What's happening September 2026

A co-worker challenged me last month to play "September" in September. Which I promptly forgot about, and then on the first of September the conversation went: "Well?" "What?" "Did you do it?" "What?" "Learn September?" "Ha, that's right, no. I'm too busy for that." "I'm disappointed." "ha ha." "No, really disappointed." "Okay, okay, let's have a look."

Pulled out the guitar from beside the desk, whipped up the chords, started noodling with it, after about a minute the rhythm was in my head and I was starting to groove with it. I'd forgotten how good a song it it. Jazz style chords, but with a pop rock feel? Something like that. I wanted to sing it as I found the groove but I'm a terrible singer. Nobody in the office was game to sing it for me.

I mean check it out - this is from Ultimate Guitar - grab your guitar and play these chords, they are a little tricky, but get the chorus in your head and groove! How is that G major 7 over A at the end! Try playing it as a Gsus2 with a high A over A bass! ...and queue trumpets! Yay!

Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7
Ba de ya - say do you remember
Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7
Ba de ya - dancing in September
Bm7   E7   C#m7          F#m7 Gmaj7/A
Ba de ya - never was a cloudy day

I have too much other stuff to fingerstyle and that one would be quite difficult, and besides, Naudo did it already - actually around 20 years ago, but YouTube cancelled his account (more than once) - lucky Juan has all his videos backed up and reposts them.

Meanwhile, as the world is circling around music and AI - so much so that I not longer believe anything I see or read - what do we do? Perhaps the only thing that is truly real these days is what you are seeing and hearing right in front of you. Your conversations with people in real life (given they aren't reading from a script or wired into the matrix). Or the musos you see at your local - given that they aren't playing/miming to a backing track. In fact musos, I think in the middle of every couple of songs, just kinda hold a chord progression for several extra bars, and talk to the crowd, razz them up a bit, even respond to shouts and heckles (I'm sure you all do this already) - it proves "this is real."

Speaking of not being real, I am re-recording Canon in D for the 20 year anniversary since I posted that video. Yep, I started practising last month and I have two glaring problems - I still haven't been able to memorise it, and I still can't play it much better than I did in 2006. After putting a few hours of effort into it over a few weeks, and generally getting dismayed, I kinda gave up. I decided I won't ever be able to memorise it, and I don't mind. To be honest I don't mind if I'm unable to play it well, it's not that important to me. Sorry! It was important at a time and place a couple of decades ago, that is no longer the case. When my daughters get married I won't be playing it at their weddings, I will be walking them down the aisle. Beautiful music, very hard to play, I have some good sheet to play from, I will play it every now and then and it will put a smile on my face briefly before I get frustrated that I can never play it to my expectations.

All is not lost though! I recorded around 40 minutes of me attempting to play it...I was never going to get it in one take, in fact I just assembled the video and there are ten splices. Yeah, not great. Twenty years ago I played it through in one take! This time I needed to forgive myself and move on.

And yet you know what? I can play 8 minutes of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" totally from memory in one take. I enjoy playing that more.

* * *

One more thing, in case I haven't said it enough. I never use AI when writing these posts. Not even to get ideas, not to proof read, not even the tiniest suggestion. I don't want it interfering with my thoughts, this was always a place to brain dump about all things musical when I'm not doing musical things. AI has its place, but that is not for rambling about the things in your mind.

Jack's Utopish social media and recording a Quip

Gotta love what Jack Conte tries to do. All the creatives out there, feeding the social media beast which has turned into a piece of crap algorithm driven attention seeking advertisement focus killing machine so billionaires can make more billions...creatives don't stand a chance of being truly creative if they need to feed that machine or are creative as a hobby with the day job pays the bills. I like my day job, but I also love creativity and I have been dabbling in sharing my creativeness with the world via the internet for more than two decades now. When Jack started up Patreon several years ago I jumped onboard - it's a way for fans to support artists.

So he's just released a bunch of updates which included the concept of "Quips" - shortform videos on the platform, with the idea that they are just quick and not overproduced. Behind the scenes style. I can get onboard with that! I have been making Jawmunji Talks videos on and off for years, generally I go longer form, but I have also done a few Youtube shorts. Seeing as I'm a recovering perfectionist it's good for me to be less-producey, so I just recorded a Quip and popped it into Jack's machine. Will that machine turn ee-vil? Maybe, but I want to say no. People will game it for sure, but will it intentionally be made ee-vil like the social medias? I want to say no. Will it get traction? Maybe! It will if we feed it! Can Patreon be the vehicle where fans can actually support creatives? I kinda think it already is! I love the "1000 Fans" notion - that you "only" need 1000 fans to pay you $100 a year and that is a decent income. I think of my youngest daughter in her various bands, I know she has followers, and she sells merch at gigs, and it gets devoured. I helped her make 30 high quality CDs for Hyperfest - all sold (note to self - write a blog about that). The lino print cheap t-shirts she makes move easily at a greater profit...heh, I think the CDs are much better value for money, but there you go!

The point being that she is already supported by local fans who show up and buy merch at all her gigs. So that, applied world wide on the internet seems like an obvious step. But the current social media, the streamers, all the internet machinery for it - designed to make the maximum amount of money for shareholders and if the creatives got nothing from it then that would consider that great.

Stepping off my soapbox, I decided to post a Quip. I love to talk about creative stuff that excites me. I love to engage with people who also love to talk about the creative stuff that excites me. I don't need to make a living from being creative, but I wouldn't stop people who want to support me as well! I do have a bunch of mates already on Patreon - in the early days I used to offer stuff so I amassed a number of supporters - but I stopped offering stuff (it was in a very very grey legal area) - and encouraged supporters who were expecting stuff to cancel their subscriptions - but offered cheap tiers for anyone who wanted to keep supporting me. Some did! Thank you supporters - it is great to engage with fans but when someone supports financially it changes things...people making a sacrifice because they believe in something. They don't have to sacrifice but they want to.

Let's switch to tech talking.

I would dearly love to have a dedicated room with cool gear set up to make it super easy for me record a video whenever I am in the creative mood. I do not have that. So just now I spent more time setting up the gear than recording the video. Shame. So here are some notes to Future JAW to help him out:

• OBS Studio: still amazing. Keep using it for this sort of thing.
• Web cameras: I'm running a classic Logitech C922 Pro and a C920. Both are dated - I'm going to buy a more modern replacement for the C920. Important - don't saturate your USB bus with webcam feeds, try to make sure each one is plugged into a different USB bus...currently I have one on the laptop and one on the dock.
• Microphone: my ever-useful Zoom H1D. Turn it on a set it into audio interface mode. Plug it into USB, it's low bandwidth so it will be fine. In OBS Studio go into Settings->Audio and point a Mic/Auxiliary Audio to it.
  Remember! Windows->Sound Settings for Input and Output definitively show what is connected. All apps refer to the devices there including OBS!
• PeSonus Studio 1824 interface, via Reaper DAW: this is the complicated bit. Guitar instrument cable -> PreSonus interface -> USB to laptop -> Reaper DAW -> OBS + headphones. I use the 1824 in ASIO mode, which is the best way to interface with an interface, and Reaper can apply fx and send them back to the interface, so I plug my headphones into the front of it and get near-zero latency. HOWEVER that isn't shared on the Windows laptop I use UNLESS you turn on Loopback=virtual in the PreSonus Universal Control application. Once you do that, you will see in Sound Settings an input for PreSonus Virtual - which you can then add to OBS as another Mic/Auxiliary Audio.
• OBS Studio again: brings it all together. I've tried different picture-in-picture/split/shifting/etc methods for the webcams, I went for portrait this time, one webcam on top another on the bottom. In Settings->Video I went Base of 1080x1920 (ie portrait HD). Then it is a case of adding the two webcams, cropping and moving them to fit. The Zoom HD1 microphone I initially added a gate filter, but the electric guitar acoustically was getting through the gate when I dug in. If I increased the gate I had to shout to trigger it. So I added a mute/unmute hotkey and remembered to deal with it. Not great.

