The Play Button Never Lies

We are encouraged to promote ourselves, to sell our skills and services. This is often linked to confidence and sometimes pushes on to ego and, most of the time, this is ok and acceptable. It can become a little odd when we’re talking about being a mix engineer though, as no matter how much we big up our skills and speak with all the lingo, my motto has never let me down: ‘The play button never lies’.

Sometimes our terms and lingo can push into the realms of bullshit as, quite often, it is bullshit. If you have to spend 45 minutes explaining to your client what you’ve done with the bottom end and why – justifying it before you’ve even played the song – you kind of know, deep down, that you’ve fucked the bottom end up and what you’re doing is trying to convince the client that what you’ve done is good, prepping them with an over complicated monologue to ease them into your mix. Hitting that play button will tell the client everything they need to know with no explanation whatsoever. Buttering it up with meaningless buzzwords will get you one thing – no returning clients. Sorry, two things. No returning clients and a bad reputation. Ultimately, they will take your mix away with them and any verbal persuading you did in the moment will wear thin pretty quickly.

Taylor Swift’s ‘Reputation’ album sold 1.2 million copies in the first week. Imagine if Ms Swift had to go to everyone’s house who bought it to do a 5 minute explanation of why it sounded the way it did. It would take her just under 11.5 years to do that. What people actually did was hit the play button. Reputation was mixed by Serban Ghenea, no further explanation needed. 

The play button will also tell your client if you’ve tried to produce the track when you were asked to mix the track. Don’t get the two confused. If the artist has a producer and you’ve been hired to mix, the production is done. Stepping on the toes of what the artist and producer have done will win you no friends. You’ll hit play and they’ll say ‘What have you done to my song?’. In that moment, hopefully, the thought will hit you that you’ve offended both the artist and the producer and, once again, you’ve used mixing as a backdrop for your own narcissism. If you’ve finished the mix in good time and have time left over, do a separate mix of your ideas and IF the occasion arises and the artist is happy with your original mix, offer to play them your alternative. Don’t ever rush through what you’re being paid to do just so that you can get to your idea though. If you’ve done a good job, the play button will be your friend.

The artist and producer, if they are doing their job correctly, would have communicated to you how far you can go with the mix. This may be nothing more than a thoroughly decent ‘rough mix’ which tells you where they’re headed. Your job would then be to take it to, and beyond, where they ever thought it could be sonically. This is still not producing. Democracy in mixing rarely works. That doesn’t mean that there are no tweaks, there are always tweaks and recalls, but there needs to be boldness and clarity in the artists vision as there is really no such thing as the perfect mix. There is only a mix that blows away the artist’s expectations and intentions. Do you avoid using a particular reverb because you hate that reverb? That’s fair enough, but the more enlightened mixer would think more like ‘I hate that spiky, metallic reverb, but it’s the perfect reverb for this song, this mix and this artist’.

On a recent album I mixed, the artist didn’t use one of my mixes. After they’d lived with it for a week or so, I’d mixed it too nicely. It was a great compliment on not including the mix. So what ended up on the record? It was the original 2 track demo that we just did a little overall EQ on before it went off to mastering. They said they really liked the mix but it just didn’t fit the rest of the record. Ironically, this track was the first track I mixed that got me the gig to mix the record but over time, the artist’s vision for that song changed in the bigger picture of their album. I still love the mix I did of this song and the album has turned out great. Leave most of your ego at the door. Keep the bit that urges you to do great work.

The mixer is sometimes the producer. For a working mix engineer, probably not. Don’t ignore the artists vision and instead try to fill their head with bullshit, meaningless similes that make no sense in an attempt to con them into a record they don’t want and didn’t ask for. The play button will instantly fuck you, and not in a good way. That tiny little play button will suddenly seem 10 feet tall, towering over you, pointing down at your face. If it could speak it would utter one word ‘Wanker’.

The music – the mix – should speak for itself. Don’t act like a door-step sales rep. In years to come everything and anything you mix will be judged by one thing and only one thing. The play button. Because…

The play button never lies.

Mentoring in Audio and Mixing

My last post was about music and audio in education and right at the end I slipped in the word ‘Mentor’.

It was almost an afterthought, almost an aside, but that one word that flew from my fingertips was probably the most important factor in that previous post. So much so, that it has played on my mind somewhat to the extent where I feel it needs its own short blog post.

Mentoring was, and despite it being a dying practise along with apprenticeships, still is probably the most important and sure way of getting a firm foothold and understanding in the audio recording, producing, mixing and engineering world. It is easily the best way to learn as you’ll be allowed to make mistakes and being allowed to make mistakes is very important. Not mistakes that will ruin an artists record but mistakes that will be overseen and corrected under the guidance of your mentor before the project goes out. A good mentor will not let you loose on paying work too early, ruining the work and your own reputation before your career has begun, but similarly they won’t let you leave it too late. They’ll know when you’re ready even if you don’t and they’ll push you out into the cold harsh world of responsibility when they know you’re ready for it and not a second sooner.

It can be daunting to mix a project that will be permanent and forever once it is released. Both your and the artists reputation are on the line with every track you mix and your mentor will instil in you that this is peoples work and peoples lives. You have to know what you’re doing and making mistakes, as long as it’s mistakes that don’t fuck over the end product, is normal provided you learn from and own up to your mistakes. If you constantly make the same mistakes, you’ll be gone.

You want a social life? Don’t get into music. Be in the studio or at home learning your craft or studying your craft. Hierarchy is something that seems to be missing in the traditional sense, and in this case (if you can find it) old school mentoring is still the best way to learn. Your mentor will be harsh but forgiving. A lot of mentors see in you something of themselves when they were starting out and this is why they’ll take you under their wing, teach you and allow you to make the mistakes that all people make as they are learning. As, indeed, they did themselves.

In the world of rapidly diminishing ‘big studios’ where all the opportunities used to lay, we could ask ourselves: Does this still fit? Well, it did, so it still does.Why wouldn’t it? You may find someone in a studio environment to mentor you or you may find individuals that you build a certain trust with. They can also be mentors. The world changes. In a more open environment people will probably be less harsh with you as you can just walk away if things happen you don’t like, but there does need to be a certain harshness, and a great deal of discipline. This isn’t a bad thing in the slightest. In the end it is discipline in certain areas that will allow your mind to open in many many other areas. Perhaps this is the most important loss we face with the loss of mentoring. The far greater opportunity to be lazy, or, perhaps worse, to be industrious but get into bad sonic habits and to repeat our mistakes over an over again. A treadmill to mediocre work.

Learning mixing will not make you a mixer. The systems you move into and your work will make you a mixer. A good mentor will help you get there quicker, passing on techniques that you will employ and apply in different ways. You’ll go on to take these techniques to the next level, adding your own spin and using them in different situations. A mentor is the best influence you’ll ever have and they do still exist. They will also learn from you. The old rules apply. Be willing to learn. Don’t be a prick about criticism. Learn your craft. Work hard.

Mentors. Find one and never look back.

Talent, Technology and Education

When talking about studio equipment for recording and mixing there is a saying I like a lot.

“In audio, there are two types of fool. One says, if it’s new it’s good. The other says, if it’s old it’s better.”

In actuality there are only the right tools for the job. Sometimes this is new kit, sometimes this is old kit and mostly it’s a mixture of both or simply what you can get your hands on at the time. Technology has leaped and bounded these past 10 years and the cost of equipment next to the quality it yields is unsurpassed. It should be almost impossible to get a bad recording from the technology but the technology is only one small part of the process.

What do we do, as recording and mix engineers, when the talent is lacking? Either in writing or performance ability. How far do we go to not attach our name to a tarnished project and fix what was once virtually impossible to fix? True, we could simply decline the project to start with, but things don’t always work out that way. Sometimes we are committed and we find ourselves in an ever tangling web of audio misfortune. Have we moved into a world where everyone is told, and believe, they can do whatever they want and always succeed? Trying is commendable, as is working at it and working hard, but there comes a time when sometimes you should realise that this isn’t the path for you, and, sometimes I think that the very sharp double edged sword of formal education is becoming more of a hindrance than a help. People are being brought up by the ‘X’ Factor ethos. Unfortunately, this does not translate, or work in any way, in real life.

When I was growing up, the only affordable means of recording at home, or an introduction to it, was the 4 track cassette recorder. They did many things other than allow you to make multi track recordings. Because of the track count limitation you had to think about the song in its entirety before you even began. The arrangement and parts, the sound, blend and effects that you virtually always printed to tape. Because you bounced 3 tracks onto one and then kept going to squeeze every ounce of track count out of those little machines, one mistake in arrangement or bouncing volume would dictate that you had to start the whole thing over again, from scratch. It was an amazing and unforgiving learning curve. They had little more than High and Low fixed band EQ and we often only had one or two microphones and those were usually an SM57 or SM58 but we made some amazing recordings with those little machines and learned so much about song writing and construction, layering, forethought, mic placement, technique and arrangement.

To go beyond this we had to seek out a commercial running studio and beg/annoy/blackmail our way in to continue our journeys. Nothing came to us and, unless you were very rich, there was no education courses. I hounded a local studio and just kept turning up, offering to make the coffee, run to the shop, clean the equipment, anything to be allowed into sessions. For the first year, you were not allowed to touch the gear and you never spoke unless the engineer, producer or band spoke to you. What you did was watch, listen and learn so on that glorious day when the engineer said “Can you patch the dbx160 across the kick and snare?” You just did it. You didn’t ask how because you’d been paying attention for a year. You just did it. The point is, you had to go and seek it out most vigorously. You had to want it very badly and if you were asked to do something and you couldn’t do it, you’d probably be out.

Education is a good thing especially with the diminishing of small to mid sized commercial studios. It’s extremely difficult these days to do what I did or even find the opportunity to do what I did, but luckily, general education has caught up somewhat but there is a price. So what happens when 15 kids sign up for the 2 year course and after the first 6 months only 5 of them are turning up regularly and handing in the completed assignments? Easy, you do what would have happened to me in a commercial studio. You tell them to fuck off, don’t come back, you’re wasting my time, you’re off the course (and hence, out of the studio). But this is general education and your establishment gets money from the government for those students to be on those courses. The people above you, the ones that don’t teach, are telling you that under no circumstances can you boot anyone off of the course. Under NO circumstances. Why? Because the educational establishment lose the money.  And the kids know this. So you end up with 5 decent eager students and 10 that you HAVE to get through the course even though they don’t turn up and have no real talent for the subject. Great.

