Like your goals here. What sort of mics are you using with the string instruments? I recently retired my KM140s when I tried out a set of Beyerdynamic MC930s on violin. I'm quite literally stunned by them.
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Surf.Whammy
New member
Rollback the clock about 15 years, and I was doing everything with real instruments (guitar, bass, drums, and a keyboard synthesizer). My first primary instrument was bass, but I always liked drums; so I got an inexpensive Pulse drumkit and then for about a year explored drumming and Latin percussion, which included (a) focusing on ergonomics and (b) learning how to tune the drums using the techniques in Prof. Sound's "Drum Tuning Bible", which is stellar.
Before that, I designed and built a sound isolation studio, which is a room inside a room inside another room of my house that sits on piers and is raised off the ground. The innermost room sits atop compressed mats made of ground and compressed truck tires and is floated rather than being attached to the outer rooms. It's heavily insulated and there are air-gaps between the walls and ceilings of the outer rooms, as well as Helmholtz resonating panels and two layers of different-width sheetrock. The innermost room is 6' wide by 7' tall and 12' long, which makes it approximately the same size as Les Paul's recording studio before he became famous and started recording himself and Mary Ford in their house.
As shown in one of the photos, what I now call the "Really Bigger Drumkit" nearly filled the sound isolation studio; and I had a lot of microphones on it. The microphones ran to two submixers and then to a larger mixer and finally to a MOTU 828mkII external digital audio and MIDI interface which I connected to an Apple iMac and later to Apple Mac Pro computers, although now I am using a 2019 Apple 27" iMac (Intel processor, 4TB hard drive, runs everything including macOS Sonoma, and cost approximately $1,000).
The "ergonomic" aspect maps to stacking cymbals and Latin percussion instruments; using double-action foot pedals; and custom 22" drumsticks that I make from 5/8" oak dowels, where the strategy is to make it possible to play several things with one upward or downward motion of a drumstick or foot pedal.
At the time, I was not getting good mixes, which was puzzling; so I called MOTU and spoke with "Magic Dave" who provided four very important insights: (a) the submixers and mixer probably where not impedance-matched, (b) the sound isolation studio was no bigger than a walk-in closet, hence having 25+ microphones was not the brightest idea, (c) use two microphones and run them directly to the MOTU 828mkII and stop using the mixers, and (d) that anyone who can play the same instruments as the Beatles reasonable proficiently can sound exactly like the Beatles if they practice the song about 1,000 times.
It all made sense, and most importantly it worked.
The advice about sounding like the Beatles was in response to my saying I can play all the instruments in early-Beatles songs, but it was not sounding so good. Overall, the "1,000" times matches some of what the Beatles did, at least with respect to playing songs over-and-over to get everything perfected and sounding good.
Another completely and totally strange bit of advice perhaps a decade earlier was from a recording engineer in Hollywood who told me that for the "R.A.M." album, Paul McCartney did everything on the first or second take, which I misunderstood literally to map to everything (instruments and singing), when as I learned a few decades later was referring only to McCartney singing a few harmony parts on one or two songs--not on everything.
Among other things, this led me to do what initially was a frightening experiment where I imagined I was teleported with my Marshall stack, effects rig, and Stratocaster onto a stage at an Elvis Presley concert at which time a spotlight shone on me and Elvis looked at me and said "Take it", meaning I was support to play a lead guitar solo for a song I never had heard other than a handful of measures.
Considering that I focused on imagining this to be very real, it was frightening; and during the early days I was afraid there would be knock on the door and two FBI Special Agents would arrest me for being "too spontaneous", since I composed and played everything in real-time on the fly, thinking that if Paul McCartney did it, then I could do it.
The "Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaster" is a custom-modded 1999 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster that has two separate and independent output signals--two channels but not stereo--and took about a year to mod, since I had to make sense of all the components and do the guitar-body routing.
The entire thing is real, and it happened; and it's one of the consequences of being very smart in some respects but basically stupid in other respects, which is best explained by my getting stuck for a year or so when my goal was to teach myself how to play lead guitar. I eventually had an epiphany, was is that with a few rare exceptions, every lead guitar solo of the 20th century was played by someone who had four fingers and a thumb on each hand, excluding Django Reinhardt. Once I had that epiphany, playing lead guitar was just a matter of moving forward and taking the time to rewire my brain and improve my muscle dexterity, where the "rewire my brain" aspect refers to creating new neural pathways between the frontal eye fields (FEF) region of my brain and the auditory cortex, where the former has response times as rapid as 24 milliseconds and the latter is more in the range of 60 milliseconds. This also keyed on the fact that you cannot think about everything in an immediately conscious way, because it takes too long; hence you need to discover how to suspend most immediately conscious thinking and to let your unconscious mind run the show, which curiously is one of the best ways to overcome the fear of being arrested by FBI Special Agents for being "too spontaneous".
