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Welcome to our sound for video session today is the 13th of November 2022. it's great to have you here I missed you all last week hope everybody's doing well out there and uh it's good to see you all again let's hop on over to our agenda and take a look at what we'll be covering here today first up a demo of the aea ku5a super cardioid ribbon microphone which is what you're hearing right now we'll come back to that in just a minute here and talk about that particular microphone but also ribbon microphones in general terms a little bit we'll also talk we'll cover some sound design

Basics some really simple elements of sound design so you can get started if you haven't already done any sound design work talk about some of the common things you hear in modern movies some of them are kind of funny but it'll be a it'll be a good time and then we'll go to the chat for any questions that anybody may have so with that let's start with the uh the ku5a and that's the microphone that you may see just a little bit of it yeah you can kind of just see about at the bottom of the frame here um let's pull up some specifications and talk through some of those really quickly if you give me just a moment here we go okay so aea is a company that's based in

California and they started in the 19 I think it was the 1970s where Mr Dooley who is the founder of the company was a big fan of original RCA microphones which were originally designed and manufactured in the 1930s they became very popular very quickly because they sounded very different from many of the microphones of the day condenser microphones were kind of in their early years and uh was manufacturing wise getting the Precision tolerances that they needed to get a really good sounding condenser microphone was pretty tough there were Dynamic microphones and even carbon microphones um but the the thing that was different about the ribbon microphones is they sounded um their frequency response is much wider they could they could capture a much broader sound and they sounded absolutely spectacular relative to many of the other options that were available in that day so in the 1930s we started seeing all the RCA microphones and in fact if you're curious what those looked like they looked something like this let me see if I can make that a little bit bigger but kind of a classic microphone body style that you've seen from the past a vintage looking kind of thing but this is what they looked like here all right and what's interesting about there are a couple things that are interesting about ribbon microphones but

I think just in terms of how they work

I think is interesting so here's a diagram here this is over at a site called Bubble bumblebee pro.com I think they have some DIY kits you can build your own microphone if you wanted to but here's a photo of the internals of a ribbon microphone and what we have here is and there's actually another one laying off to the side here but this is a little foil ribbon it's aluminum and they're usually somewhere between maybe two and a half to one microns thick they're very very thin and they're folded in this accordion like pattern and suspended between a magnet here and between this very strong these neodymium magnets and very strong magnets and as the air the molecules in the air move this little ribbon vibrates a little bit with the movement of the air and that creates an electrical signal through the ribbon itself and that gets fed into the to the rest of the internal Electronics of the microphone a couple of other photos is none of those the photos were it was tough to find a good photo and I'm not taking my ribbon microphones apart because I like them and I would probably break them but here's the inside of a buyer dynamic ribbon microphone here again you can see the magnet and the ribbon here which they're holding with a set of tweezers in this particular case and here's another site this is called

DIY re where again you can build your own microphone here is a the internal portion of a ribbon microphone again the two magnets on either side and the ribbon in the middle this one actually also happens to show the Transformer so they typically put a transformer in there to take the output signal of a ribbon microphone which is incidentally very very weak and that's one of the challenges with the traditional ribbon microphones is that if they didn't have any of their own internal active circuitry or preamplifier of any sort inside of them they required astonishing amounts of gain the output signal is really really quite weak but a lot of the modern ribbon microphones now are have active circuitry in them and they actually amplify the signal more but the

Transformer would help to boost that signal just a little bit I'd also change the impedance a little bit but in any case that's the idea with a ribbon microphone now in this particular case with the ku5a oh and I guess I forgot to mention almost all of the classic the original ribbon microphones had this figure of eight polar pattern that is to say they were sensitive on the front of the microphone and they were just as sensitive for the most part on the back of the microphone which um it was nice that they had these nulls at the side so you could reject sound from the from the sides and in fact in some of the early films that they where they recorded sound they would use ribbon microphones and they'd have them on these enormous boom arms that they would control and try to get them as close to the um the actors as they could but at the same time they would use these null areas and the film cameras at the time were extraordinarily noisy there were mechanical cameras that were feeding film through and really really noisy uh so what they wanted to do of course was it reject as much of the camera noise as they possibly could and pick up as much of the sound from the actors as they could so they would often aim the nulls on the side here towards the camera in ideal circumstances and the most sensitive parts of the microphone toward the actors so that's that's one of the kind of the the main

