Hmmmm…maybe I need to get the caffeine and earwax removed from my ear canals? I seldom listen to my Pepsi or coffee though. Usually just drink 'em. Straight-up. No chasers. 
TG
I’m not aware of any break-in period for mics. But as mentioned above, some things will sound different. Humidity (the heaviness or thinness of the air on any given day) for example. The age of the equipment will sometimes effect sound by mellowing things out over time.
And then there differences composition. When it comes to guitars, not all guitars are cut from the same stick of wood, even though they both might be maple or alder or whatever.
It will sound different in different settings. Just accept that, and try to minimimze the effect with a bit of creative EQ. 
Want to break in your LD condensor mike and give it that vintage sound?
1) Buy 10 cartons of unfiltered Camels
2) Smoke them all
3) exhale towards mike capsule
4) call your doctor
| Quote (learjeff @ Oct. 04 2004,13:36) |
| Want to break in your LD condensor mike and give it that vintage sound? 1) Buy 10 cartons of unfiltered Camels 2) Smoke them all 3) exhale towards mike capsule 4) call your doctor
|
Yeccchhhh! I'll stick with the "earwax and caffeine" theory!!
TG
What do you think all the old hallowed Neumanns et al were subjected to during their day ? Hardly just Camels…
Nothing to add really, but made for intersting reading on the crapper once again!..tehe…
I’ve noticed new mic’s have a tendency to be “hot” in the high EQ. I sing through a painty hose filter to soften it up a bit.
Personally I keep my prised one and only “good mic.” in a leather bag when not in use, to keep it as sharp and new as possible. Eventually it will be broken in with the enevitable lint and dust of time. Until then I will croon on in crisp harsh monotone! tehe…
jerm
| Quote (gtr4him @ Oct. 04 2004,13:42) | ||
Yeccchhhh! I'll stick with the "earwax and caffeine" theory!! TG |
Um...you'd rather smoke earwax? Ugh.
I've noticed new mic's have a tendency to be "hot" in the high EQ.
Err, probably lower cost Chinese mics. For what ever reason the Chinese mics (they are almost all made in the same two or three factories by 797 or Fleow and then have another name stamped on them) tend to be pretty bright. There are some exceptions, but if I had to guess by place of manufacture alone, I would guess a Chinese mic to be bright.
Err, probably lower cost Chinese mics. For what ever reason the Chinese mics (they are almost all made in the same two or three factories by 797 or Fleow and then have another name stamped on them) tend to be pretty bright. There are some exceptions, but if I had to guess by place of manufacture alone, I would guess a Chinese mic to be bright.
Tom,
I think sometimes when you buy something, you have expectations about how it will sound. You try it out, and it doesn’ meet those expectations, so you think it sounds bad. Then later, you haul it out again, with very low expectations because it sounded bad before, and you hear what it really sounds like. Then you find out what it’s for.
I guess it’s really about phenomenology. You’ve got to get the mediating concepts out of the way to perceive the true reality.
John
Well, John, in good Husserlian fashion I’ve done my “bracketing” and I still think it sounds different - I have recordings of acoustic guitar and my voice from just after I bought it and a year later, afte it was used on kick drum for quite a while. Same preamps, same room, same location, I would guess pretty close to the same humidity (in any case we’re talking about a few inches here and not enough to produce much filtering)…I dunno, it may be phenomenological, it may be that the strings are better, it may be that I learned how to place it (although I think I’m putting it pretty much in the same place - and I know that small movements here can make a difference…), well, in the end I guess I just dunno.
Ah, that makes it a good Husserlian project, he never came to any conclusions either!
Tom,
What a nice little project that would be: The phenomenology of digital recording. Detailed descriptions of auditory perceptions appear on this board all the time. Don Ihde has a nice little book that is think is called The Phenomenology of Sound. Good starting points!
But that would take time away from playing and recording.
My apologies to everyone else for this brief philosophical interlude.
Thanks,
John
philosophical interlude
Is that when you think you thought something or you are thinking about thinking about something or thinking about something someone else thought about? (Would'nt that involve mind reading?)
