taking things apart

the famous $14 ’steady cam’

razi — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:15:09 +0000

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 â€“ 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.

pre-show construction and repair 1

razi — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:37:54 +0000

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.

sticks

razi — Thu, 17 May 2007 02:51:38 +0000

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.

you shriek: spies on zero zero island

razi — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 07:34:18 +0000

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.

there is hope

razi — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 06:59:41 +0000

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.

get in the box - notes to self

razi — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 08:59:47 +0000

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. this only amounts to 8 channels of analog audio to monitor, so i can use my current audio i/o (echo Layla) for the task. i’m talking about direct monitoring with the device, in this case- not putting audio into the host computer for mixing and output. i’ll certainly need to do that, but my one greatest aversion to the whole concept is mousing the “virtual mixing desk” on screen. almost as bad would be paging thru banks of channels on a virtual control surface. that is to say, i like the idea of having a real fader in front of me that will reliably and predictably operate on the signal i’ve sent through it when an awful sound is suddenly in need of squelching.

but really, i like doing most of my level matching, eq, fader moves, and mutes in-the-box already. no compromise there. i don’t hear anything particularly nice that the mackie mixer imparts on the signal, so i don’t think i’m loosing anything doing all of my summing in digital. so far i’m living OK without the real faders and busing matrix. but i will need to have my returns from the studio toys end up in the mix, so i’ll need a decent number of inputs. add maybe 16 to cover all the reverbs, delays, compressors, eqs that might want to be heard. and one requirement is that most of my vintage and/or crappy old keyboards must be normaled thru to the mix at all times. add another 16 or so inputs. the rest of my stuff can live on the patchbay.

i still don’t like the idea of relying on one computer to pass every signal in the place to the speakers… or to wait for it to boot just to hear the electric piano… but then again, i really couldn’t count on the analog mixer to present every channel line in at the 2mix, and although that was an enormous pain in the ass, it didn’t kill me.

so i’m figuring out what cheap, old, used pieces i can throw at this project. the shopping list is coming along. more on that later.

red tape

razi — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:00:11 +0000

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.

Things inside the wall

razi — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:56:14 +0000

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.

3d Studio (min)

razi — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 05:22:41 +0000

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.

not making things for some time…

razi — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 20:49:57 +0000

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: