AuxMix - Showcasing Talent

Simons Audio Setup!

As the title said this blog is about my audio setup :D

I have a x-fi extremeMusic sound card along with Logitech X 5500 5.1 Stereo Speakers.

info on my layout click here

encase the penny did not drop the cable management system was..... a joke. although it does actually look like that behind my desk. I call it 'Wire City'.

Nice Audio in film called "Hitch"

As many of you know who have digital TV, the film called Hitch was on this weekend (Easter weekend).

I have seen it many times before as I have it on DVD but just thought I would let you know that it has some really nice audio in there.

The audio that the director has chosen for each of the scenes I think works really well....

In case you have not seen the film Hitch, its all about Will Smith who plays Alex Hitchens. He's a date doctor who goes around setting up average joes with typical girls.

If you haven't seen it I would say you really need to! The film makes perfect sense as to how typical girls act. The director made a packet getting this message across and I think every women should see it. At least then, maybe women would come to release that us men are not the same!

This is what happens when pro-tools goes wrong

Common Digi-Design please fix the active directory code errors!

AuxMix Site

As Chris has just posted up what he’s looking for I thought I’d share what I’ve been up to, for the web development module we've been given the task of coming up with an idea for auxmix.com and I’ve kind of gone along the lines martin said in the lecture/lab a couple of weeks back if any of you can remember!

I’ve gone with the sort of mix of professional look and fun and rather playful at the same time! The layout in my view has been kept simple so you can easily find your way around the website without having to spend 5mins working it out...

The menu can be found via the "pull me" chain which then drops down the menu for moving around the site a similar system is in place for registering on the site and also resetting password if you forget it.

Registering for the site is easy its using a php/mysql script which stores name and email address and password with md5 (encryption) so everything should be nice and secure.

On the main page I’m planning on implementing a hacked version of the RSS feed from the blog to show the last to posts (may change the limit I don’t know just yet).

The site is coded using XHTML 1.0 Trans and CSS and if you kick the style out you can still use the website without any problems which is great for usability.

I’ve checked the site in Firefox, Internet Explorer and on Safari on the Apple Mac’s and there doesn’t seem to be so many differences in the design, so looks like for once my coding for CSS is getting much better and all the pennies I’ve spent on books has finally paid off!

Anyways if you want to check out the site you can at

http://auxmix.magicbug.co.uk

Design Ideas

So here I am pondering on what we need for Auxmix.com in terms of the quot;front-end".

When I say front-end I specifically mean the main page, the home page, the start page which sits in the root folder and named index.html.

Essentially with a project of this kind we need to understand whom our target audience actually is, we need to understand the demographic, where these people are coming from and what they are seeking, we need to understand what type of person the site is designed for and what type of content that target audience would be stimulated by.

Moving on then, I feel we can draw up two main target audiences here.

1. Potential students interested in our courses.

2. Employers and other persons with a vested interest in what is taking place within the audio related areas of Technology at BCUC.

Those two items above are the main themes I personally feel this site should cater for. This leads us on to thinking about the actual content we should display in order to meet the above needs.

I think our greatest asset is YOU, the current student, it is exactly what you are engaged with, producing, understanding, creating, examining (enough buzz words) that is to be explicitly shown off on Auxmix.com. The site is a SHOWCASE for your talents and abilities (which will grow in magnitude), which enables (we hope) the above target audience to, for want of a better phrase, "a piece of the action".

So what content do we need?

Here is my list, feel free to add anything:

Blog (heard a good film recently? - tell everyone why. Found some good audio samples for an animation? Strange noises on the bus?

Podcast (great idea this, essentially a student time-shifted radio show)

Moving images (created a cool animation?)

Music (mixed a tune?)

Course outlines and module details

Sponsors (who's helping us out, shops companies etc)

How to apply

Ability to create an account profile (this is so we can notify people in
the future by sending a newsletter)

I think the list could go on, though that's enough for starters.

Now I think the way forward for the initial design is to come up with a template that enables the content to be imported into varying content areas. So for example clicking on a link in say the top navigation menu would change the content below, though the nav menu stays the same. Having the design this way allows for expansion and importation and integration of the content required.

Moving on further I know Martin is looking to have some of you design for this, or possibly anyway, but bear in mind you need to finalise what will you are being assessed on as I am acting here as an industrial person who is indicating some site design needs.

Please feel free to open up the discussion, anyone need a blogger invite please e-mail me.

Chris

Big Ribbon Mic VS Tiny M-Audio Mic

Hi again,

Another microphone review from Simon again....

Jason from Rainbow Bridge kindly lent BCUC another microphone to test out this one is;

Another NADY one this time its a Ribbon type of microphone and the model is: RSM-2.

Chris took a picture of it on his mobile it looks like this when its all setup:

As you can see from the image above this microphone is a beast! - the image doesnt really do it justice the general size of this thing sets the standard alone hehe.

Another cheeky question is "Does size really matter?" - well do you know what, some people might despute this but I would say it does not....

The Ribbon Mic I used here was just as good as the large diaphragm one but the large diaphragm one was smaller in size.

The smaller one will give you good quality dont get me wrong but to be honest if I had the £350 - £400 I would shell out for this puppy, its Big! and it gets the job done nicely!

Click here to listen to the podcast - lol - done by me and pete. (I'm on the big and expensive mic and petes on a cheepy m-audio mic ;).

Assignment 3 Showcase!

