Location, Location, Location

The first rule of real estate is also an important consideration for a band. Playing loud music at all hours of the day and night is, in most neighborhoods, frowned upon to say the least. Well, we've been lucky in that respect. Drummer's dad rents space in an industrial park. It has been nice to have a free place to practice and record, but the dad hasn't been using the space for his business lately and is looking at closing/downsizing to reduce costs. Basically, we now have a deadline we didn't have before. We'll have access to the shop for at least January '08 and probably through the end of February too. Anything after that is up for grabs.

Guitarist and I took most of last Saturday to clean up and fix up our space. It was a functioning industrial shop in the not too distant past. Lately it has been a big mess with a drum set in the corner. It is looking quite snappy after several hours work. We swept and shop-vac'd, cleaned and wiped. Now all of the metal shavings that were all over the floor are in the dumpster. We have a sort of orchestra shell made out of plywood behind the drum kit. We have a makeshift vocal booth (based on the ideas from the Mac Idol article). We've got a sort of control room set up behind the vocal booth. That night guitarist, drummer, bassist and I inaugurated the new set up with a play through of all of our original material. Not necessarily the last time we will all play together, but bassist has now made it clear that he isn't really interested in writing or recording as bassist. He has expressed interest in being our part-time, substitute recording engineer. Since I am the current recording engineer (as well as vocalist, co-songwriter, and part-time second guitarist), I will be glad to offload some of my recording duties when I can.

Now for something a little different...

Can sound be upside-down? The answer is yes and no. If you have a single mic picking up a sound source, you have nothing to worry about. The sound wave will be changed from sound to electronic signal and then back again when going through a speaker. The problem is if you have multiple mics picking up a single sound source and one of them is upside-down, the upside-down mic will be picking up the signal upside-down from the others. When you blend the sound waves together in your mixing program, they will be out of phase with each other and actually cancel out the fullness of the sound. You end up with a thin, unprofessional sounding mix. Kind of an ironic result when you are specifically adding mics to get a better sound. The key to all this is to reverse the phase on the signal coming from the upside-down mic. If your mixer has this handy switch, then you're sitting pretty. If, like us, your mixer is without said switch, you need to purchase an adapter like this one. We have yet to buy and try and there are no ratings on Amazon. I'll be sure to post an update when we test this out. Until then...