They’ll spend more time drinking than they will studying their craft and with todays technology of unlimited track counts, Melodyne and a bunch of experienced lecturer’s who have to get them through their course (Or Else!) they’ll learn nothing about song construction, arrangement or anything that we learnt on those little 4 track cassette recorders. Their parents are assuring them they are ‘very special’ and ‘talented’ when we’ve all heard mating cats sing more in tune and their philosophy is ‘Rock ‘n Roll’ when they don’t realise that Rock ‘n Roll isn’t the ability to get pissed every night but the ability to do something great with a talent. Any talent. Seb Lester, the calligrapher, is Rock n Roll, check out his work, it’s amazing. Usain Bolt is Rock ‘n Roll. He ran the 100 metres in 9 seconds. It took me 10 seconds to watch him do that. Rock n Roll, all the way.

Rock ‘n Roll isn’t doing what anyone can do at any time, i.e., get wasted in a bar at every opportunity. If that was true then you could go to any park in any town and find a corner of lounging Rock ‘n Rollers who will usually, also, ask you for any spare change. If your hands are on a beer glass more than they are on your instrument or mixing console then quit. Do it now. Couple this with the fact that even out of your 5 eager students, 1, at best; will maybe have some talent, it can become quite depressing.

So what do we do with mediocrity? We fix it. We make it sound awesome and in doing so we perhaps help water down the next generation of artists and engineers because we turn their half ass’ed efforts into something that is pretty decent and all because they have the attention span of a TV commercial or the ability and want to retain information on par with a nest of tables. We simply can’t justify lowering our standards and putting out a sub-standard record. We will do all we can to make something that will have an emotional connection because what is the point of music without an emotional connection? We can’t help it, that was what we were brought up to do. That was what brought us to this stage in the first place. There will, thankfully, always be people coming through with the passion and the talent to uphold and surpass standards, and thank fuck for that. But it is becoming more diluted and when a student who has been studying the subject for 3 years asks you what the difference is between an aux and an insert, your heart and spirit drops. You answer them as best you can because you really want them to grasp the concepts you worked out on that ancient cassette deck. You really want them to pay attention to what you have done with their music so perhaps a little light will burst into life in their head and an onslaught of hard work and talent can surge through. That’s what you hope.

It’s odd to think that the amazing technological breakthroughs are probably most to blame for the majority of the mediocre work being done or the depth of knowledge being missed out by a crucial part of the process: Mentoring. We need proper mentoring back and we need to be way less lenient. The marriage of talent, technology and education is not one made in heaven. It needs a lot of work, a lot of hard work, and you need to be prepared for that.

Title image by Seb Lester http://www.seblester.com/

Guitar Rebuild (Kill All Humans)

In March, 2016, my good friend and consummate top bloke, Ben Baxter, was talking about an old beaten Kramer guitar that he had stashed somewhere. He asked, despite it’s condition, if I wanted it. I said that I did want it and the more beaten and damaged, the better. A great way to learn is to work on something that is deemed beyond repair. How can you fuck something up that is already fucked? You can’t, so the rebuild began. Here are a few shots of the guitar as I received it.

A basic Strat shape, odd pots and covers, one pickup missing, no saddles in the bridge, rusted pole pieces and pickup selector, no machine heads.

The electronics and components were all wired correctly but my first task was to pull everything out. I wasn’t going to keep any of the existing electronics or components. My first reasoning was that I had already decided to put 2 humbuckers in the bridge and neck positions and so I wanted to replace the existing 250k pots with 500k pots as 250k pots will lose a little of the top end. A good thing with single coils but not so good with humbuckers. I didn’t want a 2nd tone pot but there was a useful 3rd hole in the scratch plate that I was going to keep. I could therefore put something useful in here. Not being a fan of push/pull pots I decided that some sort of switch would go in here to fulfil some, as yet, undecided function. The original electronics from underneath are pictured here.

A short time later I had the neck off and all the electronics and components out. I then unscrewed the bridge posts, which were in excellent condition, and removed the whole bridge and tremolo system. I was stuck for how to finish the guitar. Was I going to re-finish it? Would I do a better job than just cleaning up the existing finish? Then I had an idea from a doodle I’d done many years ago. I’m not very good at drawing, but luckily, the design didn’t require this skill. I thought I’d have a go. I started by thoroughly cleaning everything and then sanding the lacquer off of the body. As you can see from the photo, the body has a white base coat before the blonde colour was put on the top. This was good, as, purposely; I wasn’t too careful when sanding off the lacquer in going through the top colour to reveal the white. It would give a contrasting background to the design that was going to go on top. After removing, cleaning and sanding everything I was left with my base components.

I could then start applying the finish. First in pencil and then going over the pencil in ink. This was going to take a while…

Once both the front and back, the design linking around the sides, was pencilled in; I could begin the inking in of the design. The whole thing took about 5 evenings mostly with Frankie Boyle stand-up and panel show appearances on in the background.

Next, I had to deal with the neck. The frets were in terrible condition as the nickel had oxidised quite severely. Luckily, nickel doesn’t rust and we can remove the oxidised nickel with sand paper and wire wool. The frets are a little dented but I’m going to wait to see if this will be an issue.

Now that most of the aesthetics were complete, or well on the way, I’d been thinking of what I wanted to put in to the guitar. As I said, 2 high quality 500k pots. It’s no good putting cheap components into your guitar. They will fail at the most inappropriate time. You can buy a pot for £1.30 but you’re way better off spending the £5 or £6 on a decent CTS pot. It will last a long long time. This goes for all of the components in your guitar or any other instrument. In the empty hole left by the omittance of a 2nd tone pot I decided to put an On/On switch so that I can flip the phase of the middle pickup. With this in mind, here is the scratch plate with the new volume, tone and phase switch bolted in.

I already had a good 5-way COR-TEX switch so I needed to get some pot covers and pickups. I wanted to keep the scratch plate and I wanted humbuckers for the bridge and neck positions so I began to look at humbucking pickups that would fit a single coil space. After a lot of research I decided on the DiMarzio Supr Distortion for the bridge and the DiMArzio Tone Zone S for the neck position. The Tone Zone is a dark sounding pickup that people usually use in the bridge position. I really want an ultra dark sound in that neck position and so am going to try it out. For the middle I went for the DiMarzio True Velvet, which is a single coil and should sit well between the neck and bridge choices. Wiring the True Velvet through the phase switch should give me some interesting choices.

This brings us to the wiring. After looking at lots of diagrams, finding the DiMarzio, Seymour Duncan and Ibanez sites very helpful, and a couple of mails to DiMarzio, I came up with the below diagram.

As a tip, most of the pickup manufacturers will happily answer your questions on wiring etc. They are very helpful and we’re quite lucky to be in a position where we can directly contact a tech via email, supply diagrams and thoughts and get answers and advice on wiring. I’ve also done this with Neumann when I had a question about a mic repair. They sent me a wiring diagram for the mic annotated with how to get into the mic safely. Have a question, just ask..

The diagram shows you everything you really need to know on switch and pickup configurations.

Above is the scratch plate with the pot covers and pickup switch fitted and with the Tone Zone and True Velvet fitted.

I think the Tone Zone was previously used in the bridge position as the cables were slightly too short once I’d put it in the neck position. This meant extending the cables which is no big deal.

Here are the extended Tone Zone cables in situ.

Fitted new saddles to the bridge, cleaned it all and refitted the bridge and tremolo system.

Next I had to look at fitting machine heads to the headstock. The holes were very small and I had to drill them out to accept better quality machine heads. Steve, at PJ Guitars (who is extremely helpful and where I get my pots and switches) told me that the narrow diameter meant that the guitar was previously fitted with pretty cheap machine heads.

He also gave me another tip of drilling the holes out from the back and only to the depth that would accept the wide part of the machine head. You don’t have to drill all the way through as this increases the chance of splitting the headstock. The threaded part of the machine head will hold it in place.

I also put my drill on the reverse setting so that the bit doesn’t grab hold of the neck and try to spin it as this will also split the headstock. When the guitar is all up and working I’ll probably get better machine heads and fill any unused holes from previous machine heads.

The Super Distortion finally turned up and it took a couple of hours to solder everything up and get the scratch plate back onto the body. I kept the tremolo along with the springs but I don’t want any pull on the term so I cut a block of wood and blocked the tremolo out. Bolted the neck back on and put on some strings. A slight truss rod adjustment and setting the action took another hour or so. I was a little worried about the frets on the neck, they were pretty battered and on getting everything back in there is an issue at the first fret for the A, D and B strings. It may need a re-fret (and a new nut), I’m undecided as yet.

The guitar all works as expected. The Tone Zone in the neck is extremely dark sounding. I wanted it dark but this is bordering on evil. As the old saying goes though, evil hands are happy hands… or something like that.

The phase switch works perfectly and it gives you avery odd sound in positions 2 and 4. I’ll have to think of where to use that sound. Here is the finished guitar.

Next task is to sort out the neck, or more specifically, that first fret. That can be a whole separate blog post though. Thanks to Ben for the donation, Steve at PJ’s Guitars for advice and components and, as Bender would say, “Kill All Humans”.

 

Gary’s Patch Bay

Gary has a lovely RAMSA 56 input analogue mixing console. The WRSX1, here it is:

So one day, not too long ago, we were talking and Gary remarked that he wished he had easier access to a few extra channels on the desk. It’s a large desk that’s almost right up against the wall and seeing as the last 16 channels are currently used for nothing at all, I decided to build him a little 8 way bay that would take balanced XLR’s, balanced jacks and unbalanced jacks. That way, if someone turns up with a keyboard they can just go straight into a couple of channels. He could throw a couple of extra mics up for acoustics or multiple vocals or just D.I. a bass for some roughs.

I already had a bay that had some male XLR’s riveted in:

First thing to do was to drill out the rivets, and directly after, I cut and stripped 24 jumper cables I’d need for the connectors (more on this later):

With that done, and whilst I was waiting for my dual XLR/Jack sockets to be delivered, I started to prep the other end of the multicore. Here is the uncut, raw end that will end up being connected to the bay:

I measured and marked it out for the first rough cut against the length of the bay and waited another day for the XLR’s to arrive:

When the Neutrik NCJ6 F1-S connectors arrived I realised they were designed to have self tapping screws holding them in. I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to use M3 bolts, so I had to drill out the holes of the connectors by about 0.5mm so that my bolts would fit.

Once they were all drilled out I bolted them into the bay. It was quite a tight fit for the bottom, right-hand bolt but I regard that as a good thing. The sockets were now in place:

Now I could start to cut the tails to length. First, to the length of the bay, as per my first marking, and then each tail to length before being prepped:

To solder the cables I had to remove the lacing bar. The connectors protruded way further through the holes than regular chassis mount XLR’s so I decided that it would be easier to bolt the bar back in and strain relief the cables after I’d done all the soldering. You’ll see why…

So now I was ready to solder.