I guess it's a it's a it's a good thing and it's a bad thing so if you're Phil if you're recording in a studio that is acoustically treated that isn't necessarily a big problem however if you're recording in a lot of other spaces like doing maybe a live stream or a podcast that you're recording at home having that figure of eight polar pattern can be not so advantageous because you're then going to pick up the reflected sound off of the other walls that you may or may not want in many cases you don't want when you're just doing spoken word so that's where a microphone like the ku58 comes into play it's very different from the standpoint that first of all it's an active microphone but it's also a it also has a super cardioid polar pattern so that's very different from most other ribbon microphones so it is very directional and we'll cover that in a little bit more detail in just a minute here are some of the specifications if you're curious it can handle very high sound pressure levels up to 135 DB SPL it is it is an active microphone meaning it does have its own little preamplifier built into it that boosts the signal to some extent but it is still not the most sensitive microphone in the world I'm still applying in this case you're hearing it through my shelford channel let me check to see how much gain I have turned on here

I think we have 48 we have somewhere around 55 DB of gain so you still have to apply a good bit of gain to get things up to a reasonable level so that's just one thing to consider there's the output impedance is 92 ohms which is pretty typical and therefore you want to to feed it into a preamplifier that probably has at least a thousand ohm inputs uh sorry uh 10 000 ohm input excuse me to create a bridging impedance that's again another topic for another time but in any case that's that's one consideration it does require 48 volts of phantom power and it does require seven milliamps and the reason that's important to know is that the I believe the specification for

Phantom Powers 48 volts and 10 milliamps per input but on some field recorders that are battery powered they don't always Supply that much current that's the seven milliamps here that it requires in this case so you do have to be careful so if uh if you were to ever use a microphone like this they're not cheap microphones by the way but if you ever were to use one you'd probably want to make sure that whatever recorder or audio interface or whatever you're plugging into does actually meet the specifications for the 48 volt

Phantom spec and actually does Supply 10 milliamps or at least 7 milliamps so it does have a high pass filter so a low cut but and it's fairly aggressive at 283 Hertz however it is fairly a fairly mild slope at only 6 DB per octave so

Let's uh let's see if we can engage that here and hopefully it doesn't I'm going to go ahead and mute while I do that and be right back with you one second actually Emma dardani let's go to the main camera for just a minute while I do that okay be right back here okay that'll sound very different there the idea is then if you for whatever reason need to maybe in a live situation you could work them up much closer on the microphone and not have all that kind of woolly sound so let me go ahead and turn the high pass filter back off and uh I'll talk into it really closely again you'll hear how Woolly and kind of boomy it sounds muting for just a second here okay we should be back and let's get it right up on the microphone and you can see that is a little bit much a little bit muddy but that's that's what the high pass filter may come in and be useful another interesting characteristic of ribbon microphones is that if you work at a little bit more of a distance the bass falloff is not quite as Extreme as it is with a lot of other microphones so here's I've moved farther away I'm probably would you say two feet away about two feet away here and it seems like the base response is still not too bad obviously we're getting more of the room but um it does tend to hold on to that a little bit better which I think is a nice thing for especially recording instruments or if you need to be working from a microphone at a little bit more of a distance the ribbons have a tendency to do a little bit better at that so all right let's let's go ahead and take a look at the questions here

Danny says we have one come in from Christopher is the ku-5a and eat the mic deal like the sm7b or something you could be 10 12 inches from and still good separation from the room well um let's go back to the Mac here and let's take a look at its polar pattern here's the polar pattern here they do call it a super cardioid polar pattern and the different colored Rings here represent different frequencies you have the The Legend over here on the left hand side but overall it is more of a super cardioid style pickup I would say in terms of its polar response and so you have a little tail on the back here somewhere around minus I would say probably minus 15 it averages so it's going to be minus 15 DB less sensitive on the back versus the front um so yeah I think you can work a little bit a little bit more of a distance from these to answer your question

Christopher and also the base fall off tends not to be quite so Extreme as you would typically get with a dynamic or even a condenser microphone so that's uh that's an interesting characteristic of these microphones as well um frequency response this is a telling story here and some people would look at this and um perhaps be horrified oh my goodness it's not anything close to linear but um this is the ribbon sound and I think it's actually a pretty good sound so there is this mid frequency right in this case about two kilohertz kind of bump plenty of bass response it does tend to fall off after that and so for people with lots of sibilance in their voice or lots of the energy and the 5 to 10 kilohertz range this can be a microphone that actually can be quite flattering and actually I find on if you're miking things like violins it tends to be a little bit more flattering as well so they don't the for instruments that can have a tendency to sound shrill on condenser microphones especially less expensive condenser microphones the ribbon mic is a is a generally is a much better sound and tends to roll off some of those higher end frequencies a little bit more and obviously after 10 kilohertz it just sort of drops so here's between 10 and 20 it drops pretty significantly so that's one of the characteristics again of these microphones now this being a modern ribbon microphone it's not as Extreme as you might have seen on some of the classics um but it is I think it's a pretty nice sound and it could be used I think realistically a microphone like this could realistically be used for spoken word recordings whether that's voiceover even podcasting and um live streaming even I guess where it's what we're doing right now it's not a cheap microphone however so in this case this is a 1200 microphone last time I checked the price so it is definitely a niche kind of product but um kind of a fun one that I wanted to just share with you and uh talk a little bit about what makes a ribbon microphone unique so let's go back to the main cam here and see if we have any more questions or

