Whew, Finished

So last night around ten o'clock I "finished" Dead Raid (the new title for Dead Residents.)
Immediately, of course, I found an error -- some missing bullet hits and ricochets in the first act. But there's a whole movie, color-corrected, with 5.1 mixes in both full English and with the Music and Effects split out.

At this point in the movie-making process I'm usually pretty annoyed with the movie I've been working on. And no, I don't typically blog about that. But this picture I'm still feeling pretty good about. A lot of the effects the writer, Steven Niles, was going for worked. Those can be hard for a director (me) to pull off but I think that somehow we did.
We're late on the delivery for this movie. Originally we'd promised February 1 (and you'll notice it's early April now). But we created a new prologue (and postlogue) which are kinda fun. The movie will be delivered by Cannes.
There's still a tremendous amount of work to do. First there's the quality-control checks. New mixes, new renders of effects, all that sort of thing has to be dealt with -- all in an effort to make the movie better. A complete transcription of the audio, along with timecode, has to be created. And just for fun, a copy of every single contract has to be double-checked and scanned and made into .pdf files. Then there will be a load of other paperwork -- mostly me signing pieces of paper which say how long the movie is, what the aspect ratio was, and a notarized form promising that the movie was made in the United States. 
I'd love to say I'm going to take the weekend off. But we have two more movies lined up for this year and somebody's got to get on the pre-production train for 'em.

Twilight of the Gods

Rehearsal this week with Diatomaceous Earth was Lou, Lily, Greg, and me. This meant that I was thrown out of the position of drummer.
We were also really tired.
Here's a piece of music called Twilight of the Gods.

This is an edited performance. The drums are just a single kick mic and a single overhead/front mic. Lou has been refusing to play with miked drums, and he's been refusing to play the ride cymbal altogether which, is, you know, not exactly the world's most musical thing.
Now here's a different version of that same piece of music. That rhythm guitar you hear is me in both versions, and Greg is on slide guitar. But the Pleasure for the Empire version of Twilight of the Gods has, er, me on bass and drums. It's not perfect. It's more of a "proof of concept". Honestly we need a cleaner way to get from the 3/4 section into the 4/4 section.But this is the concept.

Robot. Aye.

Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel was first published in '58. And yeah, there's some stuff in it which is kinda creaky. It didn't age 100% well. The computers in it, for instance, are comically slow. 

It's basically the story I Robot (the movie) was based on, even though there's another book called I Robot. So there's that. And it's a good story about a detective who hates robots who is (naturally) assigned a robot partner.

This was the art on the copy I read. If you like book covers which have nothing at all to do with the actual content of the book, this is the cover for you.

One thing I thought interesting.There is, essentially, a Voight Kamf test which takes place in the book. It's not to test whether someone is a robot but rather whether a robot has a working 1st Law of Robotics in place.

SaündFraud Skill Killer: Take Your Lack of Skill to the Next Level

This is my favorite April Fools so far this year.

SaündFraud Skill Killer.
Now if I could only get a pedal that would make me play more tastefully.

SaündFraud Skill Killer: Take Your Lack of Skill to the Next Level

This is my favorite April Fools so far this year.

SaündFraud Skill Killer.
Now if I could only get a pedal that would make me play more tastefully.

Roger and the Therapeutic Therapist

A short from our own Montserrat Mendez.

Le Maitre Neutron Hazer Maintain

If the Neutron is running and not displaying any error codes via the LED at the rear of the unit it most likely just needs to be adjusted.

First make sure the air pump is running and that the small plastic bottle on the same side as the heat tube is not full of fluid, if it is remove, clean, dry, and reinstall.

If you are comfortable doing so, remove the side cover (10 screws) to gain access to the PCB, just above the fan at the center bottom of the PCB there is a blue potentiometer w/ a white center, use a small flat  screwdriver and in small increments turn the pot to adjust haze output, too far on way or the other will slow/increase the fluid pump and cause no output or cause too much fluid and spit fluid with the haze.

 

 

Those are the notes from Le Maitre themselves on how to get our hazer to behave properly.

Things on or about the Internet Today

Jeff Wills wants to do a crowdsourced Twitter novel. I'm totally down with that. Here is the character I want to play:

Oops. That's a rabbit on the moon. Totally different character. Er. Here we go:
Mei Xin: I am a 29-year-old Chinese Special Agent (F) who works for the Chinese government on the Orion system. I wear sneakers, jeans, a short-cut leather jacket, and carry a 2mm flechette pistol. My biggest problem is alien smugglers bringing in photopsychedelics from uninhabited planets. Or, that's my second-biggest problem.
My biggest is that I've been infected with an alien nanovirus which lets me see 15 minutes into the future...

