to be something that’s not too difficult to set up that preferably runs through my lappy so I can play a lick on the commodore, set it to quantized the notes to a tempo and then just let it loop while i go back to playing guitar.

Perhaps I’m thinking too hard, it would certainly be a lot easier to que up an ableton live set and just play loops when I want them in the song; but that takes the fun out of playing the part live!

Oh well, this post is more of a rambling than anything…I just want to have some tangible evidence that this thought has in my mind for a while now and I want to get it done right.

(originally posted here: Long time wants of a c64)

(originally posted here: Finally working)

Shure KSM-44 –>
Auditronics 110B Preamp & EQ –>
Universal Audio LA-3A (vintage) –>
Computer input (Layla 3G).

I really dug the sound. The LA-3A leveled Si’s more-dynamicker-than-average vocals nicely, and the bright KSM-44 was a perfect compliment to the smooth 110 pre.

The point of this post, however, is not the setup, though that’s nice: The point is how I got there, and the implications for the future of the setup.

When I first connected the LA-3A, I was getting signal into it and gain reduction out of it… and I could hear it working through the monitors. Sounded great. Problem is, no matter how hard I drove the comp, I didn’t see any gain reduction happening in the computer — it was nearly impossible to keep the level within the sweet range. After scratching my head for a while, I got out the Auditronics manual and traced the signal flow thorough those preamps. As it turns out, the issue was with the modification I had made to those preamp modules to make the echo send (Auditronics-speak for “aux send”) pre-fader, so that the fader didn’t affect the record level. Unfortunately, this mod had the side effect of making the record send pre-insert and pre-EQ, due to the routing on those modules. Unable to come up with an ideal fix, I ended up un-modifying one module (I just had to move a single jumper) and viola, a river max-o-squish flowed forth.

This all means that in order to track with EQ and insert FX, the mod will have to be un-done on all the modules, and thus the faders will affect the record send on every channel. Until now, the faders were primarily for the 2-track mixdown, control room, and studio send mixes, with the echo send knob being an independent level control going to the DAW, which worked beautifully. I haven’t come up with a way to get the mixer to do exactly what I want without many intense nights of soldering and PCB trace cutting, so for now un-modding the modules will probably have to suffice.

But the good news is: Some lovely vintage-gear-powered sounds have been made, and more are forthcoming.

(originally posted here: A winding road to a tasty signal chain)

Well, as I really wanted this CD to live again (and being basically broke because I have a family, work for a small college, and can’t make a profit off my stellar prose or deft soldering abilities) I recalled some “cherished” memories of auto-body repair work I used to willingly perform on snowmobiles, go-karts, and eventually full-sized vehicles before I realized that that type of dust and asthma really didn’t play nice together (Masks? We don’t need no stinkin’ masks…). From that well-repressed area of my mind, it occurred to me that rubbing compound, used correctly, takes out surface scratches on automotive finishes – same deal-ee-oh with the blessed nitro-cell lacquer covering any guitar worth worshipping. From the little bit of guitar servicing I’ve done over the last few years, I had a can of #7 Polishing compound and a tube of Swirl Remover sitting on the shelf (note: I’m ashamed to admit that those items have spent 99.99-percent of their lives cleaning up my guitars and de-sticky-ing necks instead of being used on my autos…which might also explain the Impala’s rather pissy attitude towards my CD’s the last couple years I had it…).

I set up shop on a towel at the Dining Room table (obviously, Dana was not home at the time) and started working on the disc with the polishing compound first. Strangely enough, about 90-percent of the really noticeable scratches did come out with only 10-mins or so of work. Hmmm…my hunch actually paid-off. When done, the disc was, of course, cloudy and covered in swirly scratches. Both of those conditions cleared-up pretty quick while working with the aptly-named Swirl Remover compound.

