It’s almost a year since I last produced and composed an original track.
During this year I…
I’m currently mocking up ideas for some fresh tunes. And will hopefully start producing new material soon. I’ll start by completing this website :)
Paul
Here’s a piece of music that I extended from my brother’s original piano piece titled “Amazing”. Credits would go to him (Peter Chen) for the composition, but I expanded it with all the other sounds (orchestra, guitar, etc…). Have a listen:
Music Link: http://kaiyoti.com/media/peterchen-amazing-remix.ogg
Paul
After a few freak outs using the wm61a microphone assembly with Battlefield Bad Company 2, I think one of the components in the circuit died. Not sure which, and the way I had it taped together made it impossible for me to fix. Will have to build another one. Since I don’t have the materials yet, I decided to build one using 3.5mm jack that utilizes the power from the inline jack. Works just as well, I have noticed more high frequence responses. I don’t have any images of the internals since I forgot to take photos this time . Again, I failed to plan ahead with the wiring size, so unfortunately, the capsule itself portrudes the 3.5mm jack. I filled the rim with superglue to make sure it doesn’t move around.
Finished Product.
Stripped an old PC headset microphone foam.
This microphone will allow me to use mumble chat without wiring up my mixer just to play online games.
My music in the action-packed Safehouse Trailer.
I noticed a few folks stumbled onto my site from google queries with WM-61a, I’m not sure if I’m providing any useful information but I believe I promised a sound sample. Here is a recording done with my guitar (I’m using guitar for most samples because it’s my current weapon of choice and I’m still learning it).
http://media.kaiyoti.com/WM61a-GuitarTest.ogg
The recording setup includes:
DIY Mic (WM-61a) ->
The Amp (from Christian’s Website) -> (using 1/4″ patch cable)
Behringer Xenyx 502 Mixer ->
Behringer U-Control 202 ->
My Sweet PC
Note that I’m not using the slot with the pre-amp on the mixer unit. The preamp on this mixer adds way to much static and interference so I turned it off. If you’re listening through headphones, you’ll notice a low volume noise which is partially attributed by my PC fans (There are 6 fans in total), that really can’t be helped. The guitar was about 3/4 of a foot away from the microphone. The amp/mic works just as well with a 1/4″ to 1/8″ convertor directly into the PC microphone port. Unfortunately, that setup does not include an attenuator, so the input is a bit loud.
You might also notice that the texture of the guitar sounds different from previous samples. This is because I replaced and readjusted both the nut and the saddle pieces to a more balanced height (weighing it against buzz amount). The previous condition was my brother’s handy work when he tried lower the actions by carving the string grooves deeper in the nut and the saddle. The poorly cut grooves resulted in more buzzing. I didn’t even realize that saddles aren’t supposed to have grooves until I saw another guitar in a store. I’ve also restrung the guitar strings to use one with a lighter sound. So the recordings will sound drastically different, and hopefully cleaner.
I’m going to work on the second mic to allow stereo recording. Will also see if I can add a potentiometer to the amp. And I actually have a drill this time to carve holes for the 1/4″ female outlet. At the same time, I’m trying different piezo elements to capture more sources for the final mix.
Paul
Microphone Capsule soldered and heat shrinked
Another shot of the prepared microphone capsule with leads
Two is better than one, one is shorter because I didn’t take into account that the leads were twised when measuring for the second.
This is actually the second circuit I made, the first one was horrible planned which gave me no room to fit into the enclosure. The actual schematics can be found here. I drew my own for future reference so I can plan the size of the circuit better for mark II.
After clipping off some pc board supports, I was able to fit everything into the box with the leads soldered onto 1/4” female jacks.
A finished product.
P.S – I will have another update with sound quality shortly.
After much thought on which audio gear to acquire for guitar recording, I came across forums discussing DIY condenser microphones. This is the one I purchased for around $12 CAD. You can also spend an extra 5 dollars for preassembled kit if you prefer not to solder all the pieces together. There are also schematics online without a big fat PCB board which I will attempt next time. Since I’ve yet a hardware mixer to plug with a better cable, I’ve wired this to a 3.5mm jack for the time being to test on my Auzentech Prelude sound card. It’s powered by a 9 volt battery, and the circuit seems to produce a really loud output. So the 3.5mm jack is actually connected to an audio cable with volume control to reduce the volume. And it works quite well.
Here is an audio recording sample of guitar: Mic Demo
The microphone capsules work well, but I’m wondering if it could be better by replacing them with the WM-61a panasonic capsules that majority of the DIY enthusiasts seemed to vote for. Those are in transit and will post updates later. I’ve also ordered 1/4″ inline jack for use when I get my hardware mixer. There’s still a fair bit of noise I must admit, but that may be attributed by various factors, once I have the mixer to test with, I will hopefully be able to reduce the noise.
I’m taking some time off on most of my other projects (except for work… duh) to learn the acoustic guitar. Been toying around with the guitar for the longest time but had only gotten as far as playing single note on the C and G scales, not hard to imagine that never took off. Using a guitar named Debra WK420. Really cheap guitar with a “few” problems but it does justice for a beginner to practice on. Had the strings replaced and will do the same with saddle and nut shortly. Three weeks of learning currently, mostly just following youtubers, but quite inspiring.