With all this in mind, once I switched to using VSTi virtual instruments and music notation, I moved the Really Bigger Drumkit to another room and built some plywood benches for the computer, an external rack, and Kustom studio monitors, which actually are loudspeakers for small nightclubs and in a walk-in closet are sufficiently powerful to be excellent studio monitors when calibrated at 85 to 90 dB SPL with a flat equal-loudness curve running from 20-Hz to 20,000-Hz and a dBA weighting.
Sometime later, there was a lightning strike and one of the Kustom two-way PA units exploded and burst into flames; so while I had some spares, I retired the studio monitor idea and switched to using SONY MDR-7506 headphones instead, which by that time was practical since I had discovered how to get good levels using the studio monitors and just applied the same rules to mixing when listening with the headphones, since along the way I would work with the studio monitors and switch to headphones and vice-versa, hence had a good sense of how everything worked. There is more to it, including the way people hear sounds, as discovered by researchers at Heidelberg University in Germany, but I explain that in my books of digital music production.
Regarding calibrating the Kustom PA units and subwoofers, I wear OSHA-approved ear protectors like airline workers wear on the tarmac when airplanes jet engines are running. Basically, you set the computer and external digital audio and MIDI interface to their maximum volume levels and then gradually increase the volume levels of the respective self-powered Kustom PA and subwoofer units until pink noise is 85 to 90 dB SPL measured with a dBA weighting. Explained another way the Kustom units have the real and tangible potential to be louder than two Marshall stacks (full), which in a walk-in closet would result indisputably in permanent ear damage or deafness, hence is something I can do as the result of running concert sound and understanding all that stuff, but is not something I generally recommend for everyone, where my recommendation for everyone is to use a pair of PreSonus Sceptre® S8 two-way monitors and a pair of PreSonus Temblor® T8 subwoofers, where I recommend two of the subwoofers so there is one for each channel of stereo instead of trying to save a few dollars by combining the deep bass arbitrarily, which for practical purposes maps to an electronic device or processor doing the deep bass mixing instead of you doing it.
Summarizing, my current setup is to do everything with the 2019 Apple iMac (Retna 5K, 27-inch) and a B.L.U.E. Snowball USB microphone, along with Studio One (current version), music notation, and a virtual festival of VSTi virtual instruments and VST effects plug-ins, along with Reason (Reason Studios) via the Reason Rack VST and the standard assortment of PreSonus native instruments and effects that are included with Studio One, as well as AI voices from 11ElevenLabs for voices to expand what I can do with my voice-overs in my ongoing science-fiction radio play "Extreme Gravity", which now has 27 chapters, all with music and online at my YouTube channel.
It works nicely, and I think the audio sounds good after YouTube does its proprietary processing.
[NOTE: These sound good when played through studio monitors and computer loudspeakers, but they are mixed for listening with studio-quality headphones, which is the best way to enjoy them. I like SONY MDR-7506 headphones, because (a) they are sonically neutral but (b) have excellent deep bass. I did the first one ("Billie Jean Intro") to show three ways to do panning: (a) Instrument Track true monaural panning with Dual Pan (PreSonus), (b) Audio Track true monaural panning, and (c) simple balance control "panning", which is not true monaural panning but is ballpark when the two channels of the sampled-sound library are nearly identical. ]
Before that, I designed and built a sound isolation studio, which is a room inside a room inside another room of my house that sits on piers and is raised off the ground. The innermost room sits atop compressed mats made of ground and compressed truck tires and is floated rather than being attached to the outer rooms. It's heavily insulated and there are air-gaps between the walls and ceilings of the outer rooms, as well as Helmholtz resonating panels and two layers of different-width sheetrock. The innermost room is 6' wide by 7' tall and 12' long, which makes it approximately the same size as Les Paul's recording studio before he became famous and started recording himself and Mary Ford in their house.
