recordinghacks

I think we’d crossed over the 450-mic point and were gunning for 500 when someone pointed out that the Shure collection was looking pretty crufty.

Shure enough, mixed in with the good stuff was a virtual stockpile of odd microphone-looking things that you’d never find in a recording studio, except maybe in a box addressed back to the confused shipping department at, say, the Enemy, with a note inside reading “WTF?”

So we cleaned ‘em out. It drops our total, but it’s like cutting the weak songs off the album, back in the days when artists really did that. The quality of what’s left behind is improved.

And anyway, what’s exciting about “dynamic base station microphones designed especially for dispatching systems?” I’m trying to track some drums here, not page a @&#*%!! taxicab.

Madness, pandemonium and chaos is happening behind the scenes. Not that you’d know it from the frequency of updates to this space.

Is freneticness a word?

Last week I launched a pretty neat new feature for the mic database: it now generates blocks of HTML that users can copy and paste onto their own sites to show microphone profiles elsewhere.

I can imagine this might be most useful for people selling mics. Rather than go look up specs on the vendor’s site to paste piece-by-piece into, say, an Ebay auction, grab this block instead. With a single copy/paste you get a big photo, nicely-formatted specs, and a link to the full mic profile.

This will shave at least 7 seconds off the time it usually takes to set up a microphone auction. Cool, eh?

To see how this works, navigate to any microphone profile, e.g. the Shure SM57, which I mention because I spent about four hours rewriting it over the weekend, and click the link in the right sidebar under “I’m selling one.” That should show a page where you can preview the specification block and copy the source HTML.

We caught up with Dave Thomas of Advanced Audio Microphones while he was on the road, spreading the gospel of vintage microphone design to a class of up and coming audio engineers. Read on for audio gear news from British Columbia:

RH: Do you have any new products in the pipeline? Will the CM-414 ever see daylight? (more…)

This is not the sort of “hack” I ever intended to write about… while researching some reviews of Violet’s Flamingo microphones, I clicked through to AppleProAudio… to find the site had been defaced

Instead of the microphone review I was searching for, I see a fullscreen picture of a bear and a page title announcing “hacked by corumluvampir,” and this ominous European deathmarch soundtrack. Sucks for AppleProAudio… nobody needs that sort of hassle.

Update: I reached the site owner, Mike Lawson, via email (and presumably voice mail). They’re working on it now.

I didn’t expect it to take this long, but nonetheless I’m psyched to finally launch a couple new search features for the mic database:

• Now you can save search results. Just click the button.
• Also you can send search results to a friend. (Or to yourself.) Just click the other button.

Midway through the coding of these features, I realized that the really cool thing would be live search results, which means instead of saving a fixed results set, the site should save search criteria, and deliver the results via RSS. So, that’s now in the works too, along with a metric ton of other features.

To get started, search for a microphone (there are nearly 450 to find as of this writing, including a couple I guarantee you won’t expect).

Congratulations to Blair Hardman and Zone Recording for the feature article in North Bay Biz: Zone Recording is giving voice to the North Bay.

Blair has been part of the Sonoma County music scene for a long time, and the scene would be a lot less rich and interesting without him. (more…)

None of the audio engineers I know look like this guy.

He graces the front page of the Sennheiser website, though, and I’ll be meeting him tomorrow, assuming he works in the microphone factory, which I guess is unlikely.

But hey, maybe the modeling thing is just a sideline gig. Maybe he’ll be at the factory, hunched over a bench, hand-sputtering gold onto 2-micron mylar membranes in a desktop vacuum chamber, bluetooth headset in one ear and weightless cellphone hovering nearby…

Show me a guy with a ribbon mic, and I’ll show you a guy who’s afraid of phantom power.

The two go hand-in-hand, as if the mere presence of phantom power could cook all the ribbons in the studio, whether they’re wired or not. But that sounds less like phantom power than like ghosts in the machine. (more…)

1. Pick a room you can take over for a couple days. Or better yet, weeks.
2. Small rooms tend not to sound great, so you’ll probably be better off stuffing something absorbent in the corners. Acoustic foam, even the cheap stuff, seems to work well.
3. Put mics all over the place — as many as you have, or as in my case, until you run out of preamps.
4. Record a sample, listen, adjust mic positions. Repeat.
5. Tune the kit. Change heads. (Preferably not in that order.)
6. Double-check your gain levels while you’re actually performing the song. Turn down all the pre’s that clipped.
7. Bargain with spouse to take child out of the house for a few hours. Or, really, the entire day/weekend.
8. Turn off the ringers on all the telephones. Unplug the crappy answering machine that makes all kinds of beeping noises even when the speaker volume is zeroed.
9. Turn off the heat/air conditioner
10. If you have nearby neighbors, close the windows.
11. Throw the circuit breaker for the refrigerator so you don’t hear it in your room mics during the second chorus. (Pictured is one of my room mics, a U87 clone, tucked in the corner of the living room, behind the wood stove, with tile walls on two sides. The drum kit is next door.)
12. Take the battery out of the kitchen clock.
13. Retune the kit.
14. Now, record quickly! Before the UPS guy comes, the family returns, the kit detunes, the food spoils, the construction guys building a house next door come back from lunch, or you asphyxiate from lack of air circulation.

Lots of activity here at recordinghacks world headquarters…

A new feature for the microphone search engine is approaching release. Coming very soon, you’ll be able to save and share search results. Soon after that, we’ll have live search results via RSS, so you can watch new mics flow into your RSS reader.

Personally I’m still neck-deep in Pro Tools. I’m dreaming of transients and crossfades, and when people around me speak I’m seeing waveforms (and, like as not, wishing for a mute button). Too many late nights of editing, I guess.

After each of those late nights, I unwind by reading about microphones. I’m entering the stereo ribbon mics from Royer into the database, and thinking: “I need one of those.” Or, more accurately: “One of each of those.” This happens with every vendor. This happens with every microphone. I’m getting to the point where I’ll need more drum sets to justify all the great drum mics I’ll have.

Hmm, I probably shouldn’t go there.