I had a disturbing dream the other night that I was modeling a reverb of an anechoic room. Been occupied a little bit too much by acoustics, reverberation and instruments samples, have we?
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There are two extremes to studio building: The situation were you are stuck with a room and have to do the best of the situation, and the situation were you have total control and can do the best you can afford. In here I try to examen the first and most common situation and how you deal with it in three easy steps. While I’m going to approach a room that isn’t necessarily allocated as studio all the basics will still be the same when you slide across the scale to the other extreme.
Just let us clear up one thing right away: Acoustic treatment and sound isolation are two completely different concepts. When you design a studio from scratch you will take both into account from the start of the design process. But with that said it’s worth to know that an acoustically pleasing space will let you play back sound at lower volume with better definition and do not exaggerate lower frequencies and make the room sound less loud. So even without any special sound isolation just treating it acoustically will probably make your neighbors happy.
So let’s get cracking!
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During the weekend I decided to hack together my own last.fm radio player in Python. I had found the My Playlist station pretty useless after being treated to the same three songs over and over again, and set out to code a player that would autoskip any songs I’ve already listened to once during a “session”.
So I combed the web and the official developer forum for useful information and even ended up digging into the official desktop client source code to find the answers to my questions. All information needed to implement a client (bar already officially documented components) have now been compiled into one spec-like entry in my last.fm journal.
I just want to give a shout-out to the software, LilyPond, that I used to produce the notation in yesterdays post.
I’m no expert in music or jazz, just a happy amateur trying to learn new stuff and make sense of what I already know. So the following is simply an introduction on how I think about the topic. My personal mental map, if you will.
For this reason it’s helpful for you to read thought everything from beginning to end, even if you already know the difference between major and minor scales and chords, or how to play Cmaj13 “jazz style”. I’ve tried to explore the subject in logical steps, so that we can expand upon what we already know and start to see all the different relationships present in the music.
However, the following text assume that you already know how to read notation, at least on a very basic level, and how to play it on a keyboard. If you don’t already know that, please take time to learn it before continuing.
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Just noticed that last.fm got a real face lift, it’s soo shiny… The downside: it take a tad longer to load the pages than on the old site even in Opera (the browser… not any section on last.fm). But from my quick look, apart from the new look, there is some good improvement. I think they managed to making it even more social by increasing the personal value that in turn increases the network value, which is a good thing.
I’ve heard this drum break sample over and over again, I’ve even got it in my own sample collection (who hasn’t). But I have actually never known the origin of it, or understood the importance of it until I saw this video.
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