A better conversation about music, with David Loftis and Peter Bulanow
Chris Green
Drummer and Audio Installation Engineer Chris Green talks to us about production from a plethora of perspectives.
Connect with Chris at 703 300 0300 or avchrisg at yahoo
If you liked this episode, also check out Bassist Aron “Teo” Lee’s episode “All In”.
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Chris uses: K Custom Zildjian Cymbals | Hot Rods | Nylon Brushes
Edit: if you liked this episode, you may also like All About Worship’s Episode #159 on Drums with Mike Murray.
I generally haul in $5k of hardware and $5k of software when I play a keyboard gig, even if I have access to a house grand piano. An electric guitarist probably has as much investment in what he is doing. A drum kit is in the neighborhood of $10k, and a good acoustic guitar is at least $5k. A good cello is more. Setting up all of that equipment takes a bit of time. Loading in and setting up a keyboard or guitar rig probably takes twenty minutes, a drum kit even more. We show up early; it comes with the territory.
Backing vocalists, by comparison, have no equivalent investment to make either financially or in set up. Quite honestly, it seems like sometimes their commitment suffers because they have so little skin in the game. The one investment they could make, that I argue they should make, is in selecting and owning their own microphone.
A microphone is very personal thing. Not only is it very close to your lips, allowing it to serve a dual purpose as both a germ repository and a voice-amplifying device, but not all microphones pair equally well with all voices. Each kind of mic has its own frequency response, its own dynamics, its own proximity effect. All of these are things that a vocalist should care about, and should ideally be matched to the voice.
Vocalists commonly refer to their voice as their “instrument”. By analogy, that would make my fingers my instrument. My fingers are what I warm up; they have the muscle memory. However, I would argue that the piano or keyboard is my instrument. Similarly, I argue a microphone is the instrument that a vocalist actually plays, that converts what their body does to electrical sound that goes down to a mixing board. Even if you don’t like my comparison on the basis that my fingers don’t actually create sound but vocal chords do, a carefully matched microphone is the last step a vocalist could and should take to impact their sound.
If you find yourself singing through a standard SM 58, or even a much improved Beta 58, you really owe it to yourself to check out a Beta 87A if you use traditional monitors, or Beta 87C if you use in-ear monitors.
Sarah talks about her origins playing and singing in Venezuela, to leading a band at an intentional multicultural church in Harrisburg, PA. She’s one of the few worship leaders I know who stepped out from behind the comfort of an instrument to lead worship with just a mic in order to more closely connect with her audience.
Sarah on Facebook | Harrisburg Brethren in Christ Church
Post we discussed regarding having/being a focal point: “Is there, like, a specific place I’m supposed to be looking?”
Zion Acoustic Sessions: Amazon | iTunes
Evan Craft & Carley Redpath – “Océanos”: Amazon | iTunes
While we’re here – the making of Oceans
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p.s. If you’re listening to this from South America, and would like to be a guest on this podcast, please contact me!
Kishore Carey
Worship Leader and instrumentalist Kishore Carey talks about building a band in a church plant, his approach to producing, his advice to new band members “Listen more than you play”, and his ultimate goal of “Honest Worship”.
Twitter: Chasing Agnus, Already Immortal
Facebook: Chasing Agnus, Kishore Carey
Websites: Chasing Agnus, CrossPointe Church
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Lyrics vs. Music post
Tom Jackson on Stage Presence
Planning Center Online was also mentioned but is not yet a sponsor of the show.
by Pete Bulanow
This story begins with the one thousandth time I’m playing “This is the air we breathe” and a simple question that actors ask all the time: what is my motivation? The point being, a good actor (and by that I mean not Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise – as much as I enjoy their movies) can deliver the same set of words a thousand different ways with a thousand different nuances. What should inform those decisions? Luck? Or outside direction?
Musicians can do the same thing with a song. There is so much nuance in music, that if all we have is a chart, precisely what we want a song to “say” is still totally up in the air. That meaning, that motivation, can be filled in by the musician and sheer luck, or can be informed by something more deliberate.
All the inspiration I ever needed was a phone call from a producer. Cole Porter (1891 – 1964)
If we already decided we don’t want “throw away songs“, someone should be able to fill in those blanks and precisely describe why I’m doing this song and how it fits into the metanarrative of the service. That person is the producer (informed by the service planning process).
This past Sunday, my community did a “Hungry Service”. We were all asked to come to church hungry, having fasted for some indeterminate amount of time, even if it was just breakfast. (The beauty of this kind of thing is that we’re asking people to invest themselves in the service before they even arrive.)
Let me tell you, when you do “We are Hungry” or Crowder’s “Hungry”, when you really are actually hungry, you understand precisely why you are doing the song and it takes on a significant meaning. The longing becomes much more than theoretical and the metaphors are much more concrete.
Do you have any examples of where you didn’t know why you were doing a song, or even had conflicting ideas about it, or success stories?
by Pete Bulanow
Even though I love blogging and hope to get back to it more, I haven’t been posting as much, because we are in the midst of planning some big new things.
The first one (and only one) I will tell you about right now, is we’re creating a weekly podcast with a new special guest each week to begin in December.
The podcast will interview guitarists, bassists, drummers, keyboardists, solo instrumentalists, vocalists, sound engineers and music directors to gain their perspective on music production. We may even interview a worship leader or worship pastor along the way, but with a focus on issues facing them with music production. We will also talk to songwriters about how they deal with producing their new music (choosing a producer, vision, control, etc.) Right now it looks like episodes will be about 45 minutes.
While the demographics for the initial group of interviewees is fairly diverse, it is nevertheless centered on people I know, and thus on the east coast of America. However, I really hope to grow it outside of the United States, and am open to recommendations and nominations (via my contact page). I’m not looking for famous people or big names as much as I am looking for someone doing it with something to say. While I expect cultural differences will impact the context of the discussion, I nevertheless expect that we all share many of the same problems and will learn a lot from each other.
With the podcast come opportunities to promote useful products or services, as well as new songs. Each podcast will promote one product or service, and conclude with an original song. If you have a product or service, or you’re a songwriter with an original song seeking a wider audience, please contact me to discuss those opportunities.
I can’t wait to release it, and can’t wait to hear what you think of it!
Microphones (and pickups) are sources of feedback
Seemingly one of the great mysteries of running sound is the source and cause of feedback. Perhaps the greatest sin one can commit behind the sound board is allowing feedback. Running sound truly is a thankless job. If everything is going right, no one takes notice. So thank your soundman today!
Since we paid attention at math in school, can we use math to understand feedback? The answer, to all of our relief, is a resounding “yes”. Incredibly, the language of mixing and sound is entirely one of engineering (as is perhaps all of reality), which makes me happy.
Feedback implies the idea of a loop. All the math we need to understand feedback is multiplication and the concept of “unity“, or 1, meaning if you multiply this number by itself, you get this number back again.
But, if you multiply this number by a number smaller than itself, you get a smaller number, and if you keep multiplying, the numbers keep getting smaller. Similarly, if you multiply this number by a number larger than itself you get a larger number, and if you keep multiplying, the numbers keep getting larger. This is the essence of a feedback loop and why it can seem to hang on a knife’s edge – because it does.
To be clear, the loop we are talking about is sound that goes into a microphone, then into a mixing board where it might get EQ’d, then over to an amplifier, and then out via main and/or monitor speaker.
The loop occurs when some of that sound leaks back into the microphone. If the amount of sound that leaks in is greater than 1x what it was originally, by even a tiny little bit like 1.001 x bigger, that sound will start feeding back on itself and continue getting louder. If it’s smaller, like .9999, that sound may ring momentarily, but it will die out.
Knowing what we know then about the nature of sound, that the atoms of sound are sine waves, this feedback could occur at any frequency that our sound system is capable of making, which is another reason we cut and try not to boost gain at a specific frequency using EQ.
