So I thought I’d let everyone (all 5 of you) know what’s officially going on around here.

First, some background.  Some of you may know that two of my good friends, Josh Milligan and Bill Smith, moved back up to Pennsylvania from Texas, to “return to their roots” as it were. This was undoubtedly a really tough move for them, because Austin is a rather amazing city. So there must be something about PA that they like a lot… I think I know what it is: it’s not their families, it not their friends, though those things contributed to their decision.  No… it’s the hills. I know because I feel it too. Few things make me appreciate God’s creativity and providence more than driving east on I-80 into the Appalachians. As soon as the weather breaks, I know we’ll be hiking and biking out there a ton.

Sorry, got on a tangent there. Anyway, as a side effect of their return, they brought their band with them, Yellow Lady Slipper.  Myself and our good friend and bassist Bryan Lightner from PasaMala will be joining them, as well as (hopefully) occasional appearances by Marla (Voltz) Taylor.  So this means a few things:  First and foremost, I’ll be able to give in to the recent urges to do less sound production and more music.  Sound production will always be there, of course, you can’t do music this century without it… but it will primarily be a tool for making the Slipper’s music better and conveying it to some yet-unformed base of listeners.  I do enjoy recording others, and will continue to do so from time to time, but doing it as an enterprise just hasn’t satisfied me as I hoped it would.  I discovered that I have a particular recording style that really doesn’t lend itself to most of the music that’s out there today, so my chances of commercial success were basically stunted from the get-go by my own tastes.

This leads me to the real point of this post: What will happen to the studio.  For the last year and a half, I’ve been living with my parents in hopes to save a few bucks and get myself out of the financial hole that foolish optimism got me into back when my life revolved around Idiosympathy.  While that hole has gotten filled in somewhat (to nearly half of what it was), activities at Blacktown Sound Labs, while fulfilling, haven’t helped.  Additionally, I’ve found that sharing a space with a group of other bands, while great in theory, is fraught with difficulties.  So I’ve decided to move on, back to an “everything under one roof” approach.  I haven’t decided whether I will be buying or renting a new place, but it will be a place where musical activities are top priority and sound production becomes a tool in the tool box — and I just happen to have pretty nice tools (by divine grace).  As for the question on everyone’s mind:  Will it still be called Blacktown Sound Labs even though it’s not in Blacktown?  I’m apt to encourage Si to keep using the moniker, since he and Brian have talked about creating a new recording set-up in the Blacktown school house.  As for myself, I’ll keep the web site up for them to use, and maybe it will just become a nerd/music community blog… who knows.  I’ll certainly keep pursuing my goal of creating a simple recording system based around Arch Linux (which it seems I have gotten some others interested in as well) — but only when the music stops for a moment.

So, now that everyone knows what’s up, I’ll let you go about your day.  I’m going to head down to Beans on Broad for lunch.

credit: harrisonconsoles.com

I was nerding around the interwebs this morning and somehow I navigated to Harrison’s website to check out their preamps and look at items that I will never be able to afford in any lifetime.  I came across something pretty interesting; they were boasting about a console that had a sort of sixth sense when recording and playing back audio.  The crazy freaks at Harrison devised a system that can actually see the audio you’re recording or playing back up to 20 seconds before you hear it.  They aptly labeled this system and display ‘ESP’.

The whole system is displayed on a bright colored screen that is easy to read and easy to understand if you’ve worked on any large recording console before.  Categories are organized with the dynamics on top, followed by EQ curve, channel name, bus assignments, pan indicator [capable of surround sound panning], aux sends and then finally the ESP-preview / input meter.  While all this may seem daunting for an inexperienced technician – it should.  Harrison boasts about being in the market for professional post-production solutions for major studios.  What that means in English is that you will never see a console like this until you set foot in a major radio station, film post production studio, recording studio or television studio.

Harrison’s ESP feature is included on [from what I can gather on their website] all of their consoles.  Some other nifty features include the ability to view exactly how much compression is being applied to each waveform and track.  Shown in the dynamics section [top of channel] and the ESP-preview section [bottom of channel]; the amount of compression is displayed in red and

credit: harrisonconsoles.com

overlaps the waveform in the ESP-preview so you can see exactly how much of the audio you are squishing.  Harrison also claims that you can use the ESP feature on live audio…but that kind of creeps me out to think of how it works.

With claims that your mixing will be streamlined by 25%, I think I need to find a studio that utilizes a Harrison console and try for an internship!

So I’m finally doing it — I’m going to ditch windows for good.  After my HP mobile recording system crashed about 9 times in one weekend as I was in the middle of important projects I made the call that it’s time to either ditch the laptop and spend a load of cash on a mac…or I could just be a total nerd and rebuild my laptop with a Linux distribution running Ardour.  My friend Sean from Blacktown Sound Labs is helping me compile everything, but I’m officially going to take the plunge and dive in to all that is Linux.

Ahhh the simplicity of Ardour