When in doubt, just talk through your problems with a chatbot - that's what I did. General life tip with chatbots: you have to have some basic knowledge of what you are trying to achieve, you have to half know the answer or they will lead you down a never ending garden trail to nowhere. You have to have  a year's worth of built up a knowledge of knowing how to get what you need from a chatbot, accumulated from trial and error...hence I wrote the notes above to help Future JAW when he forgets things.

What I need to do to be a little better for next time (and there is always a next time, I have been doing "behind the scenes" videos for 20 years) - at least one better webcam, and a microphone stand that puts a microphone close to my mouth so I don't have to worry about mute/unmute, so I can just use gating.

Oh and I played Pink Floyd Learning to Fly. I was aiming for a more "Pulse" live feel, so more bassnotes, wasn't quite getting it, still undecided whether I should be hitting it that hard. The G string rings a bit too much, wasn't happy with my playthrough. BUT THAT'S ALRIGHT...if you want perfection use AI slop.

More vibe coding - song analysis

I am fascinated by the happenings in the LLM/Chatbot/"AI" landscape. I studied an "AI" unit at Uni more than 30 years ago, we called it "Artificial Neural Networks" in those days, but the underlying premise remains. I'm sure the tech is WAY more complicated than the simple models and training data we used. Heh, for my final year project I wrote a program in C, in DOS, that was running on a "luggable" computer (not quite a laptop, but a computer with battery you could carry around and use), that had a sound interface and a microphone. There was a small database of words, students would walk around with the computer and get volunteers to say the words that appeared on the screen and it would capture the audio - to be used for training data. I managed to put a pretty oscilloscope graphic on the screen as well - to make it fun for the person talking - as they pressed the space bar, said the word, pressed the space bar for the next word. After twenty or so words it would thank them and save all the sound files to folders to be later used as training and test data for speech to text. Very early stuff.

Anyway, it's fun to see it have come so far.

My most recent vibe code, with Claude who is my current favourite vibe coding chatbot, "we" wrote a python script to analyse music. Let me explain.

I have been mixing songs from my local church for a few years now, it's such a great way of practising and improving. Both as a musician and as a mixer/producer of a mixed song. I have mixed more than 60 songs over the last two years and I thought I'd take my favourite 12 from 2025 and make a playlist. But each mix has a different feel, as my ear developed, as my skills developed, so the 12 songs across 2025 have quite a different feel, even though they are all similar in style. Sure, there are differences - we aren't playing the same song over and over! - but I felt that as an "album" of 12 songs there should be a certain level of consistency.

I think you know where this is going

A basic consistency check is your LUFs and LRA. You don't want to be constantly turning the volume knob up and down between songs, or even within songs - so an overall perceived loudness (LUFs) and a measure of how much dynamics there are in a song (LRA) is important both for the listener and for a streaming service. Streaming services will adjust your loudness if you don't hit their metric.

In Reaper DAW I can easily track LUFs and LRA - but I was interested if I could get other sonic characteristics as a metric for comparison in Reaper.

In typical Chatbot style there was lots of talk about integrating various sonic libraries into Reaper (it has great programmability) blah blah, but chatbots just don't think outside the box. When it was talking about calling some python external to Reaper I said - "can we just do all this outside of Reaper?" and the answer was basically "yes that would be easy." Sheesh.

Suffice to say I now have an interesting python script that analyses a group of songs for an interesting range of metrics, looking for outliers and suggesting what needs to be changed and how it can be changed.

So much going on there. First thoughts are "C'mon JAW, are you trying to make all music hit the same bland boring metric?" No. And a little bit yes. Who else here turns down the start of "Time" on Dark Side of the Moon because they don't need to have extremely loud alarm clocks scaring them. I get it, the artistry, the "scare me into action because every year is getting shorter", but I don't need it on the 100th, 1000th listen. Or the first whalesong note in "Echos".

So I'm going to say yes, the LUFs should be close to each other (especially since the streamers will change them if you don't behave yourself) and the dynamics shouldn't be crazy wide. You don't want a listener turning up a song at the start because it is a quiet guitar intro only to turn it down again when the verse kicks in. At the same time you don't want your song to be so compressed that there is no dynamics at all (I was guilty of that on a few).

However for spectral data broken into bands, Sub - Bass - LoMid - Mid - Presence - Air, I do feel like there should be a certain amount of homogeneity across the board and yes, I did tweak some outliers. Frequency rolloff point at 85% is also another interesting metric. I don't want there to be some songs that sound like an AM radio and some that sound like you are standing outside of a rave party. Particularly when the recordings are from the same venue, the same style of music and the same groups of musos appearing in the songs.

From a vibe coding point of view - it s so good to do, fun and super effective and efficient. From an art point of view - I like consistency, I like having my mixes compared with each other to see where I went a bit wild in places. I have templates and recurring processes, but I mix to the song so they are always going to get a different vibe. From an album point of view I think reeling in some of the outliers is a good idea.

If you want to try it out, get it here.

Reaper, you've done it again. ReaSamplOmatic5000.

As I mentioned earlier I decided to make some drum tracks to play along with for my fingerstyle arrangements, equally to improve my tempo and equally to make them more engaging to audiences. I've played with drummers many times over the years, solo fingerstyle, it makes sense. Solo fingerstyle already incorporates a bassline so don't need a bassist, it incorporates a melody so don't need a singer, it incorporates a rhythm so don't need a rhythm guitarist are out...there's some but not a lot of percussion so drummers are a good fit! I've talked about playing with drummers many times as far back as 2009 and 2010 and at an open night a decade ago not to mention a gig I did this very year at work with my mate Geoff.

I'm not a very good drummer. I own an entry level electric drum kit, a Yamaha DTX Explorer, I dabbled a bit years ago, decided drumming is best left to drummers. But I've always had a love for the drums and how they fit with guitars, and it goes right back. Let my wax nostalgically for a moment.

In the mid 80's I was a Commodore 64 nut. It's where I learnt to program - C64 basic and even hand coded 6502 assembler. Musically, there were a few programs I used on it, one was "Funky Drummer". I would make drum loops and play along with them endlessly. Sadly no recordings of that exist anymore...I do have a few cassette tapes with various stuff on it, perhaps one day I will stand up a cassette player and see if I can find any!

In the mid-late 90's a mate of mine at work introduced me to the DOS multi-track sequencer "Impulse Tracker" which was a whole new level of drum machine, with actual drum samples! I had a lot of fun with that. That eventually gave way to "Modplug Tracker", being Windows based, but I never enjoyed it quite as much. I wrote several original songs in the late 90's early 2000's during the time I was getting more into arranging fingerstyle covers. Fingerstyle had always been my first love, but I had a fun experimental "full band" period of time which ended around 2001.

Impulse Tracker

ModPlug Tracker

Yes, recordings exist from that era...I need to find the masters and remix them...one day. I've never shared any here before, I'm not sure why - possibly because they just aren't any good - but why not. Have a listen to these badly mixed songs I wrote - using Impulse Tracker, my electric guitar, bass and some vocals. Ask me if you want me to talk more about songs from my distant past :-)

Blue Metal:
Sheister Meister:

Which brings me back to the topic of the day, making drum tracks. I'm not going to revive any of that old software, but I have my DAW Reaper, and I have Kenny Gioia, The Legendary Reaperian of Lore. He showed me the FX called "ReaSamplOmatic5000", which is EXACTLY what a sample tracker in the context of Reaper should look like. Good job Repearians. It took me a while to get my head around it, but it is just what I needed. Essentially using MIDI to track samples, making it the drum machine sequencer I loved from my youth. I've already churned out a backing drum track for "Wish You Were Here". What really makes ReaSamplOmatic5000 special for me is that I can us my little AKAI MPK mini mk3 MIDI device as a drum trigger - OR - I can use my Yamaha DTX Explorer as an actual kit through my PreSonus interface to record the drum hits, when I have drummer in the house. Or even, olde school, just click away in the MIDI editor and make them all like I did when I was a kid.