I took the now-shiny disc over to my cheap-azz, BloRay deck on the home theatre rig and slapped it in. To my utter amazement, it found the TOC instantly and cued-up the first track. It then proceeded to play every track perfectly – no skips, no hiccups, no framing, nothing! The only downside to the experience was that it highlighted how utterly awful the “Dynamic Range Optimization” was on my TV’s audio section. With God as my witness, an Alesis 3630 compressor couldn’t do any more, excruciatingly-audible damage to a source. I am just thankful that I didn’t play Steely Dan’s “Aja” through it as that might have made me weep openly in front of my 10-yr old (who’s head was actually bobbing-along with Tool tunes as she played her DS on the couch…hmm, come to think of it, both levels of media exposure probably nullified any good Sunday School actually did for her earlier this morning..).

In the end, some internet research yielded the “toothpaste trick” on CD’s, which IMO, is actually rather inferior to using real polishing compound correctly (plus, one cannot huff their way to brain cell-killing enlightenment with the minty goodness of Crest). If you haven’t used polishing compounds before, I’d recommend a bit of practice first on your neighbor’s Benz before you touch something as important as a your favorite CD…

(Btw – I’m @dtube1 on Twitter)

(originally posted here: “Bring Out Your Dead!” Getting Those Pesky Ones and Zeros Back Into a Readable State on a Beat-up CD.)

Darren is our resident tube guru and will likely be posting about various projects he’s got on the bench. He’s also a wellspring of music industry history and trivia and will hopefully share some insights about the ins and outs of what went into classic recordings.

Si is the lead vocalist and Bass-VI-ist for Amplifiers and is a self-professed gear supernerd. He also builds guitars, and will share a bit about what goes into that process.

Brian is an engineer-musician and likes to make both crazy and classy sounds. He was the lead guitarist of the now-defunct regional Pittsburgh band Recession, and will be sharing noises and info on his recording sessions and gear.

(originally posted here: ObsoleteAudio is Now a Community Blog!)

Bro Cave from an Alternate Reality

In some alternate universe, the fashion and decor tastes of bygone eras might still be with us today. And instead of laptops, we might have desktop PCs that are “luggable” like the old Commodore SX-64. And not only that, but we might all be using the Ubuntu operating system instead of Windows.

A man can dream can’t he?

We might have flying cars too.

As detailed in the original build post, here are the specs:

• Currently, Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit OS
• Intel DG45ID multimedia motherboard
• OCZ 700w modular power supply
• Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 CPU
• Intel GMX4500HD GPU (integrated)
• 8 Gigs of Mushkin DDR2-800 memory
• Two 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives (one just for backups)
• SanDisk multi-card reader
• IBM Model M keyboard
• Gigabyte WiFi PCI card (I forget the model)
• 22″ widescreen LG LCD monitor

Not very impressive by today’s standards, but this post comes just in time for me to mention a new PC build I’ll be undertaking, funds-permitting. The next one will be a real gaming & recording rig, inspired by the beastly rigs over at KBMOD, to replace my rapidly aging recording PC (which is actually an old dual-Xeon server I inherited from work… and we don’t get rid of them unless they’re pretty dang old).

(originally posted here: Suitcase PC, finally done after 2 years)

Unfortunately my original design was full of fail because the power transformer ended up right next to a bunch of unbalanced, guitar-level signal wires. So the thing buzzed like crazy when I put it together, and no amount of shielding trickery could eliminate it. The next thing to try, then, was moving the supply into an external enclosure. For this, I found an old failed network hard drive (actually the little mainboard is fine, just one of the drives failed… don’t get me started on the stupidity of RAID-0) and gutted it. After adding a fuse and properly tying the enclosure to ground, I ran 8 discreet 9-volt DC lines out of the enclosure via CAT5 cables and added an RJ45 jack to the back of the Atari.

The next iteration will likely incorporate two or three more pedals in the Atari, since there was plenty of room in there when I was done. What I’d really like though, is to grab the guts out of a newer-generation 2600 and mount them in there too, so it still functions as a game system.

After a hectic day of finishing this project up, I used the set up at a gig that night (the Repeal Day Brew Fest in Sharon, PA) and I was really pleased. The pedals, unlike my previous wall-wart-powered rig, were totally noise-free. The only annoying thing is that it’s a little difficult to turn the tuner on and off using my feet (since it’s turned on and off via the original Atari switches). Some sort of additional foot-friendly momentary button may need to be added at some point.

(originally posted here: Atari 2600 Guitar Stompbox)