As shown in one of the photos, what I now call the "Really Bigger Drumkit" nearly filled the sound isolation studio; and I had a lot of microphones on it. The microphones ran to two submixers and then to a larger mixer and finally to a MOTU 828mkII external digital audio and MIDI interface which I connected to an Apple iMac and later to Apple Mac Pro computers, although now I am using a 2019 Apple 27" iMac (Intel processor, 4TB hard drive, runs everything including macOS Sonoma, and cost approximately $1,000).
The "ergonomic" aspect maps to stacking cymbals and Latin percussion instruments; using double-action foot pedals; and custom 22" drumsticks that I make from 5/8" oak dowels, where the strategy is to make it possible to play several things with one upward or downward motion of a drumstick or foot pedal.
At the time, I was not getting good mixes, which was puzzling; so I called MOTU and spoke with "Magic Dave" who provided four very important insights: (a) the submixers and mixer probably where not impedance-matched, (b) the sound isolation studio was no bigger than a walk-in closet, hence having 25+ microphones was not the brightest idea, (c) use two microphones and run them directly to the MOTU 828mkII and stop using the mixers, and (d) that anyone who can play the same instruments as the Beatles reasonable proficiently can sound exactly like the Beatles if they practice the song about 1,000 times.
It all made sense, and most importantly it worked.
The advice about sounding like the Beatles was in response to my saying I can play all the instruments in early-Beatles songs, but it was not sounding so good. Overall, the "1,000" times matches some of what the Beatles did, at least with respect to playing songs over-and-over to get everything perfected and sounding good.
Another completely and totally strange bit of advice perhaps a decade earlier was from a recording engineer in Hollywood who told me that for the "R.A.M." album, Paul McCartney did everything on the first or second take, which I misunderstood literally to map to everything (instruments and singing), when as I learned a few decades later was referring only to McCartney singing a few harmony parts on one or two songs--not on everything.
Among other things, this led me to do what initially was a frightening experiment where I imagined I was teleported with my Marshall stack, effects rig, and Stratocaster onto a stage at an Elvis Presley concert at which time a spotlight shone on me and Elvis looked at me and said "Take it", meaning I was support to play a lead guitar solo for a song I never had heard other than a handful of measures.
Considering that I focused on imagining this to be very real, it was frightening; and during the early days I was afraid there would be knock on the door and two FBI Special Agents would arrest me for being "too spontaneous", since I composed and played everything in real-time on the fly, thinking that if Paul McCartney did it, then I could do it.
The "Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaster" is a custom-modded 1999 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster that has two separate and independent output signals--two channels but not stereo--and took about a year to mod, since I had to make sense of all the components and do the guitar-body routing.
The entire thing is real, and it happened; and it's one of the consequences of being very smart in some respects but basically stupid in other respects, which is best explained by my getting stuck for a year or so when my goal was to teach myself how to play lead guitar. I eventually had an epiphany, was is that with a few rare exceptions, every lead guitar solo of the 20th century was played by someone who had four fingers and a thumb on each hand, excluding Django Reinhardt. Once I had that epiphany, playing lead guitar was just a matter of moving forward and taking the time to rewire my brain and improve my muscle dexterity, where the "rewire my brain" aspect refers to creating new neural pathways between the frontal eye fields (FEF) region of my brain and the auditory cortex, where the former has response times as rapid as 24 milliseconds and the latter is more in the range of 60 milliseconds. This also keyed on the fact that you cannot think about everything in an immediately conscious way, because it takes too long; hence you need to discover how to suspend most immediately conscious thinking and to let your unconscious mind run the show, which curiously is one of the best ways to overcome the fear of being arrested by FBI Special Agents for being "too spontaneous".
With all this in mind, once I switched to using VSTi virtual instruments and music notation, I moved the Really Bigger Drumkit to another room and built some plywood benches for the computer, an external rack, and Kustom studio monitors, which actually are loudspeakers for small nightclubs and in a walk-in closet are sufficiently powerful to be excellent studio monitors when calibrated at 85 to 90 dB SPL with a flat equal-loudness curve running from 20-Hz to 20,000-Hz and a dBA weighting.
Sometime later, there was a lightning strike and one of the Kustom two-way PA units exploded and burst into flames; so while I had some spares, I retired the studio monitor idea and switched to using SONY MDR-7506 headphones instead, which by that time was practical since I had discovered how to get good levels using the studio monitors and just applied the same rules to mixing when listening with the headphones, since along the way I would work with the studio monitors and switch to headphones and vice-versa, hence had a good sense of how everything worked. There is more to it, including the way people hear sounds, as discovered by researchers at Heidelberg University in Germany, but I explain that in my books of digital music production.