Curiosities out there in the chat Shoji can you please comment on ribbons versus condenser mic designs um well we covered a bit a good bit of that I think maybe you asked that before I talked about some of those differences there so um and I can it also depends on whether you're talking about a modern ribbon most of the modern ribbon microphones are um are active microphones meaning they do need 48 volts phantom power and let me grab another one here really quickly okay this is the rode NTR I did a video on this one a couple of years ago I think it's been now talked a little bit about this but the I think the biggest thing is this the overall generally the the sound characteristic of a ribbon microphone is quite a bit different whereas the what what I guess draws people to ribbon microphones is that high-end response is quite a bit different it's still there but it has this roll-off that's actually quite pleasing on on some voices and some instruments this is an example of a more classic ribbon design here the rode NTR although it is again it's a modern microphone it was it was released in oh I don't remember 2013 or 14 maybe 15. you can see the ribbon element in there it actually has um it's suspended has a suspension system internally in a very kind of transparent outer basket and then it has an inner cover on the ribbon assembly there as well but this is this one does have a figure eight polar pattern the road so this is not the type of thing you would just use in any space like a spare bedroom or a kitchen or a dining room uh this would be something you'd probably you do need probably some sort of acoustical treatment to in most cases when you're going to be using something like that unless you're recording an instrument where you intentionally want the sound of the room to be part of the recording as well and that's where I've used this one before for both violin and trumpet and gotten very good results with that microphone so

I would say that the the difference to my ear is generally the the high frequencies and um the fact that you can move the microphone substantially farther away with less loss of the base response so just a really [Music] um it's different in that way so that's kind of the main difference with the ribbon microphones so put that one back if you're interested on my main Channel we do have the video on the rode NTR and some audio samples there now oh yeah there is another thing about driven microphones in general terms they tend to be a little bit more delicate they're um one you know this is a ribbon in this case on the ku5a it's a 1.8

Micron thick ribbon um that's you have to be careful with that and even with for example with the road and I'll come to the question in just a second here Shoji even on the road they have Specific Instructions when you're storing it for a period of time you should store it vertically so that the aluminum corrugated ribbon doesn't um deform by lying on its side so there's some things that are a little bit more fragile in general our ribbon designs more fragile than absolutely yes absolutely yes Christopher ribbon mics are notorious for their susceptance to damage a

EA says it's supposed to be durable but how um yeah I don't know I don't know the answer to that Christopher

I actually I will say this I I paid for this I first of all with my own money um and when I first got it I did some tests with it I'm like why is it so noisy and we we had to actually contact aea support and said I you know this I used it in several different pre-amplifiers quality preamplifiers shelford Channel

Apollo universal audio sound devices mix pre uh Zoom F series recorders all of them had this sort of uh kind of hum to it and so we contacted them they said yeah why don't you send it in we'll take a look at it we did that and um turns out there was an issue with the grounding in the microphone they fixed it and this is what it sounds like now so I think they definitely got the problem whatever the problem was I don't know how they make it more durable than traditional ribbon mics I don't know we'll see over time if it ends up being especially durable they actually claim that this one the ku5a that the touring musicians are using it as well so it does come in a pretty pretty nice case here pull that out so sort of this kind of hard style case with foam lining that's custom for the microphone so maybe that helps a little bit as well but it's fine question

Christopher I think it's also a smaller ribbon in in this one versus in something like the road by its very nature being shorter um I think it's less likely to sustain damage or to run into issues where the ribbon stretches or deforms in a way that is problematic because it's less it's less not as heavy and you know because it's smaller I I don't know this is all the conjecture so I don't know the answer to that okay any other questions or comments okay any other questions all right let's go let's get some questions here we have a a minute before we jump into the other thing okay this is two different people interesting updates to the fairlight page and resolve 18 Studio and Daniel interested to hear if you've taken a look at resolve 18.1 because it has significant upgrade in fairlight so yes I have I have heard about the changes we have not taken a close look at it I just came off of uh the biggest production of the year for me um so I haven't had a chance to look at it but I did see the announcement and I am looking forward to taking a look at that we will talk about that here in the future for sure you know Damian is more recent isn't it

