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Author Topic: ...on the polishing of turds  (Read 10553 times)

PP

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #30 on: December 29, 2004, 06:22:45 PM »

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wwittman

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #31 on: December 30, 2004, 12:02:39 AM »

Apparently, someone once said to Stanley Kubrick. "you can't polish a turd".
He thought for a few minutes and then replied, "you can if you freeze it first."

Now THAT is a creative mind.


The aphorism is really only valid if you're CERTAIN you can actually recognise said "turd".

More than a few widely perceived turds go on to sell millions of units or tickets or tee shirts or whatever.
Making them, at least econmomically if not artistically, worth polishing.

Kubrick had a MUCH better attitude.
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William Wittman
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Fig

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #32 on: December 30, 2004, 11:10:09 AM »

Hi Keith,

Excellent thread.

I love it when Peter gets stirred up about something important,


such as turds.

Keith Smith wrote on Wed, 29 December 2004 10:55


It was also nice to get far enough away from the turds to see the, er, bog? I haven't turned this system on for almost a week and now I'm afraid to hear what I was working on.


Fear not thy passion.  Your quest is noble.

Retreating to fight another day, as it were.  Encouraged.


Quote:

More often than not, for my own work, where no invoice is written, it doesn't really start that way.



Agreeing with Eric (?!?), invoice or not, herein is where polishing benefits most.

Preproduction.

Starting "that way" will allow for better finishes (or in your case, perhaps finishing it at all?).


Quote:

It's often just recording to document the form or concept of a tune, and then something nice happens, which leads to many hours of trying to get a guitar sound that just isn't there because the recording preceded the concept development.



Understand, some of the best recordings in history started out as "merely" documentation.

A difference, I think, between those and what you might be experiencing, Keith, is the application of will or rigor to ensure that EVERY document sounds good on the way to tape (or HD or what-have-you).

Miles said something like, "every time the horn touches my lips... you press that red button."

A challenge with a spacebar, to be sure, but I digress.


Quote:

The net result is volumes of stuff that's 'almost' there.



A clear indication to move on, while meticulously applying lessons learned to each new attempt.

These lessons include things like:

I'll never do THAT again (to the guitar or the snare, etc.)
or, that's a good clean vocal sound

but hopefully will NOT include:

we'll fix it in the mix
or, its just a scratch track.

Treat every track equal whether it be your own instrument or someone's you have never met.  Each sound deserves our personal best, don't you think?

This is a behavior -- not a matter of equipment, or clientele, musical style, etc.  Do not settle for "garbage in" and you will experience less "garbage out".  This includes performances as much (if not twice as much) as tone colors, mix balances, etc.

Adopting such perspective will empower you to simply not record poorly, even if it is "just" recording to document.  No one in the room minds waiting a moment for sound quality's sake:

move that mic one more time
use that other mic pre
add this, subtract that
try, try, try.

Try everything you can think of, you'll remember what does NOT work.

You'll be surprised how easy it is to mix, when tracks go in sounding good  Cool

But it is the attitude of it being "just a demo" or what-not that erodes the plumbing in your particular septic, perhaps.


Quote:

So I guess the real turd is the one that's recorded by a client for a price, and the price of rerecording precludes the completion of concept development (by both artist and recordist) and so you get out the files, and the 600 grit paper to produce something that pleases no one.



Insightful, and sad.  Yes.

<< Flush. >>

Someone said the artists are their own worst enemy.

I do not envy the performer that is also the recordist.

One man, two enemies.

Besides, its hard to do-nothing-but-listen, when you are playing an instrument.

Photographers rarley take pictures of themselves, who would mind the F-Stop and focus?  


Quote:

I'd really appreciate a few words on when to use sine/pink.


In the control room?  Never.

Ummmm.... No, that's not right.

No expert here, but, sines have a lot of focussed energy, specifically at its frequency.

Noise-like signals have a "spreading factor" -- could be the same amount of energy but spread out over the entire spectrum.

Might I suggest some crital listening in addition to your measurements?  Listen to records you think sound great, as often as possible, on as many different systems as possible.

It keeps the goal fresh in the mind.

Very best of luck, Keith, and thanks to the thoughts from this forum.

Osci-later,


Thom "Fig" Fiegle



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Keith Smith

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #33 on: December 30, 2004, 02:15:17 PM »

Jeff: Thanks for the post. I was obviously fishing for a reply from BK, but he does seem to be quite properly preoccupied with another, and I'm sure, more interesting thread right now. No matter. I'll take all the help I can get with full gratitude!

As I understand it, the 1 kHz sine wave as a calibration signal has been around for a long time as a method of calibrating tape heads esp.. I'm not clear as to its usefulness in the digital world, so if anyone including you wants to chime in on that I'd be interested to read their responses. Is it one of those magic frequencies? Would something lower, higher or noisier be more appropriate for digital? Just wondering out loud, if you will...

