Posts Tagged ‘pro tools’

Inside the recording process

Friday, February 26th, 2010

The vast majority of music that I hear is recorded, and if you’re reading this the same is probably true of you. Most people don’t have a clear idea what the recording process is like, especially using computers. Here are my adventures in recording.

I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

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Copyright Criminals

Monday, January 25th, 2010

This PBS Independent Lens documentary on sampling culture is a good one, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Their resources and links page includes my Biz Markie blog post. Thanks Beautiful Decay for posting the videos.

Part one:

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How we wrote this song

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Boys And Dance Floors

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Revival Revival vs Janet Jackson

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Right-click or option click the links to save the track to your computer.

There are as many different ways of writing songs as there are songwriters. Barbara Singer and I have arrived at a good one, so I figured I’d share it with you in the hopes you find it inspirational.

Like all of our tracks, “Boys And Dance Floors” began life as a string of looped samples in Reason. Here’s the sequencer window.

Each brick is eight bars of four-four time. The top two tracks are different samples of “What Have You Done For Me Lately” by Janet Jackson, just synth bass and drum machine. Both loops are the same basic groove, but with subtle differences: one has a backwards cymbal crash building up to the end and the other has a quiet crash at the beginning. The other two tracks were added later. The third track down is a sample of Barbara singing “Fire, fire” in an intense voice that we have filter sweeping in at the beginning and end of the song. The bottom track is another loop of Janet that only appears in the live version. Peach is for the intros and outtro. Light blue is verses. Green is choruses, with the darker green as the prechorus and the lighter green as the chorus proper. Orange is for instrumental breaks and purple is the bridge. If we ever try to release this thing commercially, we’re either going to have to license the samples or program something else. Hope Janet’s people are willing to make a deal.

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Janet (Ms Jackson if you’re nasty)

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Here’s my remix of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” featuring Barbara Singer, Nicole Bishop and Candida Haynes.

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Janet has been on my mind a lot the past few months, what with Michael, and I was driven to go listen to Control again.

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Björk thought she could organize freedom, how Scandinavian of her

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Björk knows how to balance the coldness of electronic production with hotly unpredictable vocals and instrument textures. Her approach is eccentric and her sound gets on some people’s nerves. It took me a couple years to be convinced by her. I’m glad I hung in there, because she’s been one of my best teachers in the art of making music with computers.

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Loop mode: improvisation is composition is recording

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Before digital recording media, recording artists faced a tradeoff between spontaneity and perfection. Recording take after take until the performances are spotless can quickly suck the joy and energy out of the music. But the kind of sloppiness that goes unnoticed in a live performance can get on your nerves after many repeated listens. It’s possible to splice different performances together with tape to make a seamlessly perfect one, but it’s a labor-intensive process. One way around the tradeoff is to have the best musicians in the world. The Beatles knocked out their early albums in a matter of hours. Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue took only two days of live recording. These kinds of heroic feats of musicianship are only possible if you’ve spent years playing together professionally, like the Beatles, or if you put in many hours of a day of disciplined practice, like the guys in Miles Davis’ band, or ideally, both.

Another method to get lively yet polished recordings is to use ferocious discipline to create the illusion of spontaneity. Michael Jackson was able to give his performances on Thriller so much polish by recording take after take after take, all at the same level of manic intensity, with his grunts and screams arrayed precisely and intentionally. I can admire the focus he was able to bring to bear over long hours of tedious studio labor, but the psyche that produced his work ethic isn’t something I’d wish on myself or anyone else.

The digital audio workstation offers a third way out. (more…)

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Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re trying to do it by mechanical means. Our great-grandparents would have been astounded at how cheap and ubiquitous timekeeping devices have become. In my apartment alone, I can get accurate time measurements from two computers, the cable box, two cell phones, a drum machine, a metronome, an ipod, a thermometer with a built in clock, and a digital camera. Probably the least reliable timekeeping device in here is our analog clock.

Before the explosion of cheap electronics, most people had no external way to keep time so accurately. Before the industrial revolution, there wasn’t much need to. The only reason you would have needed precise timekeeping was for music and dancing. (more…)

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Mashups as micro-mixtapes

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Back in 1966, Glenn Gould predicted that recorded music would become an interactive conversation between musician and listener. He described dial twiddling as “an interpretive act.” He was wrong about the dials, but right about the main point, that technology would make listening to music more like making music. Anybody with iTunes instantly becomes a DJ. It doesn’t take much more software than that to produce your own electronica. Some copyright holders and their lawyers are feeling a lot of anguish about this development. For the rest of us, I think it’s an exciting new opportunity, a chance to restore music to its rightful and natural state as shared property, a dynamic conversation anyone can be part of. (more…)

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Learning music theory with Auto-tune

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Auto-tune makes producing music easier. It can also make understanding music theory easier. The way you dial up different keys and scales doesn’t just guide your ear, it also guides your eye.

Your voice can produce a smooth continuum of pitches. To sing, you eliminate most of those possibilities, vibrating your mouth and throat only at certain frequencies, the pitches of the melody. Auto-tune helps by shifting the voice’s frequency to the closest desired piano-key pitch.