So nice. I've got my WAVBVKERY vintage kit drum samples, I will need to look for others for the various songs I do - but the 70's Ludwig is a great starting point . It will take some time, but it will be good to make these drum backing tracks.

JAW's guide to using ReaSamplOmatic based on Kenny G's tutorials

References: Youtube 1 Youtube 2

Note for Windows OS: In Options->Preferences Device, if you are just using your computer soundcard, then don't use DirectSound, it is gross and laggy. You could use ASIO (either the one that came with your MIDI controller or ASIO4All) but the driver takes over windows sounds so you wan't be able to listen to youtube/music/etc. A good option however is WASAPI, which is Microsoft's answer to ASIO. If you use it in Exclusive mode it is pretty close to ASIO, but then you may as well use ASIO. In Shared mode it is quite good - not too laggy, and you can listen to Youtube at the same time. Change your Block size to be low for low latency, but high enough that you aren't hearing crunchiness.

• Make a new track called Drums. Set it to Record, set the Input to MIDI, All Channels.
• Right mouse click Input, Track Recording Setting, turn on Quantise to 16th notes.
• Right mouse click Input again, set Record MIDI to Overdub. That way each pass just adds drums.
• Make another track called "Kick". Add the FX ReaSamplOmatic5000.
• In the ReaSamplOmatic5000 drag in a Kick Drum sample. The View->MediaExplorer is a great way to browse your sample library, when you have found the one you like, drag it into the waveform window.
• Set the Note start and note end to both be the MIDI number for your target MIDI note. It's a good idea to turn on View->Virtual Keyboard so you can see what number/what is happening.
• Set Min vol to -inf if you are using a touch sensitive (velocity) MIDI trigger. If you are just using your computer keyboard, not really an issue, it's only on/off
• Make sure the Mode is set to Sample (Ignores MIDI note).
• Route your Drums track to the Kick track by dragging the routing icon from one to the other. Set Audio to Off, you only want to route MIDI.

You are now at a stage where you have a MIDI track to record your MIDI triggers, it passes the MIDI down to a drum track, the drum track listens out for the one specific MIDI note and then plays the sample when it gets it. You can add other normal FXs to it, adjust faders, panning, etc, like a normal track.

A few other tips/tricks:

• Obviously, add a track per drum type!
• You can include multiple samples per track, for instance I will have a "Hat" track, and it will include an open and close hat sample.
• In the case of an open hat which rings out, you can make it stop ringing if another hat strike is made. Add an FX "JS: MIDI Choke", set the Choke Note Range Start to the the MIDI note that you want to kill the ringing drum, set the Affected Note Range Start to the MIDI note of the ringing drum. In the ringing drum, set "Obey note-offs" to true. Now, if you trigger an open hat, then a moment later trigger a closed hat, the open hat sample will stop ringing, so more like a real drum kit.
• When in the MIDI editor, setting to "Named Notes" view is nicer, and double right click on a note to name it.
• You can change the Grid size in the MIDI editor in the drop down box at the bottom of the window.
• If you need a different time signature, for example there is a 2/4 bar, then right click on the bar in the main window, Insert Time Signature/Tempo Marker, set it to your new time signature, and then repeat the proces in the next bar to change it back to the previous timing.

What's happening April 2024

A while ago I decided I needed an electric guitar. I bought an interesting one that had a UST pickup in it. I remembered pretty quickly afterplaying it for a while that electric guitar necks are too narrow - generally a nut width of about 43mm. I next had a company in China build me a custom neck - 48mm wide - but I accidentally specified Stat style heel rather than the Tele style heel that guitar actually needed so it wouldn't fit on the guitar. Not dismayed, I picked up a cheap Stat copy from my local pawn shop and fitted the neck. It was okay, but I hadn't made a good nut for it, so the intonation was bad.

Nonetheless I started using it as my practice/arrangement guitar, mostly because it is quiet and yet the neck feels like a classical neck, and the string tension is not that far off a nylon string. I've been playing it more than my actual classical... a lot more.

I thought to myself "why don't I fix up the nut so it intonates better, and do some of my normal recordings with it?" Because to set up a recording with microphones with the classical requires a bit of effort and the house to be quiet. My house is rarely quiet.

Getting the nut better is becoming an easier process for me, I have made a few saddles and nuts now. I have a feel for what you need to do, and am getting a bit quicker at it. This one was easy, the strings all just needed to be closer to the fretboard.

I remembered why I stopped adjusting it last time - you have to be able to file a very narrow groove - the width of a string - into bone. I had tried the welder nozzle cleaner files and they are okay, but not with the really fine files, it's not really possible.

I remembered a trick I had seen on the internet - modify a set of feeler gauges. The idea being that feeler gauges come in all the exact widths you'd need, and they are kinda tall so they don't flop around like a 0.4mm round file. So I grabbed my feeler gauge, measured up each string with a caliper, got the corresponding feeler gauge out, and roughed up a section with a heavy duty file. I didn't need to make it super rough, or even a very long section. I did clean up the burs on the sides by running the edges flat over some sandpaper, and rounded it ever so slightly so it wouldn't cut a completely square slot.

The end result is great. You don't need to file much, it is only slightly abrasive which is fine for a thin bone slot and you aren't going deep anyway.

I quickly had the nut slots the perfect width per string deep enough that you only had to press the string down a tiny bit before it was touching the fret. How far? Well, I figure if you fret at the first fret, and then look at how close the string is to the second fret, you want about that same distance. Leave a bit extra - nuts wear down during tuning, so have a bit of meat there so it lasts longer than the first string change.

Once I re-tuned and then fretted at the first fret the intonation was not perfect but a lot better. I still fret like an acoustic player - mashing those strings down so of course I am going to go a bit sharp anyhow - I need to develop a lighter touch for electric guitars. But I was happy enough.

The next stumbling block recording on an electric, is how to play with headphones on through whatever effects pedal you want to hear, possibly listening to a click at the same time, all while recording just the guitar.

This should not be a stumbling block of course, people have been recording through interfaces for years. I had bought a nice little Behringer mixing desk with USB output for a cheaper price than an interface, and that has come in super handy as both a mixer and for recording. Because whatever you mix can be sent straight to a computer as a 44.1kHz 16 bit USB stereo signal.

The problem now is latency. If you are sending your mix to a giant amp that you are listening to, and recording in the background, then latency is not a problem, it can be seconds, who cares! But if you pluck a string and are listening in headphones from the computer then there should be no delay (no latency). I reckon I can hear latency starting at around 10-15ms.

Out of the box the average computer hardware running Microsoft Windows will not achieve 10-15ms. The standard Microsoft audio driver is "DirectSound", and it is not made for real-time audio. You will be quite sad if you try to use it for real-time audio.

However if you switch to ASIO as your audio driver, you should be able to get your 10-15ms. Unless you have a specific ASIO driver for your USB interface, download and install "ASIO4ALL". From Reaper/Audacity/etc go to your audio setup, choose ASIO, and click on the ASIO Configuration. Things to try: test out Hardware Buffer, I found setting this with anything around 12ms-20ms worked great. Try setting the block size to 64. Keep the sample frequency at 44.1kHz/16 bit.

If you hear latency, then decrease the values. If you hear noise - like the occasional pop and click, then increase the values. I was able to find a noise free setting that had a latency that I could tolerate.

With that all done, I found with ASIO I couldn't play a click track or anything else at the same time! That is because ASIO will only run exclusively, it won't share with other audio. I found if I went back to DirectSound and recorded a click track, and then back into ASIO mode I could play the click track and overdub, so it's okay.

Otherwise, try out WASAPI. This is the Microsoft equivalent to ASIO. It's pretty good, it will run in shared mode so it is almost the same as using the default DirectSound in that respect. It has similar settings to ASIO, play around with the buffer size, and set the thread priority to Time Critical.

I found I couldn't quite get as good latency out of WASAPI as I could from ASIO. This is all on an 8 year old Dell laptop running Windows 10, so hopefully you have more joy!

So once I was ready with a guitar that would play in tune, with a recorder that could record noise and delay free while I was listening, I hit the next road block.

