mmd

Not much to report just of late hence infrequent posting. However, it’s apt to share with everyone that my Tascam BR-20T reel to reel tape deck has been completely sorted out ready for pro-level mastering. I hear the geeks of you asking “what was wrong with it?” while everyone else goes “Tape? Yawn!”.

Well, for the geeks who were kind enough to ask: two things were not addressed when I used the deck for remastering Vulcanella Self Destruct a while back. The first was the quality of tape I was using which was mere low grade duplicating tape. I’ve since got my hands some reels of Ampex 456 – which for many studios was one of the standard mastering tapes used in the 80s (just check out the sleeve notes for Mike Oldfield’s Crises record). In this day and age there are better reels out there (like ATR mastering tape; and ATR-102 decks are better than my Tascam as well: but that’s another story) – but the Ampex 456 is the best I can use for my deck seeing that Ampex tape tends to shed coating onto the heads and affects them in a way that prevents you from using any other tape. To prevent this dreaded shedding problem, I baked my tapes in the oven for about 12 hours at about 50C. And then, wha-la: perfectly usable tapes. Nothing like a bit of baking to help out the audio engineering!

The second issue was a matter of deck calibration. Calibration involves a series of technical procedures done with the deck to perfect I/O levels and tone. This required quite a bit of patient fiddling with geeky detail I won’t go into here. I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do without help from Simon. Simon is also currently getting deep into the world of tape, not only with 2 track mastering tape, but with 8 track session tape. So thank you Simon! After some fine tuning I got an excellent standard system using a combo of Reaper and the tape deck to do both standard digital mastering as well as using the ‘magical sound’ tape method. To use Simon’s words, tape is an instrument: you play it. Finely riding the input levels just to get that sweet spot nestled between clarity and punch, it’s just so fabulous to finally get that sound I’ve been after for so long.

This means that my mixing and mastering business is officially back up and ready to go! So if you need any mixing or mastering done on your songs, please visit the site, read the FAQ, and get in touch with me. I’ve already got one client’s project on the boil, and a few more lined up. And hopefully some of my big projects will soon see some tape action as well.

Speaking of which, I’ve been cutting back time from my day job during the quiet winter time so I can spent some more time finishing songs at home. I’ve been doing a lot of structured vocal practice and a lot of vocal recording for Paradox songs (trying to crack ‘First Impressions Always Count’ right now) with improving success. It’s very hard though, and I think I’m still a long way off from what’s in my brain as being the ideal sound. Tomorrow’s another day…

After getting back from 3 weeks off work I find myself thinking the same old cliche when I get back to work: “It would be nice to have some time off to do nothing right now!”. And now being back at the grind, and having the long task ’setting up’ at our new rental home with mountains of junk everywhere, it seems like yet again it’s expected that we’re to run on empty. No rest for the wicked! (-Or some other saying that will help me cope with the denial) However, I have time to relate this adventure to you, in brief:

Heading back about 3 weeks to Easter both R, the animals and I set off for Brisbane to make temporary camp at R’s Mum’s place. Once prepared R and I headed out for a road trip in much the same intention as our Birdsville trip last year to see more of outback Queensland. After three days of driving up through Roma, Emerald, Longreach and Cloncurry we finally make it to Mount Isa. You have to see Mount Isa to truly believe it – it’s like something out of sci-fi movie crossed with suburban Australia plonked on Mars. As we were winding through the rocky semi-desert hills heading west toward the town, we could see plumes of heavy smoke rising. Getting really close to the town we rounded one last set of hill to see it all appear before us: massive chimneys and elaborate mining industry towering over a sprawling busy town, all surrounded by rocky red desert country hills. As we were going into the town the usual billboards were on the side of the road welcoming us. One stood out as humourously unforgettable: “Welcome to Mount Isa – Now you’re a REAL Aussie!”. In this we felt content.