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Digital audio is just long lists of numbers

Monday, December 8th, 2008

How do you get sound in and out of a computer? There are two steps. You have to turn the sound into electricity, and then you have to turn the electricity into numbers.

Turning sound into electricity

At the physical level, a sound is a rhythmic vibration of air molecules. Your ears can detect subtle changes in the air pressure, and can reconstruct good guesses about what might be agitating the air to produce those changes. When the air pressure fluctuates in a steady sine-wave pattern, you hear a musical pitch. The faster the fluctuation, the higher the pitch. Microphones work a lot like your ears. They contain pieces of metal that vibrate in response to the vibrations of the air, generating a fluctuating electromagnetic disturbance.

Analog recording stores the fluctuating electric current. Vinyl records store the fluctuations in the undulating sides of the spiral groove. Magnetic tape stores the fluctuations in the alignment of tiny magnetic particles embedded in the plastic.

Turning electricity into numbers

The computer takes in fluctuating current and turns it into numbers.

The analog-to-digital converter in the computer’s sound card has a clock, like the one synchronizing the activities of the computer generally. At each clock pulse, the converter takes a reading of the current on the wire and finds the closest numerical value out of a finite set of choices. The quality of digital audio depends on two factors: how many different possible values the converter can assign to the current, and how many readings it takes per second. When you see a reference to sixteen-bit or twenty-four bit audio, it means that each sample is a sixteen or twenty-four digit binary number respectively, taking 2^16 or 2^24 different possible values. The more bits in each sample, the more accurate it is, so 16-bit samples are twice as accurate as 8-bit. More frequent sampling also helps to create a closer representation of the original waveform. Standard CD-quality audio is 44,100 samples per second. This sounds like an incredible speed, but CPU clocks routinely operate thousands of times faster than that.

The image shows a four-bit analog-to-digital converter.

The red line shows the amplitude of the wire’s voltage over time. The sixteen horizontal grey lines are the different voltage levels the converter can detect. It takes four bits of data to specify the sixteen different values. (Four-bit audio sounds terrible but is easier to draw.) The tick marks on the horizontal axis are clock pulses. To produce sound on speakers or headphones, the converter agitates the wires in the stairstep pattern, which your ear averages out into a pretty good reconstruction of the original sine wave.

Once you have your current stored as numbers, you can do a lot of cool stuff. Any sound in any digital medium is basically a spreadsheet with two extremely long columns, one for each stereo channel. In 16-bit audio, the numbers in the columns range from zero to 65,535 (2^16 – 1.) One second of stereo CD-quality audio is two lists of 44,100 numbers each. If the values of the numbers range smoothly along a sine wave that cycles four hundred forty times per second, you hear a computery beep playing concert A. If the numbers fluctuate along the pattern you get from superimposing the sine wave with another one that cycles six hundred sixty times per second, you hear two computery beeps a perfect fifth apart. Add in another sine wave doing eight hundred eighty cycles per second and you get the I-V-I power chord beloved by rock and roll.

All of the audio editing and processing that happens in Pro Tools and programs like it boils down to systematic mathematical operations on your lists of numbers. Auto-tune looks for sine wave patterns and alters them so they snap to the closest piano-key frequency. At the transistor level, Auto-tune is no different from Microsoft Excel, except that it acts a lot faster on bigger lists of numbers. Copying and pasting repeated sounds is the same procedure for the computer as copying and pasting a list of numbers or a string of text.

You need a fast computer with a capacious storage capacity to do serious audio work, but we’re lucky enough to live in an era when even a garden-variety laptop can handle good-sized Pro Tools sessions. We can Auto-tune Babsy’s vocals live through her laptop at Revival Revival shows with processor power to spare.

To turn the list of numbers back into sound, you need a digital synthesizer. The synth has various oscillators that produce analog current according to digital signals. Any computer’s sound card has both an analog-to-digital converter and a digital synthesizer built in. They probably perform adequately for most purposes: cell phone calls, video game music and sound effects, playing mp3s in noisy environments. However, if you want pro-quality digital sound, the computer’s built-in hardware is probably not going to do it for you. The computer is a noisy environment, with a lot of electromagnetic activity packed into a small space. This is not the ideal setting for accurate voltage readings. For professional audio purposes, you want a specialized piece of hardware located outside the computer case. I use an Mbox 2, Digidesign’s intro-level Pro Tools compatible device.

The great miracle of music for me is not any particular technique or piece or performer, but just the fact that it exists at all. A single linear wave can encode all the rich complexity of all the sounds we hear. This wave is as easily translated into numbers as dollars can be translated into pizzas. Really? The complete works of Bach, Coltrane and M.I.A. can be losslessly encoded as a two-dimensional waveform? All that music is two-dimensional curves, voltage vs time, or air pressure or guitar body flexion vs time? Apparently, yes. Cool!

Our brains are stupendously adept at detecting patterns of patterns of patterns in the linear waveform of air pressure, deconstructing and comparing the component sounds that went into it. If there are multiple frequencies present simultaneously in the pattern of vibrations, we can distinguish them and, with a little training, detect the ratios between them. I feel like we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of the artistic possibilities of mathematical operations on numerical audio data.

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