BenVersluis.com

Since my current job is in said industry, I figure’d I’d write a quick something about how to work with in-house hotel A/V companies (many of these things can be applied to outside A/V companies).

1. Please don’t bring in your own equipment and expect it to work. Typical scenario: client comes in; client wants to use In-House AV Co.’s laptop but has their own projector they like to use; presentation goes south; client mad. It may sound like a cheap sales-pitch, but PLEASE, if you’re going to rent something from an A/V company, rent everything. The reason being is that the techs for said A/V company tend to know their aresenal of gear better than they know your stuff: they’ve dealt with their gear plenty of times, know the ins/outs as well as all the weird quirks gear sometimes have. That being said, if you want to bring in your own stuff, see #2:
2. Be patient…at least for a little while. Problems happen with gear. It’s just the way it is. Techs are there to help you with your problems. So when your PowerPoint isn’t showing up on the tripod screen and you’re not sure why, give the tech a second to figure it out. I, and every other tech, understand that most meetings are stressful: you’re expected to give a professional, working presentation on-time to your guests. Just do us a favor: don’t get pissy right away, don’t offer up your own solutions (unless you really know what you’re doing),  and don’t ask us why it’s not working. Your problem will be fixed.
3. Respect Union boundaries. If a tech can’t run audio, power, or do something like that, ask them why. If it’s because the hotel you’re in has a Union presence, then leave it at that. Ask the tech if they would kindly call the electricians (or whatever other department you need) to run power, etc. Don’t yell at them because they’re not doing something they’re not supposed to do. We have to respect the Unions and the work they do, and you should too. There aren’t a lot of union-heavy hotels around anymore, but they do exist.

So there you go. A few small tips that might help you interact with your in-house/outside A/V company. Keep in mind, however, that the above tips should only be excercised if the tech you’re dealing with is a decent person. If they’re not, well, then I don’t know what to tell you.

And, a special tip for outside A/V companies working in a hotel with an in-house A/V company: don’t be dicks to the in-house guys unless they’re not treating you with respect. We all work in the same industry, we all have similar interests, we all have similar stories to tell. Put your bullshit ego aside, and hopefully the in-house guys will do the same.

Chances are, if you went to see a movie this summer, you probably saw the Dark Knight. It is, in my opnion, an extremely well crafted film from start to finish, and that includes the score within the film.

Problem is, while Dark Knight will at LEAST be nominated for a slew of Oscars (Best Supporting Actor and on), it will NOT be nominated for “Best Score.” Why? There were too many people involved with it.

There were five people involved with the score: Hans Zimmer (duh), James Newton Howard, music editor Alex Gibson, ambient music designer Mel Wesson, and composer Lorne Balfe.

The five above signed an affadavit citing that Zimmer and Howard were the two primary composers. But by adding Gibson, Wesson, and Balfe to the cue sheet, Zimmer and Howard ensured that all would recieve royalties acrued from the use of the score. However, the downside is, according to the Academy, there were too many people involved directly with the score thus disqualifying it from the Oscar nod for “Best Score.”

I wasn’t able to find out exactly how many people can be involved on a score while still keeping their work in contention for the Oscar, but from what I gather anything more than two is generally frowned upon by the Academy.

This wasn’t the first time in recent memory a score has been DQ’d: There Will Be Blood was unable to recive a “Best Score” nod due to the use of some pre-composed material within the score.

The moral of the story: by Zimmer and Newton not being total dicks and including the core crew invovled with the score, they ruined their chances of a “Best Score” Oscar this year. Oh well.

Oh. My. God.

I don’t know how many of you who read this (if any) are life-long gamers, but I am. I’m also a huge Blizzard fan (from Warcraft 2 and on), so when I read this post, my heart nearly skipped a beat.

What you see above is a year-long International project consisting of music from Blizzard spanning ALL of their titles: the Warcraft universe games, Diablo, Starcraft…it goes on.

It comes out on November 22 in two versions: a regular for $30 (90 minutes of music) and a “special edition” that includes CDs, DVDs, and art books for $50 (the SE is available now in limited numbers). Quite cheap when you think about all that you’re getting.

PS: Check out the Kotaku post for some nice studio pictures.

At the school I recently graduated from (yesssssss), we had to do two different Logic certification tests. Logic is a great app, right? Of course it is. But what happens when a disgruntled student who gets through the first test and realizes that the second test (and the second book) is really more of the same?