We had a good stay over and enjoyed a few things like the swiming pool and seeing tropical birds we’ve never seen before. The following day we headed south west into more remote country and ended up at Boulia. Seeing that the country had recent rains it all felt abnormally ‘green’, and there were an excess of flies and locusts to add to the discomfort. We also found that the car had a flat tire. In the morning we found a local mechanic to patch it up for us, but later on the road to our surprise we found it flat again. Pulling into a tiny little place called Middleton we got a hand from a friendly old local which basically resulted in us putting the spare on and being done with it. Swealtering in the sun we needed a drink, so we followed the old bloke into the pub and got some icey drinks and had a yarn to young Brittish exchange worker as well as the old fella. Before recent rains they hadn’t seen rain for 8 years. Can you imagine that? I noticed a poster on the wall from Bird’s Australia asking ‘Have you seen this bird?’ showing the ever so rare Gray Falcon. I asked the old guy if he had seen any around. “Yeah, all the time!” He explained that we might see a few up the road a bit further nesting in one of those high thin communications towers. Sure enough he was right. Not only did we see one of these rare birds: we saw three – quite possibly a whole family of Gray Falcons and a nest. Satisfied with our twitch we kept on the road east until we finally rolled into Winton. By this point we were very tired of the whole camping thing and traveling huge distances just to get anywhere – we decided to treat ourselves to an airconditioned motel room and take it easy.

More adventuring had been pre-planned at that point but due to R coming down with a head cold we decided we had enough and to head back to Brisbane to relax. Of course it wasn’t that easy. It took two days of driving just to get there! The first day was epic, a sunrise to sunset slog from Winton all the way down to Roma. R’s cold had hit full on, and we were glad to be back in modernity of suburban Brisbane.

We spent the following week around the city, doing a lot of things but not enough ‘nothing’. One highligh was meeting none other than Hunz in the flesh for the first time, and had a good chin wag with him at Fundies in Paddington. It’s always good to put a ‘person’ to the ‘artist’ – very nice guy. If all goes to plan I might head up that way again on the 22nd and catch him live in The Valley. We also got to catch up with Jarrad and Bec for dinner and a day of bird watching up at Lamington NP. But by the time the end of the week was coming around my version of R’s cold was starting to manifest…

Heading back to freezing Armidale didn’t feel like fun. As soon as we got there we had to begin the ardous task of moving house. As I’ve explained before in this blog, we had to move due to the landlord wanting to move back into Galloway Street – so we found a new rental at Dorothy Avenue. With some great help from Dad and Simon (who also helped with my tape machine, more on that later) it took us the whole week to move just 3 blocks away. You can now probably see why I need a holiday. Moving sucks. Moving is worse when you have cold. There’s nothing nice about it and I won’t write about all the little problems and remaing issues. One thing I will say is that I’ve already set up the core parts of my new studio space – I’m already coming into some nasty RF interference problems with the power lines, and I have very ugly sounding bass response (probably due to the ceiling being lower). I’m not sure how to approach these problems just yet as we’ve barely started living in there, but I will speak of them again soon…

Ok now for some musical style updates:

A few posts back I said that Hunz’s new album Thoughts That Move (which I now have a lovely physical copy, ta Hunz) was up online for audio streaming at the RPM website. Well RPM took it down for some reason, so the link I provided would have seemed wrong. He’s since put it up at bandcamp and you can listen to the whole thing here! I’m really happy for him and I think the music deserves wide appreciation. The launch of the record will be on the 28th of May, so keep an eye on his website.

Another tid bit that has surfaced is some noisy guitar work I did for the artist Vivace (formally known as BotB) – he’s just release a new album called Polderdub which you can get here. You can hear some of my ‘off the rails guitar’ in the song Test Results. Not for the faint hearted…

A little update for you all on all things mmd. Previous posts told of our housing drama, so it is expressed with relief that we have finally arranged a new place to rent! As of late April Galloway Street Studio will be no more and a short move 3 blocks away will see the beginning of Dorothy Avenue Studio. Preventing the homeless problem and having a nice cosy house to be in will certainly help R and I think about what the next move is and how to do it. In the meantime, I’ll have to spend the next few months trying to figure out how to best set up all my equipment…

We are also very happy that as of the end of this week we’ll be off on a much desired holiday from work! For a few weeks we’ll be out driving around western Queensland like we did last year – more desert adventure that will hopefully lead us to Mount Isa. It’ll be food for the soul and good thinking time. We’ll also be spending some time in Brisbane catching up with some folks and items of culture. For now, it’s adieu to computers, and adieu to the web (said with much joy).

