51m0n

Alas, earwax

Me too? Bizarre, mine was carefully fashioned from Dairy Lea, he may find out if the stage lights are very very hot....

The version with the output tranny is supposed ot be awesome - I'd love a go on one

Here's two.... http://www.empresseffects.com/compressor.html [url="http://www.origineffects.com/Cali76.php"]http://www.origineff....com/Cali76.php[/url]

It sort of works....

Thats kissable that is....

Short of sticking it into an oscilloscope, a computer with a vst oscilloscope in a DAW, or some other effect with good metering you only have your ears to go by. This thing has a fixed attack & release and exactly what the sensitivity knob controls (be it ratio, threshold or both in some way) is not documented in an easy to find place (read: I couldnt find it in two seconds on the interweb). You can find more info [url="http://www.ovnilab.com/reviews/rossclones.shtml"]about it here[/url] Set the sensitivity so it is doin gnothing, then equalise the volume on and off with the output control. Play 8th notes on the A string and roll the sensitivity up until you hear/feel it doing 'something'. Find how much something you like/can live with. Rebalance the output when on and off. Thats as good as it gets, which isnt saying much.... Its designed for guitar, not bass, it stands to reason it wont do bass well.

Sounds delicious

Cool, let me know when, wouldnt miss it mate, loved the last one

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1350326283' post='1837395'] Thanks for the endorsements! We had a really good time - great gig and great promoters who know how to organise a fine evening and keep things going even after the main band has to drop out at the very last minute. With a bit of luck we'll be back in London soon. If you don't want to view the whole gig I've made separate video clips of "Love Me Tendons, Love Me Goo" and "Lilly & The Killers" + "Invasion Of The SpiderQueen" and put them up on our [url="http://www.youtube.com/user/terrortones"]YouTube channel.[/url] [/quote] Any idea if you'll be doing the loooonnggg haul down to Brighton again anytime, I know a few dodgy old geezers who once upon a time wore big bad psychobilly quiffs who are well up for catching your lot if you do

Yes its not designed to do that job, its really a dictaphone at best, it probably has built in filtering (ie in the hardware rather than software) to remove the bass as that is unhelpful for phone transmission. The iPhone claims to be capable of doing this stuff, but it isnt designed to do it, and therefore it doesnt do it well. Buy one of the many decent devices out there designed with recording rehearsals rather thn speach and enjoy it....

Take a leaf out of Phill Brown's excellent book 'Are We Still Rolling' and go and find a nice local church, give them a small donation to be able to use it to do a live recording for a couple of hours. Pick one that sounds 'nice', and doesnt have any loud heating systems in operation (or anyone wondering around). You'll be fine, since you have no lyrical content to scare the practitioners, unlike when Phill Brown tried this option

Yup, C1000s if you find the exact right place to put them could do ok. The chance of that is improved the better the acoustic in the room. If you have a nasty room, and a nasty mic, and a slightly harsh recorder (anyone heard a descant that didnt sound shrill like a screaming child?) I reckon you are going to struggle to tame the 'ouch' factor in the sound. Lovely sounding room, decent player, better mics and you have far more successful placement options already, so a better chance of a good capture. IME.... If I had this to record I might even try a Cascasde Fathead II with a Lundahl trannie, if the recorder sounded harsh.