Here’s what said student believes the second Logic book’s table of contents should read:

Chapter 1: Shit You Already Did In Book 1
Chapter 2: More Shit You Already Did In Book 1
Chapter 3: More Shit You Already Did In Book 1, Part 2
Chapter 4: Key Commands For Shit You Already Know
Chapter 5: All About Disclosure Triangles
Chapter 6: Using The Marquee Tool
Chapter 7: Advanced Template Opening
Chapter 8: Using Time And Pitch Machine To Write A Love Song To Apple
Chapter 9: Consumating Your Marriage To Logic Pro 8
Chapter 10: Browsing Presets
Chapter 11: Finding The Apple Loops Library
Chapter 12: Dragging Apple Loops Into Arranger
Chapter 13: How To Stretch Apple Loops
Chapter 14: How To Compose Using Apple Loops
Chapter 15: Messing Up Your Tempo To Make It Kind Of Fit The Cuts To Your Naruto FMV
Chapter 16: Time Signatures, Key Signatures, And Other Things You’ll Never Use
Chapter 17: Customizing Your Workflow To Integrate MPCs
Chapter 18: Even More Stuff You Already Did In Book 1
Chapter 19: Troubleshooting:  Subchapter 1: Your Audio Didn’t Record Because You Didn’t Arm Your Tracks / Subchapter 2: Unclipping Audio That Was Recorded Too Hot

So this may not be “audio news,” but depending on who you are, it’s kind of funny.

This site has been around for awhile, but, just recently, it started to recieve a slew of original content (see interview with Jack Douglas) as well as constant updates by Wiki nerds. There’s some awesome topics (both obscure and common). So if you’re looking to geek out over audio knowledge, check out Wikiaudio.

I think we’re all aware that Metallica released a new album awhile ago. Did you also know that the CD version you buy in stores is plagued by clipping and distortion due to multiple stages of brickwall limiting? Well, it is. 

Did you also know that the Guitar Hero version sounds better than the CD version? If you don’t think so, check out the video below:

There’s some great notes on the Mastering Media blog about the waveform anaylsis of Metallica’s new disk (note: keep in mind that, when talking about digital audio, 0dBFS is the end of the road…it’s the ceiling of digital recording and it sounds HORRIBLE when signal reaches this level)

I just skipped through 3 random songs and the highest I saw on the meter was -4,3 dB RMS (-1,3 RMS in AES17 norm), looking at the realtime RMS meter with Wavelab’s default time constants.

Wavelab’s global analysis (with its default time constants) reports -2,93 RMS [+0,07 in AES17] RMS in one of those tracks.

Most of the album (looking at the meters) sits between -7 and -5 (between -4 and -2 in AES17).

You remember that popular myth that mastering will “make your record sound the same across different systems”? I now get the point. Death Magnetic (although apparently not introduced through mastering) sounds thin and distorted on my laptop speakers. And it sounds thin and distorted in my mastering studio. There’s always a silver lining

I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.

Unless you’ve been living underneath an Internet-less rock for the past few months, you probably know that Spore, the new game from The Sims creator Will Wright at Maxis, is a pretty epic universe indeed.

Such a massive enviroment calls for some massive sound design. Maxis (and Wright) seemed to put a lot of thought and care into the sound team (headquartered in Emeryville, CA). The sound team consisted of six people (when Spore was published; there had been several more sound team members throughout the five years of the game’s development).

Considering that the creations of Spore are, sometimes, animal like (and always creature like), Kent Jolly, audio director, says that the team used hundreds of animal recordings - from sound libraries to recording trained Hollywood animals used in movies. Jolly and his partner, sound designer Mike Cormier, carried around a couple of Sound Devices 722 recorders, one with a Schoeps M/S setup, the other with a Sennheiser shotgun.

One of the most interesting aspects of the sound design in Spore is the generative music implemented into the actual game by Cliff Martinez and Brian Eno.

On the music inside the game:

“Brian was involved in a  lot of general music design with me [Jolly], so he came here and I also went to London and worked in his studio.” … “He’d come with his Mac and Logic and he’d be generating sounds. We sould sample them, get them in as instruments into the game and play with them together. 