By the way, Hunz’s finished album is now up online for streaming listening here. I had a listen to it today and did some reflecting on the mix work I did on the project back in the flurry of activity during Feburary. With the benefit of hindsight I can detect one or two micro-moments where I think “gosh that should be 5% more THIS way”, but otherwise I’ve happy with what is there. It was a great opportunity to help Hunz get to that final point, and to have a hands on experience with his fantastic music. I’ll keep you posted if he does a physical release.

I’ve been keeping an eye on all things Hunz in the last year or so. I’ve been listening to his music since the old tracker days in the 90s and I no doubt learned a thing or two about making music by looking at his modules. Last year he released a fabulous come-back album called “When Victims Fight” which caused me to buy a copy and confirm my fanboy status. Do go have a look.

He’s recently taken it upon himself to have a crack at the RPM Challenge, which is roughly attempting the impossibility of writing 10 songs or 38mins of music within the 28 days of February. Apart from thinking it is utter madness and a complete stress-out I actually got excited at the thought of Hunz attempting to do this. Some great music has got to come out of it, at least, right? What’s even more interesting is that Hunz is documenting the entire process on his blog making the drama really transparent. He’s sharing his works in progress and it’s fascinating to see how the ideas mutate and germinate into fully formed songs. He intends to release not only a CD from the project, but also to make free the XRNS source files for free playback in Renoise.

I made an offer via the comments section to give him a hand with the mixing of the songs if he was struggling against the deadline. Amazingly, he accepted the offer and I’ve been on mix duties since. And because of the deadline I’ve had to work fast and hard at adding polish and sparkle to his already beautiful tunes. I’ve already worked through three songs, with more to go. I’ve also done ‘mix notes’ to keep up with the transparent theme of the project – all of which you can find at his website.

I’ll post back when the project is complete. Will he make it in time? Let’s see…

Enjoying my new monitors I thought I’d take a break from the heavy involvement in an album project I’m working on and go back to revisit a track I never got right in the first place. Rewind back to 2003 and we have a song called Vulcanella Self Destruct! Made as an entry to a Triple J remix competition, I took Adalita’s (from Magic Dirt) vocals plus the songs chords and built a lumbering industrial wasteland groove around it. I didn’t win the competition, but I liked the cathartic dirge the song ended up becoming – the only trouble was that I never got the mix right with the limitations I had at the time. Now that I have an accurate mixing/mastering setup I can finally get the beast to behave how my ears always wanted it to. So as a point of comparison I’d firstly like to share the original 2003 mix: listen at your own peril! – get it here. What follows is the new definitive version…

I feel it necessary to discuss some technical issues here, so if you find this stuff boring read on to the links and grab the songs. To start things off I upped the entire mix from 32bit 44.1khz sampling to 32bit 96khz sampling, which is what all my projects have been in for the last year or so. The higher sample rate brings new life and vitality to some rather ‘cheap’ sounds and effects that I used in the original, even though it’s a pretty noisy song. This allowed me to really give everything a good polish and take my time with the monitors to get the placement and tone of everything just right. Then again at 96khz I made up a mastering chain of good plugins, the best stuff I got at the moment. So my 96khz mix and master was complete, and I was happy enough with it. However, the trouble with using 96khz is that you have to at the end of the process get the song back down to 16bit 44.1khz sampling for mp3 and CD playback. I’ve been doing this step in the work using a pure digital process: i.e. mathematically using software to upsample then downsample the audio to get the sample rate remotely representing the original high quality mix, and a process called dithering to move down from 32bit to 16bit. Despite the quality of such digital processes the mathematics isn’t perfect and the sound is slightly compromised as a result. It’s good enough for what I’ve been doing so far, but I’ve wondered how I can get around this downsampling/dithering problem.