Peter. Oh, Peter: I do especially appreciate those who love language, and realize it must be fed to be sustained. Every time you send one of us off to his dictionary, you do a service to the English-speaking world, and I thank you for it.

When I read "You appear to have grasped the ‘Dynamics’ of my point…… Undoubtedly it arrived as an 'entirely complete Wave'….." I had a chuckle. "Hey, wait a minute", said I. "That was MY point!" But, in reading back, I realize it was something I was thinking while wrting to Bill, but never stated, or hadn't formulated quite properly in this little head of mine. You've helped me immensely in thinking about this analogous relationship between photographic and audio art and Mr. Adams' role in shaping my approach to both.

A little history:
I slipped from music into photography in the late 60's. It seemed a natural thing for me to do at the time, as I enjoyed the science, the optics, and began to finally grasp the completeness of the inter-relationships between everything we do in this physical world. For example, how the harmonic overtone series applies to everything from music, to radio, to light and right down to balancing the wheels on the car. For someone thrown out of school in his mid teens, these things were a revelation.

Still, no matter how one works on the explanations, the technique, and the mechanics, the Art can remain so elusive.
You can imagine my joy when I found myself in a machine shop; a place where the output is tangible and measurable; where junk is junk, and specification relieves you of the nagging doubts about merit. A veritable holiday for someone struggling with art. Anyway...

"I’m sure Mr. Adams, was excruciatingly sensitive to this issue, precisely as you have stated....

But whether Mr. Adams would agree with it, or not……

The words….. Remain objectively true…..

And effervesce with verisimilitude…"

I recant my position, (having run off to my dictionary). You nailed it. It's the struggle with a medium that appears, on the surface, to give you a free ride.

When I differed with you, I was thinking about his methods and not following through to his objectives. Yours was a more holistic analysis.

If I might dare to summarize Mr. Adams photographic mission, I'll try with this: To deliver the emotional impact of the original scene to a remote visual experience, despite the necessary reduction of scale (in size, colour, tone, contrast, and dimensionality) that the new medium imposes. If you'll accept this in principle, then just substitute audio for visual and it still holds.

In order to do this (for the benefit of those with less exposure to Adams than we), he started with calibration. He looked at input vs output, and considered the variables in the process. These consisted primarily of exposure levels, development, chemistry,  and the reflectances of the various print materials at his disposal. He devised a system of setting out the entire process so that even before he 'pushed the button' he knew with absolute clarity, what would be necessary to deliver his vision of the scene before him to a piece of paper as a finished and compelling work of art.

So in short;
Exposure levels = recording level: So, where on the audio characteristic curve shall we place this sound, such that every detail is faithfully recorded and falls on a part of the CURVE, where the contrast between adjacent levels suits our purpose. In photography this relates to placement of the shadows, ensuring that the darker details are not lost in the opacities of the filmbase plus fog (noise floor).

Development = Playback fader levels/compression settings: Here he controls the density (level) of the highlights such that the brightest highlights fall on the maximum reflectance of the paper and there are no large areas of  blank white which are devoid of any detail or texture. (No lack of dynamics even in the loudest passages.)

Choice of paper = selecting an overall dynamic range: I suppose this as being akin to mastering, but certainly not unaffected by mixing.

Choice of Chemistry: This would be related to limiting and compression, carefully used to preserve or augment the most subtle dynamics. and EQ, of course!

Burning and dodging = heavier use of EQ and multiband compression: Definitely coarser mix techniques

This is fine as far as it goes (and please do embelish where you see fit, i.e. preamp selection, tape or digital, etc.) in a mechanistic way, but the crucial thing is still the previsualized image.

It seems to me the real task is to (sometimes very quickly) assess the sonic situation and make some very critical decisions at the beginning about what the end product needs to sound like, assuiming one has learned the skills to manipulate it all in a sensible and predictable way (hmm, that's a big one!).

Mr Adams did have the luxury of living in a time when technological developments in his medium were occuring at a much slower pace than they are in audio today. For any project, he had 2 characteristic curves (negative and print) which he learned to manipulate with chemistry, time and temperature.

How we would aggregate the huge variety of I/O curves from the gear available to even the most humble studio today is quite beyond me. But somehow, I feel that in this analogy must lie some simple premises that would help folks like me 'tame the science' and get back to finding the Art.

wwittman: Walt, well said. Kubrick was a very good lateral thinker as evidenced....

Thom: Thanks for your very thoughtful reply. It has been good to observe the bog from afar. This takes us back to where we started, in a way.