Regarding calibrating the Kustom PA units and subwoofers, I wear OSHA-approved ear protectors like airline workers wear on the tarmac when airplanes jet engines are running. Basically, you set the computer and external digital audio and MIDI interface to their maximum volume levels and then gradually increase the volume levels of the respective self-powered Kustom PA and subwoofer units until pink noise is 85 to 90 dB SPL measured with a dBA weighting. Explained another way the Kustom units have the real and tangible potential to be louder than two Marshall stacks (full), which in a walk-in closet would result indisputably in permanent ear damage or deafness, hence is something I can do as the result of running concert sound and understanding all that stuff, but is not something I generally recommend for everyone, where my recommendation for everyone is to use a pair of PreSonus Sceptre® S8 two-way monitors and a pair of PreSonus Temblor® T8 subwoofers, where I recommend two of the subwoofers so there is one for each channel of stereo instead of trying to save a few dollars by combining the deep bass arbitrarily, which for practical purposes maps to an electronic device or processor doing the deep bass mixing instead of you doing it.
Summarizing, my current setup is to do everything with the 2019 Apple iMac (Retna 5K, 27-inch) and a B.L.U.E. Snowball USB microphone, along with Studio One (current version), music notation, and a virtual festival of VSTi virtual instruments and VST effects plug-ins, along with Reason (Reason Studios) via the Reason Rack VST and the standard assortment of PreSonus native instruments and effects that are included with Studio One, as well as AI voices from 11ElevenLabs for voices to expand what I can do with my voice-overs in my ongoing science-fiction radio play "Extreme Gravity", which now has 27 chapters, all with music and online at my YouTube channel.
It works nicely, and I think the audio sounds good after YouTube does its proprietary processing.
[NOTE: These sound good when played through studio monitors and computer loudspeakers, but they are mixed for listening with studio-quality headphones, which is the best way to enjoy them. I like SONY MDR-7506 headphones, because (a) they are sonically neutral but (b) have excellent deep bass. I did the first one ("Billie Jean Intro") to show three ways to do panning: (a) Instrument Track true monaural panning with Dual Pan (PreSonus), (b) Audio Track true monaural panning, and (c) simple balance control "panning", which is not true monaural panning but is ballpark when the two channels of the sampled-sound library are nearly identical. ]
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Surf.Whammy
New member
I have a sound isolation studio that is a room inside a room inside a room where the innermost room sits atop rubber mats made from ground truck tires. There are air gaps between the innermost room and the outer rooms, including the respective ceilings; but after starting to calibrate the audio to a flat equal-loudness curve running from 20-Hz to 20-kHz at 85 to 90 db SPL with a dBA weighting, I discovered there was a gnarly standing wave at approximately 70-Hz which made everything muddy and prevented any possibility of clarity.
I did a bit of research, including watching some YouTube videos by Ethan Winer; and discovered (a) that rolls of fiberglass insulation and (b) cubes of compressed cellulose insulation are excellent for handling low-frequency standing waves.
The strategy was to play "Billie Jean" (Michael Jackson) at 85 to 90 dB SPL and then to add rolls of fiberglass insulation and cubes of compressed cellulose insulation until everything sounded crisp and distinct, which for the sound isolation studio that is 6' wide by 7' tall and 12' long mapped to 9 rolls of fiberglass insulation and 3 cubes of compressed cellulose insulation.
The midrange and high frequencies were not a problem due to the combination of (a) using several layers of different thickness sheetrock, (b) using built-in Helmholtz resonators in the wall, and (c) having a carpet on the floor, as well as air gaps between the rooms and floating the innermost room.
I used a Behringer DEC 2496 Ultra Curve Pro and matching condenser microphone for the overall calibration and checked it with software and matching condenser microphone with ARC X (IK Multimedia), along with a NADY DSM-1X Digital SPL Meter, while wearing OSHA-approved ear protection like the ones used by airline workers on the tarmac when jet engines are running since the Kustom PA loudspeakers and subwoofers are vastly too powerful for what essentially is a walk-in closet, hence configuring everything require a bit of expertise and ear protection until it's calibrated and safe to use.
