Inspirations / Distractions – Gordon McGladdery

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There was a very inspiring and motivating post over at Designing Sound today from a great young sound designer who I've had the pleasure of getting to know via the Vancouver Sound Design meetups named Gordon McGlattery.

I’ve learned there is a distinct difference between hobbyist/personal inspiration and professional inspiration with deadlines and accountability.

I’ve lived through both and prefer the latter.

I enjoy insights into the journeys people in indie media have taken. They are often solitary journeys in which they have had to find their own support and drive. Gord's is a good one as he's had his hand in many awesome projects already!

You can follow Gord on Twitter at @ashellinthepit

Don't fear the REAPER

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(note: I am fully aware that the majority of blog entries on this topic share the same article title)

There is so much to learn about REAPER!  The scrappy DAW alternative that has been slowly building is reputation over the last 10 years is so incredibly modular, customizable and flexible that to go into it without having a goal in mind of how you want it to work for you is almost counter-productive. It's best to bend it to your will, to mould it in the image of the DAW you want it to be, the DAW you'd like to use.

There are plenty of useful (and some not terribly useful) resources but I can't see anything more valuable or educational that Jon Tidey's The Reaper Blog with articles, tutorials and inks to workshops and personalized training - it's the gateway to a community of power users that revel in sharing their expertise. It's worth any price, and secondary to buying yourself a proper REAPER license (which is kinda sorta not totally necessary but HOT DAMN should you ever do it - SUPPORT)  it is wholly deserving of a contribution to the tip jar. Jon was good enough to visit a meetup I attended at the Centre For Digital Media a few weeks ago and do an intro talk to REAPER. He's an excellent sales pitch and makes it all seem very accessible.

And who doesn't like a good acronym? 

REAPER: a Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording. 

Heh. Sure.

Pro Tools: First and 12 (Not about football)

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Pro Tools has announced that the new Pro Tools 12 will have another new edition: Pro Tools | First.

Some people may remember the last time Pro Tools did this in the year 2000 (cue Conan O'Brien) with Pro Tools Free (v5.01). The Mac version worked relatively well and the Windows Me version... well it was a Windows Me version. It did, however, let me learn how to use Pro Tools and allowed my university (which no longer exists, so I can admit our possible breach-of-user-agreement without fear) to put a copy on every computer in our lab giving all the prospective sound geeks continuous access to Pro Tools.

Pro Tools | First seems to take a similar approach (back then it was by Digidesign, before Avid bought and since re-coded the entirety of the software) but can be confident of their improved cross-platform performance. Also, it should give them a good opportunity to load-test their new cloud-based project storage system, which is a new feature of the version 12 family. If that became widely used before they iron all the bugs out, they'd only have to lose a couple of big projects before the flaming bags of poo started to fly.

In talking with several other Sound Designers at our Vancouver Sound Designers meetup over the weekend however, the prospect of the new pay-per-month licencing system unsurprisingly has a lot of people turned off; and in some cases downright livid. Discussions immediately turn to what systems current users are thinking of switching to. 

While a monthly licence fee has been gaining ground in the professional media development world (See: Adobe Creative Cloud) and the costs can even be less in some cases for staying up-to-date, it's a daunting prospect for the independent / small-time designers that perhaps only upgrade every-other version or stay behind because, say, they spent $5000 on a digital console that still works perfectly fine but for some reason the new version decides to not support any longer (what do you mean that one sounds personal?)

Contenders around the bar table were Nuendo, Cubase, Logic and REAPER, that last one being new to me but apparently a choice pick (and also there was a brief ironic mention of Audition CC). Different users all seemed to argue the strengths of their favourite over the others, but the prime concerns in switching from Pro Tools generally seemed to be: Keeping your plugins, not having to get an additional hardware licence, and most importantly being able to preserve your workflow. That last one is a challenge because of course because everybody uses their DAW differently, from Old Habits That Die Hard to codependence on other external softwares (I personally can't imagine removing Sony's Sound Forge from my toolkit, I know and love it so well).

A lot of the early emotional reaction to this seems to be that someone else will come and take the lead among the defiant who don't want to be held to a monthly contract - but how many will cave and just add "software" to their monthly operating costs?

Pro Tools 12 is expected to be released in summer of 2015.

How to hide a lavalier mic

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I found lav mics to be the best and worst things when shooting entertainment. I love them for close up sound, the versatile wireless set-and-forget functionality and dynamic range, but the few ways I knew worked for hiding them were sometimes problematic and usually awkward. Usually it involved some method of taping the mic to the inside of the actor's shirt (which you could usually see the tape from the outside) or right to the chest of the actor (I've ripped more chest hair off of strangers than a first-year esthetician). Then, of course, when working with performers of a female persuasion, I get all stammery and sweaty (not because of any problem on their part, they're always pros) but where else would the best place to hide a lav mic on a lady be, than... right... in.. front?

At any rate, once again No Film School has found me the expert tips that I could've used long ago in the guise of one IzzyVideo.

I look forward to having a better relationship with these little sound ninjas in the future! Thanks fellas!