I was really struggling with whether it's better to beat your head against the wall for 18 hours a day, or just stop and listen to someone else's work. And of the 18 hours, how much time is spent farting about, vs the time in which a lesson is really learned. I am frequently guilty of 'trying to hard' and 'working hard -not smart'.

I observed (but, it seems, failed to learn from) how different musicians experienced and dealt with 'plateau's' through their early years of development. I was always a bulldozer and just plowed through them relentlessly, yet I saw others who would practice a bit less, and emerge a month or two later, none the worse for having taken a break. Maybe I can learn that now -but I am a bit of an old dog.

Thanks for the heads-up! Smile

Ciao,
Keith

PP

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #34 on: December 30, 2004, 06:23:42 PM »

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ted nightshade

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #35 on: December 30, 2004, 06:50:44 PM »

Well, there's polishing the turd, and then there's gilding the lily.

My eye-opener was a session on an ADAT and a Mackie board, back in the grunge days, not that we were playing grunge- tracked it all live to 7 tracks and left one for vox to be overdubbed. Did a little ultraquick mixdown at the end of the session with no EQ and everything at unity.

Then flailed about for weeks and weeks doing whatever this "mixing" thing is- at the time, it seemed to involve great greasy globs of Mackie EQ and Lexicon reverbs- <shudder!>

Then by random happenstance someone put on the "quickie rough mix", which sounded WAY! better.

I can take a hint.
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Ted Nightshade aka Cowan

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Bill Mueller

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #36 on: December 30, 2004, 10:34:33 PM »

Keith Smith wrote on Wed, 29 December 2004 11:55

Does this make sense? I'd really appreciate a few words on when to use sine/pink. I'm also just bit suspicious about the quality of pink noise noise generators in general. I've beeen using my Roland VS-2480 for this purpose. The sine wave output seems to be rock solid, as one should expect, but the pink noise seems to have the peak meters jumping around quite a bit, which makes me wonder how well 'integtrated' (?) the pink noise is.

Thanks to everyone,

Keith


Keith,

I won't attempt to answer your question to Bob. However I can contribute to the  Sine wave/Pink noise question. Actually the question is Sine wave, White noise/Pink noise.

Forgive me if I am going over ground you already have covered.

An ideal Sine wave is a single frequency waveform. That means that it contains NO harmonic overtones. Such a wave is inherently stable and so it is convenient for calibrating tape machines and amplifiers.

An ideal white noise SIGNAL is comprised of all frequencies at equal amplitude, within the (typical) bandwidth of 20khz. Because all the frequencies are not in phase with all the other frequencies in a white noise signal, some cancel while others reinforce. This internal interactivity causes the inherent "drift" or instability that you refer to in your Roland. This is unavoidable. There is nothing wrong with your Roland in this regard.

Equal amplitude at all frequencies does not mean equal POWER at all frequencies however. With every doubling of frequency, the power doubles, because the wave peaks are pushing on the medium twice as many times in the same interval. Therefore, in order to measure equal power, (the way we hear) we need a source of equal power at all frequencies.

Pink noise is filtered -3db per octave from it's fundamental frequency on up, and so delivers equal power at all frequencies. The random phase relationship within a Pink noise signal makes it somewhat superior to a sine wave for testing speaker/room response. This is because it does not excite room resonances the same as a sine wave. There are so many frequencies next to each other that they sort of smooth out each other.

However Pink noise is not ideal for measuring speaker/room response either, because it can hide those deep anomalies that will be excited by the in-phase characteristics of low frequency music. There are other, more expensive methods that render more accurate real world results.

I hope this is helpful.

Best regards,

Bill

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PP

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #37 on: December 31, 2004, 08:41:42 AM »

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Keith Smith

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #38 on: December 31, 2004, 01:03:08 PM »

Ted: I get the hint too. Here's where audio is quite analogous to machining and welding, as well as photography. The more you mess with anything -the worse it gets. The best successes I've had in the past year have been distant mid/side mic'd recordings in a church with the absolute minimum of plugins -just a bit of EQ and dither to 16bit. These made me feel like a genius. But sometimes it's a devil of a job to keep your fingers out of the pot!

Bill: Thank you for posting again on this thread. You've cleared up much of the question I was asking, and of course generated a few more. In this regard, I am thinking along the lines of my conversation with Peter about the analogous properties of photography, and much of that has to do with calibration. It seems somewhat easier to set up a print viewing station where the colour balance and intensity of light are controlled, and then you can A/B two prints quite conveniently -you can even cut them up and juxtapose the areas in question. Getting this kind of quality control in audio seems to be another matter, and those of us who start with digital (as referred to in John Hardy's thread) find ourselves in a real quagmire of uncalibrated goop where understanding the output for a given input gets very difficult indeed.