Furthermore, the acoustics of the room will come into play as every room will have a bunch of resonant frequencies (just like a coke bottle or flute) that will be more prone to build gain. And even the angle of the microphone with respect to the speakers will have a role, as some mics reject on the side purposefully for this reason.
Positive feedback like we discussed above is ultimately unstable and applied socially can be unhealthy. Positive feedback can make a diva or a spoiled child. Negative feedback is required for stability.
Unclipped sine wave compared to a sine wave 1dB higher that is clipped
What happens when a signal clips (runs out of headroom, or hits a digital ceiling, or an amplifier runs out of power)?
Well, when a sound (such as a sine wave) clips, we start to see a corner that looks like a square wave forming. So what is happening to that sound? We know that the sharp corners on a square wave are high frequencies consisting of odd harmonics – which is exactly what happens.
Spectrogram of 40 Hz sine wave 1 dB into hard clipping
So on the one hand, odd harmonics are not atonal, so as a signal starts to clip, the sound still could be pleasing / musical as it’s still related by integer harmonics – at the very least it’s not inharmonic!
But on the other hand, pushing that much power normally found in the low frequencies up into the higher frequencies which need/use less power is a formula for disaster.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, too little amplifier blows speakers. You can never have too much amplifier.
And now the term “total harmonic distortion” makes a lot more sense!
Welcome to your second semester of Timbre! I hope you have everything from first semester under your belt! 
Integer Harmonics
Previously, we looked at the harmonic structure of some nice pretty harmonic sounding sounds. That is, sounds that seemed to have a very clear note (tonal center if you will) and a nice even pleasing timbre to them. We did this by looking at platonically ideal waveforms like square waves and sawtooth waves – which are actually common starting points in many synthesizers.
Acoustic instruments are generally pretty harmonic but a little richer sounding. They mostly follow these same integers for their arrangement of harmonics. Although often when I hear instruments from the far east I hear less harmonic, or inharmonic, sounds that sound “clangy” to my ears. I am not at all an expert on these instruments however so I’ll stop there.
White Noise
But I am somewhat of an expert at the piano, which employes stretch tuning, meaning that harmonics are progressively sharper as you go up the piano. This is done to align the fundamentals of higher notes to the slightly sharp harmonics of lower notes. This is also why you will see season stringed musicians tune their instrument to their harmonics.
So inharmonic sound starts on a continuum starting with strech-tuned pianos, extending to clangy sounds, and ending up with atonal sounds and finally random noise. To get that type of sound we start with harmonics that are increasingly not related by whole numbers to the fundamental, extending to atonal sounds such as a snare drum with rattles, through completely random pink or white noise.
Sine, square, triangle, and sawtooth waveforms
Before we dig deeper, let’s remind ourselves of some basics:
Typically we humans hear down to 20 Hertz (Hz) or vibrations per second) and up to 20,000 Hz (also said 20 KHz).
If we were to hear a note at 440 Hz, that note would be the A above middle C, also known as “Concert A” which is the note an orchetra tunes to.
The question we pose is, “How would we be able to tell if a 440 Hz ‘Concert A’ sound came from a violin or a clarinet?” The answer is, we can tell by the harmonics, or the mathematically related sine waves above 440 hz that give each instrument their characteristic sound or timbre.
Let’s understand this better by looking at a mathematically ideal square wave and sawtooth wave. For reference, a square wave sounds somewhat string-like -any early string emulation was built on these square waves. However, a sawtooth wave sounds somewhat reedy, like a clarinet.
Animation of the additive synthesis of a square wave with an increasing number of harmonics
So mathematically, a square wave contains the odd harmonics (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc), each one half as quiet as the previous while a sawtooth wave contains all harmonics (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc).
What we see as we add harmonics, is that the waveform gets less wobbly, more mathematically precise, and eventually (with the harmonics going out to a theoretical infinity requiring an infinite frequency response) we have a perfectly sharp corner.
Thinking about sound as sine waves lets us make sense of a lot of things which we will talk about soon.
