The wooden box was made from an old door that was kicking about my dads garage. Not sure if i’m going to leave it pure wood or paint it/tolex it. I’ll have to see. The mains transformer is a weird one and seems to be giving pretty high B+ and heater voltages on its output (about 7.2V rather than 6.3). From what I can tell, it warms the tubes up alot more than usual, which means more electrons will be dissipated from the cathode which will either mean earlier saturation or MORE VOLUME! It will mean a shorter tube life, but I think I can live with it.

Can’t really do a thorough test as my neighbors and house mates are sleeping but watch this space for sound clips..

In a bit..

M

Max

Drum Replacer

Building these was the most fiddley thing i’ve ever done. It took me a total of about 5 hours just to get the 0.6 micron think aluminum leaf cut right and maneuvered into place. It took like 15 tries per mic.

The design was taken from a really mint guide that a guy called Rick Wilkinson made up (http://www.rickshawrecords.com/ribbonmic/). It consists of some 1 1/2 inch brass pipe with some grill holes cut out, with a ribbon motor made from acrylic rod mounted in the middle with some weather proofing tape. This then connects to an output transformer and out through the XLR connecter.

All in all, i’ve spent about £55, which for two pretty good sounding ribbon mics isn’t bad at all. Due to the ultra thin ribbon and the transformer - the output is also alot greater than chinese import things. This means i’m not going to have to get special preamps. Don’t get me wrong, they’re certianly no Royer killers, and the craftmanship is no Ben Askem, but they do the job nicely.

Have a listen (excuse playing…):
Mic tests

Stereo overheads on drumkit in my middle room
Stereo on acoustic guitar about 2 feet away.
Mono on transistor fender stage 100 amp, center speaker, 2 inch away with telecaster, clean then distortion.

No processing on any of them.

Have a look:
One of the mics (gaffa only temporary):

Ribbon Motor:

It feels nice to get this amenage out my system. I think i’d like to start work on some serious music and try and put a coherent album together. The only problem is that it won’t be as good as This Binary Universe by BT which is quite a big hurdle.

On another nice note, I cleaned my house today. It took fucking ages but it just looks a bit dirty now, not an absolute filth hole as it did before.

Mx

http://src.infinitewave.ca/

It’s pretty interesting, its a comparison of lots of different software’s downsampling algorithms.

Notable Offenders:
Logic 7 (Awful)
Digital Performer
Reaper (Probably produces audible comb filtering)
Sadie (Pretty amazingly bad, odd for such a highly revered product)
Soundforge
Wavelab 5

Protools HD, Sonar, Leopards Core Audio (including logic 8 ) and wavelab 6 seem to come out best.

I’d very much like to hear the differences of all these systems in controlled anechoic room to see how much difference there actually is. I always though people were just being silly for saying they could tell the difference between different DAWs (Reason excluded), but this seems to throw some weight to the argument.

In a bit.
mx

After my exasperation with the awful sound quality of my crappy behringer desk I decided to extend my ageing pro-tool rig with a selection of ADAT accessible pre-amps. After a quick sniff round ebay it looked like the Focusrite OctoPre would do the trick, they sound amazing and have built in compressors and ADAT access. Sweet, it thought, Until I noticed the price tag. Focusrite are expensive.
Figured the next best thing would be to look at the Behringer ADA8000 (like the one in studio 2). Apparently they sound really good and have got ’state of the art’ pre amps. Mint, there is one going on ebay currently at £20. Can’t go wrong I thought. I’ll just see if there are any reviews.
Sound on sound said it was pretty mint and Tape Op quite liked it.
I think they’re both deaf.
Have a listen to these.

http://homerecording.about.com/library/ada-rain.wav
http://homerecording.about.com/library/digi-rain.wav

The first is rain recorded through a Behringer ADA8000. Sounds like rain? Ok, good.
Now listen to the second, recorded through a Digidesign Digi 002. Not the best pres in the world, but even still….
Notice the difference? It’s as if someone pulled a blanket off the mic. I can even tell the difference on my LAPTOP SPEAKERS!!!
All the highs above about 6k are being mangled by the ADA8000.

I’m recording a full length over summer with a ‘real’ band and I just cannot bring myself to use the shitty pres on my shitty desk. Next student loan…. not long…
In the mean time, you can donate to the BUY MAX AN SSL CONSOLE fund via paypal. It’s the same account as my email address.
Thank you.

mx

http://rapidshare.com/files/168255768/Artifact_-_Cities.zip

The album I recorded over summer with a band of mine.

Mx

The room was nice and quiet and the stage guys turned all the smoke machines onto full in preparation for the all senses experiences that is a Sunn gig… The first hiccup of the evening was that the right hand stage smoke machine was knackered, and with the air con blowing the other ones smoke straight off stage as soon as it got out the nozzle the performance area was left someone smoke free which i’m sure infuriated steven o’malley, whose tech spec almost certainly reads ‘… and the audience should not be even able to see their hand in front of their face at any time during the show.’

After 20 mins of an impressive but ultimately fruitless uphill struggle by the left hand smoke machine, Oren Arawatshisface came on stage in his outfit and started to press some buttons over the doomy soundtrack that had been playing out the PA for about 10 mins. A cutting three note C major run then made itself known to the room from above… Surround sound??? surely not???.. Ding, dong, dong….. ‘Will all staff please report to HQ’…….Ding, dong, dong…’Ladies and Gentlemen, Your attention please. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we must ask you to evacuate the building. Please make your way to the nearest exit, or as advised by staff’…..

They’d set the smoke alarm off…..

Steve must have been pissed by this point, in both senses of the word (he’d been glugging wine since well before boris came on stage).

Once the whole band were on stage, and started to get into it, steve began conducting the band, pointing to different frets on his guitar and expecting everyone to follow. I’ve never seen them do this before, and it sounded shit. I’m pretty sure he was just pissing about. When Greg Anderson started to lead up to the big…. ‘Slowly everyone.. plectrum in the air…… 1……….2………3……. DOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!’ bits, steve was just doing scratchy shit up round the 17th fret, with no interest in playing the doom game. he didn’t even have his hood on.
After 40 minutes of bollocksing around, he put his guitar down and just walked off, and could only be seen from the side waving his arms in a ‘calm it down now. manner. He did a few funny faces, did alot of thumbs down genstures, came back on stage, wispered to everyone, did a few more thumbs down and started doing scratchy bollocks again.

Then… the best thing I have seen… ever.

Greg, suddernly, after being almost motionless for an hour snapped, ran at steve, hit him with his guitar, gave him a good whack and pushed him into two of those enormous full stage, his legs and stupid rode flying up in the air like frier tuch being thrown down a well. As soon as the amps hit the floor, the sound cut out, greg walked round the back, said sorry to the crowd, bollocked steve once more for good measure, gave him what looked like a kick and stormed off to the dressing room.

brilliant.

Simply set up a bus send on the master drum return and shift it off to a multiband with a well quick attack and release and a pretty harsh ratio followed by a tube or tape saturation emulator. You can then just use the send on the drum bus as a comeonthenletsfuckingavsome! dial. Works wonders.

Also, if your having problems with guitars ’sitting right’, just cut everything below 100-150hz , you don’t need it and itcleans a mix up nicely.

According to this, it will shoot a beam about 200 feet and still burn. alot.

Dom, BRING ME YOUR MICROWAVE!