EG not back from the 30s or 50s yeah that'll be in the more recent uh designs correct that's my understanding as well just an off-topic question for later but have you ever done mid-side recording I think that would be a cool topic to go over glad you brought that up in fact in the video that we released on YouTube today on the main Channel it is a look at some of the AKG microphones the c414 the 214 and the 314. one of the things we covered in the video was what is the use of having a figure eight polar pattern and one of the big uses is to be able to create mid-side stereo recordings and so we actually have a demo of making a mid-side stereo recording there so we did we did actually cover that to some extent we can go into more detail in another video in the future I'm not an expert on that I don't use it a lot but um we did we did cover that on today's video and we will probably take a closer look at some point in the future as well okay from Chase the high end frequency response was made to cut through the roll off of tape machines I love my ribbons to soften the top end of of my mostly flat converters yeah I agree it's it is a nice

I like the sound I like it quite a bit uh did the aea contact you about the ku5a or did you find select it yourself

I found an I found it actually um so I bought it with my own money they haven't given me anything um and the way I found it was actually ban Drew on podcastage covered it as a review is one of his

I don't know that he he said that Curtis and ban Drew are the only two people in the world who do any sort of podcasting or live streaming with ribbon microphones so um I found it when he had a review of it that's how I wasn't um exposed to it interesting design how is this design a front address versus site address so I think that there I watched some of the promotional material that and promotional video over on the aea website they don't tell you exactly what the internals look like and I'm not going to take mine apart to find out because I have a tendency to break things when I take them apart but from some of the imagery that they showed it looks like there are some channels and I don't I don't know if the ribbon is oriented along the long end of the long axis of the microphone or not the ribbon is just barely over an inch in length I don't think it's it's probably oriented so that the sound moves down these channels um and then and then vibrates the ribbon from there so my guess is that they're using some sort of channels to I'm not sure it's it's it is an interesting design so very different from what you see with most other ribbon mics and the short answers I don't know but definitely take a look at that if you're really curious over on the aea website okay this is uh is the mic preamp module in the sound devices 8xx superior to the mix pre-mic preamp module in what way I guess um not by all specifications I don't believe it is so for example we're going to go to the sound devices website and Danny you can go ahead and pull this up I'm going to go to the support page actually I'm going to go to the current products let's look let's look at the 888 I believe they all have the same preamplifiers the specs the analog inputs uh let's see here one limitation on the eight series inputs as I recall was that let's see here here we go four kilo ohm input impedance so you can use that with pretty much any microphone uh they thought they provide the full 10 milliamps to all eight puts simultaneously I believe the mix pre does that as well that's again this is one thing that a lot of those field recorders will skip skip on or cheat at as they won't provide a full 10 milliamps and therefore some of your mics will not work optimally um it had to do with the max input level yeah here it's it's only a Max of 8 DBU and I think the I think that actually the Max on the mix pre is actually 14

DBU so is that is that going to be a problem in real world use for a recorder that's designed for recording vocals or dialogue specifically probably not if you're on the other hand recording a lot of really loud sound effects like my friend Watson Wu you're out recording firearms and performance vehicles that might be a problem potentially so that's that's one thing to consider uh not not been a problem for me again because of the type of recording I do not not an issue but in terms of dynamic range I think that they were saying I think Paul Isaacs was saying at one point that the dynamic range of the inputs on along with the converters it's it's both um is somewhere around 140 DB so it's it it specs pretty well that way in terms of overall sound they're very close I haven't noticed any massive massive differences but in any case hopefully that answers your question I think in short um there's not the biggest thing that kind of raised my eyebrows at one point was the fact that the 888's max input level is what was it eight DBU plus eight DBU yeah so again if you're going to record a lot of loud stuff probably the eight series like a lot of sound effects is your primary thing and you're doing a lot of loud sound effects probably this is not the mixer for you banjo and his wallet sucking influence [Laughter] well I will say this in in Andrew's defense um and my own neither of us advocate for going into debt to purchase anything along these lines and in fact one could also argue that um well banjo in particular he has more expensive microphones than I do I don't have