Well, two road blocks.

I couldn't get the tone I wanted, and my fingerpicking doesn't translate well to coil pickups. Huh?

Tone - I am using my Zoom G Four multi-effects pedal, so I can dial in any patches I want. I found an acoustic simulator with a tiny bit of reverb, running through the neck pickup only at about 50% tone was barely okay - I could live with that - but it just isn't the sound of a classical guitar.

Fingerpicking with a consistent dynamic and tone is hard on electric! I only had to pick ever so slightly different between notes, almost imperceivable, and that different dynamic leaps out. Only have to flick the strings percussively a tiny bit different to the previous and it is the difference between a kick drum and a closed high hat!

I dialed in some compression and this squeezed those inconsistent dynamics together and made them less obvious... but you know what? It squeezed the dynamics together! I _want_ the actual dynamics that I want when I'm playing!

So my years of nylon string has meant I don't have the ultra-fine control of my dynamics I need for an electric guitar.

I haven't given up, but for now, I think I will stick to practice on the electric but recording on the nylon. (Oh, and all this practice on the electric is making me rusty on nylon...)

DAW

I'll come clean with you - in the very early 2000's a mate of mine gave me a dodgy copy of Cool Edit Pro, said "hey those recordings you are working on, try this on them". And thus started my foray into the world of DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations). By the time I realised I loved Cool Edit Pro and went to buy a license, you couldn't get it anymore, it had been bought out by Adobe. I then spent years using Audacity but I never really liked it, and kept falling back to my dodgy copy of Cool Edit Pro. The shame.

The early DAWs were all "destructive", because computers weren't powerful enough to do real time processing. But once you had your own editing process, destructive isn't really a problem, you would have revisions of the wavefiles and you could step back if you needed to. Obviously real time processing would be much better, but just to pop a bit of EQ on a guitar track isn't going to do your head in.

A few months back I grabbed a copy of a recording from the sound tech at my local church where I regularly play in the band. It was a raw 32 channel single file - straight from mics and instruments, no processing. Yeah...I needed to step 20 years into the future to mix that.

Several of my favourite YouTube artists use Ableton as their DAW, so I grabbed the demo and set about learning it. It was so foreign to me I couldn't do it. I looked up Audacity again, which does support real-time processing, and I very quickly got my 32 channel recording loaded up and started mixing it. It was pretty good! Still felt like the same old Audacity so I felt a little bit uncoordinated with it, but I pushed on.

As a side note, mixing a recording of a live mix is a universe into itself. I only know what my ears like, but after reading several articles and watching several videos about mixing, there are some basic techniques, the very first most important one being that mixing is the end of the line - production is the most important part. Let's just say that the band - which changes from week to week as there are many musicians that rotate through - is pretty good, so I'm not wasting my time mixing. But wow, 7 mics on the drumkit, were every drum mic bleeds into the other drum mics, and the drums bleed into all the vocalists mics, and the other instruments...it's a challenge!

While surfing about mixing I came across someone using Reaper, another DAW that I had used years ago but found it unintuitive to use. Because of my frustration with Ableton, and my lackluster desire for Audacity, I gave it another try. I was quickly able to stand up a recording and did some mixing just with the basic real-time processing, and wow, the mix came out sounding so much nicer than Audacity! I think the built in Reaper effects are better than the freeware effects I had downloaded for Audacity. Or perhaps I had already started getting a better ear for mixing.

So I persisted with Reaper, and it was starting to feel more natural. This is good, because I knew that there was some serious scripting power underneath the hood of Reaper, and I knew that a 32 channel mix from a live studio deck could use a lot of automation to simplify the basic tasks you will get every time you explode out the 32 channels for example delete the channels not used, name the rest, group the stereo signals back together (all 32 tracks are mono) and then apply a standard set of effects across them...yeah lots of automation.

The language of choice for Reaper seems to be Lua, which I'd never heard of but is indeed a programming language. I could have used Python, or EEL2, but Lua seemed to be what they were pushing. After working out how to use the script library manager, I downloaded a few scripts to use as an example. The Lua syntax wasn't a problem - I do a fair bit of scripting in my day job - what was a problem was getting my head around all the APIs that Reaper can deal with.

Skipping forward, after about 10 hours of fumbling around, I had built up a nice script that automated all the basic tasks I wanted. It has been enough to make me commit to Reaper, even though there are still a few things that I'm uncoordinated with and seem unintuitive.

Not too pricey either, around (AUD2023)$90 one-off cost (I really dislike subscription model software).

What's happening June 2022

I haven't taken any action on the custom guitar neck yet - but I the guitar in pieces ready to go, I need to make a nut. I wish I took the existing neck off before I ordered it, I was sure the fretboard had overhang, but it does not. Means the end of the neck won't butt up against the guitar. Not ideal, but it will still fit. Lesson is - take your neck off for a looksee before your order a custom one!

I posted my response to Paul Davids' "Never Going Back Agai"n challenge, wow that was hard. My final playthrough is not *superb* but that's okay. I'm pertty happy overall with the video I made, it is instructive but short, has comedy elements - it is one of my better talking videos to date. It's good practise to make videos like that, a useful skill to have in this day and age. I'd love to have a media room in my house - all my videos are full of cars going by, kids talking/watching TV in the background, dogs barking - and the lighting is never right. I need a friend who lives nearby with a studio!

I reckon https://youtu.be/v_J51pHPcSI?start=41 is quintessential proof I am Ocker - Paul Hogan would be proud. I also posted The Mii Channel Theme, it's good fun 👍

Music Studio

Last weekend I had a real treat - I got a tour of a music studio!

Backstory - my eldest is doing a theatre technical services certificate as part of her studies, my dad's workmate has a brother who runs a music studio, would she like a tour...yes...and so would my other kids, my nephew, my dad and so would I!

Fast forward, we meet up, it's at the back of a house in Perth. I wasn't sure what to expect but wow, it was amazing, beyond anything I may have expected. A local musician Nunzio Mondia has spent several years acquiring  the permits and getting the building done, he is still working his way through final permits to be able to hold concerts there.

As I walked in the first thing that hit me was the delicious smell of wood. Because there is a lot of wood in there. Artistic, much of it non-milled, just polished and beautiful. It was like walking into an art gallery.

Covering the walls are various passive acoustic devices. We had a good lesson on them. I was the most excited, I scarce could take it all in.  There were the usual dampers that I expected, but many acoustic diffusers.  Made to prime number equations apparently...my brain launched into engineering concepts of constructive and destructive interference...but how does it sound?  For the main room there was no pesky echo or resonances, but the room was not "flat" or "dead".  Nunz explained how careful selection and sound engineering means that the room will actually enhance the natural sound, make the room feel alive.  And you could tell!

Upstairs is a gallery type area; more acoustic devices, a wonderful balcony that overlooks the main studio.  We were treated to a sound example - Nunz himself playing superbly on an Italian Fazioli piano.  A quick google reveals these pianos start at more than $100k. The sound is warm yet bright, clean, fully dynamic from a roar to whisper quiet.  Never heard a piano like it.  My eldest daughter had a turn, I gave her a few minutes and then said "that's enough for you".

There is a control room, again a masterpiece of acoustic engineering.  All the fruit for audio control - he does everything from recording studio duties, live performances, audio/video recording, educational sessions and even live streaming.

I could go on, for quite some time.  Hank Marvin, the legend himself, who lives in Perth, records with him regularly.  If it's good enough for Hank...

Well my youngest daughter brought her cello and I brought my guitar, I convinced Nunz to record us playing a duet as a show and tell.  Which we did, had a bit of fun.  He played it back to us, did some minor tweaking as a demonstration, again, lots of learning.  My daughter and I weren't satisfied with our performances so I didn't ask for a copy ;-)

I look forward to when he is able to run concerts there, I'll be standing in line!  Thanks Nunzio Mondia you are a gentleman and a scholar!