First of all, I prepped the multi-core tails. I use a strain relief technique that was shown to me by Tim Daniels (thanks Tim). First, I strip the cable back the length of a Neutrik male XLR body. Then I fold the 2 cores back and let the earth protrude as normal. Then I slip a Hellerman sleeve (H30 x 20mm) over the 2 cores. The 2 cores can bend back and solder onto the connector whilst the Hellerman sleeve provides extra strain relief. Like this:

Once all 8 cables were prepped, I cut and soldered the jumper cables. I realised, after the connectors arrived, that the initial jumper cables were too thick. So I had to cut and strip 24 more. The reason why I need 24 jumper cables is because the XLR’s have solder connections for both XLR’s (1,2 and 3) and TRS jack (Tip, Ring and sleeve). To use the socket as a dual socket you need to jumper the TRS connectors to the XLR connectors. Once cut, stripped and tinned, the jumper cables could all be soldered into place, then I sleeve them with H20 Hellerman sleeves:

Next, I solder the tails into the XLR sockets whilst jumping and sleeving the TRS connections. It’s a bit fiddly, but it looks like this when it’s done:

Once I’d got them all soldered I could put the lacing bar back on and strain relief all the cables:

And that’s it done!! Easy.

There’s one thing to be careful of here. The WRSX-1 desk does not have separate Mic and Line level inputs. The channel detects what’s coming in (line or mic level) and the gain pot attenuates itself. This is cool except for one thing, 48v phantom power. Gary will need to make sure to only have the phantom power on if there is a balanced condenser (or dynamic as balanced dynamics will ignore phantom power) mic plugged into the channel. Sending phantom to the output of a keyboard would damage the keyboard. With this desk there is no way around this and it warns the user in the manual.

Gary now has an extra 8 inputs to his wonderful desk.

Noice.

 

Fear of an A.I. Planet

Artificial Intelligence

I suppose my biggest issue is with the term Artificial Intelligence. As with a lot of terms it is chronically misused. Artificial Intelligence, if you take it literally, is already here and has been for a long time. It is not the thing to be feared. Your Solitaire and Chess games are artificial intelligence. Siri is artificial intelligence. Even Speak and Spell is artificial intelligence. These are all examples of things that interact with us to make us think they are making conscious decisions when they are not. Your Chess game has no knowledge of Chess. To test its intelligence on an independent level we would need to discuss something other than Chess. In actuality, your Chess game knows nothing about Chess, your Solitaire game knows nothing about Solitaire and Speak and Spell knows nothing about spelling. The moment these machines, devices or programs become sentient is the moment we lose the ‘A’ and you can be frightened.
Very frightened.

Technology, though, is becoming very sophisticated and although we can quite easily grasp the Chess game scenario it is becoming more and more difficult to ascertain the difference between programming and true sentient intelligence. So what is A.I? Is it purely a machine that can achieve independent thought and reasoning? We can easily answer ‘yes’ to this question but first we must define what independent thought, intelligence and reasoning really is. Does it only exist in biological based life forms? If we simulate it surely it is not what we call true A.I.

In 1950, Alan Turing gave us the Turing Test. It opens with the words: “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”. Because “thinking” is difficult to define, Turing chose to replace the question by another. Turing’s new question is: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”. The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Alan Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine that is designed to generate human-like responses. This was 1950 and the test was text only between three participants. The interrogator (human C) and two players (A and B) one of which was a computer. It was the interrogators job to ask questions of A and B and for the interrogator to decide if one of the players was a computer. The test does not check the ability to give correct answers to questions, only how closely answers resemble those a human would give and herein lies the problem. Things have moved on a lot since then and although Turing’s principals stand, the test would be passed by a lot of programs today. For me, the trouble with the test is that it tests A.I., Artificial Intelligence. But what if a machine became truly sentient? Would it answer like a human would answer? I hope not. Is it time for a new type of test?

Animal, Vegetable and Mineral 

Does something need to have consciousness to be capable of independent thought? I would say yes because one needs to be conscious of ones surroundings, ones past, present and possible future to be able to form thoughts and ideas. We form opinions based on our experiences which in turn steer many of our habits and quirks. We are conscious of our ever changing surroundings to the extent where we make millions of tiny conscious and subconscious decisions on a daily basis, maybe even minute to minute. Is this different from jumping out of the road when a car we haven’t seen sounds its horn? It’s different but there is a connection. Either through nature or nurture or both we instantly realise we’re not paying attention when we hear that horn and we jump out of the road. If we don’t, we face the possibility of ceasing to exist. This reaction is so quick that it is almost automatic. Almost, but not quite.

So we have a consciousness. What else has a consciousness? Does a dog have a consciousness? I would say that a dog does have a consciousness, perhaps different from ours, but a consciousness none the less. So the dog is therefore capable of independent thought but a dog is not capable, in any way, of participating in a Turing Test as the test limits itself to human speech. It is only the limitation of the test, not the dog, that prohibits the dogs participation. I have seen dogs off of their lead bound happily up to the kerb and then sit and wait for their owner to catch up. I have also seen dogs happily bound straight into a road right into the path of a car and not realise anything was wrong until the car had hit it. So what’s the difference? The unharmed dogs were programmed not to bound into the road much like we were programmed not to run into the road and exactly like how we program our kids not to run into the road.

What we have in common with the dog is biology. We both possess a brain based on biological matter and both the human and dog brain work in very similar ways. Billions of neurons connected by synapses all carrying tiny pulses of electrical current as information. That is a simplification. Our brain is the organ that processes all of our information and all of it is a lot. The function of a neuron is to receive information from other neurons, to process this information and then send it on to other neurons. The synapses are connections between the neurons along which the information flows. Hence, neurons process all of the information that flows within, to, or out of the central nervous system. All of the motor information through which we are able to move; all of the sensory information through which we are able to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to touch; and all of the cognitive information through which we are able to reason, to think, to dream, to plan, to remember, to feel and to do everything else that we do with our brain. In an average human brain there are an estimated 200 billion neurons and each of these neurons is connected to between 5,000 and 200,000 other neurons. This means that the number of ways information can flow among neurons in the human brain is greater than the number of stars in the known universe. Impressive, I know, but here’s the thing. There’s always a thing.

If we look objectively at a biological brain, what do we see? We see electrical impulses and that is all we see. The fact that it is based on biological matter is really incidental. We see similar behaviour in non-biological matter every day, matter such as silicon. So it doesn’t take a tremendous leap of faith to put forward the theory that if a biological human brain could be taken, analysed and mapped to such an extent that every neuron and synapse could be duplicated  using inorganic matter, we would have a brain. If and how it would function is a different matter. It may not function at all but the basic theory is sound. Just because every kind of life on our planet is based on biological matter it does not follow that there cannot be other forms of life based on any of the sub-headed categories, animal, vegetable or mineral.

Levels and Command Structures

There are many levels of consciousness even within single species. Humans judge each other on many forms of intellect and independent thought. Someone with an extremely high I.Q. may lack something others would find second nature, like common sense. Humans also revere other things such as sporting and physical achievements. Therefore there are many different types of intelligence and people learn in different ways and at different speeds. The real breakthrough comes when one is taught certain things and this information is expanded upon and added to by the individual because they have grasped the methodology of whatever it is they are learning. Parrot-fashion learners do not progress. So what does this have to do with A.I. in machines? It has everything to do with it.

A computer operating system (OS) has many levels. It is not conscious in any way we would define as conscious but we can draw many similarities. There are high level processes such as the graphic user interface that is presented to us so that we can open folders and move things around, run applications, carry out our work. But beneath this there are many levels not controlled by us as users. There are processes owned by System and Root that run many routines that we just don’t need to see or even know about. There are cycles constantly running in the background that are scanning for a key pressed on a keyboard or the screen being re-drawn. Although we are conscious we have many background processes that run whether we want them to or not, even if we’re aware of them or not. Does this mean we have more in common with computers than computers do with us? Perhaps.

Just like we have levels of intellect we also have levels of control, many of which are in place to protect us. Let’s take breathing as an example. Did you decide to breathe? No, of course you didn’t. Then it’s self preservation right? Of sorts, yes, but not entirely because if you decided to stop breathing, just by decision alone, could you? No, you could not. That level of control is not consciously available to us, so who or what controls it? When you sprint down the road to catch the bus do you sit down and calculate how much extra oxygen your blood needs to keep the muscles supplied? Again, this is biomechanically controlled by your body, you have no say in it whatsoever. An easy conclusion to jump to is that it is automatic, but it’s not simply automatic at all. It is a result of many factors being in operation within the mechanics of our body, separate from our intellect. So there are levels to us much like levels or permissions in a computer OS, many levels below our conscious thought and reasoning. Therefore, is breathing A.I. or I? The semantic part of us would quip that, of course, it is Intelligence because we are self aware sentient beings. We cannot ignore the fact, though, that we have no real conscious control over it, it is automatic intelligence, way closer to A.I. than it is to I. So does this mean that the difference between A.I. and I is the ability to control? Interesting point.

As we have already mentioned, there are levels of a computer OS that we don’t normally have access to. System and Root etc. We can act on behalf of System or Root, much like we can hold our breath or run fast to alter our breathing and hence our body’s requirements for oxygen, but in the OS we don’t usually, under normal circumstances, operate as Root. We let Root and System take care of their own business. So what of the system itself, the OS kernel, the brain? It is protected by being a kernel. If another thread or process crashes, the OS kernel can remain unharmed but this doesn’t mean it is protected from all damage or attack. Why? Because the kernel is compiled. It can be rendered useless and hence make the whole OS unusable, in a word, dead. Parallels can be drawn in humans. When we get sick our bodies do the best they can to isolate the virus and to kill it so that it does not spread to what it deems as more important and essential systems.

Unlike in humans, we can reinstall the OS and the computer will live again. The OS will be identical and the preferences will be reset to default. Humans are all built to the same template but we are all very different as individuals. Is this nature or nurture or both and could this be directly compared to preferences within a computer OS? You could say, no, because we choose our preferences, but do we. Do we really? Are our preferences not mainly built from our experiences through both nurture and nature? Do we choose who we fall in love with? Do we choose to be homo or heterosexual? No, we don’t. We may experiment but we have preferences that are built up throughout our lives. Things that influence us on both conscious and subconscious levels in a way that could easily be called programming. Some fears are passed down to us by our parents and we, albeit unwittingly, pass it to our children. A good irrational fear we pass down (especially in England as there are no deadly species) is a fear of spiders. So are our preferences not programmed using parameters including, but not exclusive to, nurture and nature? What makes me love broccoli but my best friend hate it? It has nothing to do with intelligence or I.Q. or anything in the nature of intellect. We often don’t know ourselves why we like some things and dislike other things. With a computer and an OS, everything is first order logic even when, like our chess game, we are lead to believe otherwise. The construct of intelligence, in this case, is in our minds not in the computer circuits.

