Audio Mixing

I've been pretty busy lately. One of the things I've been doing is mixing down the recordings for the Strawberry/Harvest Festivals. I've got it set up so that I'm using Reaper  on windows 7 as my software, my HD16CD as the control surface, and it makes a pretty nice DAW setup. One of the problems I have is that I could spend hours on mixing a single track! As I have about six hours of audio to go through, I can't do that! I have to spend a minimum of time to get the maximum out of the raw audio tracks that I have. The nice thing is that usually once I have the effects set, (say the piano mic needs a low cut filter) it's a  one time set. (for the most part, I might have to tweak it a little). Below is one of the tracks that I recorded live.

For effects I've been using EQ, compression, and reverb.

The main problem I'm having is the background noise. People talking in the background, and white noise. The mics I was using were dynamic mics sent through about 75 feet of cable, except for one studio condenser, but it still had to go through about 75 feet of cable as well. Still, considering the situation, I think it's sounding pretty good.

Hunter ed class

Right now it is break time of a hunter education class. We got up at 0430 this morning to leave because it is two hours away. It runs from 0800 to 1800. We get five minutes break on the hour and a half hour for lunch. The attendance is pretty good, I guess we might have around 100 people. I was starting to get sleepy from getting up so early, but we have a while to go yet. We are now going to lunch at wendys. The instructor seems to be pretty good, though he's not always correct

Essay 01

I now have to write essays to practice for the SAT on October 1st. Writing is not my strong point, but I am going to post my essays on here so that I will have a record of them in case I lose the papers. This one (and probably all of the others will be digitized as written, with all misspellings and punctuation errors. The only thing I can't transfer very well is my handwriting, unless I scan it, but I'm just going to type them for now.

Here is what I had to go off of:

Prompt:
"That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value."
Thomas Paine

Assignment:
Do we value only what we struggle for? Plan your response, and then write an essay to explain your views on this issue. Be sure to support your position with specific points and examples. (You may use personal examples or examples from your reading, observations, or, knowledge of subjects such as history, literature, science.)

Here is what I was able to write in 25 minutes:

That which we obtain too easily we esteem too lightly. -Thomas Paine
In many cases this is true; take for example electricity. In many parts of the world there is no electrical supply available, and furthermore, it were, they would have no use for it, and quite probably not understand it. However, if they were to visit a modern city, and see what use we made of it, and we were to reciprocate by visiting a place without electricity, both parties would probably be shocked, it in different ways. There are many things that we take for granted, and yet if we lose something, say continuing on the topic of electricity, it suddenly becomes the center of our attention, when, while it is functioning normally we give no thought to it. Therefore it is obvious that we value more lightly those things which we have not experienced a loss of, or have not had to struggle to obtain. This is also demonstrated by many other things which, while commonplace here, might be unheard of in other places Take for example; cars. Many people here own cars, and do not give them a second thought, unless they cease to function normally. However, those same people might value them much more highly when the only available method of transportation was a horse, or even worse, on foot! All things considered, there is much to be said for the theory that "you must struggle for a goal to truly appriciate it" -John Sineder

Yes, I know, appriciate is spelled wrong, but I only had 22 seconds left, and I decided to skim over the whole for easily fixable problems. It's not as easy as it might seem, writing. It took 25 minutes to write this, and took up a page and two thirds, instead of the short text box on this blog. If I remember right, it was around 300 words. 

P.S. The John Sineder reference is made up. On the SAT they do not count facts against you (!?!?!) Really!

Sermon Audio

I know why we use MP3's for recording sermons now. A .WAV file was about 400 + MB, and took about a half hour to upload!
From now on, if I have to upload a file and it's in .WAV format, I'll convert it first!

Soap dish progress

I'm slowly making progress. I started out with a 48" board. I now have about 24" worth of scrap red oak strips, one promising soap dish, and a little more than 12" of good wood still left. The reason for so much scrap wood is that the wood bits I had were very coarse, as wood bits tend to be. I would start drilling, and it would be fine until the very end, when it would catch and mangle the piece or just tear it in half. I tried different speeds, fast, slow, and speeds in between, but it always caught. A drill press would have helped I think. (And could have drilled the holes straight the first time!) Here is a photo of some of the mangled wood:

I finally managed to figure out how to drill a 1/2" hole without splitting: Drill a pilot hole, and then just use a stepped metal bit. The metal bit is for a much harder material, so it shaves off material much more gradually, so the wood doesn't split. The problem that I had was that the step was not quite long enough for the piece of wood that I was using, so I had to drill from both sides, which I'm sure didn't help the hole to be straight. Be that as it may, Here is the dish while gluing, before finishing.

