Everything’s Workin Out

Well I refuse to bad mouth anyone online, so I’ll just say that the job at R&D did not work out. There were things going on there thatled me to decide not to return. Bummer. However..there is light at the end of the tunnel. I ended up getting a co-op at Sunflower!! Yay!! The work there is definitely more up my alley. I’ll be floating between the studio and a music store in Angus who is owned by Keith, the owner of the studio. So things worked out perfectly…and I ended up with work that is defintely more in line with what i want to do. Have a session there tomorrow. A folk artist, Paul Snelgrove, is coming up to lay down some tracks thursday and sunday, will let you all know how it goes…

My website is coming together, Pat and I are anticipating launch withing a week or two. I’ll post here when we actually launch but in the mean time keep an eye on www.feedbackaudio.ca 

And last, but definitely not least…today marks 11 months since I started courting Trace. I love you so much!! Can’t wait to see you tomorrow!!

Life is good, God is good, praying for a close friend.

Smiling

R&D Audio

Well I’m officially employed. Kind of excited, although it’s not exactly what I was hoping for, it is work. R&D Audio is based out of Kirkfield, pretty much in the middle of nowhere (it does make for a stress free dirve to work….). They specialize in speaker construction, audio system design and installation, and recently they got opened a new division and got involved with live productions. They’ve taken on some pretty big projects..I’ll admit, it is Kirkfield, and I wasn’t sure what the scope of the firm was, but they actually did the whole system to the main dome for the Atlanta Olymics.

The position is almost all positive, although there are one or two negatives. I was hoping to get in in a post production firm, however, audio installs will allow me to apply my knowledge AND get my hands dirty in a semi-construction type role, which I really do miss. Also, It’s up here, and I don’t have to make a regular commute to the city, which is really important to me partially because I really don’t like the city or the drive there, but moreso because Tracey wants to stay up north, and I love her very much.

The process went verryyy quickly. I submitted my resume last thursday, they called me on friday, I had my interview today, and my first shift as a “junior installer” is on thursday this week. Not really sure how to take that, either they were really desparate for hands, or they were so impressed with my resume and interview they jumped, or maybe a bit of both…

One negative… My involvement at Sunflower will be much more limited, which is too bad because I really enjoy it. I guess it just comes down to reality. Sunflower isn’t a full time business, and even though I love it so much, I can’t make myself available at whatever weird hours musicians decide to book and put everything else on hold. Being availabvle for thursday and friday morning/aftyernoon shifts for recording just isn’t feasable while trying to hold down full time work. I hope keith and I can continue to work together during hours outside of the typical “business work week”, although I realize that the fact I am no longer available through the week has got to be a bit of a bugger for him…

Some big positives, It is full time work, and even though the pay isn’t fantastic, there is significant room for advancement. But more than that, I’m working in the industry, whereas most of my classmates are working in restaurants or Future Shop, putting in volunteer hours at studios when they can. I’ve always been fascinated by physics of acoustics, sound/room interaction, and speaker/cabinet design. This job will give me an opportunity to explore that facet that I just wouldnt get in a typical audio engineering position. I’ll get to work with my hands, and put in a little dirty work, which I really get a lot out of. Ya, my back is a bit rough, but as long as I’m smart, I think it will be ok. Lastly, it’s in the middle of nowhere…and I’m a country boy..so thats just right So, while this maybe wasn’t exactly what I had planned, I think this position will really grow on me. I see myself really enjoying it and excelling there, it will be a benifit for both myself as well as R&D. An unforseen advantage as well, when the church decides to move into a building, I’ll probably have a few years experience under my belt, and will be able to provide a valuable resource to them in the form of acoustics consulting. Also, since R&D is a speaker manufacturer as well as an installer, I may be able to hook the two up to the benifit of both. The speakers the produce really do stack up..trust me.

At any rate, it’s a big period of transition for me, and I’m actually pretty glad that I get the opportunity to work in audio and still be somewhat active, rather than having a desk job. I think it will be good, although only time will tell. There are pros and cons, but such is the reality with any job, and R&D is a place where I can see myself pursuing a career. I’ll keep you all posted on the various jobs and jobsites I work on.

Still going to work on my own and build my project studio. R&D hires all staff as sub contractors, so while I’ll have to manage all my own taxes and insurance, I’ll also be able to use it to funnel funds into my business, Feedback Audio.