Daughter plays a very fancy piano

Daughter and her grandad in the control room

What's happening June 2020

Three days, three videos.  Well, I recorded them all in one sitting, but processed them over three nights. "The Logical Song", a re-play after my original recording was taken down 12 years ago. "You're So Vain" which I've kept short and sweet, and then finally the epic "Band On The Run" which is based on Jake Reichbart's arrangement he posted in January. I mentioned to him at the time how great it was and that I was going to try it, he emailed me and said the tab will soon be available, but I'd already started making it my own arrangement/transcription. Ah, I've sent Jake a few bucks in the past from his live streams, I'm sure he won't mind!

I have been practicing a number of other songs to polish them for YouTube, I'm still targeting 100 videos. In the recording session I set up two cameras and two mics. Had a lot of dramas. My house wasn't particularly quiet, the kids and the missus were chatting, but you can only hear them in the really quiet sections. But I had two flat batteries during the session, one full memory card, and I forgot to turn one of the mics on for the whole session. Argh! But I managed to salvage the three videos.

Because I use my DSLRs for "high quality" videos, I don't get to see my framing while I'm playing. Maybe modern cameras you can? Dunno. I use a mirror on a stand to get it initially right, but because I like to frame tight sometimes I move and go a bit out of frame. The last video was not so good for framing.

First song and second song I botched the endings in my takes, but because they have distinct song parts, I played the endings again, and spliced them in.  Because I have two cameras, I can switch between cameras in the final video and you don't know the take is spliced. I played each song around three times, picked my favourite take, and then punched out a few missed notes from the other takes.  I do this to most of my videos, I'm a functional perfectionist which means that I have to fix errors but I'm not afraid to post even with a few errors still in there. Around 20 mins to record, around 2 hours to post edit and produce.

Time to work on the next songs on my punchlist!  Really enjoying a Naudo inspired version of "Sweet Child of Mine", I'm a bit sick of "If You Leave Me Now" but it's good so I should finish it. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is going well but I'm also a bit worn out with it.  That's the problem - if I can get a good arrangement down and learn it before I get bored of it, I will record it!  I've got all these songs at 80-90% not ready to record, and it feels like work! Ha ha!

JAW

How I record and why I embraced auto-level (in certain circumstances)

I have dabbled in audio recording for many years with varying degrees of success.  While I once thought that only the direct feed from a guitar plugged in would get a good quality sound I am now convinced that microphones are best.

I have been using a Zoom H1 for a number of years, it is a stereo condenser mic that records to a micro SD card, at the low price end of the stereo condenser mic range. Perhaps one day I will venture out into the more expensive land of mics, but for now, I get more than I can deal with already at this level.

Over the years I've messed around with various filters, apparently everyone loves a bit of reverb. No, I don't. A mic has already captured whatever reverb the room you recorded in offered. I won't muddy up the sound by adding more artificial reverb or any other delay style effects. (Singers - don't hide under layers of delay effects.)

But I am a sucker for getting the graphic EQ "right". Where "right" means what my ear hears, through my fancy closed monitor headphones. Almost without fail I will boost the bottom end frequencies slightly, decrease the mid slightly, and boost the top end. I have many presets I have created but each recording I will listen with the EQ being applied realtime, drive up a frequency range to max to see what it sounds like, drive it down to min to see what it sounds like without it, and then pick an appropriate increase/decrease or leave it as it is.

A pretty common mild EQ I would apply looks like this:

The mid range I have removed here is what I'd call the "AM radio" sound, whereas the low and high ranges give more of the "FM radio" sound.  You can overdo it, and many times I have, so I have to remember to calm down and not "over produce" the audio.

Levels are important, particularly at recording. You don't want to overdrive and clip, but you don't want to be so low that you aren't using up all the dynamic range you have. I've read many times about aiming for a peak recording level of -12db, but you know, I reckon go a bit higher. If the crescendos have a tiny bit of clipping I think that is okay, almost "nice". It's not "pure", but it kinda accentuates the power of the top end of the volume dynamic range. Even when I apply my EQ filters I don't stress too much if it maxes out with a tiny bit of clipping.

That's because you want the end result to fill out the dynamic range of the signal, ie, be as loud as you can get. "Stuff sounds better when it is louder". If someone jumps on to your youtube video and has to turn it up, then you didn't get you final amplitudes right.

But I stop short of compression. Sure, with compression you can max out the levels in frequencies without clipping, create this powerful "wall of sound", but you are heading into over produced land again, like adding reverb and other delay effects. That original signal - the pure sound of an instrument - you want to stay true to that. Get the original sound right to start with, don't dabble too much from there. I'm sure this can be said to distorted electric guitar, I don't do much with them anymore.

And here's where I was when I was inspired to ramble on about this. Your time range dynamics, that is, over the course of a song where it goes soft, then goes loud, that's important. If when you are preparing to record setting up your mic, play as loud as what you intend on playing during the recording and set the level so that is close to the boundary of clipping, lock in that setting, perfect.

But what if you can't do that? Or, things change during the recording session and you can't change the level setting?

I have had this problem several times while recording my kids orchestra and band performances. I will set a level, record, and then later find it was way too low, or way too high, and that ruins the whole recording.

The Zoom H1 has an auto level feature. Where it will ramp up the level if the signal is low, or bring it back if the signal is high. I once believed that this was awful, complete heresy, worse than compression. I don't think that now, because, after ruining a few recordings getting the levels wrong I reluctantly turned it on for the last performance.

The problem being that I leave the mics on stage, and the little kids perform, the big kids perform, guest performers, then everyone combined - no chance of setting a fixed permanent level, even if I could access the mics in between performances.

You know what? The auto level was not as awful as I was expecting. I had two mics set up for either side of the orchestra, a H1 and a H1n and both did a similar admirable job. Sure there was the expected occasional "inrush", where the mic had scaled itself up trying to hear something as the performers were waiting to start, and the first note smashed the level, the mic went "WHOA!" and scaled right back, and it is very apparent in the wavefile.  You know what? Perform an amplitude fade for those few events and you will barely notice.

Looking at this sample stereo wavefile the first song is louder than the second, so it's not like the mic is constantly hunting to have every moment at a pre-designated amplitude. If I was to guess, and I'm allowed to because I write control algorithms for a living, I would say the Zoom will work in a range where it won't change the level until an extreme high event comes along where it very quickly scales down, and it's only if it's not hearing a minimum signal will it scale it up. So most of the time it is doing nothing, just leaving the level setting alone.

Which is exactly what you want in the situation I just described!  Yes; you will get a few glitches but fix/hide them in post production. That is nothing compared to ruining a recording by fixing a level that is not appropriate.

Mind, changed. Key learing: do fix the audio level if you know what to expect; if the unexpected is expected and you can't change the level as it happens, then turn on auto level and deal with the very few issues you will get in post.

Zoom H1 versus H1n

Recording sound quality is upmost important for music. I used to consider the plugged in sound feed, direct from a pickup, the highest quality sound you could get from a guitar. But many years ago I bought a Zoom H1 stereo condenser microphone/recorder, and it blew my mind. The sound is *so* much better! It makes sense, you are capturing all the other subtle nuances that a pickup misses. I had already gone to dual pickups in the guitar, one that captures the soundboard as well under the saddle, which is great, but a quality microphone; that is hearing like your ears do; so much better!

The Zoom H1 has done me well for a long time, and I have an application coming up where I want to use two microphones, to capture an orchestra sound from both sides of the stage. I was going to buy another Zoom H1 but I noticed the new Zoom H1n is available, the upgraded version.

I has a lot more "stuff" like dubbing and playback at different speeds and other things I don't need, about the only feature I thought might be useful for my purpose was the limiter. However, it's only $20 more than the old model, and perhaps the microphones themselves are improved or something, so I bought one.

As a test I put them both in front of me playing guitar, one to the left, one to the right, and recorded both in the same mode being 48kHz 24bit WAV.