This is where my new reel to reel tape deck comes into the picture! I set up the Tascam BR-20T with some high quality tape to record my 32bit 96khz master audio file. The soundcard I’m using is the M-Audio Delta 1010 (which isn’t jitter free, see more on jitter for an entirely other technical issues) connected with balanced cables to the tape deck. The BR-20T (pictured above) is a last generation mastering tape deck and the specs are pretty fantastic (e.g. low noise) – I used the IEC EQ profile which is an industry standard for tape. After fiddling a bit to get everything calibrated I recorded a clean take of my high quality mix and checked it on headphones. After rewinding I opened up a new blank file on my computer set to 16bit 44.1khz sampling. I hit record on the computer and played the recording off the tape – so I was recording the analog tape sound back into digital sampling. This was so I didn’t have to do any editing on the digital file (aside from top and tail edits) and I didn’t need to do anything to it that would muck with the sound digitally after the recording. Playing back the end result was quite magical. As some of you may know, tape introduces all sorts of magic to audio – it changes the dynamics in nice ways; it smooths harsh sounds; and it makes anything in the mix that has an organic quality to it (like vocals for example) sound warmer and real. On the other hand the EQ profile and limits of the tape format plainly showed that I had lost some of the crispness in the high end frequencies, and had lost some of the sub frequencies. So if I felt I really needed those parts of the sound I’d have to be mindful that the tape looses those aspects a bit at the benefit of producing a really lovely organic sound. Already I’m thinking that tape would be appropriate for some genres and styles of sound, and for others not so much.

I decided that I’d let people decide for themselves what they think of the difference. So I have made up not one, but two versions of the new mix/master of Vulcanella Self Destruct. The first is the ‘regular digital method’ of using the software to do the downsampling and dithering; the second is the tape mastering version. For web, I’ve made them into 192kbps mp3s, which you can download here:

Vulcanella Self Destruct – Digital Version
Vulcanella Self Destruct – Tape Version

I’m interested to see what you think of the comparison. Can you pick the difference? Which do you prefer? I’m also interested to see what you think of the song. It’s certainly nothing I would ‘compose’ these days – definitely represents a different era of headspace. But I do think now the idea is properly ‘represented’ for what its worth. Give us a shout if you like what you hear.

Incidentally, Mick Rippon has been testing some new web software for my mastering website that allows for streaming A-B comparrisons. We thought we’d test it out on the two versions of this song. You can try it out here!

I have done some work to set up a little website to serve as a front end for my low-key business project ‘mmd mastering’. You can visit the site here. The service I am offering is mixing and mastering of audio material, negotiated per project with each client. If you would like to use this service check out the site’s FAQ and use the contact form to get in touch.

It’s early days at the moment with the site’s design and function, but there’s enough blurb to let you know the ins and outs of the service. I’ll also be using that site to feature some of the finished work I’ve done for clients – covering all sorts of unexpected styles of music. In terms of a business it’s baby steps for me seeing that I’ll be doing the work in my spare time outside of my day job. I’ll be initially focusing on a Renoise-clientel to inject some sonic love into that community. If things go steady I’ll evolve from there.

Over two years in the making it is finally here! Alex Strain and I have finished our album and it is up and ready to go! Visit this page:

mmd_as

Above are some images of my new Yamaha HS80M Monitors and myself in my new Renoise T-shirt. No need for comment on the latter, but the new speakers have been absolutely wonderful and I’ve been kicking myself for not investing in them earlier. As you can see from the pictures I’ve adjusted the position of the desk (thus the speaks on them) by moved the entire set-up off the wall by about 2 feet. The reason for doing this? Well, apart from being able to better access the growing mess of cables back there, the aim was to improve the speakers bass response. Monitors this big (8″ woofers) get quite boomy against a wall due to bass harmonics getting emphasised – having them out in the middle of the room helps the frequencies “breathe” better and you get a much more natural response. This means that I do not have to deal with the HS80Ms ‘room control’ switches being at anything other than ‘flat’. This equates to a fantastic sound reproduction that I can be very confident in using the speakers as a tool to make mixes that translate well on other speaker systems.