I don't have his u67 reissue which I think is like a set isn't that like a six or seven thousand dollar microphone um I think the idea is for him to be able to demonstrate them and that this is certainly the approach I take is that let me demonstrate them for you and and see if there's really that much of a difference and it's really worth the money for your particular application so you could look at it that way there's always a glass is half full and a glass is half empty kind of perspective all those things uh what will you be using the aea ribbon for things exactly like this live streaming also for recording violin um so I think this will be a little bit easier to manage than the big road the road is an incredibly heavy microphone too by the way so mounting that up high you need a pretty substantial stand this is far lighter weight so that's uh that's those are the things that we'll be using it for mainly good question here from Chase Danny says when traveling for work how do you go about flying with sound blankets or treatment do you have a case for them all so yeah I don't travel a lot first of all for for work but when I have yes

I have a whole series of Pelican cases they're actually in the background they're stacked down here but yeah we can usually put a couple of blankets in there and we also um in one case we borrowed some blankets um we just found some to help mellow out a room that we were working in down in Austin Texas when I was down there with my brother so you shall be able to they'll fit one or two in there it also helps pad all of the equipment that's in the cases as well so kind of serves double duty okay all right let's go let's talk a little bit about uh sound design then next so first of all let's go back over to our agenda the very first thing I want to talk about is well first of all let me give you some context here first of all I am not a sound design expert so do not look to me to be the sound of my design expert I am just starting to experiment with it myself and learn so we're just going to cover some really really really basic stuff here but one of the things that I had to do for the recent production we worked on um and I for those that don't know I work for a company called webflow and I work with the video production group we just had our annual conference and for that conference we put together the keynote um address and that keynote was about an hour and 20 minutes long portions of it were pre-recorded other portions of it were live and for the opening part which is about a six minute bit and you can find this on YouTube if you just do a search for webflow keynote 2022 the first six minutes we'll give you a great example of what I'm talking about and what we're going to cover here in some a very high level here today is um we wanted to put some sound design elements in there are some really fun parts of the video where there are three people so there's McGuire who is the main narrator and presenter and he's talking about how web design has changed over time and how how today is very different from back in the 1990s when the internet first started we have

Sarah who is a designer who is also part of the video and we also have Greener who is uh was actually one of our producers and um he also went to school studying design so at one point uh greemer uses the force and pulls a lightsaber off of a shelf he ignites it any kind of um yeah he waves it around he brandishes is it brandishes is the safer a little bit hey wields it and then Sada asked him where even did you get this and he lifts it up just to say something about you know it uses a crystal and when he lifts it up it shatters the lighting fixture above him so glass falls down Sparks are flying smoke is coming down from the ceiling so that's where sound design becomes really really important and the things that you can do are a lot of fun and also during that presentation when Maguire is talking again about web design how it's changed over the years um he we're using a lot of visuals 3D visuals from that were generated using

Cinema 4D and they're kind of just on a black background with these three-dimensional elements and so it there's this kind of

Grand feeling of being out in space and so there's some sound design that goes there as well so we'll talk about that in just a minute but that's the backdrop let's talk first about making something sound farther away so what I did for the glass smashing is I actually went and purchased a recording of shattering glass um just in the interest of time but the problem with the recording was it sounded the perspective was wrong it sounded right up close it sounded like the microphone was close to the shattering glass and that just wasn't going to work based on the visuals in our particular piece so with that let's come on over to the Mac here and I have up on the screen right now Adobe

Audition which is what we'll use for this demonstration but let me just find first of all the glass shattering here let me pull this down just a touch and this is the recording we started with so there is a little bit of Reverb in there you can hear but it sounds like it's a pretty close perspective as again I said the microphone sounds like it's quite close to the glass so the question is how can you make it sound farther away which is exactly what we needed to do and there are a couple of things to do with that that I think can help with that so first of all is using some Equalization to change the sound and the thing that's important about distance is that low or higher frequencies don't travel as far so let's go back to our default here so what that means is you may want to attenuate some of the higher frequencies a little bit to get the right sounds so let's do that let's go ahead and just turn on this one right here and there's a high Shelf and let's pull it down so this is at let's put it about five six kilohertz as a start that's with without with okay so that's one thing you can do as a start so we'll go ahead and apply that well actually you know what let's not apply it let's actually put it in to our rack over here

