OK, so I was supposed to go and get the wood glue to complete the diffuser, but it didn't happen today. In part through written work on the dis, and in part because I was up so late using the colour organ.
I consider myself and electronic musician, sound designer and mix engineer in practice - after uni this is where my main passion lies and I would love to make this my career. I really wanted to develop a means of monitoring music to meet my personal demands, of which there are a few.
Now, we have meters. 1000's of them, far more accurate than anything that I could achieve, however at the same time none of them conform to a few simple wants of mine. Firstly, I'm sick of looking at a screen for the information. Until I get a third monitor in my studio, there is always going to be at least one click involved. So it needed to be outboard. Secondly, I find the whole process very, very dry. Any normal FFT based metering system will look roughly the same and determine the same information. Some have clever features of routing individual tracks to see how each element of the mix sits etc.... But like I say they exist. I have been concerned with something that you can look at that gives you an insight into the sound that inspires you to create more. So it has to be accurate to the point of confidence in what information it is displaying. Thirdly, it had to be relatively cheap, as I am a student and like many others, I am a "bedroom" producer at this stage. I don't know why I used inverted commas there, I actually am.
So after tweaking it to a far better state of reactivity the night before, and just purely listening, I can certainly say that it has changed the whole experience of monitoring my audio! And actually, it does more than I ever expected it would. It really does make it obvious when the loudness wars are in full effect.
With nice dynamic music, the system is an absolute treat, with obvious and consistent colour shifting and blending. Each very well mixed tune I have listened to through it has an obvious colour signature through each phrase. Little fills at the end of bars become a form of visual entertainment as I wonder what the blend is going to come out like.
If the audio material is squashed to much and over limited, it simply results in kinda tinted white light. When you push a mix too hard, effectively all frequency bands become (at least) as loud as they ever possibly could have been in terms of digital full scale. Because this is a three band eq split for the Low, Mid and High frequency bands, which then feeds Red, Green and Blue LED's within a strip, when you push everything to hard, you get extremely similar values for all three colours. If you have been reading through my work, you will know that when we blend all three colours in equal amounts, the result is white.
So in calibration of the system, I took the same approach as the guide to my recently purchased Subpac. It's a seatback subwoofer, look it up! (And buy one, they are the dogs balls) Anyways, they advise you to go through your most well known tunes, and find the level at which the balance of the subpac feels right by comaparison to the level in your cans (or speakers depending on how you choose to set it up).
So I did that last night. I went through my collection, all my Flac files to ensure quality didn't effect my listening. My soundcard has too very high quality headphone circuits built in, and funnily the system reacts best at the level I use on the other output for my Subpac and Headphones... Strange, as it is a pretty driven output and the MSGEQ7 is such a small chip!
Another intriguing property of the system is that it detects low level audio really well too. Remember a few posts ago now, I was talking about using HSL values instead of RGB as a way to improve the stepping sometimes encountered with weak RGB code? Well blending RGB values in this manner seems to be a far more appealing way still. Perhaps it was just because of the shitty chip in the unit the LED's came with for changing colour, but yeah, this is awesomely reactive! You really do see all the colours of the rainbow throughout the course of a tune. AND so far, I have been nothing sort of addicted to either listening or making music through it. AAAAND it only cost me aroun 60 so far. All in all, I'm pretty damn happy. It most certainly works.
The next question for this part of the project is how I am going to package this all up, as right now as you have seen, it's all wires and breadboards and certainly not what I can take up to the uni. Im thinking a frosted glass vase, Im going to TK Maxx tomorrow to see whats up with that. Im also gonna keep an eye out for a nice trinket box for housing my electronics.
I also I have a little suprise in mind, but I'd rather save that for the expo. Love it when a plan comes together ;) till next time.
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