I attempted to match the levels at recording time but I didn't get it very close so I adjusted amplitudes in post, I also applied the same graphic EQ to both. I always apply some EQ to drop down the mids and boost the lows and highs a bit. Makes the sound more punchy and less AM radio. Or maybe that is just my tinnitus speaking. I do all this listening through Sennheiser HD280 Pro monitor headphones with a quite flat frequency response, so it should be pretty accurate.

What did I find, what was the difference?

The visual look of the WAV files showed some differences, like the H1n was maybe slightly more sensitive? But listening, no, they sound the same, other than a difference due to the location of the mics; you can tell they weren't in the same place.

...which was part of the reason I didn't have them next to each other - even though they are stereo microphones, if I combine the two files how would that sound? The answer - clearly better than either one! I went with 50% left on the H1n and 50% right on the H1 (100% either side seems excessive). I wasn't sure what putting stereo on an already stereo signal would be like, but I can tell you, I will be doing that from now on. A little bit more work, but it adds another layer of depth to the sound.  Here, check it out:

Zoom H1 demo:
Zoom H1n demo:
Mixed demo:

For interest, that was a sound grab from an arrangement that popped into my head last week, Bob Dylan "It's All Over Now Baby Blue", although I gone with more of the Graham Bonnet 1977 more rock less folk as that's the version I remember, more my era. I will probably talk about that more another time.

Enjoy!
JAW

June 2018 was video recording month

I got a bit excited in June and re-recorded a few songs for my main youtube channel. Over the years I have recorded videos using different cameras, audio capture techniques, framing...my ideas of what people want to see changes, but I've always wanted the highest quality video and audio. Since I'm cheap/tight I've never really spent the big bucks required for high quality, but the tech has been in place for quite some time to enable good quality. For several years I have collected what I needed...and kept working on my videography.

For some time I thought that people wanted to see the whole of the subject framed, "who is this person I'm listening too?" But since I don't get many views on youtube anymore, and most people who look now are guitarists, they are more interested in seeing what my fingers are doing.  So I now mostly frame closeups. My personal favourite closeup is looking down the neck from the headstock, "guitar cam" style. I have two mirrorless DSLRs, when you frame a closeup you introduce a depth of field, so you can tradeoff focus primarily at the left hand or right hand. Depth of field makes the video "look fancy" but really, people want to see clearly what is going on. To do that, you need to adjust the f-stop, but then you are letting less light in, so the ISO will go up and makes the picture noisier. I deal with this by introducing a lot of light, and forcing the focus mostly near my left hand but a bit further out so the right hand isn't a blur.

Since I have two of these cameras, I have the option for a second vantage point. Right hand looking up at left hand isn't a good angle, so I opt for a tightish front on, framed at the extents of my left and right hands.

Really, the difficulty in getting an asthetically pleasing video increases as the quality of the equipment you are using increases!

Audio I started using a stereo condenser microphone years ago and haven't looked back.  I'm using the budget end "Zoom Handy H1", I'm sure the higher end ones do a better job, but the H1 is really quite good.

But just as important, if you want to chop between camera angles you need a bit of software that keeps it easy. For years I used Virtualdub, one video feed, all one take no cuts, and resynchronised the audio feed from the microphone, with the EQ tweaked a bit.  Now I use PowerDirector (I have tried several video editing programs over the years, this one suits my style the best, it's not exactly what I want, but it's closer than the others). I can synchronise the two video feeds and the audio feed quite easily, and chop between the cameras for effect. It's still much easier if I play through a song in one take, but if I get halfway through and muff it, then play out the end, ie, do the song in two parts, it's not too hard to work that.  More than two parts, nup, too hard, easier to replay the song and get it right :-)

Anyway, 5 videos released this month which would be a record, 2 never seen before though. And here's what my setup positioning looks like - it's hard to have bright lights angled so that I don't have killer reflections on the guitar from both cameras!

2018 New songs new recording style

During my two weeks off over Christmas I tackled two new songs from my "to-do" list, Cyndi Lauper "Time after time" and Daft Punk "Get lucky". Cyndi, because my wife likes that song. Daft, because years ago a mate challenged me to do it, which I did not take up, but moreso while adding Gareth Evans to the fingerstyle database as suggested by a reader I came across his arrangement and it inspired me.

But, I talk all about it in the video, no need for a transcription here.

I have only played both these songs for a few hours each, so they are rough-as, and not really ready to put out there but I had an alternate reason for recording them...

A month ago I recorded the end of year concert for my youngest daughter's orchestra, which was actually a tad stressful, that it needed to "be good". I recorded two hours (several orchestras performing), using a fixed camera and roving with a second camera to get different vantage points.  I own two of Canon mirrorless DSLRs, the EOS M, which I bought to do some 3D video work with years ago, they are old now but still okay. It's handy to have two for different angles when you aren't using them for stereoscopic vision.  Unfortunately they blew out the brightness levels - it was a big auditorium, mostly dark with well-lit performers, the cameras didn't know how to capture the levels very well and I didn't know how to tell it to do better.  So lots of washed out faces - but not totally terrible. . I used my stereo condenser microphone to capture audio which worked out pretty well.

It forced me dust off my video editing skills; normally I use virtualdub and simply trim/put on a logo/replace audio/re-encode. But for multi camera angles you need a multi-track video editor. When I first started out in video editing in 2001 I used Ulead Video Studio and got quite used to it.  But somewhere along the way they were bought out and the resulting software went in the wrong direction for my liking.  So the next time I had to do video editing I trialled the big three and settled on Cyberlink PowerDirector. It irks me constantly learning new software, that's part of my day job. So for the concert video I shelled out for the latest version and although it easily took me 10 hours to produce the resulting 80 minute video, I was quite happy with the software again.

So I decided that I could put the similar effort into my guitar videos, seeing as I was all up to speed again.

And so brings me to this video, where I set up my two DSLRs and an older handy cam that takes a tolerable video, for a three camera shoot!  It was easy to set up, although I don't like the low camera angle, I'll do that different next time. From start to finish ready for youtube slightly less than 2 hours. So, doable as a regular event. I experimented with some pans and zooms - swapping between fixed cameras is better than only a single camera, but some subtle movement during the shots brings the different camera angles to life. Most of the movements were random tests, I watched it back afterwards and worked out what I liked, but left it as is.

So here you go. I'm waffly and word stuck in places, I should plan these things. Oh and the playing was awful. But...

...it's practise for some proper videos I have in mind to record soon :-)

Commando High Score Recording

Although I arranged this a year ago, I hadn't got around to recording it.  In fact I hadn't recorded anything for nearly a year.  Partly because it takes me several hours, and partly because there isn't much need for more guitar videos in the world.  I feel like my music comes across better live, so I prefer to share my songs at gigs these days.

I have a few songs to record yet but this one decided to come out.  It's 1985 Rob Hubbard, nah, not the scientology bloke, the music composer.  My favourite of his is "Monty on the Run" but that is too much to take on.  This piece however, which was used in Command High Score and another that I can't remember, was somewhat simpler.  The SID chip it was composed for used three instruments, a bassline, a looping middle rhythm part and the melody.  I tried a few ways to put the middle into it but it never quite sounded right.  So I left it as a simpler bass and melody.

To keep video recording simple I zoom in on the guitar and keep me out of the picture.  I use my trusty Zoom H1 condenser microphone for the audio.  My DSLR camera is not easy to self-record but I don't think any are - well at least not the ones that have a backscreen that can't flip forward. So if you can't frame yourself, and set your focus, what do you do?  After much scouring of the internet to come up with a solution, I still simply use a mirror behind the camera.

So as you can see in the photo below, I've got the camera on a tripod with a mirror on another tripod behind it, and on the bottom left the microphone.  Standard deal - take video and audio separately, synchronise by eye and ear, tweak the audio EQ and the colour saturation, add a logo, job done.

What's happening October 2015

This month I created an opportunity to sit down and record some songs.  Okay, I did it twice.  The first time was outside and I was so displeased with the recordings that I ditched them.  The video was just awful.  The second time, inside, was tolerable.  My lighting still sucks.  I generally turn on all the lights in the room, and put a lamp facing me.  The videos end up full of excessive highlights and shadows, and the not-enough-light makes the camera recording noisy.  I tweaked the balance later in software, but you need a good video source to start with, you can't make a silk purse from a pig's ear!