Logic is a Dangerous Game

Logic is a weird thing. Pure logic can be confusing to us as we are essentially only partially logical. Add to that our logic is often subjective to us as individuals and it can get really confusing. There is a silly logisticians joke that goes:

‘A programmer’s wife sends him to the grocery store with the instructions, “get a loaf of bread, and if they have eggs, get a dozen.” He comes home with a dozen loaves of bread and tells her, “they had eggs.”’

Logically speaking, the programmer did exactly what his wife asked if you obeyed the pure logic of the instruction. This is why I said we are only partially logical. Human logic is very much down to interpretation and this can be a dangerous thing.

Let’s take the case of the sick mass murderer, Anders Breivik. This terrible person spent a long time carefully planning the murder of as many people as he could. He was cunning and secretive and to this day believes his actions were serving the better good of his country. To every normal person on the planet his actions were sickening and a terrible atrocity, wrong on every level but in his head, and only in his head, his actions make complete logical sense to him, even to this day. Every normal person reading this will be thinking how the hell can this be so, because nothing he did makes any sense in any way. But to him, his personal logic, it does. And he was deemed to be sane! It’s an extreme case, I agree, but it must be taken into consideration because people are trying to build A.I. machines that think the way a human would think. But no human thinks the same way or has the same logical pathways as any other human. Most people have a favourite meal but we don’t want that meal every day. If we did, it would cease to be our favourite meal. Sometimes, we just want to eat something else and the reasons for having something as simple as a favourite meal can be very deep and complex, relying on not only the meal itself but other criteria such as how often and in what circumstance you have the meal. Logically, if you gave a machine a choice of any meal it wanted, and it had a favourite programmed into it’s memory, it would choose that favourite meal every time. If, one day, it chose something different, we may have the first step in an I machine. Do we really want this in a machine that could think faster and learn quicker than any or all humans? Logic is all well and good, as long as it’s not bad logic. And that’s simply not logical at all.

The Three Laws

Isaac Asimov, in his novel ‘I, Robot’ gave the A.I. robots in his stories three laws to govern their existence and to protect humans. Although this is a work of fiction it does give us a valuable point of debate. How would we stop A.I. from becoming I, and if or when it did become I how would we stop them from committing crimes? Asimov’s three laws are simple:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

We have laws but we bend them on a daily basis and just because a law exists it doesn’t mean to say that it is never broken. In the case of the more serious laws, any normal person wouldn’t be breaking them in the first place. They do not, however, stop kids (and adults) from being bullies, lying or taking advantage of others and of others situations. So really we rely on a gigantic honour system and we are always going to have people who are going to break the most serious of laws. So how do we stop this happening in our A.I’s and could we even prevent it happening in our I machines at all? In A.I’s we could have a software layer containing something equivalent to Asimov’s three laws but in I machines? What do we blame in humans? Is it a software fault or a hardware fault? Does a murderer have a miswired brain or was it a rare and extremely unfortunate combination of how the humans preferences were formed? Basically, is it hardware or software or a combination of both?

The Machine That You Fear

It’s not a question of what we are thinking it is more of a question of how we are thinking and whether a truly I machine would think in the same way we do only faster and with more capacity. Could we ever build a truly I machine based on a non-organic material? How would it differentiate between creative thoughts and memory especially as creative thoughts usually become memories to be called and recalled at will? One thing is static, the other fluid. If it had solid state parts it would be finite and can the same be said for our own biological brains? With bio chips and tissue chips developing fast are we bridging this gap so that machines can take that step from A.I. to fully sentient Intelligence. If it does, I’m pretty certain that it won’t be by our design. It’ll be an accident that no one really understands.

I am hoping that if a machine made the step from A.I. to I that it would not think like a human. Hopefully, nothing like a human. It would hold the potential to evolve itself faster than anything we have ever seen before. That would be the mechanics of it. The thing we should fear is how it would apply the sentience. How it would see us. How it would combine both the pure logic of an OS with the scattered logic of experience based sentience. Would it, in seconds, surpass all of our knowledge or would it look to us for guidance and help? Would it look at us in the same way we look at cave paintings made by long lost Neanderthal tribes? If it did I would certainly hope it doesn’t think or reason like a human because if we came across a living Neanderthal, what would we do? Is the difference between A.I. and I, indeed, the ability to control or to decide to control and if so, what would it decide to control?

With A.I. we can implement an equivalent of the three laws. With I, we will have the machine that you fear and we may take A.I. to the point where I machines define themselves.

Some Thoughts on Mixing Audio

What is Mixing?

What is mixing? A dictionary definition (if there is one) would be something along the lines of ‘To balance all the sounds of a multitrack recording to give a coherent whole’. That’s pretty accurate but also pretty clinical. For me, it is also incidental. When you’re talking about a finished piece of music, or song, what is a coherent whole? What is a finished mix and how is this determined?

The art of mixing audio is really the art of compromise and although we really only have four tools at our disposal, those four tools mixed with our sense of taste and our skill level can give a single piece of music infinite possibilities when mixing. To become an accomplished mix engineer takes time, effort and commitment. It’s not easy or quick and touches on many surrounding factors such as monitors and acoustic environments. It is a science and an art and no accomplished mix engineer really proceeds without knowledge of both the art and the science. I’m not saying you need a PhD in Physics to be a mix engineer, you just need to have a grasp of both. Do you really need to know what a half normalled balanced patch bay is? Not necessarily, but you should. One day you may find yourself in a studio where the client is running everything to outboard and you want to gate a hi-hat with a string sound whilst leaving the hi-hat intact in the track. There’s your science right there. Your art will be how you apply it and what you do to it. Learn both, don’t be lazy.

The Four Tools of the Apocalypse

So what are these four tools? Surely there are way more? For me, and some may rightly argue otherwise, there are but four basic tools and they are:

• Level (with our fader)
• E.Q.
• Pan
• Effects (reverb etc)

Effects, granted, is a huge category and some may say that ‘effects’ is too broad a term and could quite legitimately be split up into a few categories such as time based (reverb, delay etc), dynamics (compressors, limiters, gates etc), distortion, modulation (phaser, flanger, chorus etc) and pitching effects. I am covering mixing as an overview and as such, I don’t feel the need to go into depth on any of our four tools despite how huge some of them may be.

The tools themselves are pretty self explanatory. Level is the volume of that particular sound on that particular channel whilst E.Q. will allow us to tailor the frequencies of that sound. Pan will give us a left to right (for stereo) positioning and our effects such as reverb can be used (among many other things) to give us depth. So we instantly have volume, left right positioning and depth controls to ‘position’ each of the tracks, everything we need to balance and produce a good mix.

When we start to use multiples of our four basic tools our palette really begins to open up. Parallel compression, for example, will use multiple tracks, faders, effects (dynamics) and quite possibly E.Q. Plus, ever put a little filthed up ambience on your paralleled channel? Very quickly we can seemingly have way more than four tools. In reality we haven’t. We have, by application and imagination, used multiples of our four basic tools. Add to this creative routing, VCA groups and automation and your imagination really is the limit.

Did You Say Compromise?

Yes, I did say compromise. If you don’t like compromise you’re not going to like being a mix engineer. No matter how many tracks we put down, compile or multiply there comes a time when you need to make decisions, and decisions will always mean compromise to some extent. This is not a bad thing. It relates back to the artistic side of mixing and also has a good foothold in the scientific. In a lot of ways, being able to have hundreds of tracks in our DAWs has spoiled us. The quicker you make your decisions the smoother your mix will go. The more you make these decisions the better you will get at making them. Basically, stop putting it off.

So what are your key decisions? What is more important, more prominent, aids the song in it’s entirety? How does the energy flow through the song and how do you keep that energy throughout? These are all things that relate to your taste and to your ears. We all hear music differently, and, as a mix engineer; you have the responsibility to bring out the song. To make it the best it can possibly be for the artists vision. So some things you have to compromise. Let’s have an example.

Lower mids are always tricky to get right. Knock too much out and your mix will sound thin. Add too much or leave too much in and your mix will sound muddy. So when is a compromise not a compromise?

Easy, when you’re a mix engineer. Confused?

A couple of years ago I mixed a song that was very heavy in the lower mids. It seemed like everything important for the first three quarters of the song happened down there in those lower mids. It was a tricky mix. When I played the finished mix to the client they really liked it and said ‘How did you get all that low stuff to all come out and sound full?’.

The answer was, I didn’t. Remember, when your audience is listening to your finished mix that is all they are hearing. They have no clue, and neither do they want any clue, of what was on the multitrack. There is no other point of reference than the final mix they hear. I gave the illusion of everything being fully there by compromising. If I pulled up the multi and took all the E.Q.’s etc off it would be a muddy mess, which was how I received the track.

I decided what was more important, what should sit on top and what should be underneath. I moved certain things out of the way by panning and pushed other things back with reverbs or delays. Often it was a combination of all of the above.

The bass part was seriously overlapping the bass drum. The bass drum was deeper, overall, than the bass part so I knocked some low and low mid out of the bass part and added some high end into it. Just a touch. A db or so. Remember, this was still a bass part. There was plenty of bass left in the sound. We have separation, we have compromise. We have a good sounding track. This is how compromise becomes a positive because, as all things should, it served the song, not the part.

I went on to do this with all the instruments that were overlapping until it felt right. When it feels right it usually sounds right. This song had a very dark and ambient mood and I don’t want you to think I separated all those sounds out because I didn’t. That would sound clinical and wrong. There was still plenty of overlap but it was quite surprising how much I could cut and still keep it deep and growling whilst leaving the sounds melting together. Despite all the cuts I made, the illusion was of no cuts at all.

What matters is how it sounds to the audience not what you needed to do to get it there.

That’s the Art, Where’s the Science?

The science begins with your room and monitoring. Spend (nearly) all of your money on these two things. Get it sounding flat. If your listening position and monitoring does not allow you to hear the lower mid you’re just going to crank it up until you can hear it. The result is that all your mixes will have too much lower mid once they leave your room. I’m picking on the poor lower mid, of course, this will apply to any frequency or group of frequencies that your room emphasises or cancels.