There are two kinds of generative music in the game. One is sort of MIDI note-based—that happened much more here from samples made by Brian by ourselves. But there’s also a whole area that’s more like Brian’s ambient music, where he made it using software he called ‘Shuffler’ [note: this is, supposedly, Eno's custom-built MaxMSP patch]. The software was based on earilier pieces where he would make 10 CDs and they’d all have a set of tracks, and then he’d set them on ‘random shuffle’ and they’d play randomly and we’d make ambient music that way. We re-created that system in the game, especially in the space game: When you go to a planet, [there's a music] system there that plays a different sample every 10 to 30 seconds, and this group [of samples] has this volume range and this pan setting, and a whole group of those forms one track. You end up wending through these tracks that are changing all the time.”

“Unlike a lot of games, most of it is not looped—it’s being generated in real time. There might be chunks of drum loops that are being re-sequenced randomly, and then all the pads and other sounds are basically MIDI but we’re generating them randomly.”

And, once out of the space universe in the game, you enter into what Jolly calls the “Civ game.” Where your creature/animal can start colonies, cities, etc.

“[In the] Civ game, the user gets some control over the music: You can pick beats—some were made by Brian, some were made by me and my assistant Aaron McLeran, and then reprocessed and changed—and then you can pick a melody instrument and design your own little melody, and also pick up ambience tracks. Using a note editor, you can set the tempo, get rid of notes, change the length of how they play…and there’s an algorithm [built in] that will randomly form melodies.”

The note editor was concieved and built by Jolly, Eno, Wright, and engineer Cyril Saint Girons.

So, as you can see, this kind of sound and music design takes up a lot of resources (”days of stuff on there. It’s more than two gigs of compressed audio”). So what’s the sample rate and bit depth?

“At one point, we thought we might have to go to 22k for all our samples, but in the end we didn’t have to. Some of them are 22k, but morst of the voices are 44[k] MP3 and most of the music is 44[k] MP3.”

“It [the stereo mix] gets multed out to surround, but we did very little in 5.1 for CPU reasons.”

Two gigs of compressed audio? An entire generative music score? Despite all the launch problems [DRM and otherwise], this makes me want to pick the game up.

Oh, and as a last side-note, the DAW of choice in the Maxis offices was Pro Tools for the sound design, and Logic (as stated above) for music.

Quotes taken from the Mix article “The World of Spore,” by Blair Jackson {9/08)

In the new (9/08) issue of Mix, there’s a (short) interview with Mastadon’s FOH engineer/tour manager, Lewis Lovely (sidenote: what a badass name).

Mix: How much gear are you carrying on this tour?
Lovely: We are carrying backline and a mic package. The boys are in the middle of recording their new record with Brendan O’Brien and are really concentrating on that right now.

Do you have a specific mixing style for the band?
I try not to make any one thing the predominant ingredient in a mix. You always run across engineers who think kick drum and vocals are all you need to hear. I want to comfortably hear any of the little nuances Mastadon has written in their songs.

What is the most difficult portion of your job for this tour?
As tour manager and FOH engineer, I have the wonderful job of taking care of their daily lives. They are a true trouble-rousing rock ‘n’ roll band, so press is always fun to schedule. 

More than anything, I’m stoked to hear Mastadon’s new album. It’ll be interesting to hear if the new album more resembles earlier efforts (Remission, Leviathan) or their latest effort (Blood Mountain).

My birthday is next week so my fiancee bought me a Nintendo DS. A few weeks earlier, I had imported the Korg DS10 game cart (Japanese version; American version comes out in October according to Amazon). I’ve been playing around with it endlessly for the last week and found it to be a pretty powerful little app.

Neddless to say, it was nice when I saw Kotaku’s story about the DS10 today. It’s about the first “album” produced using the DS10. Check it out here. Among the DS album, you can also find a really nice DJ mix using music performed entirely on the DS10.

The album and the mix are actually very entertaining. They sound like pumped up 8-bit chiptune songs, and with some mixing love I think the tracks coming out of it could be amazing.

I can’t wait to pump some audio out of my DS and into Pro Tools so I can play around with some tracks.

There’s a new interview up with Tetsuya Shibata, Kota Suzuki, and Wataru Hokoyama, three of the audio post-production guys on Resident Evil 5.

Among topics in the article are why they recorded the large-scale orchestras in Hollywood instead of Tokyo and this gem, which doesn’t seem to be a popular opinion judging from the other guys’ answers:

Kota Suzuki: I get the impression that production at western, particularly American developers are ahead of those in Japan. But, I think that more and more in Japan, the process of making video game music is becoming specialized. More and more Japanese production companies are working together with foreign companies, and sound production quality in Japan is approaching that of the west.

Anyways, click here to read the full article. It’s really good.