Chapter 3 - Holy Sh#t! Most of that I didn't know - Posted on 2015-04-23 by Daniel Bubert

Hello out there in audio student land, it's me again. Well, Let me tell you about chapter three. I started reading chapter 3 thinking I had a decent grasp of how digital audio worked. Boy was I wrong. For instance, Sample Rates: I understood from the onset that a higher sample rate meant better quality sound although I never really understood exactly why. Now after my lesson it's kind of a "Duh" moment as I realized how very obvious it should have been. Its quite interesting how sampling actually works. I'd never heard of the Nyquist theorem before and the analogy used to explain it also helped me to understand why wagon wheels always appear to be going backwards in old westerns

Moving on. After going over the lesson with Derek we talked more about developing critical listen skills. Having just recieved the first master references of my band's new record I asked if we could do a side by side comparison of my mix vs. the mastered reference. We proceded to load the same song ( one of my mix and one of the mastered version ) into a pro-tools session. Derek gave me the controls, which was not exactly enjoyable because I have no experience navigating pro tools what so ever. Let alone first time on a Mac. Derek pointed out thing the mastering engineer might have done to make the master sound the way it did and also ripped my mix to shreds. But hey, I did that mix on a combination of headphones, and in my extra bedroom armed only with the "knowledge" of mixing I could find on various audio blogs strewn across the interwebs.

Monday: Monday I was able to sit in on another recording session. It was the same artist as last monday. I arrived at the studio at about 3:30 or so and helped Derek clear out/clean up the live room before the musicians showed up. We then started to backline the room with the various mics that were going to be used for the session. We started with some vocals while we waited for the string players to get there. I was very excited for this as i have never watched anyone play a violin up close before. Also I was curious as to how Derek was going to be micing up the strings. For the "lead" violin he used his U-87 and a ribbon mic ( I didn't catch what brand or model) placed slightly above looking down between the where the neck meets the body and where the strings are bowed. The player was quite good, as far as I could tell. She had a really nice sounding violin as well. I over heard her tell one of the other string players that it was from the late 1800's, which I thought was Rad. I was at the studio for about eight and a half hours and was finally able to go home and get some much needed rest.

Well that was my week last week. Talk to you all next week