And with soap...

I'm not sure how I should seal it, but I have some shellac I will try, and see how that works.

Soap dish

I am now also making wooden soap dishes for Stitches and Sticks. Below is the image that mine are based off of.

Here are some photos of mine, just to get an idea, as it's still a work in progress.

The calipers are set to 6"

1" chisel, wood pieces, calipers set at 1", and bar of soap for size comparison

I'm using red oak, and it seems to be working well, but for the next step it would really help to have a drill press, however, not having one I'm just going use a hand drill and see how it comes out. It should be fine, but it's certainly harder.

Banjo photos

Well, I said a post or two ago that I would post photos at some point, so here they are! 

Below is a photo of the red oak from Home Depot

Detail of the red oak. The knot looks rather interesting.

Bolivian Rosewood from Bell forest Products.com

Below are two photos for texture / colour comparison
I couldn't decide which photo I liked better, so I uploaded both.
Bottom: Bolivian Rosewood with clear shellac
Left: Red oak with clear shellac
Right: Red oak with oil based finish
The tops of the red oak pieces are unfinished.

The camera tended to give these a slightly warmer than natural look, but they give a good idea of what they look like.
I really enjoy working with nice wood, which this is. I hope I can do a good job with it!

Swimming

I note in passing that I have had three primary winter swim coaches in three years. (Four if you count CY's temporary replacement, I can't remember her name)

Listed from first to current:

Coach Brolin, George Mason Makos
Coach CY, Potomac Marlins
Coach Bill Marlin, Potomac Marlins

Maybe things will start slowing down some now that I'm at the fastest level group.  ;)

Banjo

I now have the wood for the neck of the banjo. I'm using red oak from home depot. The fretboard wood is some nice bolivian rosewood from http://www.bellforestproducts.com/. I'm planning to finish it with clear shellac. I say clear because they have amber shellac too. I may post photos at some point also.

I'm still working on the tone head. For me this is the hardest part, but a friend of mine had a really good idea which was to simply secure the plastic onto one ring, and then heat it, and see if it will shrink enough not to need any more tensioning, so that's what's in progress right now. The main problem seems to be how to glue or attach the plastic sheet to the metal ring.

Vacation photos

I never actually got around to editing the photo set, so I'm just going to make them public, and maybe delete the bad photos when I remember and have some more time.

Vacation 2011 Aug

Meters

Duncanamps.com seems to have a preference on digital multimeters; quote:

"A *good* quality DMM is required for this measurement. (When it comes to good DMMs, you have three choices...Fluke, Fluke, and Fluke.)"


That's not far off either!
They do seem to have a pretty good reputation. 
I have a Fluke clamp-on ammeter that will do Ohms and DC/AC volts with probes, and it's a nice tool. The one problem with clamp-on meters is that it will only measure properly when clamped onto one conductor. If you try to clamp it onto two wires, you will only measure a little bit of phase shift because the magnetic fields are cancelling each other. This can be quite a problem if you can't get to individual conductors. I can sort of get around that in a makeshift way, but only really for comparison, A vs. B.


One of my projects is to modify a spare circuit breaker with a current sense wire for the clamp meter, so that I can just pull a circuit breaker module out of the electrical panel and insert my module to measure current draw.

Much Ado About Very Little

Hurricane Irene has come and gone. Where we were it didn't amount to much, I've seen worse thunderstorms, but it did flood several small to major roads. Right now we are in the middle of a week of rain. Thankfully the weather at the Harvest Festival was good. (More about the Harvest Festival later.)

At some point I might go down to our local stream and see how flooded it is. It's fun to go watch it when it's raining hard. At one point there is a three foot drainage pipe. When it fills up it's really impressive to watch. It will shoot that three foot jet of water probably 10 feet!