pretty amazing what people can shoot with a just a bit of inertial damping and a balanced grip. pipes & bolts:
this certainly takes care of the hand-held shakes – the rest is technique. here is an example of a first stab, without practicing. almost looks like something:
steady-style mk1 from razielpanic on Vimeo.
ok, i’ve been away from this weblog for a while, largely because it stands as a reminder that my studio still isn’t isolated. a Plan of Action has been drafted by those in the position of acting, but is yet unfulfilled. meanwhile, i’m doing some small projects to get ready to play live. step one: get the pitch wheel of this Oxygen8 to stop generating spurious data all the time.
it doesn’t seem to settle into null when the springs return it to center. next i’m building a mic stand with a place to put the Oxygen8. that’s already in progress.
if you’re following progress, you’ll glad to read that we’re now building the partitions in the loft. framing is done. electrical inspector signed off today. i’m going to go pull some UTP & coax (while neglecting music entirely.) balance what?
by the way, these beat the hell out of a reel of steel fish tape.
this video podcast i’ve been making now has a few episodes & seems to be a feasible - and thus ongoing - project. you can subscribe in iTunes to get the videos delivered directly.
i shoot with a Canon ELPH still camera in video mode, sending its composite output into an analog-to-FireWire converter on my PowerBook. iMovie captures the DV stream, so that’s also where i do the edits, titles, fades, and output. from there it is a one-click export to open a new RSS article / page in iWeb, and one more click to publish the results to my iDisk.
with every episode i have been itching to fall back on Final Cut & Compressor for vid cap / edit / export, Dreamweaver & BBedit for HTML / XML / text, published to my own Apache & PHP & MySQL & WordPress box - but i will not give in! this has to be kept simple, and the limitations of the iApps are going to impose that restraint. more about what one can’t do with this workflow later.
i’m told by A Person Who Matters that there will be some form of remedy for the party wall sound problem. and we now have a contractor to pull permits. building is imminent. meanwhile, seth has happened upon a whole shitload of sonnex and auralex. that’ll be nice for the proto-studio until i build the real acoustic fanciness.
this prolonged studio downtime might just be the kick i needed to ditch the big mixing console. i’ve been mostly holding off from doing any real song-writing in the interim, but it has just gone on too long. last week i broke down and got all the computers running in their old, usual capacity as synthesizers. (more…)
i can’t believe how different building shit in your own loft is when your loft is legal. not such a fine line between respecting ‘the spirit of building code’ and code. it’ll be a while before this thing comes to pass. i’m mixing on headphones for the time being.
In other news, this building’s developer claims a respectable 54 STC for the party walls. I now have solid data that I expect will allow me to completely and disrespectfully refute that claim. We ran test sweeps with the mic next door. just… bad.
Neighbor on the other side of my studio area’s party wall had a cold last week. I would not know this, but for the lack of isolation between our units. With this in mind, Blackmer suggested I open up the walls enough to have a look inside for acoustic paths. We suspected that the partition between units doesn’t extend past the corner, through the perpendicular wall, to the exterior rigid insulation- leaving a large flanking void to compromise any other attenuation efforts. I opened a 2″x3″ hole, and found a loose stud. Just hanging there.
Add that to the mistake they made in putting all of the outlets on one breaker, and we’ve got a little more reason to be suspicious of the GC’s talents. So we’re waiting for the electricinas to decide how to remedy their error, and now fretting about how to deal with the wall ’situation’. Now I’m wondering what we’ll uncover next.
At least we have plans! Here’s a draft. The final version is on paper. The anticipation is killing me.
Famous studio designer Michael Blackmer just came by to measure the space that will be my new recording studio. He’s serious…
to the point that I’m not sure I deserve a the kind of room he’s about to make. That AutoCAD file he left for me results in this rendering I made in C4D, via Sketchup for modeling.
That’s the bare room, as-built.
Next post will be his drawings. In the meantime, if you aren’t familiar with the Blackmer name, think DBX, Earthworks, and the Mercury space mission. A family of distinction to be sure.
because lara and i bought a loft. yay. we’re owners. in the South End, which is much better than the previous locale, South Boston. world of difference. i feel like i live in Boston again. More posts as build-out begins. new studio forthcoming. still shiny and new:
