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 Ice Sculptor Isotope 14 version Cover Art this new recording uses the valve mic preamps I built over the last couple of months. It was a learning process for using the new gear and for some recording and mixing techniques we hadn’t used before. The arrangement features more overdubs than most of our prior work, and is a step towards what we will do on the next full album. The lyrics have also been reworked, see the pillowfish website for details and download! they sound great! I have tried a variety of critical components, different capacitors and transformers. The lundahl 1538 input transformers sounds great as expected, very open and detailed but the much cheaper OEP A262A3E is not too bad at all either with a pleasing solidity, although a little less detail. Claritycap capacitors from ICW were the overall winner for coupling capacitors. More when I get time…. Beginning work on the 2nd Pillowfish album. Recording the zouk with a stereo pair of hypercardiod mics in 60deg XY, and a single 414 as a different sound option.
a very well intentioned website at: http://www.dynamicrange.de/ every musician, producer, engineer and listener should know and care about this… disappointing that their DR measurement plugin is not yet available for osx… moved the blog to my own hosting, running on wordpress, as you can see…. improvements will follow as I have time… hmm, so I haven’t posted anything for a long time, i think this is because I feel I have to post something interesting and complete. Being on twitter has cured me of this, so I’m now going to post smaller things as they occur to me if they are too large for twitter. Here’s the update on headphones…. incomplete because funds are limited… I tried the AKG flagship (open hifi) headphone K701. I was disappointed. Although beautifully made, comfortable, and marvelously detailed they simply don’t give an accurate rendition of the music, its hyped and heavily over emphasised in the treble. And there some sort of weird phasing effect I can’t put my finger on. I found them enjoyable on less then 10% of music, and I couldn’t trust them in the studio since they sound so different from most other equipment and I need to make music that translates onto any equipment. I think AKG have succumbed in recent years to a perceived need to make their products sound more exciting – at the expense of correctness. It just doesnt work for me. I sold the K701s and bought a pair of vintage now discontinued, nearly unobtainable AKG K500 . These are much much better…. although still more unforgiving than my K271 (which make most things sound good) and a bit light in the bass, these headphones are the revelation I had been hoping for on well recorded music. The K500s have magnificent soundstage and immersion, great detail and an open natural sound. However – they don’t emphasise the bass as much as we have grown used to for rock music, and they will show up flaws in an imperfect recording. They also are quite difficult to drive and a powerful dedicated headphone amp is required to get the best out of them. I recommend the K500 as an audiophile or studio mix reference headphone. However for most casual listening the K271 get used more since they make even poor recordings sound ok, isolate from outside noise, and are easily driven by even my Cowon D2 portable media player. Ok the D2 is very powerful for a portable, but still. One more tidbit – I also found a pair of AKG K530 very cheap.(£40) If you can find them this cheap they are a steal. These use the exact same driver as the K271, but with a cheaper construction and an silly bass ported semi open design. They also lack the K271 auto off switch and removable cable. They are made in china as opposed to the K271 being made in austria. Out of the box they are over bassy due to the bass ported design, however – if you block off the ports with tape (requires disassembly) then you have a set of phones that sound almost indistinguishable from the K271 at half the price. I use these for mobile use, since then I’m not risking my K271s in the big bad world. I see many places are asking a price nearly as much as the K271, – don’t pay more than £50 get the 271 in that case. well that will do for a “short” blog….. There’s 2 reasons I’m thinking about headphones a lot at the moment: 1. I’m aware that many of our Second Life listeners are listening back on rather poor equipment, and that an acceptable budget pair of headphones is the cheapest way of getting a reasonable sound when listening to your computer. 2. Playing live on SL a lot and getting a really nice mix in my headphones, as well as using headphone monitoring a lot in the studio, has made me even more intolerant of the lousy sound so prevalent at “real life” live gigs with PA. For tracking in the studio, and for our SL gigs, we in Pillowfish use AKG K271 closed back over ear headphones. These sound really nice. They have quite good reduction of outside noise, they don’t leak sound into the mics, and they have a very open and natural sound. They compete well for sound quality with studio monitor speakers costing 10 times as much. However, with a street price of around £80 they are what some might consider a little on the expensive side. Also, to sound their best they need a decent headphone amp, not just an ipod or laptop soundcard, and for RL live gigs for some reason it’s just not done to wear large over the ear headphones. So, I’ve been looking at other headphones, specifically budget sets I can recommend for our fans, and also in-ear phones that we can use live, to get the same results as we now get with the AKGs but without the phones