All in all I’m really looking forward to this new chapter. Happy to be employed again Happy to be applying everything I learned in school to a career Happy to be with R&D Life is good, I have great friends, great family, and an amazing girlfirend who is the love of my life. And now to top it off, I have a great new job too. Happy God is good

The Importance of Organization…

A little late on this one…been busy :S

Anyway, the second half of the saturday session at Sunflower was spent doing some rough mixes for a session that had been recorded there about two weeks before. The group was called “Chavrim”, and they are a local church youth music/choir group. They had recorded about 20 songs all pretty much live off the floor with a choir overdub. The wanted a series of rough mixes for each track to decide which to scrap, which to get fully mixed, and which to come back into the studio to work on.

Basically I stuck to balancing, (adjusting only volume). Keith, the studio owner, wanted me to spend only 15 minutes or so per track, which is only really about 3-4 run throughs of each song. Not nearly enough time for delicate EQ, compression, gating, or reverb adjustments. That was ok, they weren’t looking for a finished project, just a rough idea of the songs.

The problem was, I hadn’t recorded the tracks myself, and the session structure was a bit of a mess. When in a recording situation it’s easy to just put things wherever with whatever label on the audio files/tracks. Generally because your working on it you know what everything is. (Think of it like a messy bedroom, it may look like a tornado went through but YOU know exactly where everything is right?) The problem was, the guy who recorded it wasn’t available to do the mixes after he recorded it, so the work fell on my shoulders.

I spent half of my time simply sorting through the sessions, trying to figure out what really was the “kick” or the “snare” because it certainly wasn’t what was labelled as the kick and snare. Audio files seemed to be shoved in random places off to the side away from the main track, a complete mystery to me as to whether the engineer was planning on using or scrapping them. Also, there were digital clips EVERYWHERE!! A digital clip is a spot where the audio gets too loud for the computer resulting in very bad sounding “pops” and “buzzing” type noises in the lousest parts. In order to get the volume he needed in the heat of the moment he had abandoned proper gain structure and pushed most of the faders “to 11″. Much of my time was spent eliminating these clips by assigning more apporpriate gain levels to the faders, and turning the overall volume of the system up. His actual recording was OK, the recording quality left a little to be desired but all in all was not too bad. There were no clips in the recorded files themselves (which is good, or else they would have been garbage),  it was just that everything had been jacked after the fact to get more volume. The organization of the session data caused me to waste about half my time and caused tons of headaches. All of this stuff I had to fix before I could even START working on getting a rough mix for each song.

Anybody out there working with audio. ORGANIZE THE HECK OUT OF YOUR SESSIONS!! It’s a practice I adopted while at school and treasure as a key part of my workflow. Label everything, name every track and audio region clearly. Or else your computer will become clogged with “Audio 1.aiff” files that you have no idea what they are. Watch for digital clips especially during recording, but also as you are doing your preliminary mixing during the session, if clips start occuring, any mixing you do after the fact will be for nothing. If you have to restructure your gain setup across the session to get everything at proper levels without clipping then do that. I promise you, it will save time in the end. Its easy to forget to do this stuff in the heat of a session, but taking the extra few minutes will make it well worth it and will save you hours dowen the road. If you ever need to re-open a session months later you’ll just be able to open it and get to work, rather than spend a few hours tring to figure out what the heck you were doing. Plus, you never know who you may end up handing your session off to, and if it is a mess, it is immediately percived, validly or not, as unporfessional. Organization is key, and it only takes a minute..so get organized in those sessions!!

The mixes, once I got everything sorted out, actually turned out pretty well. As I said, the recordings themselves weren’t totally ideal, but I’m never totally happy with something unless I do it myself (and even then rarely totally happy). But for rough mixes they were perfect. It was stressful, but I managed to just stay under the 15 minute/song cap, although I was working like a madman..

Sidenote of this post..Sunflower is great..I really love it there. As much as I wish it wasn’t, it is however only a part time gig, so I’ve been on the hunt for a more stable “day job”. Today I applied to “RD Audio” out of Kirkfield, on the other side of Lake Simcoe. They work in live productions, systems design, installation and manufacturing. I applied today, and am hoping to hear back for an interview. Wish me luck and prayer!!

