Mastering guru Ian Shepherd, the main influence on my own mastering work, demonstrates mastering’s basic principles with three real songs in thirty minutes in this video.
If you’ve ever been curious about mastering, had any of your own work professionally mastered, or wondered if it was worth it, I think you’ll dig this.
We’ll be emailing about just the big stuff, new releases and such.
There is a pop-up reminder, but you should only see it every 30 days. Please contact me directly or comment if you have concerns about that. Hate mail can go to:
Crokry Krobbiler
1 N 14er Mountain #14er
Near Denver, CO 98765
Thanks, Cory!
This new Brian Eno / Kevin Shields track from the Adult Swim singles series is really good:
After… two and a half months, tonight the SPFFy Loop Selector lives and breathes.
I’ll get nerdy about it on mrfuriousaudio.com later; the upshot is that I wanted to build this before starting h&s guitar parts, and now I have.
Mic placement for said parts begins tomorrow night. I’m so happy to have this done. It’s been a good learning experience and I’m going to use the hell out of it but I’m beyond ready to make music for a while. Every h&s song will have its own guitar sounds, mostly because of this box.
I’m considering open-sourcing the design, because it’s a pretty gnarly build. Mostly because of drilling / fitting the hardware. I probably won’t make one more; it would be zero, or a bunch (enough to make making drilling templates worthwhile).
SPFFy!
I laid down two vocal tracks for Mars Lights last night. We’ve officially started vocals for the duo LP & double LP.
Drew was excellent at clicking the mouse, telling me if my voice got too ‘Cher,’ and laughing about those Japanese baseball video game American names that have been making the rounds.
Two down, 18 to go. (Counting Drew’s songs. Nine to go for me.)
This has been the view from the basement for the last several weeks, and as of this afternoon it’s finally working perfectly.
(Though it looks like a crazy mess.)
It’s a loop selector (yet-to-be-named) meant to replace my Boss LS-2, with some enhancements over that design:
This is going to be a fantastic recording tool, and I’ve been pushing to get it done so I can build it and start recording h&s guitar tracks with it.
Though, now that I’ve written about it… I’m revisiting the idea of making it buffered bypass. <thinking emoji>
I’ll draw up the layout tonight or tomorrow, order parts, and maybe record synths until the parts arrive.
After absorbing Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain (Deluxe Expanded Edition) for a few weeks, I’ve had fun this week re-organizing the listening experience for myself.
The package has four discs:
I prefer listening to my own vinyl rip of Purple Rain to the remaster, so I’ve combined all of the non-album material (from both From The Vault… and …B-Sides) into one playlist, and made an “Alternate edits” playlist of the original material using the longest alternate edits available (so dance mixes and the “Hallway Speech” “Computer Blue,” and 7″ edits if longer edits aren’t included). Here’s the result:
From The Vault, Previously Unreleased, & B-Sides:
Purple Rain (alternate edits):
(The 7″ edit of “Purple Rain” is just disappointing to listen to. Not through any fault of Prince’s; it’s just not a song that can be edited and retain anything resembling its musical effect.)
The result is a very good new Prince double-LP (From The Vault…) that sits nicely between 1999 and Sign O’ The Times in a universe where Purple Rain never existed. It’s not quite as strong as those records (both classics) but it’s close, and that’s saying a lot. It’s raw, it’s loose, it’s raunchy, and it’s a lot of fun. There are a couple clunkers in the second half (I’d say the same of Sign; really every Prince record has them, except for Purple Rain and 1999) but that’s part of the deal with Prince’s genius. Getting a new peak-era Prince double LP in 2017 is amazing.
Hearing the alternate edits in a Purple Rain tracklist I know incredibly well is a good way to trick my ears into noticing new details in the songs. Worthwhile listening on its own, it also enhances repeat listens of the original album, thoroughly accomplishing the point of releasing a deluxe edition like this.
Prince and the Revolution, Purple Rain (Deluxe Expanded Edition) – 5/5, would go crazy again
Yesterday I finished building a run of four Mohs Fuzzes. One is available first-come-first-served, so contact me directly or comment if you’re interested in it.
Enclosures done; hardware set in place.
This is just my method, but next I’ll wire the hardware-to-hardware connections. Then I’ll do the circuit boards, and finally I’ll wire the boards into the enclosures.
I changed how I do my finishes slightly, with good results (purple knobs are the new finish vs. red knob on the old finish above).
It’s nice to be home.
Today I was back at the iron for the first time in a couple months, it seems, wiring in some modifications to my Fender Squier P-J Bass.
I wanted to try wiring the pickups in series, and figured I might as well do other stuff while I was in there, so I also added mods to put the pickups out of phase with each other, and a different tone capacitor. The diagram is below.
First off, I had the wrong value potentiometers (I used them anyway, but may switch them out for the correct values some other time). The stock pots were 500KA for the neck volume, 500KB (not sure why linear taper) for the bridge volume, and 500KA for the tone. I had 250KA for all (based on Seymour Duncan’s “P-J BASS, 1 VOLUME, 1 BLEND, 1 TONE” schematic).
Next, the volume controls were wired with the hot input from the pickup to lug 2 and the output on lug 3, instead of the opposite (which I think of as “normal”). I followed the stock wiring, against my plan (I updated the drawing), but I may switch it to normal (hot in to lug 3, out from lug 2).
I used DPDT push-pull pots for all three controls; in all cases down is the stock wiring, and up is my mod.
The neck pickup volume control, when pulled out, puts the pickups in series. This results in an overall volume boost and a tone closer to the neck pickup’s sound than the bridge’s tone. It’s a great sound, and worth doing the mods just for this.
Pulled, the bridge volume control puts the pickups out of phase with each other. It’s a thin, edge-y sound, not something I’d probably use a lot but maybe cool for overdubs, specific song sections, or if I ever start a post-punk band.
The tone control pulled engages a 33nF tone capacitor, instead of the stock 68nF. This raises the cutoff frequency of the low-pass filter, retaining more treble, and it seems musically useful all the way down to its minimum setting. (The minimum setting on the stock cap is way too bassy for any use I can think of.)
Overall I’d highly recommend the pickups-in-series mod, and straight up changing the tone cap to 33nF if not making it switchable.
I’m going to get some kind of black pickguard. Maybe after that’s in, I’ll do a demo video of the wiring mods.