There are more expensive systems that probably are better, but these calibrating and measuring devices are good and are not so expensive.
Considering there already are curtains or other absorbing materials that should handle the mid-range and high-frequencies, I think adding some rolls of fiberglass insulation and cubes of compressed cellulose insulation will map to crisp and distinct audio in the studio--noting that if you are concerned about appearance, then you can cover the rolls and cubes of insulation or put them behind decorative cloth screens, so long as the cloth is porous, although for deep bass one can suggest accurately that porosity is not important, that is best understood by hearing deep bass from highly-amplified custom vehicle sound systems which among other things act as early-warning devices to announce the approach of massive deep bass and literally can shake the walls of your house, which is the way it works because deep bass waves are 16' or longer and travel through nearly everything, which is in contrast to mid-range and higher frequencies which easily are filtered by shrubbery and cloth curtains.
For reference, a Coca-Cola bottle is a Helmholtz resonator, and if you blow across the top of the bottle, you will hear a pitch, which is the resonating frequency. Curiously, Romans put wine bottles in the walls of their theaters and adjusted the room accountings by adding or removing sand depending on whether the performance was musical, theatrical, or a meeting.
You can control standing waves with PVC pipes that are closed at the bottom but open at the top, where the sizes can be determined visually by studying a cathedral pipe organ, where bigger maps to removing deep bass, but smaller maps to remove the respective mid-range and higher frequencies.
Nearly everything except glass and mirrors absorbs sound, which includes instruments acoustic guitars, violins, violas, cellos, contrabasses, as well as people, furniture, and so forth.
Instruments like acoustic guitar, non-solid body guitars, string, brass, woodwinds, drums, and so forth have Helmholtz resonator properties and behaviors; and the practical aspect is that since people absorb sound, the studio might sound differently depending on how many people are in the room as well as what the people are wearing, with heavy winter coats being more like a roll of fiberglass insulation and just a tank-top or short-sleeve cotton shirt not absorbing so much deep bass, although overall the human body absorbs a lot of deep bass.
I use (a) scientific measuring devices and (b) the "by ear" strategy combined with using "Billie Jean" (Michael Jackson) and songs from "Dark Side of the Moon" (Pink Floyd) as references, since they are mixed perfectly for studio-tuning purposes, where in particular "Billie Jean" is excellent for centering the stereo image of your studio monitor system, since the kick drum, snare drum, and bass are center (or "top-center" if you are listening with studio-quality headphones) and there are other instruments and voices that appear in distinct far-left and far-right locations in what I call the "Rainbow Panning Arc", which is something Quincy Jones (producer) and BruceSweden (audio-engineer) did and is something Quincy Jones did as early as the late1950's and then in 1963 when he produced Leslie Gore's first hit song ("It's My Party").
It doesn't matter whether you like the songs when you are adjusting the studio monitors and checking the acoustic behaviors of a studio or listening room, because what matters is that they are excellent reference songs and have distinct locations for the various sounds--instruments and voices.
[NOTE: I reverse the integer numbers for panning locations from the way it's numbered in Studio One; so far-left is "L.1", far-right is "R.1", and top-center is between "L.4" and "R.4". ]
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The 505 was our drummer for a few years then we both bought Atari’s and I added a Korg Poly 800 as the bass player. Later that was replaced with the Roland MT32 and then it was a huge upgrade to the Korg 05R/W. That was my backing band for a long time. I gave away the MT 32 because it was no better than using the MSWavetable synth. The Poly 800 was killed by me connecting the wrong power supply and Im happy that I’ve found the free Fury 800 by Full Bucket because I love that big fat Polysynth sound.
The 05R/W has some huge synths in it so it’s used still in a few of my songs.
A few years ago a friend gave me the Sound Canvas but I don’t really ever use it. It reminds me also of the MS Wavetable. But it’s a good piece of history so I kept it.
I also have a Roland GR50 guitar synth which is loaded with the LA sounds so I mostly use it just as a sound module. We have a Godin guitar with the midi connecter to drive it.
Then I have a Yamaha DX450 drum kit which is also a very good sound module as well as a Yamaha digital piano which is also loaded with some good stuff.
But I mostly just use VST’s. I like the hardware just for live messing around. It’s nice to make music without the computer turned on.
The 05R/W has some huge synths in it so it’s used still in a few of my songs.
A few years ago a friend gave me the Sound Canvas but I don’t really ever use it. It reminds me also of the MS Wavetable. But it’s a good piece of history so I kept it.