After learning the basic anatomy of the guitar and recording, I considered getting a pickup for the guitar. Most options aren’t cheap. So before jumping into buying a pickup that could cost more than a studio microphone. I decided to test out recording with my current set of microphone. Surprisingly, my $20 microphone (dynamic) works fairly well, though the noise/ambient sounds is quite significant. On top of that, I have to be strumming like mad to while have the microphone half a foot away from the guitar. So not very promising solution. Then I took a look at my 5 dollar clip-on microphone, the Zalman ZM-MIC 1 that I use for gaming (so I don’t have to see a microphone in front me while I play FPS) and thought due to the low cost, this would probably sound worse. Using the same distance set up as the previous dynamic microphone, it sounded okay. I was even more surprised to find less ambiance/noise on this sucker. Unfortunately, it also picks up less of the bass. But remembering that this was the clip on microphone, the one that clips on to your shirt (like my tie :))… see:
Yes, I clipped it to the side of the sound hole on the guitar. I was expecting fuzzy sounds due to the high bass and the direction of the microphone not being able to pick up the highs. Anticipating the boosts in sound, I lowered the overall volume. And the result? I have to say, excellent for 5 dollar equipment. Suffice to note, it does not have the natural acoustics heard from the physical world, however, it does do quite well to act as a microphone pickup. While there’s a surge of the low frequencies, it’s still quite audible as a whole. The minimal amount of ambient noise shouldn’t be overlooked.
Have a listen: http://media.kaiyoti.com/misc/guitartest.mp3
The audio demo had no “noise cancellation” or equalization done on it, it’s raw sound encoded in mp3. It could use a little HP filter to bring out the highs a bit more. The downside is that it picks up all sounds from the body of the guitar since the mic is clipped to the surface. So my clothes rubbing against the guitar is also amplified… oh well, guess I’ll just have to record songs with my shirt off, like a real rock star.
For my next trick, I’ll be experimenting multiple source recordings with my gaming and onboard sound cards using more of these cheap microphones to create a sound with more volume.
I’m looking into getting a condenser microphone called Samson Go Mic which goes for around 50 bucks. It’s a fairly portable microphone that plugs as usb device. Combining it with my ghetto microphone pickup, it should balance out the sounds as well as allowing me to do vocals, so I can be a rock star!
[Update]
Just tested out duo microphone recording using two sound cards (one onboard and another pci card)
http://media.kaiyoti.com/misc/guitartest_duo_mic.mp3
Sounding pretty good so far.
[Update 2]
So after hearing the clips in my studio headsets, I’ve learned that there’s a slight ambient noise… which I think is fine as long as I fade out the silent portions. If you know me, I’m probably going to be adding plenty of other sounds to my tracks anyway.
Being a producer of custom sound samples, I’ve came across the problem of sound looping of my samples in the past. To achieve this, I manually construct a fades in audacity to create loop point. But this is tedious work, especially with hundreds (if not thousands) of audio samples to go through. To ease this process, I did what I do best, automate via scripts. The choice of tool was AutoIt (Windows Only). This was a GUI automation scripting tool. Works wonders, but I soon found it tedious to run each script manually. So I ventured forth by using the C# api from AutoIt to automate so I can parse input files for batch edits. But the overhead from the GUI automation was still making the whole process slow. Not to mention the change in Audacity’s processes, it made automation a bit difficult. I also tried to port the C# code to C++ but that was left unfinished (mostly because of the release of Battlefield Bad Company 2).
So recently I decided to give the direct wave file manipulation a go. I came across multiple open source libraries that can parse headers and read / write to wave files. Finally ended up working with the Synthesis Toolkit (STK). Some other libraries include the RIFF class from libgig which can be found in Linuxsampler (really good), CLAM (C++ Library for Audio and Music), looks like an extensive library but the installation instructions was a massive turn off, Libsndfile (good for multi formats). There were also a few other libraries I found but they seemed to be geared towards video games audio, bit of an overkill.
After a few hours of work, I’ve finished a simple command line wave looping tool in c++ in Codeblocks.
There are at least 4 required fields:
Notice that when you input in seconds, you need to prefix the parameters with “s”.
For some apparent reason, the reading utility from STK doesn’t seem to read the inputs consistently in terms of normalization, so I’ll have to dig into this. Therefore, files parsed by the waveloop utility are all normalized to peak at 0db. I’ve only tested it with 16bit and 24bit Wave files currently, but according to STK specifications, 32bit samples should work as well. Multichannel files are supported. Only uses linear fading for now, I’m not sure if there’s a need for other interpolated fades. I should also point out that currently, anything after the “loopEnd” will be trimmed off. In the future, I might want to fade the tail to create release samples.
This is also my first time using Codeblocks, all I can say is that it’s horrible. I’ve used Visual Studio and Eclipse for C++ environments, and I have to say that the codeblocks autocomplete is the worst by far.
Download: Waveloop Utility for Windows 0.1a (GNU General Public License V3)
Mac and Linux ports are pending consideration…
The next update will include csv/xml file parsing for batch edits. Stay tuned!
Feedbacks are welcome!
[Update 09/27/2010] – Fixed normalization bug, now output file data is no longer normalized.
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