A man and a musician

I went to Michigan last week, sort of. It definitely started out on the wrong foot – my brother and I were supposed to get on this one flight out of Philadelphia International Airport, but it got cancelled. That wasn’t before we were stuck on the plane on the runway for a good 4 hours, at least (no exaggeration!). The airport gave us hotel and meal vouchers because there weren’t any flights left that night, so we made our way to a hotel… only to be told that since I was under 21, I couldn’t register a hotel room in Pennsylvania. Totally stupid considering I have done it in other states before. So we cross a bustling highway with our luggage and go to a shadier hotel which took us, no questions asked… it was nice, even if the elevator smelt a bit funky. The next day, we got on another flight after waiting in the airport for 6 hours (met the coolest dude ever however). That flight gets delayed for an hour or two before we finally get in the air.

It was nice to finally get into Michigan (Detroit Int.), even if it was at like 11PM. Went to Cedar Point the next morning with a bunch of Liz’s friends, it was a nice 2 hour drive with some total strangers. Had a good time there, even if I wussed-out of a lot of the roller coasters. The next day was filled with packing mostly all day, with a going-away dinner for my sister that night. The next day was pack, pack, pack some more, now with a truck we had to load. It was a long, long two days, and the next day wasn’t anything to scoff at either. Close to 12 hours on the highway (a 10 hour drive + 2 hours simply because the truck maxed out around 65MPH and like 55 up hills). I drove most of that, too, I’d say about 9 of those hours were mine.

Anyway, it’s nice to be home now, my sister has been doing job interviews in New Jersey, and I’ve been toying around with electronics, because I got a whole crapload of parts in the mail while I was 500 miles away. tk47srebgd

For the last week or so I’ve been looking up ways to build my own synthesizer. One thing led to another, and that led to me discovering and reading up on the Arduino. It’s a sweet micro processor which makes it easy to build circuits and program them on your computer. What really sold it for me, besides all the already amazing features, was that the development IDE was available on all three main OS platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X).

My first circuit with the Arduino

So I just got mine in the mail yesterday and already I’ve fallen in love with it. So much so that I’ve been scrounging around the house for more electronics parts. I opened up an old junk remote and scrapped an LED and a capacitor… an old motherboard gave me a 3.3 miliFarad capacitor (that’s just the start, too). I ordered some more components, such as resistors, an LCD screen, a speaker, more wires, LEDs, etc. from AllElectronics (I used to order 1/4″ -> 1/8″ adaptors from them). The thing is, they probably won’t arrive until Friday when my brother and I will be on a flight to Philadelphia. I won’t even be able to play around much with it until August rolls around.

To the right is a picture of a push button circuit I made with the Arduino (alas, only following an example). Push the button and a light goes on. Look out technology, here I come.

I’ve spent a little bit of tonight reading on ways to record drums at home – slightly counter-intuitive, seeing as I have been recording drums in my garage for a few weeks now. But it never hurts to dig in for the little extra bit of information. And just for that very reason I’m going to post what I’ve been doing in case any other reader on the internet happens to want to record in the comfort of their home.

First of all, I’d like to note that this is far from perfect, but for a (relatively) low budget approach this is awesome, at least in my opinion. My set sounds good and its pretty simple to set up.

For Overhead miking I use two large diaphragm  Studio Projects B1 mics. I position them on either end of the drumset, using the “recorderman” drum miking method. Basically, just take your two drumsticks, place them standing up, end to end, in the middle of your snare drum. That is the height of the overheads. Then use one of the sticks to postition the left mic one stick-length away to the left, and repeat for the right.

For Snare Drum I use a classic SM57 (Shure). Really nothing special here, I mic the top of the snare, and I point the mic down at the head about 3/4 of the way in from the center.

For Bass Drum I have two mics I switch off using. I never really invested in a bass-drum-only mic, so I started experimenting with my other large diaphragm mics: Audio Technica AT2020 and an MXL 990. I had the 990 mounted in front of the bass drum when I used it, and I think it was a bit boomy; when I tried it with the AT2020 I put a towel in my drum and put the AT2020 right inside, and I like the results much better, and I’ve been using that more recently.

I have those 4 mics running into my FireStudio, running into my Macbook, which has Logic Studio 8 running on it. If there is one thing I could change about my recording setup now its the room. I’m getting a lot of reverb I don’t want (its a little too much coming through the overheads), but I think I can alleviate that if I change the positions of my drums.

Of course, everything in this post (mics, positioning, recording software) is subject to change with your own setup, but it can’t hurt to put my setup out there, as it’s been working pretty well for me. Good luck.

Well, I’ve finally given into temptation and a few other factors and switched my website to something a little more manageable. So instead of having to browse through endless lines of code to get something done on my website now, I can just let WordPress do all the work for me. Pretty sweet I guess, but I don’t think it will ever replace the soul of my old website. Anyhow, I’m still manageing the switchover so some things are still a little weird. My site root (http://www.novakeith.net) is probably temporary at the moment. This theme has a few tweaks I need to put it through yet. But still, it feels good not to have to code this stuff anymore (as the person who helped me set this blog up, Flowsion, had said, it sucks having to reinvent the wheel).

So besides working on this site migration I’m fairly the same. In about 3 weeks time, my brother and I will be in Michigan with our sister, for a week. Musically things have been a little dry, but that happens. Looking forward to some new prospects though, we’ll see how they all pan out (this entire sentence feels inspired by a gold rush).