I also have a Roland GR50 guitar synth which is loaded with the LA sounds so I mostly use it just as a sound module. We have a Godin guitar with the midi connecter to drive it.
Then I have a Yamaha DX450 drum kit which is also a very good sound module as well as a Yamaha digital piano which is also loaded with some good stuff.
But I mostly just use VST’s. I like the hardware just for live messing around. It’s nice to make music without the computer turned on.
I have a Sound Canvas too! I love playing around on it but I can never seem to squeeze it into songs. I always find something else that's more appropriate. But I love that thing. Those GR50s are SO COOL. Gosh you have a cool setup. Thanks for sharing.
Heck yeah I love reading this. Cool insights and I love the lengths you've gone to here. Post more pictures!
TimC340
Active member
My space is a repurposed shed in my garden. It’s just big enough to swing a cat. Very little in the way of sound treatment other than curtains, and I do have a reasonably busy main road about 80m away and a pub right next door, so it’s not an ideal place to do any mic-based recording - at least during the day. I’m slowly building a new studio closer to the house that’ll be much better treated and a much more solid structure. It’ll be dual use as a guest bedroom, so can’t be totally dedicated to great sound - but I’m just a hobbyist and no-one’s relying on anything I produce!
Surf.Whammy
New member
I was in Hollywood in the early-1970's and had some free studio time to help a friend who was learning how to be an audio-engineer; and one of Hal Blaine's drumkits was in the studio. It was equally impressive, but not so many Latin percussion instruments and stacked cymbals as the Really Bigger Drumkit.
My friend was a studio technician--setup microphones, ran cables, and did some of the work with the magnetic tape machines--and when there were no recording sessions booked, he was allowed to use the studio to do experiments and learn how to do audio-engineering. Every once in a while he would call and say the recording studio was available for a few hours, usually very late at night, sometimes for as long as eight hours, and some of my musician friends and I would get together and have a bit of FUN.
The strangest thing was the result of one of the guitar players getting upset and smashing a Martin acoustic guitar, which left a bit hole in the back of the guitar; so we had the idea of sticking a microphone in the hole and seeing how it sounded, which actually was pretty good.
Most of us were playing in local nightclubs, but nothing famous, just playing Top 40 songs in nightclubs.
It was interesting, and it's the way I learned about recording studios and audio-engineering.
I was playing electric bass at the time, and this is when I learned that Paul McCartney did everything on the first or second take, which I misheard and thought applied to instruments and singing but actually was just a few harmony parts on two songs on the "R.A.M." album.
Years later, while teaching myself how to play lead guitar, I decided to do what I though Paul McCartney was doing; and after a few months, it started making sense and was not so difficult to do.
This is one of the songs I recorded here in the sound isolation studio, where the lead guitar was composed and played in real-time on the fly on the first take, which was done of the Fabulous Fifty Million Dollar Trinaural Stratocaster running through two sets of stereo effects pedals to create what I call a "Wall of Guitars".
The photo shows some of the effects pedals, but there are two DigiTech Whammy pedals and a Budda wah-wah pedal on the floor. The custom modded guitar has two separate and independent output signals, so this mapped to having four channels of electric guitar and a virtual festival of cascading echoes, which after a bit of experimenting maps to being able to play with what you already played.
I had done the drums, bass, and rhythm guitar in advance, so I knew the structure of the song, which made composing and playing lead guitar for the song easy.
This was when I was doing experiments to discover how to play lead guitar; and perhaps the strangest experiment involved discovering how to suspend nearly all immediately conscious thought and to let my unconscious mind run the show, which actually is the only way someone can compose and play elaborate phrases in real-time on the fly, because conscious thought is too slow.
You can't totally suspend immediately conscious thought; so the practical limit comes when you start drooling and almost forget to breathe.
This is connected to enhancing the neural pathways in the Frontal Eye Fields (FEF) and Auditory Cortex regions of the brain, where the FEF is located at the front-top of the brain and explains why Jazz musicians when asked how they composed solos usually reply something like, "I just played it off the top of my head".
The FEF has an auditory response time as fast as 24 milliseconds, which maps to 40 notes per second; which you can verify by doing a finger tapping exercise where you angle your fingers and rapidly tap them in sequence, which can result in 40 or so taps per second, which folks who are fingertip "drummers" will recognize. Doing 20 taps per second is easy, but doing 40 taps per second takes a bit of practicing.