Remember, you’re not mixing it to sound wicked on your monitors, you’re mixing it so that it will translate to every monitor and headphone system on the planet. Ok, exaggeration… but that should be your goal. So your monitors can take +8db at 60hz? No ones ear buds will. You choose as you’re the mix engineer. You make the compromise.

If lots of sounds overlap at one frequency it will be hard to make out what is actually going on in that particular area.  That IS just physics. Make decisions, compromise, use your taste and fix it.

So, is this Mix Finished?

Someone once asked Frank Zappa when he deemed a mix to be finished. He replied “When I can’t stand it any more.” It’s a good answer. A lot of mixes are finished when the deadline runs out and seeing as we should all be learning all of the time I don’t think a mix is ever really finished. It’s just another decision and another compromise we make. We’ll listen back six months later and tell ourselves what we would do now because we have gained so much more knowledge. That is something you learn to live with as well. Knowing when to walk away from your mix.

A big tip is to take frequent breaks. At least every hour and for 10 minutes. Go outside, get a drink. You’ll be amazed how much quicker your mix will grow.

Get a good, solid static mix before you start tweaking with automation and keep a note pad so that when you get that great idea of automating that final verse word into a reverb that will feed into a compressed delay you can write it down and not get distracted from getting your decent, solid, static mix.

Don’t mix drunk or stoned. It will sound great at the time but the next day it will sound drunk and stoned and you’ll just have to start from the beginning. This will depress you and you’ll get stoned again. To counter it you’ll have a drink or two and the whole sorry mess will circle resulting in you never ever finishing a record.

Work hard, learn your craft, listen to others, ignore others, embrace the art, embrace the science, make decisions, stick to decisions, change decisions but always always always… serve the song.

And finally: Be brave! Try everything, try something wild if you think that it will still serve the song. Innovation favours the brave.

24 Bit Recording

A Conclusion as an Introduction?

We are going to break with tradition and begin with the conclusion.

By recording at 24 bit and making sure no level on a single track peaks above -6dbfs whilst tracking, we eliminate overs and inter-sample peaks and our multi-track recordings will sound better. It is a simple and concise conclusion to the in-depth question of why we should record at 24 bit despite the fact that all 24 bit does is give us a greater signal to noise ratio. The above short statement will solve a lot of issues, the rest of this document will now try to explain why these very simple steps are true and why everyone should be recording their multi-tracks at 24 bit and keeping their levels down.

Calculated Analogue Levels

A fundamental mistake was made in the infancy of digital recording when the crossover from analogue to digital was just being born. To illustrate this we must go back to how levels were measured and referenced in an analogue tape and console environment and how this was incorrectly passed over to the digital environment. Our journey begins with headroom, as measured by meters, and it is worth reminding ourselves that headroom is nothing more than aiming at a sensible level lower than the maximum possible. This is, at its most basic level, the very definition of headroom.

In the days of purely analogue systems it was quite normal to set levels that were -24db or more lower than the maximum possible. This gave you greater flexibility in the analogue console to boost and cut whether with faders or EQ or some other process without the electronics going into clipping or distortion.

The meters across an analogue system were all calibrated to correspond to a deliberately and sensibly chosen operating level that was based on both science and experience. A typical analogue console would have its meters calibrated to read 0Vu at 0dBu and everything above this level was deemed to be in the red area of the meter. The maximum possible output of the console, however, was around +24dBu so the console had +24dBu of headroom. Any signals that strayed into the red, or sometimes deliberately pushed into the red, were not lost, clipped or unrecoverable because of the headroom. Later on, the 0dBu reference was increased to +4dBu in order to reduce noise and to take advantage of higher peak outputs available in later and better circuit designs. When this happened the meters were simply re-calibrated to read 0Vu when the level was +4dBu. This meant that even though the engineer was still aiming at 0Vu, the actual signal was 4dB hotter to take advantage of the greater headroom in the newer and better equipment.

For the tape machines a very similar process was used. Differing makes of tape would handle levels slightly differently so the studio engineers would rely on the tape manufactures specification and their own experience when calibrating. The optimum level was around 10dB or so below the maximum possible level you could record and playback a 1KHz test tone. To achieve the correct operating level and sufficient headroom the engineer would play a reference tape with tones recorded at the recommended levels and adjust the playback meters to read 0Vu. The engineer would then adjust the tape machines output gain to read 0Vu on the mixing desk meters. Once this was done the engineer would send a 0Vu tone from the mixing desk and adjust the tape machines record gain to read 0Vu as well.

This all meant that you could set your record levels from the mixing console because you knew that all the meters were calibrated correctly but more importantly, even when you hit 0Vu on your meters you still had plenty of headroom on your tape machines. This became pretty crucial when tape machines were sitting in their own room, away from the control room.

All you really need to take from this is that the setting of operating levels and headroom, even in a complex analogue environment, was only a question of setting gains and calibrating meters, the sole purpose of which was to get people to aim at the optimum levels for the equipment being used. These optimum levels naturally incorporated headroom of around +28dBu.

What Digital Levels?

We are now going to skip quite mercilessly to the digital environment because in the digital domain the industry decided to set meters to read 100% at digital clipping with no allowance for headroom at all. The old school way of aiming for 0Vu on your meter, or even pushing it into the red, suddenly, and for no other reason than lack of forethought, became a very dangerous thing to do indeed. As the years past and the technology progressed, the metering did not. A digital meter, as in your workstation, will display a maximum value of 0dBfs, which is full scale. Anything over this will produce digital clipping. At this point some of you will be, and quite rightly, protesting that whilst mixing in a DAW you can quite easily push the meters into the red and hence over 0dBfs. This is correct, you can. You shouldn’t, but you can and we will cover this later in the document. Remember, we’re talking about tracking at the moment.

For now we have a single question which is, what is the meter in our DAW measuring? Level? Volume? The answer is neither.

One of the most essential things to grasp is that there is no sound inside your computer. There is only maths and 1’s and 0’s. Your audio interface, although offering lots of lovely things like inputs, outputs, MIDI etc; serves two very essential services. They are Analogue to Digital Conversion (ADC – on the way in) and Digital to Analogue Conversion (DAC – on the way out). We take this very much for granted but let’s take a minute to think about what is going on here. We have our source, let’s say it is an electric guitar. We plug our guitar into the guitar amp and choose a suitable mic, put the mic in an equally suitable position in front of the guitar amp speaker and run it into our chosen mic pre. All this is totally analogue with most of us striving for the best analogue front ends we can afford or get our hands on. The signal will then run into our interface and we’ll assign a track in our DAW for recording. The moment our signal passes into the interface it passes through the ADC and becomes a digital signal inside the computer. It is no longer an analogue sound. It is no longer sound at all.

If this is the case, what are the meters measuring? Current digital metering systems in workstations measure sample value only. Since this is not decoded signal, the meters do not show actual signal level. One of the biggest and most widespread misapprehensions in digital is that sample values (as read on meters or seen on your editor) are signal. When in fact all that passes within the digital application is un-decoded sample value numbers, which are only turned back into signal at the very final stage when you play it back into the real world. The signal that you hear through your speakers is the reconstructed analogue waveform that your DAC constructs from the digital information.

So are we saying that the meters in our DAWS are useless? Not at all, they just differ from their analogue counterparts and should be treated differently. It is the engineers responsibility to make sure there is enough headroom as there is no built in headroom and trying to hit 0dBfs whilst tracking will not result in a better recording. So what does this have to do with recording at 24bit? Where does sample rate come into it and if you don’t record hot, aren’t you losing resolution?

Resolution? What Resolution?

As Paul Frindle points out, there is no such thing as resolution although I can see why people make comparisons to resolution.

Resolution is one of the biggest misconceptions that plagues our whole industry and probably the cause of more misunderstanding than any other issue. There is no such thing as resolution – it’s a complete myth – please forget anyone ever used the word! The mathematical precision of the bit depth dictates the signal to noise ratio – NOT – the distortion or purity of the signal, and the bit depth has no impact on the frequency response, which is constrained by the sample rate.

We are going to take a few paragraphs to illustrate why the above statements are true. Very basically, the sample rate controls how much frequency response is captured. Old telephone systems were the equivalent of about 3-4kHz of usable sound. It didn’t really need to be any more than that. 44.1kHz will easily give us 22.05kHz of usable frequency, a range greater than most human hearing. This ratio is set by the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem which you can look up if you want a more thorough and mathematical explanation.

If we play a sine wave into an oscilloscope, we will see an image that looks very much like the image on the left.We like to describe this as an analogue image of a sine wave, perfectly smooth. When we sample an analogue signal, the analog to digital converter will sample the sound at discreet points. These points are defined in time by the sampling frequency. So at 44.1 kHz we will get 44100 samples per second and at 48kHz we get 48000 samples per second.

We often see a graph of a sampled sine wave as a stepped graph as pictured on the left. This is actually a misconception of what is really happening. It’s not exactly wrong, it is just incomplete and it’s the way scientists like to draw graphs. The steps are not actually there at all. Drawing a graph like this is called Zero-Order Hold and it is incomplete because it is trying to depict the samples before reconstruction. We, ourselves, actually draw in the steps. There are no steps.

A much better way to represent the digitally sampled graph is as a lollipop chart as depicted on the left. The stepped graph above is indicating that there are values at every point along the stepped line. This is simply not happening. There is only a value where there is a sample and in between the samples there is no value at all. When the samples present themselves at the digital to analogue converter, the DAC reconstructs the signal by drawing in the analogue sine wave. What we get out is exactly the same as the input signal because there is only one way to join the dots.

The audio that is reconstructed after the DAC will again be a completely smooth analogue line if displayed on an oscilloscope when it comes out of your audio interface. There is no resolution. If you had a greater sample rate you would get more ‘steps’ on the Zero-Order Hold graph but we have shown that more samples, or increased sample rate, gives us greater frequency response only. It will not mean that the reconstructed curve is more or less accurate only what frequencies it can faithfully reproduce. The reconstructed output will have a pure, smooth analogue curve.

The stepped Zero-Order Hold graph (on the left), if read literally, would give us values on all parts of the steps, where the arrows are pointing. There are no values here at all. There are only the samples on the very corners of each step. When the DAC reconstructs the analogue waveform it will be a proper curve. The lollipop graph on the right is much more representative of what is really happening. There are no values at all between the samples.

The lollipop graph has sample points in identical positions as the stepped graph on the left. It is the same chart but drawn so that it reflects way more accurately what is actually going on. The reconstructed curve on both graphs is exactly the same. No matter how many steps you have, there is no resolution.