Fair enough, but IME thats perfectly in line with them being average at best. Pretty much any sdc will do for OH's, C1000s (and I've used a matched pair for OH's for years when there wasnt anything better) certainly can cope in this task. Micing a piano is all about placement, almost more than any other instrument I can think of (harp is a bitch too actually). If you get the placement exactly right with less great mics you will achieve a far better result than brilliant mics without the same level of attention to placement. So not surprised one jot there either. The CM3 are in a completely different league to the C1000, hugely hugely better mic. They have one nuance you need to be aware of, they are a very very wide pattern cardiod, not an omni as they reject at 180 degrees, but still very wide, which is part of why they sound so natural too. So if you are about to close mic something and rejection is vital, there are cases where (a hihat mic for instance) a C1000 [i]may [/i]be more appropriate, but in general the C3 is going to give you a more accurate representation of what you are recording - which in this case means better IMO. The Thomann is an unsual beastie, unlike the myriad other sdc cheap chinese clones it doesnt have the actual diaphragm about 5mm recessed into the body. Instead, and exactly like the Neumann's that all those cheap clones are copying, it has the diaphragm virtually flush with the end of the mic, which actually makes for less resonances and a hugely better mic physically - [url="http://www.oktavamod.com/"]there are people out there modding these mics[/url] (and Oktava mk 12s) for pretty serious bucks and delivering really exceptional quality results. So I'm happy to put the Thomann's up against a set of C1000s in a lot of places, except they are stupidly cheap!.

Oh boy, big topic. Firstly record the thing in a big space that sounds great, if you record this in a crappy sounding room, then no amount of digital reverb can remove or cover that innate crapness from the recording, you'll just add a different flavour over the top. I cannot stress this enough, dotn go for a poor sounding room with recorder!!! The only other possiblilty is a very very dry room, and add a great sounding convolution reverb at mix time. You can get a great (really, brilliant) set of impulses for the Bricasti M7 [url="http://www.samplicity.com/bricasti-m7-impulse-responses/"]here[/url] which you can load with the free SIR vst from [url="http://www.knufinke.de/sir/sir1.php"]here[/url] C1000's are pretty average at best. They are OK for OH's in a pinch. If you have alittle bit of time and budget on your hands, the very very best bang for the buck small diaphragm condcensor that you can buy in Europe is the [url="http://www.lineaudio.se/linemic.htm"]CM3 [/url]from these guys [url="http://www.nohypeaudio.com/lineaudioproducts.htm"]here[/url] for about £90ea They blow C1000s away in every single respect, and are getting into Schoeps range of excellence (though Schoeps are still better). If you have less budget you could do worse than t[url="http://www.thomann.de/gb/the_tbone_sc140_stereoset.htm"]hese bad boys from Thomann[/url], which have a really good physical design (very close in many physical respects the Neuman KM84) and cost about £76 a pair with a stereo bar! When I get the time (actually its not time todo it, its time to finish the damn thing, its turning into a huge piece, including a fair amount of info on microphone design and characteristics, with a tonne of diagrammes I'm doing from scratch - I hope its worth the effort!), my next recording blog is all about stereo micing ensembles in rooms. Which would give you a lot of pointers about recording the entire ensemble, in which case you need two mics for stereo. A very important part of recording acoustic instruments is mic position. Simplest rule to follow for a mono recording is to walk around the player listening with one ear covered and listen, when you find a spot you like the sound of put the mic capsule right there, then listen on cans and fine tune it if necessary. Some guidelines, acoustic instruments sound from their entire physical size. If you mic closer than their longest dimension you are close micing the instrument, and the position and direction of the micropphone becomes hyper critical to the resultant tone - you tend to pick up the bit you are closest to (with an omni mic) or pointing at (with a cardiod mic). If the performer moves whilst playing (hint the [i]all[/i] do) then you will have constantly changing tone as you record. This is a "bad thing" - dont go there with something like a recorder! (So no close micing as a rule) If you dont get within close micing distances however, a different set of issues will arise. You are now entirely dependant on the room/instrument mix. There is something called 'critical distance' - it is the distance away from the instrument where the room reverb is of equal volume to the source. If you have one mic, and the instrument is to be in any way a feature in your recording, you do not want to be outside the critical distance, as your recording will be very washy and indistinct. If you watch the meters as you back off the mic from the source, you will see them drop in volume, as you get further away they will stop dropping in volume, this means you have gone beyond the critical distance, ie reverb volume >= source volume. For what you want to record you want to be within the critical distance and beyond close micing distance. In a smaller room this is can be tricky to achieve, especially with such a quiet instrument! Final points, noise - recorder is quiet, really really quiet. You need to have no background noise leaking in to the recording - close back cans are essential for everyone listening in! Recorder has nothing going on below 250Hz (unless its a bass recorder, but even then its minimal) use a high pass filter to bin any hum and low frequency noise. Good luck, and enjoy it!