being visible. We recently got a couple of pairs of the ubiquitous Sennheiser CX300 ear canal headphones. These are about the cheapest thing I could find that promised to not be utter garbage. In fact they are cheaper than a lot of garbage phones. The CX300 are now available very cheap, we paid £12.50 per set for ours. We got them to try out the whole idea of ear canal headphones for playing live, and to see if they were good enough to recommend to our listeners. here’s what we found so far: * they sound really amazingly good for £12.50 – I would certainly recommend them for anyone on a very tight budget, who wants to upgrade from nasty earbuds that came with their mp3 player, but can’t afford any significant amount of money. * they are sensitive to correct positioning in the ear, like any ear canal phone, if they are not fitted tightly you will lose bass. * they are much less comfortable than good over ear phones, but not bad compared to other in-ear phones. * the attenuation of outside sound is not as good as the K271 * the sound quality, while good for the price, clear and punchy, is not remotely in the same league as the K271. (I’d be alarmed if it was) The CX300 lacks a sense of stereo image and being immersed in the sound, they can be a bit harsh in the top end and fatiguing overall (though nothing like as bad as the real cheapos) and the detail in quieter sounds and background sounds is not there compared to the K271. * the CX300 are only 16 ohms impedance. That means most headphone amps can’t actually drive them correctly without losing bass. This has probably been done in order to suck more power out of tiny ipod headphone amps to get a decent level, at the expense of sound quality. Driving them with a good low impedance headphone amp will improve the sound a little, but if you have such a headphone amp why are you messing about with £12.50 headphones? (except as an experiment as I am). Bad design decision there. That said, they still sound good for the price even on an ipod or similar, so I guess Sennheiser sort of semi got away with it. While I’m here I’ll mention the other set of headphones I have tried recently, these are Helen’s AKG K55 over ear phones. These are AKG’s ultra budget closed phones. They cost about £15. The K55s are in roughly the same league as the CX300, but with different strengths and weaknesses. The CX300 is cleaner and punchier with a subjectively more even frequency response, however the K55s are more comfortable, with better imaging and immersion, and perhaps a little less fatiguing, despite a somewhat zingy high end. To be quite clear though, our studio K271s are miles better in absolutely every respect than either of the budget options. Nevertheless, either set of budget phones would be a large step up from listening to a streaming SL gig on cheap computer extension speakers, or (horrors!) laptop speakers. As far as performing live – If I had to – I could play using the CX300s for monitoring, and if fed the right signal they’d probably even be a step up from a typical PA monitor wedge – but they are so far behind the studio phones that I’m used to, that I’m compelled to look further, as I always expected I would. The next step would be high quality earcanal phones like the Etymotics ER4S (£150) and the next step above that would be custom moulded in ear monitors. (£600) I don’t doubt that I’ll go to the custom ones eventually, but the price is prohibitive for now, so I might look into the Etymotic products in the meantime. Watch this space. I thought i’d start this blog straight in with some info about how i mounted my lace sensor bronze acoustic magnetic soundhole pickup in my Stephen Owsley Smith bouzouki. The problem with off the shelf soundhole pickups is that they mount on the soundboard, damping it, and secondarily that they block too much of the soundhole. For some time I have been mounting them in other ways, this is the latest. Firstly I mounted a RCA socket on the transverse brace that runs under the end of the fretboard like this:
this is wired up to the endpin jack. Then I removed all the excess material from the pickup, including cutting off its plastic casing to make it as small as possible. I epoxied a piece of aluminium to the RCA plug, and attached the pickup to that with stickyfoam pads and a wood spacer to get it to the correct height…
and here it is installed:
the advantages of this system are; * the pickup is easily removable it simply unplugs and the physical mounting and the electrical connection are achieved with the same object * minimum soundhole blockage when installed and none when not installed * only one small hole drilled in the instrument * mounted on a part of the instrument that is not critical to the sound There will be a piece of ebony veneer fitted on top of the pickup, to make it less obvious, it is a little steampunk as it is. UPDATE:here is a pic of the pickup mounted with its ebony cover so it is less noticeable. Similar setup on a Davy Stuart ZoukAlso I thought I’d add pics of the similar but different mounting system i have for the same sort of pickup on my Davy Stuart zouk. In this case the pickup was left in its plastic cover, and mounted in the traditional electric guitar manner with 2 screws onto a shelf made of a piece of angle aluminium that is bolted in using one of the bolts that secures the bolt on neck. This was possible in the Stuart because it has a larger soundhole, so partially blocking it was less of an issue, is more heavily constructed so i was less concerned about weight, and has a bolt-on neck so the neck bolt was a ready made place to attach things.
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