Sound Recording - the WellMixed.com Blog

Electronic musician Brian Green - http://www.myspace.com/seeyouinsleep - has superglued 2 iPod touches onto a guitar to create this interesting instrument. It seems to put a lot of sound possibilities right at the player’s fingertips.

Green writes:

The ipod closest to the guitar pick ups is running Itouch Midi’s Matrix app which I’m using to send midi to Ableton Live on my Macbook via wifi.

And the itouch near the bottom is running Bloom designed by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, Bloom is a generative music application.

He shakes the instrument to clear the current patch from Bloom.

For everyone who ever wished that their mic looked more like a pink whirl-pool or desert camouflage, Audix has announced five new camo-mic finishes for early 2009. The OM2 and i-5 microphones will both get the treatment.

The obvious question is: how many people have ever wished for this finish? (…aside from Dusty and Snow Job from G.I. Joe…..) And how will Audix now answer the demands of the paisley and plaid lobby? We can only hope that they get some design nerds on that ASAP….

The folks at Recording Hacks have just posted a list of microphone reviews found in issues of Tape Op magazine.

http://recordinghacks.com/reviews/tapeop/

The product reviews from Tape Op are usually fairly positive, and advertisements often appear beside them. This has let some readers to wonder whether the objectivity of the reviews is authentic.

The positivity has been justified in the past by DIY-hero/studio owner/editor Larry Crane as not wasting readers time with reviews of products that they will ultimately not buy anyway. So take what you want from them.

The list includes many affordable mics such as AKG C1000S, the MXL V67i, the Nady RSM-2, and others.

Via the Tape Log.

Time and Space has just began shipping to the states the ESI UGM96l.

This little thing looks like…. surprisingly like a big iPod shuffle. Maybe they’re going for the new (firewireless) MacBook guitarist market. At about 7 cm x 6 cm, it runs off USB2 power and features:

• 2 x analog input and 2 analog output channels
• 2 independent mono Hi-Z inputs
• One Hi-Z input switchable to microphone input with preamp
• 2 headphone output
• One headphone output can work as line output
• Drivers for Windows Vista/XP with ASIO support with low latency
• Core Audio support under Mac OS X 10.4 and higher

The lack of XLR jack is disappointing, but fairly understandable given the obvious desire for portability.

The process of recording is completely reliant the process of transduction. So what is that?

Merriam-Webster [on-line] says that “to Transduce” is:

to convert (as energy or a message) into another form <essentially sense organs transduce physical energy into a nervous signal>

There are many transduction that occur in the recording process. The modern recording signal chain often goes like this:

Mechanical movement (a moving guitar string)

to

Waves (pressure differences) in air

to

Mechanical movement (a moving microphone diaphragm)

to

Electrical signals in a wire (magnet, ribbon, or condenser to mic cable)

to

Numbers on your hard drive (A/D converter)

It’s amazing to think that all of these forms are essentially the same information, yet the media is completely different in each case!