Already an album project has been mastered on this set-up that is due for release now very, very soon. So watch this space…

Download mp3: Nullarbor

I thought I’d get back into the swing of things by putting myself to the test of trying to best use my new monitors to re-mix/mastered an older song I was unhappy with. The rising maximalism of “Nullarbor” seemed appropriate for the task and was quite the challenge! With much complicated juggling I think I’ve come up with a good result, but at a guess I still think I am a long way from sonic mastery.

This is where you can possibly help me with feedback (especially you audio geeks out there). How does this sound to you? Any points that are too harsh or too muddy sounding? Could this sit alongside your favourite big name artist and sound like it belongs in the same sonic world? Let me know what you think.

Upon reading an excellent book regarding the improvement of assertiveness and empathetic communication I’ve come to some realizations that relate to music production. I have had and still have a problem with assertiveness – too easily saying ‘yes’ to projects, jobs, performances and collaborations against my better judgment and sometimes completely against my personal desire. As the years have gone on I’ve realized clearer goals and intentions with my own projects and have needed more time to properly fulfill those projects. Most of my own major projects still remain incomplete, and I have serious album ideas that have been in slow evolution since 2001! Talk about albatrosses…

This situation of course is due to my own lack of assertion and not the fault at all of other people who make requests of my time, ideas and energy. That’s worth repeating: it’s not your fault I’m behind in what I want to do, that’s something I have caused myself. With that point being clear I can now express intention to be more assertive and create workable compromises to attain my goal. I’ve already stated recently here that I intend to finish off existing collaborative project in the next few months freeing my time in the studio for my own work, but assertions need to be made to prevent future complications. This comes from acknowledgment of personal rights, in this case my rights as a composer and creative music-person. This could work for any musician or creator, and could apply to yourself. So…

An assertive bill of rights:

1. We have the right to turn down invitations for working collaboratively. No matter how small and ‘temporary’ the project may be, we do not have to squeeze it in.
2. We have the right to be in a collaboration but choose and be clear about our level of engagement, which includes a clear and flexible statement of when the projects ends.
3. We have the right to not play live if we do not want to, irrespective of how much others want to play live for whatever reason.
4. We have the right to say we are not interested in helping or paying attention to another person’s project.
5. We have the right to pull out of a project if we feel it is a necessary priority, either in deferral or permanently.
6. We have the right to not accept work even if it is of a commercial nature, as money and worry about money poisons creative intentions if allowed to dominate.
7. We have the right to work on our own projects at whatever level of our choosing without guilt or acceptance of vilification or manipulation (via guilt) from others.
8. We have the right to our own leisure time and time for recuperation outside of music in whatever amount we see fit without accepting guilt projected from others.
9. We have the right to not work on music at all, even for no apparent reason.
10. We have the right to honor the natural expression of our inspiration and work as best we can to enjoy creation to ensure the best possible expression of it, and therefore we have the right to nurture that process with or without other people involved as we see fit.

If the above rights were completely asserted and attained that would be an ideal situation – and ideals are rarely completely reached. Practical experience shows that people will come up and put pressure on you, sometimes irrespective or your assertive position being clear. Depending on the situation this is where it is pragmatic to make a ‘workable compromise’ via empathetic communication. This still retains yourself as being the only judge of what you will do with your time and allows you to negotiate it relative to your desires and rights. An example of this may be: “I can do my album, but for fun I might go play live improv with xyz every now and then”, or similar. You still retain the right to change your mind and give as much as you want to expressed via assertion to the people attempting to ask things of you (either in open friendly way or right to way that are downright maliciously manipulative). You can retain your friendships, networked associates, clientele, peers and so on as much as you like if you assert what you want and clearly set up with empathy a workable compromise that attempt to keep both parties in a state of mutual understanding.

I want to do this now.