New tune from the Avvie Nation

A couple of you have already heard this.

Titled Dirty Thirties, posted on Soundclick. Downloading sounds better than streaming, although SC compresses the hell out of everything anyway.

Comments/critiques appreciated.
Enjoy!

 

That's all solo, Bobo. The drums are MIDI data sent to a machine and recorded as audio waves. Mark Morris plays lead guitar; everything else is me. It's all recorded on this computer at this desk in Logic Pro.

Compression...hooboy. Tough to explain here, as so much of it is taste and experimentation.

Lemme start by saying that C is something that's best "seen" and not heard. Without C, you would see spikes in your level meters; with C turned on, you won't.

Second: try to get the best sound you can BEFORE recording. It will save severe heartaches afterwards. You can't polish a turd but so much.

Think of a compressor as a "funnel" for sound waves, squeezing down the high and low peaks. "Knee" would be the taper of the funnel's neck: hard knee would be more like a flat-bottomed cup with a small spout out the bottom. Soft knee would be a long, cone-shaped funnel. The hard knee is usually used as a sound effect...you can hear "skids" trailing after the sound. This was a popular effect used for drums in the 80's...most notably Phil Collins' toms and Def Leppard's snare when combined with a noise gate (which is similar to the snare I used on this recording).

"Attack", when used on stringed instruments, denotes how much of the initial signal is cut off. With attack set to zero, you don't hear as much of your pick or finger hitting the string (attack), and only hear the note that sounds behind it. This can be heard in the lead guitar of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game"...C set to zero attack, sustain turned all the way up.

"Wet" and "dry" are how much of each signal is mixed together: the uncompressed signal and the compressed one. A simple example is a sink faucet: after having part of the water supply diverted to the water heater, you then mix the hot and cold to suit with the faucet.

Compressors are useful to control spikes in that meter, as I mentioned, but they also have a seperate purpose when mixing---controlling the sound output so that your speakers don't get rattled out of the mounts. That part is an art and a skill that just takes hours of practice, listening, reading various meters, getting other opinions, etc. It takes a lot of work to get the right combination of EQ, compression and filtering. And BTW, low- and high-pass filters are absolutely invaluable. They can quickly solve problems that will make you pull your hair out when trying to use a compressor alone.

It's gonna take a while to learn...persevere!

 

Here's part of my DAW setup: (crappy phone camera shot)

The black box is a 1985 Roland Boss DR-660 drum machine. It has MIDI cables plugged into the top of the Tascam USB interface on the right. The "Drums Mapped" MIDI track in Logic "plays" the drum machine. Audio out from the machine is fed to audio in on the interface (not shown connected) and recorded as audio sound, so that EQs and compressors, etc can be applied.
That interface also drives headphones and powered monitor speakers on either side of the computer.

Drums are the bane of startup home studios. There's free everything on the web, but free drums are hard to find.

{edit: bad advice deleted here. Hey, it's not like you never screw up at your job....]

I've neglected to tell you about kvraudio.com yet, and there's a reason why: there's a huge supply of free audio software there, but like I said before, a great portion of it is crap. If you do a LOT of research there, you may find a drum application to suit you (or anything else), but most of the forum help that I've seen are hip-hoppers mackin' on free stuff, and they're beginners too, so their opinion is crap. I'd suggest going there, but only when you know exactly what you're looking for.

I'll put a feeler out to my peeps and see if there's any other decent ones out there. But keep in mind, any sample by itself will sound like crap...it's up to you, the engineer, to turn them inot audio and make them sound big.

 

Oh dear God somebody stop me!


EDIT EDIT EDIT

http://www.naturalstudio.co.uk/ns_kit7free.html
Free drumset!
I might be checking it out too.

I just noticed that raeper has an update posted yesterday: it now has a virtual keyboard! Hey, they stole that idea from Logic!
You'll love this feature: hit Alt+B, and your computer keyboard becomes a piano/MIDI keyboard! This is how I work out my horn parts.

Here is a free drum synth--some rocker kid is really liking it FWIW
http://www.e-phonic.com/plugins/drumatic3.php

For $48, here's a serious drum sampler with lots of free kits. But for $15 more dollars you can get all 255 sounds in my black box! :ha:
http://nusofting.liqihsynth.com/DKplus_Virtual_Drums.htm
Reviews here: http://www.kvraudio.com/get/1507.html
Dude, $48 is dirt cheap for drums. The big names are $200+, and you'll sound just like everyone else.

Still searching...

 

Check out that naturalsturdio ns7 kit I just posted above instead.

That e-phonic one should go into a VSTi folder, not the VST folder. The former is an instrument, the latter an effect plug-in. Same applies on all instruments/samplers.