Holy cats. Do you want a really good software Foley instrument? Dig these free ones from Signo Audio Designs. They're for Kontakt (you need the full version, not the free version, ironically.) Signo has some very nice instruments for Foley. Reasonably priced, too. From Text to Speech is a pretty good text-to-wave web app.

Diatomation Direction

I think Lily came up with the perfect description of Diatomaceous Earth.

"Fantastic, goth-esque, masquerade-type event for which waltzes are the prominent feature and stately, sumptuous outrageous revelry happens with lots of watery darkness, weird wonderful costumes, and some sort of scented smoke…... maybe smoldering rosemary branches sprinkled with opium oil….."

Yup. That's pretty much what we've got going on here.

Here are some improvised pieces we did last week. Ethan on Stick, Lily on bass, Greg on guitar, Drew on drums.

Foley For You

Recording the RC car.

So today I bought an radio controlled car. And not for the 9-year-old-boy reason you think I did. No. 

We've needed something to make robot sounds for quite some time now. And the dude at Pilotage Hobby came up with with this RC car as a relatively inexpensive way to get servo sounds. 

The picture above shows the car on its back, on top of a music stand, being recorded by a Rode NT1. 

The servos seem to change in quality over time. We'll see how it all works out. 

Tomorrow will be robot Foley day in the Pandora Machine, that's for sure.

Pre and Post

You know what is a song I'd like to cover? This thing, Arctic Botany, could be played cleaner but the structure is pretty solid. I'm pretty sure this is Dave, Lily, Greg, and me. I think it would make an excellent side of an album.

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So. Preamps.
The operating theory has been for a while that the quality of a recording is an accumulation of subtleties. Which is why listening to any given preamp makes you think "Huh, that sounds pretty good." Even cheap preamps in (say) Mackie mixers.
But remember that mic preamp shootout a few weeks ago? Yeah. The differences between the preamps were pretty apparent. At the same time there really wasn't a correlation between expensive and good. In fact, the cheapest preamps were among the best-sounding.
The ART PRO MPA II is... well it's just amazing. The sound is (to use a real weasel term here) rather 3-D.
I compared the direct-injected sound of Alice, the Fender Squire Jazz 5-string, between the ART and the built-in preamps in the Focusrite preamps in the Scarlett interface.
The subjective difference is that the Focusrite were more, er, focused. And the ART were more broad and deep. Actually I'd say the Focusrite's were more accurate than the ART's. But that's cool. The ART preamps have plenty of color, which you'd expect from a tube preamp.

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As an old man I've started to get very grumpy about audio engineering. My grumpiness is suchly: once you've got gear that actually works, it's all pretty good. Spending untold amounts of money on esoteric gear isn't nearly as helpful as, say, practicing your instrument.
Maybe this wasn't as true back in the day of Realistic mixers and those early Tascam mixers. Because I had a lot of trouble getting those to sound good back in the day (mid 1980's).
But now I have Neve preamps and Apogee converters. They're not night-and-day better than even the Focusrite built-in preamps and converters. Not even dawn-and-dusk better. Arguably not even better in all situations. Am I contradicting myself here in the last paragraph? Yes. Yes I am. Just a little. I'm like the New York Times. Don't worry about it.

Skin Undertone

According to Amy Parlow:

The easiest way to determine your skin undertone is to look at the veins on your arm.  If they are green in color you probably have warm undertones, and if they are blue you are most likely cool. You can also tell by the color of clothes you gravitate toward.

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My neighborhood is the best.

And.
Languages included in the institute's easiest category are Danish, French, Italian, Spanish and Swedish.
And languages in the hardest category are Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin Chinese.

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Used DUI drysuits.

Quattro

Note this is actually me playing drums.


Drums are hard.

Could I become competent enough to record if I had enough practice?
Yes.
It would take a certain minimum number of months though. Perhaps many of those months.
My biggest problem is not that I don't know where the beat should be. It's actually executing the drum part. Hitting things with sticks at even remotely the right time is really quite difficult.
It's like finding a bunny on the moon.

This is a test.

This is only a test.
 
This is a test of the recording system in my apartment. It's made from parts and pieces of other bits of gear I've had lying around. Getting my Focusrite Scarlett to work on this laptop was a spectacular nuisance. I finally went to using ASIO4ALL drivers and that seems to make the hardware stay connected. Sheesh.

Alice now has Thomastik-Infeld jazz bass strings on her. I'll admit, they do sound very nice. They're thicker than the previous strings so the bass becomes a bit "grindier". I don't know if that means I should adjust the truss rod or raise the bridge or do nothing. I'll find out from Ethan.