Thats all for now

First Session at Sunflower

Well I had my first session at Sunflower Studios today, and it went very well. I have to admit, I was pretty nervous going in. I had been to Sunflower once before, but only for a walkthough. Today was my first time actually getting my hands dirty with the gear. Even though I know my way around anything to do with audio pretty well, going into any situation without knowing exactly how everything works and is hooked up is a bit unnerving for me. The fact that the owner was leaving me by myself didn’t help matters. I am always in for a challenge, and when there’s clients waiting, you have to figure out what wires go where, what does and doesn’t work, what buttons connect whcih things to which other things, wrestle down the computer software, and get the session rolling, FAST. AND you have to do all of that while making it look like you have everything under control. Great challenge and great opportunity for problem solving.

The first client was named Machala. She came with her mom, and is an aspiring 14-15 year old singer. She was doing the famous track “Unforgettable” to a backing track. She had met up with a 77 year old male vocalist who lives in the US via the internet. He had a very warm, crooning big sound, and he recorded the instrumental tracks, as well as his vocal track, leaving me to record Machala’s parts. Pretty easy for my first session, I was lucky. There were however a few issues…

Most of you know I’m a Mac user, and Sunflower runs off a window platform. They use winamp as a general media player. Fine, except it makes the computer magically change every file you upload into a “Winamp Media File” And changes the file extension into something that Cubase (Their recording software) can’t read. Ahhhhh windows… Anyway, initially I couldn’t import the backing tracks, but after some workaround conversion I eventually got it into Cubase. Not a good start to the day…I was screaming inside for my Mac.

After that however the recording went fantastically. I had the first chance to really stretch the legs of my AKG 414 LTD and it performed BEAUTIFULLY. If I was doing a pop track the vocal wouldn’t have needed any EQ at all. This is partially due to the great mic, and partially due to the fact that Michala was a very talented singer. Hoever, this was not a pop track, this was a crooner track. After about 5 takes and some editing between the takes to get the best combination of performances Machala and her mom Karen left. They were very happy, but the work was only just starting. The male vocal sounded like it had been recorded in 1950, it was so warm and smooth, a little dark with a huge reverb. It sounded…well…like a 1950’s crooner. If I had’ve put Macala’s track up there as is, it would’ve sounded like bad karaoke.

The real challenge was to make it sound like Machala and this older gentleman were singing “together”. My 414 sounded too perfect, too clean. I had to “warm” it up a bit. I used a cutting high shelf to slightly warm her voice and reduce the crispness of her voice. I also boosted the low mids to add some presence. between these two things and some other small EQ adjustments, I was able to mimic the vintage ribbon microphone sound of the male vocals, at least as much as they could be mimicked on the voice of a young girl. Next came the reverb. The male voice had this marvelous reverb, sounded like he was in one of the great halls of america’s golden age. I had to match the reverb exactly, or else they wouldve sounded like they were in different places. I ended up using a combination of 4 different reverbs, varying room size, degree diffusion, high and low frequency damping, and pre delay to come up with a combination that closely matched the reverb on the male voice. I find with plug in reverbs, using only one often ends up sounding too thin, and artificial…like a plug in. By using four differnt ones and balancing them, you come up with a much more natural sounding “room”.

It was a lot of work, and Keith had budgeted 2 hours of studio time to get it done from the time Machala and her mom showed up in their car, to the time the final mixdown was being exported…so it was tight. All in all I think I did a very good job, I’ll be posting a link to the track once it get’s uploaded online. Would I have liked to work on it more? Sure…but in audio you can always do more work on a piece. At some point you have to budget your time and say “I’m done”. With Machala’s piece, I think it turned out fantastically. By the timne I was done it really did sound like the two were really singing together, pretty crazy considering they’re separated by over half of a continent, and the tight timeline I had to work under.

More on the second half of the day tomorrow

Cool Game….

Very fun..

….theres just something magical about combining problem solving physics with blowing limp stick men out of a cannon….

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/444877

Sunflower

About two weeks ago, a guy randomly got in touch with me. His name was Keith, and he owns a recording studio called Sunflower Studios (www.sunflowerstudios.ca). He had gotten my name from an old bass teacher of mine who knew I was going to school at Trebas. He asked if I could could down and meet him at his studio just outside Angus.

I went down last week, and while I was a bit nervous, it turned out Keith was a really great guy. His usual recording engineer had moved to Toronto, and he has been using a few local guys to run the sessions. He was looking for someone else to help pick up the slack. If things go well I’ll be puitting in part time hours at his studio, as well as continuing to run my own freelance audio production company, Feedback Audio. Keith is also looking for ways to make imporvements to his studio, to bring things up a notch.  Since my last project in school was to build a complete studio from scratch, I have TONS of ideas that are both effective and cheap. I see Sunflower as a great place to put my engineering skills to use, as well as to use the skills I learned in acoustical construction and renovation. It’s a great opportunity for me to use and further develop my skills, and a great opportunity for keith to get some great improvements to his studio. Win-win’s are fun

I really look forward to working with Keith at Sunflower. He’s a really cool guy and his studio is one of the largest up in the area. I’ll be posting every so often about what develops out at Sunflower in Angus, both musically as well as changes to the actual studio through renovations and such, as well as updates on projects I take on my own. Keep an eye out!!

