Week 11 Forum - “To build or to destroy?” – Construction and Deconstruction in Music Part 2

Today our presenters were Simon Whitelock, Nathan Shea and John Delany. It seems that the only person who actually spoke about the topic was John. Simon talked about DJs and their jacking of music. The term was discussed with hilarity during the forum. I feel like I should have taken the opportunity to talk about DJs during my presentation last week. I've been a club DJ for about three years now so I have experienced the "destruction" of classics. Simon played a song, which used a sample from song Around The World by electronic group Daft Punk. I picked this the use of this sample in about a second.

Nathan Shea talked about Black Metal and music of that style. I don't know anything about Black Metal and I have no interest. It sounds worse than musique concrete. He also played some drum & bass, which was refreshing.

John talked about Lustmord an ambient electronic composer. I thought his insights on dark ambient music were very well put and his music examples were interesting.[1]


[1] Simon Whitelock, Nathan Shea,John Delany. 'Music Technology Forum Presentation - EMU Space'. Lecture presented in the EMU Space, Electronic Music Unit, University Of Adelaide, 24th May 2007

CC2 Week 11 - Distributed Performance

This week Jake and I did some interesting dual performances. We used Reason as our sound source and manipulated some drums samples in the Redum. Jake's Max patch was sending out some drum samples to me and I was controlling them in Reason. I was altering the parameters in the Redrum such as volume, duration, pitch, tone, velocity, panning etc.

Our performance went for a while and I have extracted almost 2mins.

my patch. . .


my Reason file. . .


Jake's Max patch. . .

You can check out Jake's blog here: http://weimerhead.blogspot.com/


Here is an mp3 and my patch
mp3 File
Max Patch
Reason File


[1] Christian Haines. "Creative Computing: Semester 1, Week 11; Distributed Performance" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 24th May 2007.

AA2 Week 11 - Mastering Part 1

This week our task was to do a Master of our best mix. I chose my first mix from week 8. Unfortunately on the weekend I left my headphones at the club I was DJing at, so I had to use my sister's dodgy ipod headphones. I am so used to my own headphones as I use them for everything, so I'm sure this weeks mastering will sound different to when I do my final assignment. Maybe it's good to use a different listening environment every now and then. Still, nothing beats my Sennheiser HD25. They're a cracker of a can!

[1][2][3]Dream on Apple. . .


I used Logic instead of ProTools. I did this for two reasons.

1) It's Sunday night and I'd rather stay home. My copy of ProTools has a problem with the plugins whereas my Logic works fine.

2) During class I didn't feel we really needed to specifically use any type of software. I gathered from class that in a professional situation you would pay a Mastering Engineer anyway.

Therefore I don't think it really matters what software we use as long as we use the same underlying concepts. This I did.

The reference song that I used was Missy Higgins - Steer. I chose this song because I think this young singer sounds a lot like her. It also had the same general musical feel.

First up I pulled up a Linear Phase EQ. I boosted up the vocals to make the overall sound brighter. The problem with working using a guide vocal is that my mix wasn't really ready to master. I did think that putting that boost around 4kHz made a better sounding mix.

Next I used a multi-band EQ, or a Multipressor in Logic. I tended to compress the frequencies below 100Hz. I think that maybe it was because of my headphones but I was using my reference song as a basic guide for bass. My most common mistake in the past has been producing music that has way too much bass. Even though I produce Dance music there is still such a thing as too much bass! In the Multipressor, I also adjusted the other bands to try get a cleaning sound.

Next I used an Adaptive Limiter to try and squash up the overall sound. I did get a few more dB out of my mix. This plugin is very much like the L2-Ultramaximiser. I have learnt about mastering when I was studying at SAE so I had used the Waves plugins for mastering. I find the L2-Ultramaximiser very useful for compressing and gaining that loudness that you want. The Adaptive Limiter in Logic gave me almost the same power.

I then used a Stereo Spread plugin. To be perfectly honest, I don't really know how to use these kinds of plugins other than for experimentation. I know that in mastering you can use a stereo imaging plugin, but I don't know what settings you would use. In my case I put a slight stereo spread on the higher frequencies above 2kHz.

Finally I placed a plain old Limiter at the end of the chain of plugins. This was basically to stop any clipping. I had no gain on this limiter as I already had the Adaptive Limiter earlier in the chain.I know that you are meant to place a Dithering plugin as the last plugin in the chain. In Logic there isn't a Dither plugin, rather it is there as an option when you do your final bounce. I find this a bit annoying but I can't complain really when you consider the huge amount of other plugins at my disposal.

I think my master sounds better than the original but with proper monitoring could sound much better.[4]

These are the plugins I used. . .
and here . . .

AUDIO
Week 8 Mix [835kB]
Mastered Mix [884kB]


[1] Tom's Hardware. Avivo vs. Purevideo. http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/09/avivo-vs-purevideo/ (Accessed 27/5/7)

[2] Head-Fi. Headphones in Australia. http://www.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=72883 (Accessed 27/5/7)

[3] Nick Starr.com. twitter. http://www.nickstarr.com/2006/09/13/2g-4gig-silver-ipod-nano/ (Accessed 27/5/7)

[4] David Grice "Audio Arts: Semester 1, Week 11; Mastering" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 22nd May 2007.