Okay so we've got that in our rack next thing is also perspective is having a

Reverb on it to help it sound like it's in a particular space this will help it make it sound a little bit farther away so we're going to go down to our Reverb and I think we're just going to use this Convoy convolution Reverb and the room that we were in was somewhere probably around the size of a classroom so let's see how it sounds with this empty livering room that could work as well endless tunnel nope definitely not gallery possibly and this is one where you just have to experiment now obviously we're just using presets here or actually these are the different impulses this is a convolution Reverb so what you do in the convolutionary verb is you actually feed it a sample of Reverb from a particular space and it uses that to create the Reverb on your sound sample using essentially the same the the response characteristics of the space where they recorded the convolution sample so you can also of course tweak all of these little settings here to make it sound a little bit different here so for example room size let me just kind of put it on Loop and change the room size not making a big difference again because of the impulse response file they're using here for the classroom but that was one way we could go from something that sounded way too close to the microphone to something that sounded closer so here's without and with so you can see how that sounds a little bit farther away so that's one thing that can be really useful when you're starting to do sound design for the very first time is understanding how to do something like that so again it's EQ rolling off some of the high frequencies and also adding a Reverb to help with that as well okay next thing I want to cover really quickly actually before we do that any any questions in the chat before we move on not about that not about that okay we will come back then to the chat in just a bit next up I want to talk about noise and EQ and specifically about generating noise and using EQ to shape the noise to fit your sound design so you might be thinking Curtis why would you ever want to add noise to a recording or to your to your video and let me just um let me just give you an example here we're going to go ahead let's go back to

Adobe Audition I'm going to go ahead and go file we're going to create a new file here um this is just fine we're just going to call it well why don't we call this our spaceship noise okay then I'm going to come up to effects and I'm going to generate noise okay so um there are different noise generators here there are different types of noise there's Brown noise pink noise white noise and gray noise there are other types of noise as well of course but this is what

Adobe Audition is capable of generating now first of all you've all heard of white noise and white noise you can see the frequency response chart down here in essence white noise is kind of equal amounts or equal amplitude at all of the frequencies across the range that we can hear as humans that's the characteristic of white noise pink noise is a little bit different it tends a lot more towards the base so you get more power in the base frequencies and it rolls down from there this is actually probably closer to how we hear

Brown noise is even steeper than that so a lot more Bass and a lot less high frequency and then gray is sort of this curve so you get a lot of bass and then you also get a little bit more high frequency than mid frequency so let me just play through a couple of these here really quickly so you can hear what they sound like and this is going to be just the starting point of what we generate so let's start with white noise we've all heard White Noise before

I'm getting a report that it's kind of loud so I'm going to pull that down a little bit give me just a second here uh whoops not there we want to go here let's pull it down a little bit okay back to audition so there's white noise uh whoops let's go back to pink noise here a little bit more a little bit more bass there for sure

Brown noise should be even more bass and less High ah yes that's sounding a little bit more like you're flying in an airplane so interestingly that's that's kind of the first thought that comes to my mind and then gray noise just as a curiosity what this sounds like a bit more bass and some of the highs okay so for that bit where they were where in our video we were showing the Cinema 4D kind of stylized icons and user interfaces out in space um I think something like a brown noise might actually be very interesting so I can tell it let's just create five seconds Worth or maybe we could go more than that we could go 10 seconds you can generate however much you need of course and just click ok all right so here now is our Brown noise and let's play that back oh that's evidently 10 minutes by the way in not 10 seconds so there's a starting point now if we look at the spectral view you can see a lot of the power is down on the bottom here but there is still some in the highs and what if we what if we used EQ to shape this even more to fit and again this is where it becomes purely subjective and and up to you I'm going to use this EQ now you might ask why are you using this different EQ why can't you just use the

EQ that is built into [Music] um audition and you could certainly the reason I'm using this one is just to save your ears for this live stream what

I found is that as you're tweaking the parametric EQ that's available within audition it distorts a lot and it's really kind of annoying to listen to this one doesn't do that it somehow

Smooths it out so I'm going to go ahead and just start playing and playing the sound to the brown noise back and start to change it here and I want to really emphasize the low frequencies I want something that creates this feeling of weight weightiness to the to the seam so here we go [Music] stop there uh what I need to do is I actually need to bring this up in here let me put a limiter on here first to save everyone's ears 0 DB gain that's great that's in our rack here and then we'll go ahead and add the EQ here okay playing again [Music] hear that Rumble it's definitely there it'll depend on your speakers or your headphones [Music] okay so if you wanted to add that serious like ground rumbling uh kind of feel to it that is one way you could do this is using EQ to do that now um again if you wanted to create the sound of flying in an aircraft we could do that as well we would probably use the uh which one was it that sounded more like that I think it was the

