Good Quality Youtube Posts With Cheep Kit. OK - not super cheep but not blowing a £1000+ on a super camcorder either. My aim has been to get up to 720p with good clear sound and an easy to watch video quality for frequent and informative youtube posts. This proved to be more challenging than I had expected. Anyhow - I seem to have managed it now - so here is how I did it. The first thing I realised is that the built in webcams in my laptops (actually nearly all laptops) and my Chromebook, whilst OK, did not have the detector sensitivity or good quality lenses to make a really nice looking video post.
The solution was the remarkably inexpensive Logictech 9000 Pro webcam (in the video I call it a 900 - woops). The signal from the AKG is passed though a little mixer, then a gate and compressor. To put the whole thing together required Sony Movie Studio HD ( the lower end version of Vegas). This is the first video I recorded using the new techniques and it talks the viewer through the process. Low cost super handy video microphone trick. Have you ever wanted to record one thing whilst having a directional mike pointing in a different direction? I need this for recording the screen whilst doing voice over.
Here is a super low cost but effective trick to doing this. This is also a big experiment for me because it is the first bog post completely created from my Sony S1 tablet. I found that dolphin browser is able to cope with the blogger interface where the default android browser is not. Back to the trick: What I needed was a highly directional microphone which is very small, will just plug into the Panasonic camcorder and could be easily and stabilly pointed at me when the camera was pointed away. Such a thing could not be found. I also have a very low cost gorilla style tripod that was not strong enough to hold my camera. The recording quality is very much geared to voice and would be rubbish for music etc. How I Shoot Review Videos.
I started trying to shoot reviews a few months ago. Now I think I am just starting to get the hang of it. Here is the settup I use and some tricks. "There is nothing wrong with improvisation". That and "crap kick gives crap video" are the two things I have learned above all else. I am not saying that good kit gives good video. The little shotgun microphone which I improvised together has made a big difference to my recording.
I am no way near good at this yet; but the progress made so far is very rewarding: Shotgun, cardioid, omni - not death but microphones. AKG 702 - First Impressions. Well - I did it, I bought my dream pair of cans. OK, there are better cans out there (for another digit on the price) but these are like having your ears reborn. I have only been running them for a few hours and so every vibration makes them sound warmer and fuller. But, even given their non-burnt-in state, they are just amazing. These are not just an incremental step from the already mind blowing Sony MDR 7506 monitors, they are something else again. The complete lack of transient intermodulation is something that cannot be described unless you have experienced high end cans. But maybe the more amazing thing is the stereo stage. For the record, I am using a solid state mid range headphone amplifier, no way would I expect this kind of sound straight from a sound card.
Now - it is completely unfair or me to give a fuller review without burning these beauties in. 50 Hour Review. After 50 hours of burn in - just how good are the 702s? Here is a review and a youtube of me being amazed! 50 hours is still young, but the cans are mellowing out now. What was amazingly precise but a little harsh is now amazingly precise and well - just amazing. My glasses catch on a massive ear cups. These are huge. On to that bass thing. The effect is different from other headphones I have tried.
Anyhow - I expect I will review more later; for now here is a video review to add to the discussion here: Little Dot MkIII Valve/Tube Headphone Amp. The headphone amplifier does matter. It might seem daft - but a chain is only as good as the weakest link. With the recent purchase of my AKG K702 reference headphones the limitations of the headphone amplifier I was using became apparent. Driving high end headphones direct from a sound card is pointless, so I did not even try! Instead I drove them from them from the 'phone amplifier on a Behringer Xenyx 502 mini-mixer. That had enough drive but nothing like the clarity and detailing to get the very best from the headphones.
I found that get a really exciting, full sound I was using my Behringer DSP2024 digital effects unit to perform 'valve' emulation. The answer to this question is contentious. 1) Non linearity in the valve amplifier and output transformer (the latter is not required in a solid state amplifier) causes a soft clipping effect. This non linearity produces a 'warm' sound by injecting low harmonics into the sound. So what of the little dot? It is a really nice valve amp. AKG New And Old. Behringer UltraFex Pro EX3200 - Give Life To MP3s. This cheep, discontinued piece of kit is by far the my most loved processor.