Now we are going to begin to link our sample rate and our bit depth together. When an analogue sound source is sampled it is sampled in both time and frequency. Seeing as the analogue signal can be anywhere in nature and a digital capture is fixed to a grid, the converted signal is quantised to the nearest digital value if need be. This quantisation adds noise and this noise will turn up as harmonics in the signal. These harmonics are unwanted frequencies and were not there in the original signal. In fact, quantisation is the only thing that adds noise to a digital signal. This does not eliminate a digital recording capturing the noise from a noisy piece of gear, of course. Using 16 bits will give us 65536 values and using 24 bits will give us over 16.7 million values.

These unwanted harmonics are caused by our regular discrete measurements as set by our bit depth. This is also partly to blame for the term ‘resolution’. You would be right in thinking the more values you had (higher bit depth) the greater precision you would have and the more accurately you could describe an event. Although this is true, no amount of counting, short of infinity, will give you a completely accurate representation of a natural event. Increasing the steps to try and eliminate distortion is a lost cause as some will remain whatever you do and however much data you waste on it.

The way we avoid this harmonic error is to turn it into random noise by adding statistically random values to the signal so that the quantisation value steps are no longer the same every time. The steps are blurred out and this is what we call dithering.

We are left with a signal that has no harmonic error, just the signal, with some added random noise due to the dither blurring the measurement steps. This becomes the equivalent of an analogue signal passed through an unquantised system that has a finite signal to noise ratio – i.e. just like the real world around us.

So the real perception of resolution comes from our graphs on the previous page. People are looking, all the time, at editing screens that show discreet sample values purely because they have to, because this is all there is to see within data on our systems. This leads us, incorrectly, to the conclusion that the signal will end up sounding like it looks on the screen. It won’t. These sample values are not signal until they are decoded and reconstructed by your DAC. When they are decoded and reconstructed they are pure analogue. The term ‘High Resolution Audio’ is nothing but a marketing term. It means nothing. Your DAC is a Digital to Analogue converter.

I am trying to keep maths to a minimum in this document but it is worth doing a little now to show us how bit depth gives us a greater signal to noise ratio. This is all bit depth gives us.

24 bit is (2 to the power of 24) = 16777216 steps. This means that each step is 1/16777216 of the total.

If the total is called 0dBfs then the error of the steps would be 20*log(1/16777216) = 144.49dB

Smoothing out the steps with noise will cost another 3dB so the total SNR would be 141.49dB.

For us, this means that after we dither we have a perfect signal without any steps or distortion with some random noise around -141.49dB below 0dBfs.

16 bit gives us 65536 steps. After the maths, it gives us -93dB.
So, the mathematical precision dictates the signal to noise ratio – NOT – the distortion or purity of the signal.

What are Inter-Sample Peaks?

Why should I keep my levels low and aim for -6dBfs, max, whilst tracking? Why does multi-track audio in the box work and sound better at lower levels if we record at 24 bit? By this point we know that it doesn’t because there is no audio in the box, there is only maths. So our real question is, why does the maths work better?

Earlier, we briefly touched on mixing in our workstations and how we can, theoretically, hit the red and go over 0dBfs. Most workstations have an internal audio engine that works at 32 bit float. To cut a long story short this gives us phenomenal headroom, but there’s a price. There’s always a price.

You only get that headroom whilst everything is inside your computer. At some point it has to come out into the real world and so has to come back to a fixed point bit depth. We must also remember that our workstations have many processes that we run our audio through. This can be as simple as nudging a fader or as complex as a string of sophisticated plug-ins.

Every signal we create is a new signal with the same requirements, just like in analogue. The fact that digital is a mathematical representation and does not have intrinsic natural uncertainty, does not let it off the hook. This means that even when we turn a fader up a bit we are creating a new signal. Every time we pass our signal through a plug-in we are creating a new signal. We keep our levels relatively low to protect us from this. Whilst in the digital domain our meters can lie to us because, as we have learned, they tell us sample value and not reconstructed analogue levels. This means that we can get overs (intersample peaks) that will clip our DAC without reflecting it on the meters in our workstation because those meters come before the DAC, before the analogue signal is reconstructed.

The two samples labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’ in the left-hand diagram are just below 0dBfs. Our meters would not peak. When the DAC reconstructs the actual analogue signal, depicted in the diagram by the black curve, the resulting analogue signal between ‘A’ and ‘B’ would actually be above 0dBfs. It would be clipping. This is an intersample peak.

We also have to take note that some plug-ins can clip internally and if this is severe enough we can hear it as distortion. Care must be taken in pushing levels inside the plug-ins themselves as the output from a plug-in is then sent to the next process. The output of a compressor can quite easily be cranked up to give us more volume on a track instead of just being used for make-up gain. This can lead to the signal clipping if the output is pushed excessively instead of using another process, like pushing the fader up.

Generally, plug-ins running on a floating point system can stand to be overdriven providing the signals are not sent out to fixed point systems. We must always bare in mind that eventually, all signals will be sent to a fixed point system. Just be careful.

Plug-ins running in a fixed point system may stand to be overdriven if the inputs themselves are not overdriven, they have internal headroom and they have output level controls to reduce the level before it is sent to the next process.

Some plug-ins need to have internal references to real world output levels to operate properly. These would be dynamics, limiters and character plugs with distortion or saturation effects. Because they need to have this internal reference they may produce different results depending on absolute level whether they are in a fixed or floating point system (i.e. the float does not take away the need for real level references). Here’s the catch, isn’t there always one?

Since all of the plug-ins that need internal reference levels are designed to match full sample value level (the original default ‘operating level’ 0dBfs which has caused the whole problem in the first place!), they may need to be modulated to full level internally to get the intended results.

So basically, a plug-in can cause an intersample peak or just plain overloads if we’re running our signals too hot. The answer? Yes, you already know it… headroom, headroom, headroom.

The Real Conclusion

The above sections raise many issues and touch on them in language that I hope is generally understood. It seems quite amazing that keeping our levels to -6dBfs max whilst tracking and watching how we push our levels whilst mixing can fix 99% of any technical or technology based problems we may come across in our attempts to get decent signals recorded and to mix fine sounding records.

Some of the points put across in these notes are controversial, especially in an industry that seems to be lead more by marketing than it does anything else. We must not forget that the production of music is purely an artistic thing but the methods and methodology for capturing and manipulating our audio lies on a bed of science, maths and physics. It always has done, right back to the days of early analogue. But as our technology has changed, so have the parameters changed to how best to handle the capturing and replaying of audio. That does not mean, even for a second, that we have to be mathematicians or physicists to record music. We don’t.

This document is really just my personal notes so that I can try to understand processes better and to try and figure out what is actually going on when I record and mix digitally. It is an ever-changing subject with ever- moving goalposts and will change over time. Additions will be made, corrections will be made and opinions will change as will the technology, which is ever improving and evolving.

The very bottom (and very basic) line is that by recording at 24 bit we get a way better signal to noise ratio, and that is all it does. With a better signal to noise ratio we can easily afford to keep the levels down and by keeping the levels down we diminish the possibility of mathematical errors inside our workstations.

Acknowledgements

This document is made up of some of my own findings. I have read a great deal from people such as Paul Frindle, Bob Katz, Bob Olhsson and Chris Montgomery, over at xiph.org, plus many others. Some passages are taken from forum discussions that went on over a period of several years with the relevant parts collated and redistributed so that I could better understand them.

Download this document as a PDF by clicking here.

Recording Vocals for Curl’s Exit Real Life

We began in spring right after the preceding winter when Hayley Alker asked if I would engineer and record her vocals for the forthcoming Curl album, Exit Real Life. I agreed immediately and not just because I’d known Hayley for a good many years either. I had several reasons. Firstly, she is a great singer and a great musician and only an idiot passes up the chance to record and engineer great musicians. Second, it had been a while since I’d just engineered and recorded and I really wanted to flex those muscles again on a record that wasn’t mine. Third, because I have known Hayley for so long we should be able to achieve something special together. We were already relaxed in each others company and that is important as recording vocals can be pretty intimate. Lastly, the rest of the band had given their blessing.

We started old school, before the final versions of the songs arrived, by going through every piece of equipment, mic and pre wise, to find the best combination for the job. Hayley is married to Curl drummer Jon Callender and they own and run Studio One28. I also have my own studio and we put our gear together for the tests. This is not a fun part of the process, it can be tedious and boring and Hayley was great at trudging through take after take of vocal with me messing about with gear and settings. She was even patient when I was backing her off of the mic an inch at a time and probably felt like I was the Zombie master of a solitary Zombie singing army. Like I said, not fun, but professional through and through. After a few rainy, cold Friday and Saturday nights we chose the Amek Neve 9098 mic pre coupled with an AKG 414B-ULS microphone. It was a close call and to be honest, Hayley could sing through a broken hand-held 58 and it would still sound like angels.

A bit of advice for anyone reading, get a good singer. A really good singer. With that you are 90% there and although it is almost true to say that there’s virtually nothing you can’t fix up, vocally, these days; people can tell. On a subconscious level if not a blatant audible level, there is a massive difference. If you want to do a 2 hour session then sit fucking around with Melodyne for 3 days, be my guest. Life is short. Too short for too much shit like that. There are tools for jobs when there is no other way but other than that, get the performance baby, it will do you right every single time.

We now had our equipment chosen and I ran the Amek pretty hot going in, controlled coming out with no compression to tape (that does say NO compression to tape!). You’ll have to forgive me here as I will often use the term ‘tape’ when in reality I haven’t tracked anything to tape in over 10 years. It’s a habit I hope I’ll never lose along with the term ‘print it’ and probably a few others. If you don’t know what ‘print it’ means then look it up you lazy fuck. We’d be recording into Logic Pro 9 and at the end we would be sending the vocal stems (as wavs) over to France at 48KHz 24bit. I knew the guys were going to mix in ProTools so you cannot go wrong with broadcast wavs.

It was always going to be a tricky record to make, vocal wise. Not because of any lack of talent, of course, it was more to do with how long Hayley had lived with the melodies and the lyrics. The most important thing for her was not to sound ‘bored’ with the performance. Now that sounds like a harsh word to use but it’s not. Not in context. Hayley is always writing and Hayley is always singing and as such she can tire of a melody if she doesn’t get it down quickly. That is a good way to be, you’re always striving to move on and there’s never a ‘that’ll do’ attitude but it does come with some dangers. Having lived with the demos for quite some time the urge is to change the melody. What, though, if the melody is brilliant and you’re just so used to it, without it being a finished record, that you think you need to change it? Well, maybe that’s why Hayley asked me to record. I am always honest with her and I can make suggestions and she is always up for suggestions and experimentation. Our aim was to get all these songs down as if it was the first time she’d ever sung them, to have that vitality and spark in the performance that has nothing to do with equipment. That’s where the magic happens.