I think it was the brown noise actually yeah we have to just turn off the EQ play it back that's going to be more a little bit more like playing on an aircraft and then here's the ground Rumble uh whoops there we go do you hear it now yep okay okay so those are the kind of things you can use to add some interest to your just sort of ambiances if you need to do that um audio buff says wow I've never thought of using noise like that yes this is a design sound design element that you can use to to create some exciting things okay so there's that let's go ahead and turn that EQ off for now I'm going to go ahead and leave that limiter on now let's go back to our agenda there's one other thing I want to talk about as far as just really basics in the sound design and that is the bass drop if you've seen an action movie trailer in the last 15 to 20 years you have experienced this we call it the bouge um and it is a base drop that sounds a little something like this let me just play this back for you let's go ahead and switch back over to audition there we go uh there's the spectral View whoops that's not what I meant that's what I meant okay sounds like this [Music] whoops let's just play it once [Music] you hear that that's a little low a little low okay coming back up uh let's go over here okay playing again [Music] okay how do you create something like that let's create our own let's go to file new audio file we're going to call this bass drop two 48 kilohertz stereo 32-bit flow it's all fine then we come up to if whoops effects let's get that back in place effects generate tones all right so you have a tone generator kind of a basic one here in

Adobe Audition and what you can do is you can actually sweep the frequency so what a bass drop is doing is starting at one frequency and changing to a different frequency so you have a start and an end so if I check this box I can now Define the start frequency and the end frequency okay so for the start frequency we'll go ahead and choose 100 Hertz so we're going to start already pretty low frequency and then for the end we'll go down to 20 Hertz now we can choose how long we want this to be seven seconds is probably a little too long let's try let's try one second long just see how that goes okay so we're starting at 100 Hertz we're ending at 20 Hertz and it's just going to drop you can also make it logarithmic in shape so it can do most of its base drop very quickly and then sustain moving at a slower sweep but let's just start here and let me play it and see how it sounds [Music] okay and the way that element is often used in the trailers is it's like build up build up build up getting more and more tense High lots of high frequency lots of stuff going on silence and a bass drop and then pick up all that noise again and all the all the action and everything again so it's sort of this it's this way to create this really um emotional or really intense moment and then there's a bass drop and everything starts again they actually use this in quite a lot of things you see this in music quite a bit we've seen it um we were we're fans of um DCI the drum bugle cores and they they often use this in their sound design as well okay so that's the way you can do that and let's go ahead and we can create that this is what the wave looks like you can see again it's starting oh Danny switched away so it starts a little bit higher frequency again around 100 Hertz and it gets slower and slower till we get to 20 Hertz over the course of a second and again sounds like this [Music] okay let's come back out and take a look at the chat see what people have to say here

Brian nice with the sunglasses airing now I'm wearing Audio Technica 50

Bluetooth headphones in my earwax just dropped out I am so sorry Harry well it does save you a trip to the clinic so uh oh there's bandru ku5a I think we're the only two people in the world that podcast with that boundary but it is one of my it is it's a beauty I did have as

I mentioned before I did have that grounding issue with it sent it back they got it fixed up and sent it right back so that was good as well all right well let's go to more general questions then thanks everybody for indulging me to play around with sound a little bit there and let's see what general questions we have for this week we have about 10 minutes here it looks like to run through some of those and I am going to take a sip of water because I've been talking for a while be right back with you I'm going to mute while I do that okay uh Danny's over here chuckling so whatever these questions are that are coming in it doesn't hurts that's good

Harry foreign I am glad it doesn't hurt because that would be bad all right John T I'd be very interested to make a comparison of the new Da Vinci neural engine enabled voice isolation in 18.1 versus rx10 you can bet on it we will be looking at that for sure also there's a voice isolation in Final Cut

Pro 10 I know not everybody most people here probably don't use Final Cut but there's a really good voice isolation and Final Cut as well dead simple to use and it's really effective for steady state noises like hums and air conditioning and things like that but we'll be interested to see how DaVinci's work works

I wonder what Alan has to say about sound design I've seen some of his reaction videos um to hear as a what a production sound person thinks of the sound design in a lot of the films and TV that are out today some of it good some of it not so good so I'm sure that's everything that's everything I guess we answered everybody's questions there's nothing more to talk about so I guess we can all go back home and start working on our other projects

Brian says it frequencies hurts me I'm again I apologize if anyone's ears got uh hurt here uh let's take a look at uh let's see what audio buff has to say there something about dual dual 15-inch woofers in my house for home theater sound I love the THX sound oh yes the THX is just amazing and with 15 inch woof dual 15-inch woofers oh my goodness that would be uh shaking the house I imagine [Laughter] all right from Darren need simple eight mic semi-permanent Zoom conference setup for one of our conference rooms reviewing the Tascam Model 12 digital and Yamaha mg16xu analog mixers with built-in USB interface using sm-8 mics think those are a good choice and then Darren as a follow-up to that one if you would any experience or thoughts of for either mixer or other setup or recommendations um