So, I played three songs, recorded the video with a Canon EOS-M and the audio with a Zoom H1.  Around 3-4 play throughs on each song.  Post processing the video consists of choosing the best play through and putting on a watermark, tweaking brightness and re-encoding.  I then take the audio from the winning take, and if there are any really horrible mistakes I will punch them out with audio from one of my other takes.  I have to do this, because I don't feel like you, as the audience, are receiving what I'm trying to give you if there are obvious horrible mistakes in there.  I'm happy to live with small (but noticeable) mistakes, hey I'm only human - perfectionism is a life destroyer.

I only ever run a graphic equaliser across the audio, usually boosting the high and low frequencies and scooping out the mids.  Any reverb you hear is actually from the room, but there is very little reverb.  The room has a big woolly mat on the floor, and three cloth loungechairs I'm playing into which soak up the sound nicely stopping it from turning to mush.  The room is quite long anyway, so reflections straight back are minimal.  The then synchronise the resulting audio and video by eye "that looks about right" in virtualdub and job done!

Rather than dump all three videos on youtube at once, I uploaded them all as private, and over a week (whilst organising the tabs) switched them to public.  There is only so much JAW anyone can take at once.

So all good, but I'm going to buy some lighting equipment.  I've read up about "three point lighting" and what I need to do; I've seen you can buy some pretty reasonable lights from ebay for a reasonable price.  I'll let you know how I go!

JAW

Poll results and Never Tear Us Apart

I hadn't run a poll for a while, which was a shame, I love polls.  So I posed this one: "Out and about...who do you play guitar for?"

The results from 69 votes were:

53% I play only for myself
23% I play for anyone who will listen
18% I play for friends and family
2%  I play small gigs
1%  I don't play guitar
0%  I play large gigs

Other than the usual analysis of "100% of people polled are the sort of people who respond to polls", I didn't find it surprising that nobody plays large gigs and everybody plays guitar. (Except for you, my 1% friend, but I'm sure you will soon).  People who play large gigs or don't play guitar don't need this.

I was hoping for more people who play for friends and family and anyone who will listen.  I spent too many years playing for myself, you are missing out when you hide away.  Sure, there is that "putting your heart on your sleeve" when you play, the opening yourself to potential emotional distraught, but you are missing out on the connection you get to make with other people through music.  What a powerful thing music is!  How great is it to share it!

So my 53% of mates out there, yes sure, practise by yourself to get your stuff up to performance level, but then go play for an audience! It is good for you!  The rest of us - keep playing for audiences, and keep refining and expanding your set - don't ever be a half song playing guitarist.

In other news, Wifey and I watched a great documentary the other week, INXS - Never Tear Us Apart.  I wasn't a fan of my home town band during the day - wifey was - but over the years I have come to appreciate them more.  And I like being able to play Aussie Pub Rock!  So while I was away with work just before Christmas, I had a crack at "Never Tear Us Apart".  I've really enjoyed how it came together as an arrangement.

In other other news, I've been doing some renovations to our bedroom, it is currently completely gutted.  So it's one big concrete echo chamber.  I decided to record "Never Tear Us Apart" in there, for Ultimate Natural Medium Room Reverb.  The play needs work, I'm finding it hard to get the arrangement to stick to my fingers.  Some arrangements are like that.  As for the reverb - well, the sound just gets muddy.  The trebles are nice, but the bass is washed out.  I ran some post EQ to demuddify it, it's tolerable, but it reminds me why I never use any reverb/delay for gigs.  Keep the sound flat and clean - the room is already going to add reverb/delay and mess up the EQ.  And get the tone you want with your fingers - not with electronics!

Have a listen if you like - Ultimate Natural Medium Room Reverb "Never Tear Us Apart":

JAW

"Get Back" Video

I've just uploaded "Get Back" by The Beatles, I thought I'd take a moment to discuss the video process, maybe it will save you some time, I learnt a few new things while creating it.

"Get Back" fitted nicely into my current standard arranging style, it's somewhat difficult to play, but worked out well.  I'm pleased with the arrangement.  If you are new to fingerstyle guitar check out how do I get into fingerstyle? As for arranging songs to fingerstyle, check my previous posts such as Arrangement concepts or Can you arrange a song for me? or How far do you take your arrangements?

I wanted to mix up some creativity with technology, I go through spurts of trying out "the fancy new stuff" and putting a bit extra into my video productions.  Generally, fancy new stuff and a bit extra in video means only one thing - a lot of time.  Quite a lot of time.  Extra time spent recording, organising, producing and waiting for processing.  So what's new this time around, why did I spend so much time?

• Got a bit dressed up.  As part of Movember, which I have been doing for a long time now, I dyed my hair (and moustache, and eyebrows) black.  Well, okay, it's not dressed up, kinda.
• I recorded in the spirit of The Beatles Rooftop Concert - I played guitar standing up (which I never do), amplified, on a balcony.
• I recorded 6 different angles, with the help of my oldest daughter on the camera.  Yes, each was a separate play through, I don't have six cameras.
• ...but I do have two cameras, and I used them paired to be able to create a 3D video.
• I spent some time learning yet another video editing package, my usual VirtualDub video editor of choice isn't a multi-scene editor.  I produced two videos - a 2D and a 3D.

So the video recording - I played through 6 times, keeping on tempo even when I botched it (Play through your mistakes).  Which I do a bit when playing standing up.  I don't like to play standing up.  But by playing on tempo and never dropping a beat, the later editing should be easier.  HOWEVER - unless you are playing to a metronome (which would sound forced), you aren't ever going to be able to exactly synchronise one video with another.  So what that meant was each "camera angle change" in the video I had to carefully synchronise with the audio track.  And yes, each "camera angle change" didn't synchronise perfectly, they drifted.  There were three ways I dealt with that - first, I would line the video to the audio slightly ahead or behind and end up slightly behind or ahead - but the bulk of the scene was close to synchronised.  Secondly, I would only use a length of time where it was pretty close to synchronised.  Surprisingly, I was finding 20-25 seconds of playing that perfectly synchronised to audio.  Thirdly - fool the eye.  If it looks like it is synchronised, then that is fine!

What about the audio?  No, I didn't use any audio from the day.  It was all home studio recorded (okay, my kitchen table).  Not only was it not live, I recorded the audio a month after I recorded the video!  Not only that, the audio was bits and pieces from about 6 different takes!  Why oh why JAW would you fool us like this?  Look I'm not fooling you.  In the video, yep, it's me playing.  The audio, also me playing.  All real.  But both were riddled with imperfections.  It is a hard song to play, I've only been playing it for about five or six months.  I wanted it to look and sound pretty cool, so I went a lot further in capturing video and audio than I normally would.  I didn't aim for absolute perfection (impossible) - you will hear plenty of missed notes, fret buzz, and I can clearly see some places where I played a wrong note in the video but miraculously the audio is correct.  I just wanted it to look and sound pretty cool.

3D is an interesting thing.  I have two cameras which I welded up a bracket to connect them together - one camera records the left eye, one records the right eye.  From previous experience the cameras are too wide to be side by side, that tends to "overdrive" the 3D depth.  To reduce the distance between the lenses, I mounted the cameras bottom to bottom.  This gave a separation of about 80mm - I was after 65mm, but this was better than the previous 120mm.  Not many humans have an eye separation of 120mm...

This introduced a problem - the footage was tall and narrow.  I still wanted it to be a normal wide screen video.  So, I rotated the videos, and cropped them hard, sadly throwing away most of the picture, to be 4:3. That means it's not full HD video, which I kinda like.  Oh well.  I then had to further crop the videos to "align" the left eye and right eye.  In my experimentation with 3D video I found you should find a point of interest - something in the middle around the centre point of focus - and crop the videos so that point is at the same x,y location in both the videos.  This helps make up for the too wide lens spacing and any alignment error in the camera mount.  Light physics takes care of the rest - the left and right videos have an outlook that creates the spacial difference that your brain translates to depth. Your brain doesn't seem to be too fussy - the variety of distances and angles it has dealt with (tilt your head - depth perception still works!) I guess means it's prepared to accept - it wants to accept - most stereo inputs and turn them to a depth image.