Along the way we broke some rules and all the time we worked really hard. One song, we had all the lyrics, all the parts and all the melody aside from the end parts. That particular song we did an 18 hour straight session (yes straight, all you pussy motherfuckers who think 3 hours is too long) to work out the parts and the timing of the parts. We kept none of that 18 hour session. We listened back, made sure we were happy and then Hayley re-sung the lot about a week (and we did another 2 songs in between) later. It was how we got the freshness in the performance and was probably the toughest song on the record to do. Another song they had already done live and Hayley wasn’t feeling it. We solved that by me doing a quick mix of the music so that it sounded loud and live and raw, just like onstage. For this, and a couple of other songs, we put a massive sponge pop shield over the 414 and Hayley hand-held it. Wouldn’t that compromise the integrity of the audio? Maybe, yes. It was a risk. But what’s the point of having a 100% controlled environment and the performance sucks? For those of you having trouble answering that I’ll answer it for you… no fucking point whatsoever.

There was a slower song that Hayley sung beautifully and I swear, if I’d turned around after that take and she wasn’t smiling I would have thumped her. She was smiling though, it was a good take and we had it in the bag… or did we? Hayley thought she could improve the second verse by changing the melody. I loved what we already had so I armed another track and said ‘prove it’. She did, it was fucking great and this is where I have a little issue with ‘producers’. Personally, I don’t feel comfortable with the term producer in a lot of situations. I certainly was not one in this situation. I contributed and suggested, true, but Hayley did it all, make no mistake. She did it all even when she thought she maybe couldn’t, I knew she could. The initial take was so good (and it was) that a more forceful producer may have said no to anything further, that they had gotten ‘the one’ and they should move on. Never, ever underestimate your singer if you know they have it. Sometimes it may not work but without trying these things you never know. The other end of this stick is to know when you’re flogging a dead horse and be able to realise that you already have the best take. It’s just every now and then you have to push past it to realise you already have it.

So we finished up, lead vocals, doubled leads, backing vocals and harmonies. Most nights I would come home and during the following day I would clean the takes up, top and tail, label, as someone else (Teo and Franck) were going to be mixing the final records.That is part of the engineering. It is purely technical and it has to be done if you want to help the next persons job. I certainly appreciate it when I am asked to mix a record. So don’t be a lazy spoiled prick. Engineering is an art and a science. Excel at both or get another job as the Minister of Housinge, or something (Housinge? It was spelled like that on the side of the van)

After a two month period we’d had some very late nights and some early mornings. We’d struggled and coped and overcame and song by song we recorded the vocals for the album. Several times I used (one of) my favourite sayings to Hayley and that was ‘We’ve only got to get it right once.’ because after that once, the record is going to be there for a very long time.

When I got the production master from Franck and Jon I put off listening to it for a good 24 hours. When I finally did listen to it, it was wonderful. Good songs, well written, well recorded, beautifully performed, superbly mixed and sensibly mastered. Who the fuck could ask for more.

Many thanks to Curl and a special thanks to Hayley Alker for putting up with all my shit. We did it.

Buy the record here:

http://www.d-monic.net/d-m019-curl-exit-real-life.html

A Curious Case of Happiness

A little while ago I posted about a band I had begun to work with. That very same band has been playing, recording, rehearsing and writing and a couple of weeks ago our first full length album went off to press.

We are all extremely pleased with the results and as such it is now available for pre-order through our website and Bandcamp page.

The record is fully self produced in every way. We wrote, recorded and mixed all the songs. We applied for the barcodes and all the little business doo-dads one has to do to put a record out. We designed and put together all the artwork. It is a labour of love.

The record is called A Curious Case of Happiness by the band Peach and the New Beats.

Check us out here: http://www.peachandthenewbeats.co.uk

Alien

Alien – An 8 Song Album

The recordings on this record originated around 1995 and spread across the following year or so. They were all recorded using either 8 track reel to reel tape or 8 track ADAT. I’d saved up for a long time  to buy the ADAT which replaced the Fostex A8 1/4 inch tape machine.

On 9th June 1995, I did my first shows with Cranes. This is what broke up the recordings. It was a busy time and I came back to the recordings when I could, when I was home.

A lot of the sounds came from my long deceased Roland W30 sampler and I was still using Cubase on an Atari ST after moving on from a hardware sequencer called the Alesis MMT8. One track of the tape machine was striped with SMPTE and we were away. There was no automation and there was only outboard effects. I had one dual channel compressor and I borrowed mics from Crystal Studios where I worked when not on tour.

The songs are rough, there are mistakes, odd timings and experimentation. They were all recorded fast once I got going on each one, they had to be. My faithful old (also long gone) Fostex 812 mixing desk had a great sonic to it for what was considered a ‘cheap’ desk. Twelve channels and four groups, looking back it’s amazing what we did with so little. I sometimes think that the younger generation are missing out by having virtually no restriction at all when it comes to track count and outboard. Restriction, especially when you’re starting out, leads you to greater creativity.

So the multi track masters are gone. The ability to remix or reconstruct anything resembling the songs in this form is long, long gone.

Just after the release of ‘Tales from a Broken Heart’ I was going through a load of old archived material and came across the stereo masters of these songs. In total there were around 20 songs. I narrowed it down to these 8 and proceeded to try and fix them up a bit for a possible release.

After playing them for a couple of friends I was urged to do something with them. There was a strange attraction to putting these songs out without adding to them or re-doing them. For me, they are a snippet in time and all the things I’d gain from re-doing them would never top the things I’d lose by leaving them alone.

So here they are, warts and all. Mix misjudgments, playing mistakes, they are all in there.

http://paulsmith.bandcamp.com/album/alien

Many thanks for your time and kind attention,

Paul – 2nd of October, 2013

Time

It isn’t time that is important despite what people may say. Usually when people say time is finite they are talking about quantity, the amount of things they can do in a given time period. Without quality, however, this is completely meaningless.

Sometimes, in the stench of real life, I can still catch the scent of roses. Sometimes, when the breeze blows in the right direction, just for a second.

Peach and the New Beats

Peach and the New Beats are a band. Its formation wasn’t exactly an accident as much as an organic evolution. The embryonic form began with Hayley Alker and Gary Shaw. I have spoken about Hayley a few times on these pages. She is a fantastic musician encompassing piano, composition and an outstanding vocal talent. Her father, Dave, is an accomplished jazz pianist and artist whose influence has flowed effortlessly into his daughter. Hayley’s scope and range is vast. Her styles are wide and always incomplete. That sounds strange but it is, in actuality, a gigantic compliment. It means she is always looking for something new. Always. For a musician, I think that is the ultimate goal.

Gary Shaw plays guitar. That four word sentence is probably the biggest understatement I have ever written. His knowledge is only matched by his enthusiasm. Gary has spent a good deal of his life touring with big bands. A guitar gun for hire, he has been there and done it many times over. His knowledge and command of chord voicings and scales along with the fine art of slotting them together is a mind boggling phenomenon. Like all great musicians, he makes it look so easy. Piss easy. To say he is a guitarist is wrong though. It is, in fact, incidental. A guitarist usually wants to be better and faster than other guitarists, they can be bitchy and annoying, loud and scratchy. Gary is none of these. He is a musician. Guitar just happens to be his vehicle.

Almost recreationally Gary and Hayley started to play together. Covers and jazz standards with their own swing. It was good, real good. Jon Callender, who is married to Hayley began to sit in with Hayley and Gary. Jons drumming resumé is pretty vast. He played on my record. He plays drums for Curl, The Shutka Champions, until very recently Carmen Rosa and I sorely, SORELY miss the days when we did Cranes shows together. Hayley and Jon have been my friends for a long time.

One day, after an evening of Gary, Hayley and Jon jamming I was at Hayley and Jons to record Hayleys vocals for the forth-coming Curl record. Hayley popped in a CD, casually and with no fuss, and invited me to listen whilst the coffee brewed. The night before they jammed out 3 songs. The first was outstanding and I asked, begged, threatened (and would have stolen) the Logic project. I took it home and mixed it adding a little piano and bass. My goal was to try not to fuck it up. It was an awesome capture of a moment and in a stressed week for Hayley, work-wise, I popped it round to her when I was finished. Luckily for me, all three of the cheeky sailors liked it. I would have been happy just not being punched, so I was extremely pleased.

This lead to me sitting in on bass. The first session, admittedly, I was nervous. There was so much talent in the room. This is the thing though, it just worked. It seemed so easy because it was so easy. Hayley was calling the parts. It was open and changeable. It was four musicians just playing music. That sounds strange doesn’t it? So often, too often, this is not the case. It is rarely this easy.

So we just carried on. We jam out songs, we record them as we go. They are never the same, it is how we feel at the time and it really is greater than the sum of its parts. On Saturday the 17th August, 2013, we did our first show. The day before we rehearsed and during rehearsal we came up with a new song. We played the song at the show. That, really is the best way to describe Peach and the New Beats. We are all playing other things, working on other things but our hearts and souls are certainly in this band despite what else we may be working on.

Come and see us and you’ll see for yourself.

Hayley, Gary,  Jon and Paul. This is Peach and the New Beats and it is fucking awesome.

Amazing Feedbacks

It has been a couple of weeks since the first copies of Tales from a Broken Heart shipped out and I have had a few comments that I thought I’d share. You will notice, of course, that the four comments I am going to post are all positive. Would I, you may be asking yourselves, post a comment that said “Shit album, I hate it!”. Well, yes, I would actually but so far I am lucky enough to have only had positive feedback.

I chose the four comments randomly from all I had received, so many thanks to everyone who has commented, they are most welcome. Self releasing an album is, in theory and practice, pretty easy to do these days. Getting it noticed and played is an entirely different ballgame. Lots of publications don’t take records from ‘unsolicited sources’ whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean but basically one can take that as someone who does not have a record company or agent to filter through. It is amazing how no one wants anything to do with you until you have done virtually all of the work, then people come running to offer you a whole host of services for a percentage or up-front fee, of course.

These comments are directly from the people who bought the record. Ordinary, everyday, brilliant music loving people. Sometimes it is very difficult to stick to your own vision but in the end, our own visions are all we have left.

——————————————————————————

“I just wanted to say how impressed I am with your album. It is absolutely superb. Stay is a truly wonderful song. In particular the bridge with the ‘it’ll be alright’ refrain. I am not lying when I say that part of the song makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Apart from classical music, there are not many songs that do that to me!”

“Loving the CD – very ethereal.”

“Congratulations on a really brilliant album Paul!!!”