Basics of audio post-production

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No Film School shared a video created by the brains at Filmmaker IQ on The Fundamentals of Sound in Post Production. It does a good job of introducing the basic tools that sound editors and mixers use to work with production audio (it doesn't really go into any track-editing tricks, just mixing tools.)

At first I thought it was a little too basic because host John Hess does spend a lot of time on EQ (which of course, as the fundamental sound modifying tool, other than volume, I thought everybody already knows)  but he does a great job of explaining what all the tools are, how they work and how they can be used. He covers EQ, Compression, Limiters, FFT and noise reduction and even some time-adjustment stuff like delay, chorus and reverb.

It's time to open up the digital audio workstation and look at the basics of common tools used in post production audio from Equalizers, Compressors, Noise Reduction, and Delay effects.

One Of Us: Episode 3

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Episode 3 went live quite some time ago, I am posting about this now, as this is the new blog page!

Billy The Kid is a long-suffering touring performer of which a great many wonderful and complimentary things have been said, particularly in the year or so since this podcast went up since her latest album has been released to much friendly acclaim and she has been performing all around Europe and North America with the likes of Chuck Ragan, Northcote and Billy Bragg when she's not hanging out with the likes of Ryan Adams and Frank Turner (stories within!)

Please enjoy the attached interview with Billy, and check out her latest record (referred to within) at billythekidonline.com!

One Of Us is available on iTunes

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades by Billy the Kid is available on iTunes

One Of Us: Episode 2

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Episode 2 is now up, with what is arguably (audience wise, certainly) the most successful creative project I've been involved in to date: TrueNuff TV!

Moze, James, Cranston and I reminisce about the genesis of the project PRE-YOUTUBE (yes, there was a time) and what going viral is like (or was like back in 2006 before CNN ever learned what the term meant.)

There's a lot of talk about learning by doing, learning by doing the wrong thing, and learning by going along with other people when they assume you know what you're doing. The key lesson here is doing, which is something that when left to my own devices I forget.

These guys, plus Brando & Rob from TrueNuff Comic (Episode 1) have been my closest collaborators and and strongest supporters (and harshest critics) for too long now to fathom. I would be happy knowing that I would get to continue working on fun projects with these guys, even if the final product never got seen by anyone.

Hope you enjoy!

Also, One Of Us is now available via iTunes.

One Of Us: Episode 1

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New project! I'm now venturing into the podcast realm with a new series called "One Of Us" - a discussion with an in-group of people so you can get inside! That makes sense, right?

The first episode is with my longest-running creative endeavour of TrueNuff Comic, which just turned 12 (YEARS OLD!). As this was my first one, I'm learning the challenges of the mix and directing the conversation (animated discussion among friends turns into a lot of talking over each other) but I'm happy with how it turned out! I'm hoping to get a feed on iTunes soon and the new website www.oneofuspod.com is still updating but should be online in a day or two one the name records on the domain server update.

Feedback is much appreciated! Listen now at One Of Us.

SoundCloud

York, ON M6C 2N2, Canada
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I finally moved on an ages-old suggestion by

Threeboy

to jump on

SoundCloud

and do some audio dumping. I've put up some of the back catalogue of musical and aural things I've come up with for various

TrueNuff

projects of the past - I don't think it'll just be final stuff though, I want to throw up some of the bits and pieces, the works-in-progress that make up the vast majority of the things I've actually recorded.

If it weren't for the deadlines of things like the video projects I don't know if I'd ever release anything as final. Perhaps I should rename my personal studio to "Development Hell."

J.Rai's sounds on Soundcloud

Beer Pop/Music

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As I mentioned previous a couple weeks ago while I was in Vancouver visiting I hung with the TrueNuff boys and did some video-ing. While I was there James also showed me the newest addition to the merch store: a Cute little Japanese "safety bottle opener" they labeled as the "Beer Popper." We wanted to shoot some kind of commercial clip for the new item (even though by the time it went live they'd already sold half their stock!) We did land on an idea of something in the vein of Vince "Offer" Shlomi of ShamWow and Slap Chop fame:



What we ended up shooting was an improvised informercial pitch spot in that style. With a little clever editing on the dudes' part it came out this way:



Now one of the best things to ever happen to the Slap Chop brand was a killer video and music remix by the now-much-better-well-known DJ Steve Porter that was known as "Rap Chop"



So as an exercise in what I figured was inevitability, I thought I'd beat out the a) request for me to try doing a remix and b) the other fans that might just do one first anyway, and do my own. I wasn't going to do the auto-tune/vocoder stuff of the other one, I just wanted to edit, beatmatch and slice. While trying to make some drum beats for it though, I realized I was trying to replicate the beat from The Soulsonic Force's "Planet Rock" - so I figured screw it and I just decided to do a Mash-Up, which seems to be all the rage right now anyway (or at least it was, it may be on it's way out yet.) Here it is:



Doing the edit was a lot of fun and I forgot how much fun it was - I hope to find other little things like this to have fun with coming up.