Dual channel mic preamp
Things have been busy at St. Anne's, as usual. It's a great parish with lots going on!
On my days off I've been working on my latest electronics project: a dual-channel microphone preamplifier. I built it using the SC-1mk2 kit from www.fivefishstudios.com. The cost for parts was pretty much what it would have been if I had built a similar circuit from Jensen Transformers and ordered the parts from regular electronic sources like mouser.com and digikey.ca, but with a very important bonus: printed circuit boards! Printed circuit boards are orders of magnitude easier to work with than the perf boards I used for my mics, where I hand-wired everything.
(Well, sort of. I still managed to destroy a voltage regulator IC. Umm, it's not a very good idea to try and adjust the heat sink while it is still attached to the IC. The chip kinda broke into two pieces. Fortunately, a replacement was found at a local store for $2.)
I have yet to use it for any recording, but it sounds great when I connect it to my monitors. It seems to have a nice, natural-sounding tone. That was my main reason for wanting to build some preamps in the first place: the preamps that are built into my Presonus Firepod are ok -- they're great value for the money, actually -- but they can be a little harsh-sounding with certain instruments. The high quality amplifier chip and the Cinemag input transformer that are used in the SC-1mk2 preamps should help warm up the sound and bring out more of the depth of acoustic instruments - all the while being a lower noise device than the Presonus preamps.
I'll post some recordings when I have a chance to make some.
Here are some photos. See the Facebook page for more.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=394628&id=793360323&l=966c23a382
Is This Thing On?
(The Recording page has *finally* been updated!)
Over the past few years my family has written and recorded a number of songs. I decided to take the best ones so far and put them into a little album on my iTunes playlist. I'm happy to share the tracks with you!
Note: all of these tracks are still a work in progress. They may be updated at various times.
Track List
In these tracks you can also hear the evolution of my attempts at drum recording. About a Time, Pirates, and You Are include drums recorded in a very basic way, and then augmented with samples. This involved a very tedious process of manually creating the MIDI data for each snare and bass drum hit. (Logic Pro 9 was not yet released, which has the capability of doing automated drum replacement.)
In Mirror of Eternity I went the opposite direction, creating programmed drums and then augmenting them with some recorded hihats and cymbals.
The drums for Rockem Sockem Hockey were recorded last summer, but before Stephen and I had properly tuned the snare drum. As a result, the quality isn't as high as in more recent tracks. I hope to try some sample replacement on the snare drum soon.
Our Song, Not Gonna Sing, and Millette Guitar Concerto are using recorded drums with no sample replacement. They turned out fairly well, I think! I still need to make a few adjustments (especially to MGC), but I think I've now got a good method for recording drums with my home made mics and the Shure SM-57 on the snare top.
Happy Sunday and Summer Vacation are using purely programmed drums.
What do you think? Any mixing or recording tips to pass along?
New stuff
Here's just a quick update:
1. Elaine and Brendan are now engaged! Congrats! (It's going to be a busy summer next year, with Danny & Becca and Elaine & Brendan.)
2. Due to Fr. Les's illness, I've temporarily been assigned to St. Anne's parish in the north end of Saskatoon. (For any canon law geeks out there, the technical term is "parochial administrator," - Can. 540. :-)). It's a lot of work but the parish has been very welcoming! I'm also still living at Holy Family, since this is a temporary placement.
3. There's some new music to listen to. This is all a work in progress... the synthesized electric guitars really need to be replaced by the real thing, and the song itself needs a lot of work (like, some melody).
Music update
This is just a quick note. I've done a bit of additional mixing to the Mirror of Eternity song. It's all very subtle but I'm hoping that the mix sounds a little bit clearer and that it translates better to more speaker systems.
Mirror of Eternity - version 3
(If you are interested in the dry, technical details, the changes mainly involve: level and compression adjustments, slight randomization on the bass and snare drum, and the use of a linear phase equalizer. I particularly think that the new equalizer makes the overall sound slightly clearer, as other equalizers can tend to phase shift the signal. Phase shift isn't necessarily bad, mind you, but it does colour the sound and I didn't like what it was doing to the mix. As for the compression changes, they make the apparent volume seem slightly lower than before but the dynamics are better preserved. I also made use of a free plugin that simulates some classic compressor circuits to colour the sound a bit. I like the way it helped liven up the mix.)
Another new song
Here is something I whipped up on Sunday/Monday this week. It's done entirely with software instruments, using the Logic Studio jam packs. I think it comes close to approximating some real instruments, especially the African drums and some of the vocal sounds.
It is fairly upbeat and somewhat reminiscent of the Disney tunes for The Lion King. Because it's summer, I entitled it Summer Vacation. Yeah, I'm not that creative with titles. :-)