Whats that , about 12 foot high? Its not a small room is it!

Betty Davis - Betty Davis (Her first album had Larry Graham on bass - legendary...) Check out the Funk and Groove thread for a frankly enormous selection of groove and funk bass playing.

Cards arent expensive (have look on Amazon) - get an 8 or 16GB card and be done with it. I record at 24bit always (especially reheasals) that way I can turn the pres right down and leave masses of headroom and it wont matter when I cme to turn it back up in a DAW afterwards - you have enough dynaimc range to play it very safe with 24bit. A stereo 2 hour rehearsal at 24bit 48KHz takes up about 1.5GB IME (its never exactly the 2 hours though, since there is set up band breakdown time which even I dotn record)

Errr, not so from my H4n, its entirely dependant upon what you are listening to the playback on for a start, and how loud, in order to move the same amount of air, such that you 'feel the whump', then you need to be moving the same amount of air on playback. At a guess I would think your hifi doesnt produce quite as much SPL as your band perhaps? There is absolutely nothing at all to suggest that a small diaphragm condensor or electret will struggle with low frequency sound. Thats why measurement mics are all SDCs - because they are more accurate at all frequencies. In fact the mics you have on those devices are all cardioid (omni doesnt work in coincident pairs) and as such they all to a greater or lesser extent develop more bass the closer to the source they are. Furthermore do you put your head right where the device is to find the spot you want to record from, or do you just tend to put it in the middle of the room? The mics will only pick up what they 'hear', place them in a big bass null (due to room acoustics) and you will get severely attenuated bass frequencies on the recording.

<PEDANTMODE> Strictly speaking the H2 (and all of these devices) dont sound or record like the human ear. To do so the mics would need to be about 17cm apart (which equates to about 0.5ms of delay), and short of a faux stereo head mic, or a Jecklin disk to add to seperation due to the meat and skull between them the closest you can get is an ORTF array which is to say the mics would need to be a matched pair of cardiod mics placed at an angle of 110 degrees from each other. The coincident, or very near coincident pair of mics on all these devices are too close together to provide any stereo info based upon phase and time delay clues, instead they only use the difference iin level between the mics to provide stereo. On the plus side the do collapse to mono with virtually no phase artifacts at all. All of which will be revealked in the next Blog posts on recording rooms </PEDANTMODE> Sorry, I'll get me coat....

Or go the whole hog and get an RME UCX an RME OctaMic II and an iPhone and record 8 tracks at once.... Might bust the budget a bit, but it will sound very very nice indeed

[quote name='Mr. Foxen' timestamp='1349999535' post='1833515'] The great thing about Vic Wooten, is that I can read his book about music, written as Victor Wooten, the great bassist who does all this stuff, and find it entirely applicable to me,[i] a guy who's set is standing in front of amps feeding back and pulling faces for half an hour[/i]. [/quote] Love the imagery mate When are you playing down my way, this I would go to see

Brilliant bash as alwyas, lovely to see everyone again, and meet new people too. Voted for Cancer Research, because, well thats what got my mum....

Bwahahahahaaaaaa!

[quote name='urb' timestamp='1349965932' post='1832840'] Many jazz albums are still cut completely live today and often feature only first or second takes - I spoke to one engineer recently who told me he's now working more and more with jazz bands as the level of playing among some well known/popular bands is so bad - and that they reply on fixing and splicing stuff in the studio to sound good - that he finds it depressing when he can actually play ALL the band's instruments better than they can - even if he admits he's a crap keyboard player... technology is just a tool, always has been, and it's always open to positive use or abuse - [i]let's face it if you want to go completely [s]analogue[/s] digital and do single live takes today - you can[/i] [/quote] Fixed for you