I think I'll stop now.........
TG
Is that when you think you thought something or you are thinking about thinking about something or thinking about something someone else thought about? (Would'nt that involve mind reading?)
I think I'll stop now.........
TG
Well, its more like when you and your buddy are sitting listening to the same CD and you think it’s great and he doesn’t. You are experiencing the same object (“object” in this case being a flow of acoustical data reaching your ears) but you are not having the same experience. Why not? Well, therein lies a complex mix of everything from spatial positioning, past experiences, mental states, and a bunch of other stuff including how much time one spends on the n-track forum.
John
I don't know the Book you mentioned John, I'm off to look for it.
Of course, after The Phenomenology of Sound we'd need a book on The Phenomenology of Temples of Sound, I think.
Was it Inde? Here is his website - oddly enough I have the Paragon book somewhere…
http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/new/faculty/ihde.html
OK, Check this out:
“FEATURE | David Rothenberg | 3/15/0
http://www.hermenaut.com/images/spacer.gif
http://www.hermenaut.com/images/spacer.gif
The Phenomenology of Reverb
"Turn up the reverb, man.” That’s what the singer up on stage says to the soundman at the mixer at the back of the hall during the sound check. He’s like all the rest of us: He likes the way his voice sounds in the shower better than it does in the dry room of reality. He wants that bathroom echo, that sound that fills his ears as it bounces off the tiles. What he really wants, though he may not know it, is the echo you hear in caverns and cathedrals, that massive reverberation which makes sound seem to be more than what it is, which actually turns sound into space. Reverb makes the music last. And are we not the music while the music lasts?
Reverb is a phenomenological effect. It works directly at the level of the senses, affecting us before we can analyze it and decide what is happening. Reverb is something that happens right between the performer and the listener. As Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, pointed out in Lectures on The Phenomenology of Inner Time-Consciousness (1928), once a sound happens, it immediately goes away; and the moment it’s over, we begin to forget it. That’s what memory, in fact, is: the history of forgetting. But listen to the extended instrumental intro to the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”; listen to the reverb. Don’t you hear something strangely, well,rolling about the sound of the strings? It rises up, swells, and fades away, just like that stone travelling through the days. The sound may come from this world, but it goes right out of this world. It’s strange and familiar at the same time; and, years later, we can’t get it out of our heads.
Acousticians have written reams about “the perfect acoustic space,” and the engineers of sonic enhancement toys have worked tirelessly to simulate such spaces, but nobody ever asks why we are so drawn to these simulacra. Maybe Tom Waits has the answer, on Frank’s Wild Years: “Today’s gray skies, tomorrow is tears. / You’ll have to wait 'til yesterday is here.” You say you prefer the past to the present and the future, because it’s safely over, because it will never come? Keep waiting. Although there is no way ever truly to recover a sound that was, reverb meets us half-way. It keeps the sound alive. It makes the sound fill the space around us?whether that “space” is an ampitheater or a stairwell, or the imaginary space of dreams and machines?until we’re living in it.
Music never belongs entirely to the artist, particularly so when it’s played in a room with great acoustics. The practice rooms in the music building of the college I attended had such dead acoustics that everything played sounded terrible, like mud. Some of us were inspired to play for hours and hours, until something sounded halfwaydecent; most of us quit forever. But on the stage of the auditorium upstairs, everything sounded beautiful. Even the most unpracticed ensemble would benefit from the sonic ambience of that space. The building seemed to be paying an endless compliment to those who performed inside it; the building, in fact, was playing along.
There are those who’ve argued that without the long echoes inside the great cathedral at Piazza San Marco in Venice, polyphonic music would never have come into being. The monotones of Gregorian chant began to pile up on top of themselves; they expanded out of the fourth dimension (time) into the other three (space). The sound of voices overlapping literally filled up the cathedral, suggesting the possibility of a music based not on melody, but on harmony. Today, surrounded by music issuing from car speakers, the ceilings of stores, and the neighbors downstairs, many people long for the austere reverberations of polyphonic chant. Thanks to modern technology, they can have it!