If I'm grasping the essence of my recent reading properly, the best approach to audio seems to be to start from the back end (something almost none of us do). What I mean is that if we started from day one with a good room (which begs the questions; how do you know it's good, and when are you finished treating it?) at least there would be one 'known' in the system. then a means of calibrating output for input -just for the monitor system by itself -2 'knowns'. You see where I'm going. I've seen very little in the way of methods to approach it this way. Can you (or anyone) suggest some reading?

I guess it boils down to: How do we really know what we're listening to? Adams had no doubts about what he was seeing.  

Perhaps I'm guilty of wanting to methodize this too much, which would be anathema to some folks. I believe there were some who might have criticized Adams for this, but his results were beyond arguement.

Peter (to both posts): Ah, yes. The analogy continues, and I have bags of unused plugins to show for it!

Alas, my situation has usually precluded the sustenance of more than one activity at a time. Much of my photo gear was sold to finance the beginning of the machine shop, and the proceeds from that were lost in the mayhem caused by a lengthy illness suffered by my dear departed wife. (I am aware of your recent losses and you do have my condolences.)

At this time, the photo gear consists of an 8x10 (quarter plate to you) Burke and James, and a Mamiya C220 nicely kitted out with three lenses and a few other odds and sods. I have an earlier model of your Manfrotto -same max height but not so good for the low stuff. When it comes to tripods my big favourite has always been the Benbo, which I still have, with a Manfrotto Ball & Socket head (same camera shoe as the big one). The Benbo is often not loved by those who were not blessed with three hands, but it is IMHO the best thing for those of us who like to put cameras in nasty places (esp. small architectural interiors, and low-down nature shots).

And speaking of systems, the best camera I ever had, and the one I may replace some day, was a Linhof Technika 70 with 5 6x7 roll backs. With the anatomical grip, it was a wonderful hand camera, and with all the roll backs it was very easy to implement the Zone System without the nasties of sheet film (dust, mainly).

Most of my photography was done when I lived near Toronto, and I dreamed of being able to tour the mountains to emulate my dearest Mr. Adams, whose portrait adorns the wall of my studio. Now I find myself living in Calgary, shut in a room with the window closed and speakers endlessly vibrating, staring at Cubase, with scarcely a thought of dragging the 8x10 1 1/2 hours into the Rockies. That's irony, for you.

I thoroughly agree with you on the good sense of a systematic approach wherever it can be implemented; and this is one area where I really struggle with audio. As I alluded to above, in my message to Bill, the idea of being able to calibrate all the I/O's, and thus get a real understanding of what I'm hearing is very attractive. I've got lots of plugins with FFT's available, but without one between the speaker and my head it all seems very suspect. I thinks there's a flat mic and an RTA in my near future!

Happy New Year to you and Ted and Bill ... and everyone else too!

Keith

Oh! PS: Your pal's lighting gear reminded me of a machining project I was involved in with a photographer friend of mine in the early 80's. We built a mobile camera crane on a Mercedes sports car. The crane could rotate 720 degrees and raise the camera from 14" to 14' above the ground, with a 16mm cine camera or similar sized video -I think the biggest camera we had on it at that time was a Hitachi SK-91. The camera operator sat in the passenger seat with a video monitor with full pan, tilt, focus controls and the crane man stood behind the driver in a cage.

We shot video up to  90mph. The crane was counter balanced for wind and weight and could be rotated comfortably up to about 50mph. I got to be the driver. It was a great deal of fun. Too bad for us that Steadycam was well into the market by then, or we might have made some money!

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #39 on: December 31, 2004, 02:03:03 PM »

My apologies, Peter.
It just dawned on me I had said 'Quarter plate to you'.
I just checked my aging 1961 BJ Almanac (do they still print those?). I guess 8x10 would have been something a bit smaller than full plate, but then, I would assume some of those sizes would have lost currency by now, anyway.

Ciao,
k

ted nightshade

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #40 on: December 31, 2004, 04:12:18 PM »

I'm thinking good old Ansel Adams had to learn to see all over again.

And as far as I have been able to ascertain, there are not so much good rooms as there are good places in rooms. The better the places, and the more of them, the better the room. I count myself very lucky if I can find a good place for the instrument and a good place for the mic- or, a good place for the speaker and a good place for my ears.
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Ted Nightshade aka Cowan

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PP

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #41 on: December 31, 2004, 04:31:17 PM »

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PP

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #42 on: December 31, 2004, 04:37:22 PM »

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ted nightshade

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Re: ...on the polishing of turds
« Reply #43 on: December 31, 2004, 04:40:26 PM »

Happy New Year to you too Peter!

God Bless Us Every One!
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Ted Nightshade aka Cowan

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