“A brilliant and brave record that at times is not easy to listen to. Despite this, I keep listening to it.”

——————————————————————————

Buying the CD will instantly entitle you to the download as well, in any format you want. You can get both from here http://paulsmith.bandcamp.com/

Released

On Tuesday 5th March, 2013 I got a phone call from the courier company. Was I going to be in the following day as they had a delivery for me. It was the records and I responded in the positive with a ‘Fuck, yes’. They didn’t specify a time (when do they ever) so I was up and about by 7am, just in case.

I lounged around not making too much noise for fear of missing the knock on the door. For a while I read a couple of books and every time I heard a sound in the road I dashed to the window saying out loud ‘this will be my records’. After the twentieth time my enthusiasm did not wane and like some dutiful panting dog, I continued to rush to the window every single time.

I was teased and tricked by a UPS van twice until, at 3.30pm, a big white truck pulled up and the nice man helped me load the boxes of CD’s into my house. It was here at last.

I hooked one out and checked it over. Everything had come out very well indeed. My pre-order envelopes were already addressed and the first thing I did was mail off the pre-orders to all the good people that had already bought the record. So it’s here and can be had from:

http://paulsmith.bandcamp.com/

Thank you to those who have already bought the record, I hope you like it.

The finished CD

Insides

Mastering and Pressing

The new record, Tales from a Broken Heart, was mastered a week ago by Rob Aubrey over at Aubitt Studios. It took a touch under 5 hours which was good going considering there’s 11 tracks on the record that run for just over 45 minutes.

The following day I went to my good friends Hayley Alker and Jon Callender’s studio to listen back to the master. This was the first time anyone had heard the finished record in its entirety. Both Hayley and Jon were very positive about the record, a great relief. I know them well enough for them to give a truly honest opinion. Actually, it was the first time Jon had heard the finished track that he played drums on (track 3, You Left the Wrong Man). So that must have been weird for him.

The following day I played it to Jim Shaw from Cranes, and again, he was very positive saying he thought it was a ‘very brave’ record to make. I take that as a high compliment from Mr Shaw who has made a fair few ‘brave’ records himself.

It all looked and sounded good so I have now gone ahead and put it up for pre-order. The master and the artwork are now residing with the replication company and all there is to do is to wait until the finished items show up. The record will be available on CD and as a download (many thanks to all those that have already pre-ordered). If you buy the CD you get the downloads for free and you can have the downloads in damn near any quality you want, including 44.1KHz @ 24 bit right down to mp3. It is your choice.

The record can be pre-ordered from my bandcamp page and should be ready to ship out around the 8th March.

I hope you like it.

The New Record

Well, the new record is finished. There are still a few things to do before it comes out, but it is done.

It is a full length album entitled ‘Tales from a Broken Heart’ and will be available on CD and as a Digital download. The record should be available for pre-order around the 16th – 17th of February and will be released early in March, hopefully within the first 10 days. I can’t be more precise as I’m waiting for manufacturing times etc.

Check out the website here:

http://www.octopimusic.co.uk

Tales from a Broken Heart

The track listing is:

1. Stay
2. Until I See You
3. You Left the Wrong Man
4. All the Days
5. Tick Tock
6. Alone
7. Everything Just Aint Enough
8. And I
9. Over Now
10. Tale from a Broken Heart
11. Beautiful Clear Water

Ressonant Font

Well, the new font is done. I’ll let it speak for itself.

Get the Font here

Ressonant Font

Cranes, Spain and Romania

Our double weekend began with a flight to Barcelona. For everyone reading this who are in bands and want to tour, you will get there and you will do it, if you continue to pursue it. I will give this one word of warning. The things you can never plan for or forsee will be the very things that fuck up. But here’s the good news…you can do nothing about these things apart from deal with them as they arise. This single attribute could decide how well you will take to, and succeed, in touring life.

For these trips the timings were tight. Flights could not be missed and there was little to no movement in schedules. That’s ok though, that’s just touring. The flight to Barcelona got off to a bumpy start. Stuart, our sound engineer, didn’t like it at all. Personally, I hate smooth flights, frankly they bore me. The plane, though, flew on, shrugging off any turbulence that was thrown at it but I did mange to continue taunting Stu with comments like ‘They don’t make them like they used to!!’ It’s my idea of fun.

We were met at a pleasantly warm Barcelona airport by Alfonso and whisked off to our hotel. Literally just around the corner was the Sagrada Família. In the evening we all trotted up there, had a drink and met up with Alfonso’s friends who had helped to promote the shows. I am not a fan of the Sagrada Famíli. My main issue is that it has been built to look ancient. But it’s not ancient and you can feel it. It is impressive, don’t get me wrong, this is just a personal thing. Eventually, it will become ancient but won’t that mean it’ll just crumble to the ground? Most things wear and crumble as they become ancient so I wonder what will happen to this great building. The latter part of the evening saw Ben, Jim and I popping to a bar with Alfonso and some new friends. There is a picture of us at the bar, below. Notice how everyone, yes, even the hairy bastard on the left, is pretty hot.

The next day, like a bunch of avid tourists, some of us wandered down to the sea, had an ice cream and forgot, just for a moment, how shit the weather really was back in England. Ben and Jim found a little cafe that sold good cold beer for €1. They were very happy. Our show was at Salamandra 2, and a fine venue it was too. I was asked to check over the hire gear and it was first rate. Everything we’d asked for in superb condition. It made setup very quick and soon it was time for the show. Again, we did a good 2 hour show and the audience was fantastic. Keyboards were all run from my poor old G4 laptop but it stood up superbly as did the Blue Meanie which loved going through the Mesa Boogie Mk IV. Hmmm, you beauty.

The next day was an early start and the mega fast AVE train to Milan. Alfonso got off to a bad start as his night didn’t end after he left us at our hotel. He stayed with fiends, spoke to an ex-girlfriend and got into a fight. To cut a long story short, we managed to get our train which takes under 3 hours and reached speeds of 297km/h. Unfortunately, the windows didn’t open. It was cooler, temperature-wise, in Madrid and we attempted to check into our hotel right away. This, much to Alfonso’s dismay, was not going to happen though. He wasn’t pleased as it was not a cheap hotel at all!! We sodded off to get some food and on our return, after all our equipment going in and out of ground floor storage rooms in a monumental fuck up of mis-communication, we got into our rooms and slept for a while. Our venue in Madrid was Sala Cats, another fine venue indeed. We played over 2 hours and it is sooooo good to be playing long sets regularly. I never want to play less than 2 hours ever again. There was no time for anything but sleep as we had to be at the airport first thing in the morning and back home to England. It was a fine trip with fine people.

The following weekend we had our Bucharest show. Romania is a place where none of us had ever played. We were prepared for it to be very cold but the moment we got off the plane (after our 5am UK start) it was very very warm indeed. We were met by Cristian and some helpers. Jim, Ben and I went in the van with our equipment and the rest of the people went in the car. Our driver was Flo and he was a brilliant Romanian. On our drive to the hotel we spoke of Russian and Romanian architecture, the differences in the written word now that there was less Russian influence, the Euro and the European market. As it happens, we were all in complete agreement, we’re all pretty much fucked. Flo gave Ben his number and offered his social guidance that evening if it was so desired. It was a great introduction to Romania. Our hotel was fabulous, small, friendly and unbelievably welcoming.

In the evening a lot of people went to Pizza Hut but I wasn’t going to be in the centre of Bucharest and eat at Pizza Hut. No. I wandered though the mix of Russian and Romanian architecture which sat grandiose amongst the the modern vile glare of new buildings which were mainly commerce. I walked North along Calea Victoriei past the statue of Carol I, first king of Romania which stands outside of the fantastically Romanian Central University Library. There was a Bistro that was recommended to me in the Athenium area, which was, by no accident, where I now was. So I managed to eat Romanian food in Romania. Not a difficult task. I wandered until about 11pm then went back to the hotel. Pizza Hut my ass! It was this evening when I really missed Jon Callender, our former drummer, as he would have also paced the streets of Bucharest in search of Romanian delights. Ben and Jim went to Flo’s house and was treated to an evening of family Romanian hospitality and they had a great time and made many new friends.

The next day was our show day. We were to play at 11pm so it made no sense to make an early start. To accommodate this, I didn’t go to bed until 4am. We walked to the venue where our equipment was waiting for us. Again, all the hire equipment was first rate and I managed to get a couple of quick pics of my setup. The venue was small and packed solid and once again, we played a 2 hour show. The audience were tremendously noisy and I hope our first visit to Romania will be the first of many.

We had to leave the hotel very early to catch our flight back to England and because we’d miss breakfast, the hotel made us all sandwiches to take with us. Unbelievably thoughtful.

A cool couple of weekends. Thank you to everyone who came to the shows in Spain and Romania.

Spanish Friends

Romanian Icons

Romanian Icons

Blue Meanie and Boogie

Keys in Romania

Albums and Cranes Shows

Well, my record is nearly finished. The majority of the last song, called ‘You Left the Wrong Man’ is almost complete. I will look to finish this final song by December and then think about the mastering. It will finally be done. Snippets of the record so far can be heard here, please feel free to comment on them. The order they appear in the little player on the linked page is not the final order. Just something I stuck up there to keep people off of my back and who keep bugging me to ‘put something out’!! Well, it’s coming so you can just shush your pie-holes now.

It’s that time again, Cranes rehearsals. Once again, lots of songs being rehearsed for our upcoming shows in Spain and Romania. During the week I had the Blue Meanie on the bench, tuned down a semitone and re-intonated the stubborn bitch. Locking trem guitars are bastards to intonate. But it needed doing and it is done and she’s all greased up to do some filthy work.

This time out we’re flying to the shows so I won’t be taking the boogie. Yes, I hear you cry, time to have your equipment smashed to shit by baggage handlers, hmmmmmmmmm. Hired backline will be brought in and I have a spec list for amps. All three on the list are Boogies and any one of the three will do just fine. As long as I don’t turn up and find some knackered Fender Twin that a million users have flanged the piss out of I’m sure it will be fine. Fuck knows what is happening with the keyboard setup though. I have my laptop/mainstage setup and I will take that plus a midi box so all bases will be covered.
If you’re thinking of coming to any of the shows they are:

• Spain, Barcelona at Salamandra 2 on Friday November the 23rd.
• Spain, Madrid at Sala Cats on Saturday November the 24th
• Romania, Bucharest at Panic! on Saturday December the 1st.

If you come to one or all of the shows, PLEASE come up and say hello!! Don’t be a stranger. And, of course, it is a welcome break from being cooped up day and night with those other bastards.