It"s Alive!!

[Bob Boyer]

Finally got those first few spare minutes to test out the mixer, mics, and recorder this evening. My bass-playing friend brought over his 6 string acoustic guitar and we did some mic sampling to get a feel for the response curves on the mics.

Oh, wow. I'll try my hand at mixing it onto a CD to rip it into an MP3 later this evening and post up but the sound is clean, warm, and very, very quiet. We tested all three of the large diaphragm mics up close by themselves and then with each mic, added two of the small condensers high and in stereo for ambiance as well. These are very sweet microphones.

Also had some fun syncing a tom-tom up to one of the guitar tracks but it was more an experiment in making sure the sync functions all worked - didn't pay as much attention mic-ing it and it shows.

Sounds pristine on the LSAs.

[Elite-ist]

Hi Bob,

Sounds like it will one of many late nights to come, while recording and tweaking your set-up. I can see it will be difficult for you to get through your work day, because your mind may be elsewhere.

Nando.

[Warped Bezel]

I hope his mind isn't like mine-still in my head but running about the school with the hall pass.

[Bob Boyer]

Okay, I'll admit to total cluelessness on getting the audio onto YouTube. iMovie isn't helping, either, in trying to convert either an AIFF or MPEG4 audio file to something YouTube will recognize...

Help!?!?

[Bob Boyer]

Nevermind... a friend here at work got me up and running. It's on the blog here: http://reelrecording.wordpress.com/

Lemme know what you think.

[Lance Lawson]

Nice reading! Well done!

[Bob Boyer]

Update:

Haven't had time to check in much lately as the big snow-batical put us a week behind going into my three-shows-in-four-weeks part of the season, plus a bunch of training classes that are eating about half of my work week right now doesn't leave much time to play...

But. We did get two days of testing in over the MLK holiday and here are the raw results: http://reelrecording.wordpress.com/

It's kinda long and takes a few seconds to load, but there are three or four songs each from two local artists - Lon Eldredge (first) and John Lathim (last). There's no reverb or compression yet as I was just testing the limits of an old PR99 I've had in the office, but the two track mix enabled me to get everything bumped over onto a CD and then the Mac. I used some shareware called Amadeus Pro to normalize the file, mark the songs and make hi-rez and MP3 copies. The MP3 is what is posted.

I finally bit the bullet and bought a Focusrite Sapphire A/D and D/A converter; it comes with some software and plugins that will allow me to play with compression and reverb in the computer before going back out to tape or digital files. It will be a couple of weeks before it arrives, so this will have to do until then.

Still, it sounded pretty good to me out of the box. Anyone hears anything that needs tweaking, let me know.