Comments for Songs and Sonics

Comment on The Nasty Lo-Fi Machine You May Already Own by Jeff Boller

Jeff Boller — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 04:35:29 +0000

That’s a great idea — to have individual musicians recording themselves. Very clever!

Comment on The Nasty Lo-Fi Machine You May Already Own by Kerchung_Crash

Kerchung_Crash — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 02:28:03 +0000

good list, I have employed the majority of these techniques at one time or another… you can also put one in the pocket of individual musicians and get pretty decent (according to medium) audio levels on all fronts to be mixed together later (just sync the tapes) inside and especially outside the studio. Also, the broken ones have yielded audio gold as feedback/noise generators. I’m curious to see if one could act as an effective pre-amp to a junk audio set-up…

Comment on Three tricks for better vocal overdubs by Jeff Boller

Jeff Boller — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 13:39:37 +0000

Hmmm… Since pitch isn’t as big of a deal for rappers, maybe don’t worry about using reverb. (I mean, have you ever heard anybody complain that a rapper is out of tune?) For these tricks, reverb is basically meant to help discern pitch information and that’s it.

Panning things far right or left while doing overdubs might work well, though. Assuming you want doubled vocal parts to begin with, the panning tricks could help make sure you have two or three nearly identical vocal performances — that they’re rhythmically in sync with each other. Trick #3 might work well if someone can’t do a good complete take for some reason.

I don’t know for sure, though. I’ve recorded a lot of R&B singers but not many rappers! So take all of this with a grain of salt.

Comment on Three tricks for better vocal overdubs by nofish

nofish — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 12:19:42 +0000

Hi,
I’m the one from the Reaper forum asking you to write about this technique.
So first, thanks a lot for putting it together.
I think you clearly outlined the steps and it does make sense to me, will test it in my next recording session.
However, as I often record rappers, I’m wondering a bit if a long reverb doesn’t get too “washy” (muddy) for vocals, but that’s a matter of fine-tuning I guess.

Will report back how the next recording-session went using this technique.

Cheers.

Comment on If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a cheap music video by gotilk

gotilk — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:13:49 +0000

PERFECTLY! Thanks. Just managed (after days of drawing.. whew) to make my first rotoscoped animated sequence. It’s 8 seconds long, looks like junk but it worked! Thanks for your article and for the clarification. It turns out there’s no special commands or anything. You just make sure the files are numbered sequentially (00001 to 01000 in the case of a few seconds of 30fps video.. whew again) and open file number 00001.. virtualdub just does it. Choose “save as avi” and it just works. I guess I’m not used to things just working. I didn’t expect it to be so easy. Turning the original video into frames was just as easy, just make sure you set the frame rate correctly first.

When I have something worth showing, I’ll send a link to you. Thanks again for the inspiration and great job with your video.

Comment on Really Really Weird remix contest winners revealed! by SensitivBoy

SensitivBoy — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:54:58 +0000

Thanx to Rewind for the kind words,
Dig your dubby style…

Comment on Really Really Weird remix contest winners revealed! by rewind

rewind — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:45:28 +0000

Congrats to the DrummerMan for winning and well done to every one. It was a lot of fun, which I think can be seen in the number of great mixes here. Special shout out to sensitiveboy for my favourite tune.

Comment on Really Really Weird remix contest winners revealed! by DrummerMan

DrummerMan — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:44:07 +0000

I meant “remix contest”, but you all probably figured that out.

Comment on Really Really Weird remix contest winners revealed! by DrummerMan

DrummerMan — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:43:06 +0000

Thanks, Jeff, for making such a fun remix!
I will try to continue being worthy of this sweet-ass prize.
You all rock.
Geoff

Comment on If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a cheap music video by Jeff Boller

Jeff Boller — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 07:12:38 +0000

Hi Gotilk –

Thanks for the kind words about the song and video. As far as animating over top of an existing video — you could do that with any professional video editing application… which means none of the tools I used can do that!

Actually, maybe there’s some way to do it in VirtualDub — but I don’t know. I’ve only utilized a small fraction of what VirtualDub can do.

What I meant by “VirtualDub to stitch all the image files into AVI movie files” was this: For each shot, I had hundreds (sometimes thousands) of bitmap images I’d created in Paint Shop Pro. Each bitmap file was like a page in a children’s flip book. VirtualDub simply took all of those bitmap images from a directory (I had a different directory for each shot) and turned them into a single AVI file.

So I then had a bunch of AVI files, one for each shot of the video. Those AVI files were imported into ABC Video Roll, where I put them in the proper order and worked on the “rhythm” of the shots.

Hope that clarifies things…!