I would check to make sure that the

Tascam Model 12 doesn't have a lot of latency if you're doing it for conference calls you don't want a lot of latency although are you doing I don't know if it's for video calls as well or if it's just audio if it is video you're gonna have to have a way to sync those and an analog mixer will not have generally will not have any sort of latency issues maybe on some of its processing if it has any processing built in but um a lot of times for live things I I like analog mixers if I can if I can get away with it but I

I don't know I haven't used either of those personally I know there are a lot of fans of the Tascam model 12. so if anyone here has any input for our friend Darren would love it if you would share that I think either one could work Darren um cool there's a question but I don't know what the question is I do have questions about OS Windows and Mac okay but we I think is the question Windows or Mac which should you use I I don't have an answer to that uh I use Mac I've used windows in the past but for all of my video work we we use

Mac here not not saying that anyone shouldn't use Windows I think it's perfectly legitimate to use either one but um there would be some apps that I would miss

Final Cut in particular for me so my favorite if I look at users here we do have other Final Cut users here good okay okay here's ah Christopher biggest lesson learned unexpected problem from your big keynote creation oh that's a really good question Christopher um I think it is all about time the amount of time it takes to put something like that together so wow we did the pre-recorded bits we also put together the script and worked with our design team on putting together all the slides for the live portion as well we put together the um you know we're again working with our design team put together the live demos we did live demos as well so if you if whoops if if you're if you're curious the format of the overall thing it was sort of like an

Apple keynote when they have a product announcement it sort of took that same kind of approach um that's that's one big thing I think another thing Christopher that and we had a production company that did the live event itself so we we didn't do the switching in any of that for the live event that was that was hired out to a production company that did that one of the things that I would have required were requested of the production company is to include audience microphones so that we could mix that in with the overall recordings and the reason for that is that um in post the the whole process of mixing in any sort of audience engagement was a little bit tricky and it's okay the way we ended up doing it but it's not ideal from my perspective so um would have been better to have a uh someone actually working on the mixing board and able to write a fader for that particular experience but anyway that that's probably the biggest lesson I think was just giving ourselves more time starting sooner in preparation for that because we had a lot to do and that ended up we ended up working over the last two weekends no just the last weekend excuse me just last weekend um which is why we didn't have a sound for video session last weekend um but if we had started earlier I think we probably would not have had to work that weekend so cool oh because my University uses windows but from what I see for film classes I see Max yeah um I think that's yeah um yeah

I mean um it just depends on what you're doing I think most people are using for example in the sound world are using Pro

Tools on Mac um I don't know the last I'd heard again

I'm not a heavy Pro Tools user yet but from what I've heard from other people it seems like the Mac version of Pro Tools might be a little more robust don't if I'm wrong on that again it's hearsay it's from other production sound or other post mixers that I've talked to or heard from they say that the Pro Tools Mac version tends to be less Troublesome less less buggy and more stable than the windows version so that's one example there potentially and that's like you know if if it's a film a company like Avid and I'm making an app and most of the users on Mac I'm gonna probably put most of my effort there so I think it's probably stuff like that just historically what's happened over time film classes use max mainly because of avid yep exactly but these days uh programs run on both agreed more off topic questions I'll be doing a one-man band production and maybe a PA anyone have any tips with maybe a public address system I assume is what you mean like front of house type mixing any tips I would get subscribed to Dave rat's Channel ASAP um if you haven't heard of Dave brat he is the the live mixer for the Red Hot Chili

Peppers and several other bands so he goes on tour with those bands and does all of the the sound for them in these massive venues he has lots of great information on his channel um audio University is another one that's that's worth looking into for specific questions um Kyle over at audio University is doing a really good job lately with some great videos there so definitely worth checking as well there's some platform bashing there's some platform uh discussion going on um I st you will notice that I stay clear of the whole operating system um debate um I think you should use whatever you want to use whatever you choose to use is fine um let's see a question boundary thank you so much

I'm doing great Andrew thank you so much um I uh it's been a stressful last two weeks just with so much going on um but we are in a good spot now I've had a chance to sleep and recover from the long hours of work so I'm doing pretty well and I'm super happy to use my uh ku5a ribbon microphone it makes me it warms my heart um because it has such a nice warm sound anyway okay well thanks everybody for joining us on our sound for video session today I hope you have a great week get out there and make some great sound and we'll talk to you again next time take care everybody [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]