The second YouTube video is a song that features the Really Bigger Drumkit and runs it through cascading echo units to double and triple everything without actually needing to do a lot of work, which is the "ergonomic" aspect. It's one drumkit played in real-time on the fly with no overdubbing, but a lot of echoes.
These are mixed for headphones, which is the best way to hear everything.
There is a virtual festival of drumming; but it's all played at the same time, where for example it's possible and practical to play a wood block, three cymbals, and tom-tom in one downward motion due to the wood block and cymbals being stacked and positioned so the end of the downward motion land on a tom-tom. The hi-hat rig is modified to play something when the pedal moves downward and then to play something else when the pedal moves upward; so with the tambourine on top and other stuff, it's not just one thing. The hi-hat rig has a second set of smaller hi-hats that are play with the pedal moves upward, so it's two hi-hats rather than just one, and then there is the tambourine, and I sizzled the top hi-hat by drilling holes and inserting aluminum rivets (need to be careful, since the drill will lock and spin the cymbal, and the holes need to be inward and spaced so they do not crack the cymbal, hence it's best to wear gloves and to use clamp, as well as cheap cymbals, for which sizzling sounds good. This photo is before I added the 10" tom-tom, but is shows the custom modded hi-hat rig nicely. It took a while to find the second hi-hat attachment, but they exist (or at least did at one time).
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DirkM
New member
Hi@all
Great idea
I'm finally venturing to show off my mini home studio.
It's in the basement - 3.2 x 5 meters.
Keyboard: STUDIOLOGIC SL73 Pro (MK1),
Controllers: ENDORPHINES PLUS3, FADERPORT2, NEKTARTECH Panorama P1, ATOM SQ,
1810C and ERIS 5 XT + Sub 8 BT,
Headphones: AKG K712, AKG K240 MKII, Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro.
The mouse has a trackball—highly recommended…
Since selling my hardware systems, I only use VST instruments now.
My favorites are U-HE Repro, Hive2, and Zebra2, and I also enjoy MaiTai, Presence, and AAS VA3. I also like CherryAudio's MemoryMode and Miniverse.
The PC (Windows 11, always up-to-date) could use an upgrade, but it's still running okay.
Both monitors are 27" 4K.
Great idea
I'm finally venturing to show off my mini home studio.
It's in the basement - 3.2 x 5 meters.
Keyboard: STUDIOLOGIC SL73 Pro (MK1),
Controllers: ENDORPHINES PLUS3, FADERPORT2, NEKTARTECH Panorama P1, ATOM SQ,
1810C and ERIS 5 XT + Sub 8 BT,
Headphones: AKG K712, AKG K240 MKII, Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro.
The mouse has a trackball—highly recommended…
Since selling my hardware systems, I only use VST instruments now.
My favorites are U-HE Repro, Hive2, and Zebra2, and I also enjoy MaiTai, Presence, and AAS VA3. I also like CherryAudio's MemoryMode and Miniverse.
The PC (Windows 11, always up-to-date) could use an upgrade, but it's still running okay.
Both monitors are 27" 4K.
I mean, that is GORGEOUS. I love it so much. I LOVE the idea of a recording shed. It feels so freeing. What a cool build.
Is it insulated? Not sound insulated obviously, but weather insulated? I've got a detached garage but it's coooooold in there right now.
That is so pretty. Love that mural on the back wall. How far away from that wall are you? It might be the picture but it feels like you're in the center of the room. Love that. Is that a custom stand for the Faderport?Hi@all
Great idea
I'm finally venturing to show off my mini home studio.
It's in the basement - 3.2 x 5 meters.
Keyboard: STUDIOLOGIC SL73 Pro (MK1),
Controllers: ENDORPHINES PLUS3, FADERPORT2, NEKTARTECH Panorama P1, ATOM SQ,
1810C and ERIS 5 XT + Sub 8 BT,
Headphones: AKG K712, AKG K240 MKII, Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro.
The mouse has a trackball—highly recommended…
Since selling my hardware systems, I only use VST instruments now.
My favorites are U-HE Repro, Hive2, and Zebra2, and I also enjoy MaiTai, Presence, and AAS VA3. I also like CherryAudio's MemoryMode and Miniverse.
The PC (Windows 11, always up-to-date) could use an upgrade, but it's still running okay.
Both monitors are 27" 4K.
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