Delving Deeper in to Avid Pro Tools

I have been using Pro Tools as my audio creation tool for around 7 years now, I passed the Pro Tools 101 corse around 5 years ago and since then I have just been using the techniques and procedures I am familiar with. I have decided to delve into the more complex functionalities Pro Tools has to offer to 'hopefully' aid my creativity in the long run.

This week I came across http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/ a site founded by Russ Hughes who is a music production and Pro Tools Guru!! I have spent the last few days viewing loads of tutorial videos and reading endless articles on the site.  There is a huge amount of free content available but the site also offers a £10 subscription fee to view 400 videos and download around 3GB of samples to use in Pro Tools sampler 'Structure'. I will subscribing very shortly!! 

So in a nutshell - Thanks Russ for creating such a great resource that will hopefully enable me to try out some new techniques when recording! 

Below is an example of the videos I have been glued to recently:

Bathroom Ceiling Speaker Install

During the restoration process of my home I am hoping to install A/V equipment seamlessly into all the key areas. I decided to start the process by installing a simple ceiling mounted speaker into the bathroom powered by an old Hi/Fi amplifier streaming music wirelessly from my iTunes library. After a lot of research on the net i decided to purchase the following:

1x Speakercraft ceiling mounted speaker

1x Apple Airport Express

1x old Hi/Fi amplifier (from relatives shed)

 I installed the speaker in the bathroom and ran speaker cable in the loft and down into the airing cupboard in the main bedroom were the amplifier and Airport Express can be powered and mounted.

Due to the dirty/dusty nature of a loft space I decided to make a box for the speaker to sit in to protect it, I also think this helps with the bass frequencies which can sometimes be lacking in this kind of install.

As this is a single speaker install I needed to convert the stereo signal from the Airport Express to a mono signal that included both left and right channels.

For example - Many of the old Beatles tracks are mixed in the studio with the vocals panned hard right, if you play this track without converting the stereo signal to mono you would not hear the vocals through the single speaker.

See next post for more details on the Stereo to mono converter.

Artifact 4

During artifacts 1, 2, and 3 I came to the conclusion that using a dedicated 5.1 microphone array is an efficient method for creating the foundation of a surround mix. To build on this foundation spot microphones must be applied to individual instruments to capture clarity and detail.
During artifact 4 I decided to use 2 sound sources, these were vocals and acoustic guitar. I used the same 5 microphones as used in previous experiments to surround the musician, this time I placed the centre microphone close to the acoustic guitar and used a spot microphone for the vocals. I made these decisions so I could experiment with the stereo image produced by the 3 front microphones; in previous experiments the centre microphone has reduced the front stereo image rendering the microphone inefficient.

Lift Production Shots

A few production shots of Tom and myself filming for London International Festival of Theatre around central London.

Setting up time-lapse camera for Lift.

When me and Tom began discussing ideas for the Lift project we knew we wanted to incorporate a time-lapse of the structure being constructed, on Wednesday 30th April this idea was put into practice.

We travelled down to Unusual (www.unusual.co.uk) the company Lift are using to rig The Lift, Over the next month Unusual will be conducting a test build of The Lift in a field in Northampton. As the test build is going to be outside we had to make sure our time-lapse camera was weather proof, we brought a £8 waterproof electrical box from Maplins, cut a 20mm hole in the underside and fitted a waterproof electrical gland so we could pass the USB cable through the box;



We then mounted the web cam to waterproof box using a highly technical device known as gaffer tape;



One of the technicians at Unusual kindly engineered us a base to mount the box to;



The next step was to add some silicone spray and liquid rubber to ensure the rain was kept out;



The box was then mounted on top of a metal container, we drilled a hole through the side of the container and fed the USB cable through to the laptop inside;




The camera is now situated on the top corner of a metal container in a field just off junction 16 of the M1 taking a still image every 2 minutes, we calculated that this should give us 7 minutes worth of footage and use roughly 3 gigabits of the Laptops hard drive space. We will return at the end of May to collect the equipment and our 7 minutes of time-lapse footage. Fingers crossed!!

Artifact 2

After using a close microphone technique for artifact 1 I decided to experiment with ambient techniques and spot microphones. During the written research document I came across journals discussing the need of spot microphones with most surround microphone techniques. The sound source again was an acoustic piano and the microphone array was very similar, I placed the microphones around the piano in the same way that most home theatre system speakers are set up around the listener.



Most importantly the microphones where placed around the piano in exactly the same place as the 5.1 monitoring system is set around the listener in the studio control room, this is were the listening test will take place. I captured two recordings, the first was the five ambient placed microphones alone, the second was the five ambient plus a spot microphone placed close to the pianos strings. At this point my findings prove that to capture the sharpness and realism of the piano a spot microphone must be added in close proximity. The five ambient surround microphones work well as a foundation when mixing a surround image.

Knowledge and experience gained during Artifact 2;
-Use of ambient surround microphone techniques.
-Use of spot microphones within a surround environment.

Lindley Productions Logo

I am currently working with Tom Oliver in creating a website/online portfolio. I sketched out a logo idea that I hoped could be used as the header of the website as well as a logo to be stamped on all the work I create. Tom very kindly drew this up in the program 'Fireworks' and I'm really pleased with the result. Its fairly simple but hopefully effective as i wanted it to be obvious from the logo what section of multimedia I work in.