MP3s aren't great. The compression takes life out of sound. That is not just my view - it is very much a shared view. A really good 320kbps mp3 transcoded from a very well recorded CD can be pretty good; 68but then CD is not perfect either. Then we have the way music is recorded nowadays. It is also available on YouTube and here as a video [note that the hd version has better audio]: Here are the images discussed in the audio: Back to the EX3200: The aim of this device is to add 'tricks' to sound to make your ears think it is bigger, wider, louder or more punchy than it originally was. Bass Enhance is done in one of three ways. Mid/Treble enhance does cool stuff to fatten out the mid and treble. Mid/Treble exciter does cool stuff I do understand! Surround the human ears and brain do not just use the difference in volume between the ears to work out where sound sources are. Also the thing as auto-noise reduction.
Reverberation For Spatial Widening. "What an odd little machine " the Etek Opera, nothing special apart from an excessively realistic reverberator. I found - by accident - this makes it really good for spatial widening of headphone listening! So what is reverberation and how can it help? The idea of reverb' comes from the way sound behaves in a closed space. It does not produce a simple echo but many echoes which interfere with one another and then from their own echoes. However, the early technologies for achieving this effect were very far from a realistic modelling of such echo effects.
A popular technique was to attached a transducer (like a speaker in effect) to one end of a spring and a pick-up of some sort on the other end. The spring then reverberated to produce the desired effect. These electron-mechanical systems made some amazing sounds, but were not very realistic. Adding back a little reverb' makes headphone listening (with good enough headphones) more like speaker listening. Behringer SX3040 Review. Equal And Just - Temperament Demonstrated. "All people are born equal and deserve fair and just treatment. " Whilst I believe this, it has very little to do with this post. Temperament is (also) a music term relating to the tuning of music. There are many temperaments, however, western music has settled on a very mathematical one called "equal temperament".
I create this video and podcast I show how this temperament creates a very slight 'out of tune' effect in harmonies in modern western music. The podcast and Youtube video are at the bottom of this post. From Wikipedia: What temperament is In just intonation, every interval between two pitches corresponds to a whole number ratio between their frequencies. The equal temperament scale is based on the 12th root of 2. In the next table we see the ratios from the equal temperament and how they (don't quite) match to those of just tuning: Whilst the differences are very small they have profound effects as I illustrate in the podcast and Youtube video. Off The Chart Epic Sound. YES! Been struggling for some time. Audio from a crappy CD players in computers is limited. For the very best I wanted a stand alone CD player - but they are very expensive or non existent nowadays - thanks heavens for ebay!
I have been struggling with the sound quality of built in laptop CD players. Also, some CDs really done work, or work badly, in computer players. So for the same of indulging my self, here is my audio chain for maximum audio madness. My second bank would drive a purist mad. Non of that would be worth the effort without the final two stages! The K702 reference headphones from AKG put anything else I have listened to into the shadows.
As I write this I am listening to Within Temptation. So - what next... IKey M3 Review. How To Record Acoustic Guitar At Home. It is all very well talking about recording with baffles, expensive software and a full 'home studio'. How can you lay down a good acoustic guitar recording in a normal home? Having given this a load of thought and quite a bit of experiment the technique I found which worked really well is and XY stereo recording using a couple of instrument dynamic microphones. Yes - I did say dynamic. Condensers might be 'better' but are expensive to buy and work with.Do not go buy new cheep dynamics. Get amazing ones second hand for the same money.Do record using a USB sound interface or even better a digital recorder.
*Do find a room that 'sounds nice'. Remember, this is about recording in your home or any other improvised environment. In keeping with the low cost theme, I fed the signal from these mikes in a super low cost stereo pre-amplifier: This is a terrible pre-amp. . * If you do use a computer, please try to use a laptop running on battery to avoid noise injection. What Is XY And Why Does It Work? Using The Internet Archive To Store Podcasts. Nerds Central. VSTHost as ultra-powerful, real time audio processor - FOR FREE!
VSTHost is free and lets you put together amazingly complex real time audio processing chains which replace hundreds or thousands of pound (dollars?) Worth of audio hardware! I started looking into VSTHost to make a real time de-esser. In a previous post I showed how to de-ess a recording by hand using a hi pass filter and auto-duck in Audacity. This - IMHO - works much better than the digital fishphones de-esser (spit fish). I have nothing against spitfish, it just does not seem to do enough even when passing through it a couple of times. So what is VSTHost? VSTHost converts VST pluggins into something akin to audio lego. Can this really be free - I was amazed when I figured out just how powerful this is! An Example: To illustrate the concept, here is a worked example.