Reverb doesn’t only happen live. It’s a complex series of echoes, which come at the listener from all sides, bouncing off different materials, rebounding at different angles. And that’s exactly why it’s so easy to reproduce electronically: simulating these kinds of differences, processing them, and generating endless variations of them are what computers do best. Nothing beats seeing someone like Jimi Hendrix play live, hearing him discover life in outer space as the distorted wash of his guitar recedes into eternal distances all around you, but have you ever listened to those European jazz recordings on ECM from the '70s? Keith Jarrett’s piano, close-miked and crystalline at the Köln Concert, shimmers in space. Each separate instrument of Ralph Towner’s and Jan Garbarek’s chamber jazz is clearly audible: saxophone, twelve-string, drums, bass. These don’t naturally mix, but here they create a sound which will linger forever in the open caverns of memory. The listener is drawn into an imaginary room?a room in which nobody coughs or shuffles, and in which every seat is the best seat in the house?and scattered to its far reaches. These musicians will never perform together again, but that’s fine: the record is this music’s true form.
Just a generation ago it cost thousands of dollars to create the illusion that the sound coming at you through those beer-stained Marshall speakers coated in blue glitter foam was actually recorded in the proscenium of a Roman ampitheater. Today, by buying an effects box that costs a hundred bucks, we can re-create the specific echoing quality of tunnels and caverns, concert halls empty and full, bathrooms large and small, and?if you could actually hear sound in outer space?the music of the spheres. Today’s 32-bit digital reverb processors, with all parameters up for adjustment?from decay time to early reflection amount and delay, to high roll-off and low roll-off, sound better than any church or concert hall?less noisy, uneven, muddy, and muffled.
Sound effects are just effects, of course, not real aesthetic innovations. Authenticity is always noisy, uneven, muddy, and muffled. But reverb is more than the simple mechanical reproduction of something that is unique and singular out there, in some separate real world. Using electronic reverb tools, we can begin to play with the very notion of authenticity. Don’t think of reverb as a drug that trips up your synapses, but as a tool that can teach us how to hear better, to hear more?much more. Reverb can sensitize us to the echoes of the wind in the trees; to the sound of waves crashing to our left, to our right, and in front of us. We humans can bear only so much reality; we get cold and bored and tired out there in the wild din of noise. Maybe sonic illusion can help reveal the magic that makes listening possible at all."
http://www.hermenaut.com/a101.shtml
Yep, Don is the guy - Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (1976). ABEbooks.com has it for 150 dollars.
Tom,
Yes, that’s the book. It is really a kind of introduction to Husserlian phenomenology, although Ihde is more into Heidegger. I can’t put my hand on my copy right now, and I have loaned it to musicologists and the like in the past, so it may be that I don’t actually possess it any more. One person I loaned it to ended up writing an article on how we hear the space between hits on a Japanese drum. I’d get it through inter-library loan or something; it is very much worth reading, but not worth $150. It’s a slim volume.
That is a very cool article on reverb you found.
John
John, ILL is on the job.
I think I’ve been hearing that space between Japanese drum hits for quite a while now. It seems to be filled with other noises, however.
Tom,
Good, let me know what you think.
In the Rothenberg article you posted he says, “Although there is no way ever truly to recover a sound that was, reverb meets us half-way.” That is a very interesting concept. Is reverb a representation of a sound? Of a space? An extension of time?
Husserl says somewhere in the Phenomenology of Time Consciousness that our experience of the moment includes protensions of the future moment and retentions of the past moment, and Derrida pounces on this (in Speech and Phenomena I think) and says, aha, these are representations, so this is not an unmediated vision of reality, so Husserl’s phenomenology fails. I think Derrida is overstating that case, but it is interesting to think about a sound as occuring in a moment, and reverb as stretching or extending that moment in an artificial representation of that sound.
I must admit I am dredging this stuff up from back when I was in graduate school, but it does seem that making a recording, or a mix, is to create a representation of a performance, and that thinking about how we experience actual sound is relevant to making better recordings.
John