Putting the images side by side via software (more synchronising - this time synchronising left eye video feed with right eye) will create a "standard distributable" 3D video.  Then chop them up and match them to the audio. It seems like putting two HD video streams side by side (3840x1080 pixels) is too much for most systems to bear in 2014, whereas reducing the width by half (1920x1080) seems to be accepted by most 3D playback systems.  The 2D video is simply one half of the original video.

I haven't worked out the deal with Youtube and 3D videos, so I uploaded both the 3D and 2D one.  I'd hoped that Youtube would automatically play the correct video based on your playback system, but I haven't worked out how, if it even exists.

I've plenty more to say about the creation of the video, if you need more information about some part of the process drop me a comment.  Until then, check out the 2D or the 3D  video!

Get Back
Get Back - 3D 

JAW

Learn a lesson again. And again.

It's a familiar situation.  In all aspects of life.  But we do it to ourselves over and over again.

It started after having recorded footage for a new video on the weekend.  I'd put in a bit of effort - I recorded myself from various angles playing the same song so that I could splice pieces together from each angle.  To make a cool video.  It's a bit of an epic to compile the video as you could imagine, but one of the key issues is that each time you play it you won't play it at exactly the same speed.  One way around that is play to a beat, which makes my playing a bit stiff, the other way is to record a good clean audio track and compile the video carefully so that everything appears to synchronise.  You generally will only vary in speed slightly, so you can make 10-15 seconds worth of video appear to synchronise with the audio.

So I had the footage, which was recorded outdoors so none of the audio was clean enough, I needed the audio track.

One night during the week I had about two hours free to record the audio.  I sat down, set up the microphone and started playing. Take 1.  Take 2.  Take 3.  Take 4.  I wasn't liking any of them.  Change approach - record smaller sections of the song until I get each one bit right at a time, and then piece it together later.  I really dislike doing that, it is much better to get it all in one take.  It sounds more natural and is a lot less audio editing.

Looking back I was actually playing it nicely, I was after perfection, so nice wasn't good enough.  Because I had limited time, I put pressure on myself.  Each take I could feel my arm/hand muscles starting to clamp up - I wasn't relaxed - and each take was getting faster and faster tempo.  That generally happens to me when I'm not relaxed, I play faster.  It's a shame, because I call that a beginners trait, I should know better.  Still haven't got that beginners trait out of me after all these years.

And to top it all off, I am attacking the guitar.  Digging right in, getting a huge sound.  Sure, the guitar sounds full and crisp, but I know "it's not working."

"Whoa, it's like, music, man.  You've gotta let it flow, relax, and like, let it come to you man."  Perhaps I should have started the session with a tasty glass of liquid muscle relaxant.

And then, still playing too fast, too hard, in pieces rather than the full song, I cracked my index fingernail.  Diagonally across, right down to the base.  Cleaned it up with the clippers, basically nothing left.  Picked up the guitar, that crisp sound I get with a bit of fingernail was reduced to a mellow, kinda dull tone.

"Well that sucks."  I pack up guitar, it's all over.  Nothing recorded.  Feel tense and unsatisfied.  It will take about two weeks to grow fingernail out again.  I knew it wasn't working, but I put the pressure on myself to make it work.  And then it didn't work, and worse, resulted in a a setback.

Another lesson learnt.  One that I already knew.  Learn it again!

JAW

Get Back Experiment^3

I'm still practicing The Beatles "Get Back", it's basically ready for recording, but I decided to embrace the fad future and try some 3D video.  So if you are 3D playback equipped (or even if you aren't) have a look at this:

From a 3D point of view there are two main problems - the 3D depth is too deep, it comes across as artificial to me.  On my playback equipment there is also ghosting of the right eye on the left eye, and a little bit the other way around.  The depth problem is related to how I created the 3D, I haven't yet worked out the ghosting problem. I currently suspect it is crosstalk as a result of the over-depth 3D.

How did I do it? Yep, two cameras side by side, recording left eye and right eye.  Then a bit of synchronisation and cropping in VirtualDub.  Then putting them side by side using AVISynth.  Finally synchronising the audio from the microphone in Virtualdub.  YouTube takes the 3840x1080 file (ie two HD videos side by side) and does what it needs to do so you can see it in it's full 3D glory.  There is the problem, two cameras side by side, the spacing should be eye distance.  My two cameras side by side are a bit too wide apart even when touching.  Your eye will resolve it as 3D, but it's a bit weird.  Some thought will be required there.

From an audio point of view, it's rough.  It's cool, but rough.  When I do record it for proper I will ensure the recording is nicer, even if I have to resort to overdubbing/punch in.  Ah, they joys of editing digital audio.

So drop me a line and comment on audio and 3D - did one of the embedded videos work better than the other?
JAW

Guitar Cam session two

Guitar cam certainly isn't new, I first remember being amazed by it in the AC/DC video "Thunderstruck" in the early 90's. Concept - rigidly attach a camera to your guitar, the guitar stays still and everything else revolves around it. Heh, everything revolves around guitar, I like it :)

GoPro have specifically targeted this "action cam" scene, and that is the first one I looked at. They have good brackets, but the camera specification is more about being rugged than high performance. Really, any camera you buy these days has the same mounting point so you could use the same bracket with anything. But what really threw me with the gopro was the very wide fish eye lens. I didn't really want to have a "bent" guitar - fish eye is for extreme offroad action. But you need to be kinda wide, so I made sure the camera I grabbed was averagely wide. Wide as in it can capture the whole guitar in the frame even when the camera is really close to the guitar.

I trawled ebay for brackets, and nothing appealed to me. You know what that means - DIY JAW on the scene :)

The first bracket I made was a bit of a mock, consisted of a bit of aluminium, fencing wire and some wood. I didn't even take a photo it was that bad. The second bracket used learnings from the first. And the third bracket, yet to be made, will use learnings from the second!

Okay, things of note:

• Double clamp - this is just two $1.50 clamps from the hardware store joined together with two little plates. Drill a hole through the plates, screw straight into the plastic handles. Some sheet rubber glued to the clamp faces makes sure it won't scratch the guitar. Two clamps to be doubly sure there is no movement when clamped on!


• Steel bar - welded to one of the plates on the clamp with a second piece at ninety degrees to the first for more rigidity. The problem is the arm is longer than it needs to be, and because it is steel it is heavy. The heavier, the more mass is bouncing around when I'm rocking out, the more rigid it needs to be so you don't see shocks. And the heaviness makes it harder to play.


• Angle/position - the bar is long because I wanted, well, the view you see. Of course it means more mass, more bouncing around, and the further out the worse the bouncing. Version 3 of the bracket will have a "more direct" angle/position - same good view of left hand and right hand - but lighter.


• Camera mount - just a hole in the end of the bracket and a 1/4" imperial thread welded to a tab of metal to make attaching the camera easy.


• Camera - Panasonic HC-V100. Not amazing, but it has a 32.5mm wide-angle lens, very small and light (lighter than the bracket!) and the iFrame recording codec is nice to work with.

For my first test I played six songs, my arm was tired after that. Of the six, five were "cafe standard" - means not bad, but a few too many fubs for my liking so I won't upload them to my normal youtube channel. One was good, I've already uploaded it :) One key learning was with my nice Zoom H1 microphone, tapping my foot comes through as an annoying thump. Don't tap foot (but I like to tap foot!) DON'T TAP FOOT!

Anyway, here are photos. And since the other 5 songs were cafe standard, that's good enough for my blog. I will be playing and uploading more to my normal channel as I go, but I thought I'd share some more with my !34! mates right now :)

Oh and yep, I think picking up the guitar at the start and putting it down at the end, guitar-cam effect, will be my thing...

JAW