10 Months

It’s been 10 months since I first racked up the nerve to ask your parents if I could have their blessing in courting you and since then I’ve discovered that I love you more each and every day. I thought about writing some big long post, and then I remembered a cute little cartoon taped on your bedroom wall. I hopped on the net and did some “magical internet surfing” of my own and found the guy who made it, as well as his gallerly of comics. So rather than a big post, here’s something a little simpler

I love you so much trace<3 words aren’t enough..

<3

Weekend Again:D

I had forgotton how much I love summer, particularly weekends in the summer. Doing fathers day breakfast with my dad tomorrow, as I’ll have to take off for church super early on sunday. After breakfast heading to a family lunch with Tracey. After that….you guessed it…WASAGA again!! Trace and I are taking our friend Cassie along, since we haven’t hung out with her in forever, I also found out my good friend Pat D is coming up from London!!! Yay!! Haven’t seen him in years (feels like)! My other friend Cody from St Catharines was spoded to be coming, but can’t make it till next weekend.. Oh well…..

There just something so awesome about cruising across the countryside with Tracey in the passenger seat then spending a full day at the beach and forgetting the rest of the world. I love it

In Love with a View and Wasaga

I met with my good friend Joni Wagner on friday. Haven’t seen him in a while and it was good to meet up again. We did meet for a reason though, Joni is writing/producing/directing a short film in the summer called “In Love with a View”. He created a Facebook group for it and as soon as I saw I asked him if I could do sound for him (I love his work). A few weeks ago he messaged me back and asked if I was still game. The answer was OF COURSE! This film is going to be really, really great I think. Joni really wants to push the envelope creatively with cinematography and audio, and has given me a large amount of creative liscense and input in regards to sound.

I’m really looking forward to trying out some things that many people would just consider “weird” or as Joni puts it “messed up” and making it work into a coherent film that draws in the audience emotionally.

This film is going to be great, and different so keep an eye out, I’ll be blogging about it periodically. Shooting is scheduled for August 22nd to 24th

As a sidenote, I went to Wasaga on the weekend with Trace, Sarah Martin, and Kyle Morton. It was AWESOME and pretty much signalled the kick off of summer for all of us. Sarah got amazingly suburned and we had the traditional Galaxy diner food. The lake was pretty cold once you got far out but was like a bathtub close to shore. It was beautiful. Wasaga beach is one place where I can really see god’s beauty in creation, and it’s also the place where I really fell in love with Tracey, so it’s an important place to me. It was so great to get back. Already looking forward to the next time I can head out there (next weekend????)………

Back in the Saddle

Well I picked up my bass and headed to band practice for the first time in about 8 months. It was awesome. I have a bit of a sore back and sore fingers…but you know the good sore?

The move back has left me feeling a little spiritually displaced. I don’t really have my own ”space” anymore and certain issues here at my dad’s have left me in a bit of a spiritual downer that I’m trying to get together with God to pull me out of. It was really great to get out and just play some bass and worship. I have such a huge passion for doing sound, but I have an equally huge, if not greater passion, for playing bass. The problem is, since Connexus has launched, there has been greater need for sound guys than for a bass players. Over the last few months I’ve been working on training some more volunteers to run the fairly complex sound board, and as a result am now only on sound every other week.

This week was the first that it worked out for me to play bass. It just felt really good to worship again. This may be hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t been in a worship band, but I just can’t worship like I’m meant to unless I have my bass in my hands. Even when i don’t have to run sound, and am just in the congregation, I just can’t get into it without my instrument. It was awesome tonight, and I’m definitely looking forward to Sunday.

Hoping to spend tomorrow mostly in prayer and reading the bible, just to get myself back on track spiritually after the move back. Lately I’ve been relying too much on myself and those around me to get me through, when really I should have my focus skyward. There are still some family issues here that I think are going to come to a head at some point (I kinda made myself forget about them over the year I was away), but I need to separate myself from them, and place myself inline with God. Tonight was a step in the right direction. I am feeling better already.