Hello AuxMix Readers,

How are you all bearing out? Still visiting the blog then :)

blog by me simon again hehe...

Just letting you know if you need inspiration for your interface for your assignment mine can be found by visting:

mm106h.custompixels.net just remember not to copy or rip the design, all the blog readers will know if you do, ha ha. (sorry evil laugh :P)

NOTE: works well in Internet Explorer, not so well in FireFox.(Before you start moaning about IE, theres nothing wrong with it, if you havent got the balls to secure your PC down enough for IE to find security holes thats your problem.) If you try and run it in FireFox it will ask you for plugins. To cutt a long story short you either need Media Player 9 installed or Quick Time.

currently taking bribes of £1,000 if you want one designed jk :P

Hope your assignments are going well, and everyone remembers the deadline for this friday thats the 31st of March of this year incase people have forgotton.

Microphone Review 1 by Simon Hall

Dear readers of AuxMix.com,

Another blog once again done by me, Simon

You're getting tired of reading my blogs right, well here is something that may interest / help you when doing part 1 of your theory of sound assignment.

My question for you to think about is: "Does a large diaphragm help, when recording voice?"

Encase you're not aware part 1 is the audio recording of you speaking which is basically an introduction to you're show reel.

Well in today's lab session me and my friend peter tested out two different types of microphones.

They were both capacitor mic's but two different types some links to details about then can be found here:

Below is a link to an expensive one made by M-audio, model is Pulsar, m-audio make some decent equipment don't get me wrong but I will explain more about that later, please click the link below for more information:

Link to m-audio pulsa microphone.

The next microphone I will talk about is a NADY SCM800. This microphone is cheaper but delivers an amazing result which I will talk about in a minute.

Link to NADY microphone.

Ok here goes....

M-Audio Pulsa Mic

The M-audio microphone was less sensitive when talking into it, it was genitive enough to get a great output don't get me wrong but I found it took a lot of effort to get a decent result.

When using the M-audio mic, you couldn't really move around a lot if it was on a stand. By this I mean you kind of had to stand still and talk directly into it without the end result sound really low and faint.

Another thing I noticed when using the M-audio microphone..... - well I am not to sure if it was BCUC's dodgy male to female connectors on our mixing board but when recording while playing yourself back in the headphones it sounded like you were talking down a drain pipe. Although when playing your recording back through your headphones it sounded OK. I say "OK" - because I wouldn’t actually say it was perfect but hey it was, well ‘ok’ you could listen to it lol. :)

NADY SCM800 Mic

Now then.... This was a beast! - for £40 you couldnt go wrong. Who said you don’t get quality for paying a low price :P

This Mic really was business; it was much heaver to hold then the Pulsar one and just generally felt like it would function better then the Pulsar one.

The NADY Mic was really dead easy to set up no need to worry about positioning with this baby as it could detect you from standing anywhere in the booth as it has a large diaphragm :)

My answer to the question I made you think about earlier was "Yes a large diaphragm does help" - it works wonders!

I can't really explain enough how much off a difference this was between the Pulsar microphone - The NADY mic really done the business when speaking while recording it would play back while recording clear and playback after recording just as good.

EDIT: to listen to the audio recording me and pete did with the microphones, please click here.

My advice.... get one! - You can’t go wrong at £40 :)

Assignment 3 - My Best Effort :)

Dear fellow readers of AuxMix.com,

Simon Hall here again to have another stab at doing some more bloggin for ya ;)

Assignment 3 for theory of sounds & Music Production is moving at a very fast pace now as the handing in date is lurking around the corner.

everything is done basically, even the dreaded report that I just know people are not going to like to write as its a lot of content. Well me personally thinks 3,000 is a lot. But some people are lazy I suppose and choose to write less ;)

My best effort for the assignment has to be my remix of 'One and Only'.

Check it out here.

P.S - Microphone review Blog coming in about 1 hour stay tuned ;) - give me chance to write it lol.

Emotional Lines

Forgive me community I have sinned, for it has been x days since my last blog.

So the assignment for 106 is coming closer and I’ve seen a great deal of you “beavering” away on various aspects of this beast. It is a large assignment, though most people seem to be discovering some interesting things through engaging with it.

In this blog I want to share another picture with you from my collection (oh so vast) taken at Electronic Arts. The picture in question is particularly interesting as this is a real working scene in progress, which outlines what is known as an emotional line.

What you can see on the bottom of this picture is a line varying in height moving from left to right of the page indicating varying levels of emotion, or excitement/intensity if you like.

Naturally most moving images need sound to convey the emotive content, which is where the maps like this come in to play. Without the audio there is very little emotion at all, very very little.

So my picture below was a sneaky peak at one of the Sound Designers of EA mapping out their emotional line, and ideas for a particular scene, you can see they have added circles with words in which represent the types of sounds taking places at particular moments through the time line.

Lots going on in just this one scene eh? - click it for a larger view.

Blog Entry 3

Well after finally getting one of my assignments out the way today, I can now really concentrate on working on my theory of sound work. Today I have been working on my star wars clip adding effects to it, and a backing track to go with it. So far so good, everything seems to be falling into place quite nicely. I’ve not really used Adobe Premiere Pro so nothing advanced is going on, just keeping it basic. Going to also try some stuff in Adobe Audition as well, to try and make some more effects add some reverb etc to sounds. Thought I would share this website that I have found very useful for downloading some star wars clip and other effect, www.findsounds.com .