Click to open in full size Step 1: Download VSTHost and all the pluggins you need/want. Step 2: The first step is to set up the audio input. Step 5: Now we have two output bands, the high frequency one is de-essed. VST & DirectX Plugins. Distant And Ancient - Wonderful Effects With A Behringer Virtualizer. Rs-met.com. Strobe Tuning Instruments For Free WIth Audacity. In this post I will be showing how to tune musical instruments using audio processing. It was my great pleasure to work on this with my brother-in-law Nick Pope, who is a tremendously skilled instrument builder. Whilst tuning string instruments like guitars is fairly simple using an electronic tuner, there are some significant limitations to this technique.
The basic one being that a normal electronic tuner will only 'pick up' a sustained note. During the constructions of a musical instrument, there is a requirement to tune the individual components (sounding board etc). A normal electronic tuner will not achieve this because the tone produced by these components is not sustained.
The perfect example is the sounding board of a guitar or octave mandolin. These should be tuned to the base frequency of the instrument. Traditionally complex and dedicated piece of electronic wizardry called a 'strobe tuner' would be used. We were using the following piece of software: Audacity 1.2.6. VST plugins [slim slow slider presents] このサイトではVSTプラグインを公開していきます。 All freeware!! Download(windows) * version 1.0.3 シンプルなゲート/エキスパンダープラグイン。 44.1k,48k,88.2k,96kの各サンプリングレートに対応。 更新 2005/9/19 version 1.0.3 Duckerモードを追加。 Download(windows) * version 1.0.3 上記プラグインのサイドチェイン入力に対応したバージョン。 更新 2005/9/19 version 1.0.3 Duckerモード及び入力チャンネルのアサイン切り替えスイッチを追加。
Download(windows) * version 1.0.2 コンパクトエフェクターの歪モノを模して作ったディストーションのプラグインです。 更新 2005/11/20 version 1.0.2 オーバーサンプリングのアルゴリズムを最適化。 Download(windows) * version 2.1.5* version 2.0.2(macOSX) * version 2.1(VST-X and AU) special thanks to apulSoft. 音声処理にLinearPhaseFIRを利用した61バンドのイコライザです。 Download(windows) * version 1.0.5 音声処理にLinearPhaseFIRを利用した15バンドのグラフィックイコライザです。 Download(windows) * version 1.3.0* version 1.2.1* version 1.1.4 windows用のディレイプラグインです。
Download(windows) * version 1.2.11* version 1.2.11(SSE supported)* version 1.1.8(macOSX) * version 1.2(VST-X and AU) special thanks to apulSoft. 下記のStereoCompressorを丸々3基搭載したマルチバンドコンプレッサーです。 更新 2005/10/16 version 1.2.11 ディレイ補正まわりのバグを修正。 Download(windows) *version 1.0.2. Audacity: Creating Drums From First Principles. Ambition realised - direct podcast recording without post processing. The more podcast recording I did the more I noticed how the post processing sapped creativity. But recording directly at a quality good enough to publish, creativity can be maximized. I have finally achieved my aim with a fairly good hardware signal processing chain. The side benefit is that it works backward (with the help of a 300watt PA amp) to make for an amazing music room!
[In the picture: front - netbook, left and right AKG D190s, box with '124' on it is the Etek, above that the gate then the Phonic Optimizer (with the rows of red and green lights as it is working hard on some dub-step), above that the equalizer and Behringer effect unit, on the right bottom is a psycho-acoustic processor and on top of that the power amp. The Behringer C3 condenser mike is above this image on the stand which is partly in the extreme left of the image.] On the recording side I use a Behringer C3 condenser microphone feeding into a Mic200 tube amplifier which gives a lovely full sound to the voice. Kill Echo In Audio Recording Without Rebuilding You Room!
Podcasts - The Easy Way To Empower Internal Organisation Communications. De-essing: What Is It And How To Do It By Hand (audacity) Voice Filtering With Audacity. Behringer C-3 Large Diaphragm Capacitor Microphone - First Impressions. November 2010. AKG D190E Review. AKG D900 Review - Initial Thoughts.