Learn by doing

After an email from Luke over at Korneff, I got thinking about my process of learning. He's got a lot of knowledge and wondered if I prefer lessons/courses in video or written. My initial reaction was "written" but it made me dig deeper and I realised I'm a terrible learner - slow, and scattered.

This is how it usually goes down:

I start a project. I quickly skim the internet for a few initial considerations and then I take it on, headlong. I fumble, experiment, slowly get stuff working. In the past when I'm stuck I would use a search engine and trawl through posts, these days the AIs do it for me. I eventually get what I needed/wanted in the project working.

If that's it, that's okay. But when a project continues, and I have to dig deeper in, I start to realise that how I have done it is not quite how a pro would do it, so I have to re-learn aspects, un-learn bad stuff, approach with better application.

It's usually at that stage where I say to myself "I should have taken the time to learn this properly from the start", shrug my shoulders, say to myself "too late now, just keep going." The reality is that it is never too late. And then I will also say to myself "Learning through experimentation can lead to great outcomes!" Again, mostly fooling myself. And even then, I irrationally believe myself.

Case in point - last Thursday my daughter's band put on a garage concert. I have been amassing enough gear to put on a live show so I had what I needed, and I have recorded audio/video for a few concerts in my time, just because I like to document things, never because I needed to. I've never done a course in concert staging or recording, just winging it. In no particular order:

• I came into possession of a Yamaha DTX500 electronic drum kit, with cymbal upgrades and a few other features. Has a nice big amp with subwoofer, but I didn't want any of that...I wanted it to be a midi trigger for a VST drum. I've done that before, I like it and it's great to mix and keep under control. I had purchased SSD5 so I could have a kit that didn't just sound like every other backyard studio free SSD5 kit. I spent time trying to calibrate the triggers through the DTX500 box, time trying to balance the SSD setup. I had to map the midi triggers manually because the default maps I could find on the internet did not match. It came out okay. I don't know if I was pleased with the live levels, but it was okay.
• I also came into possession of two condensor mics and decided I wanted to record the crowd. I've experimented with ambience mics and I'm totally convinced they are essential for a live feel. I set it up so they would record through my audio interface, but were not in the output stream. In post this proved to be a winning move - my placement was good, they had good rejection of the main sound and yet picked up the audience. I didn't even need to isolate them - just having them faded in at the right level, great feel.
• I set up an in-ear rig a while back, it's just a 4 way splitter with a volume knob. It works great, they can hear themselves at whatever volume they like through the headphones. Comes straight out of the headphone output on the interface. I want to make it better though - I want to be able to give them personal mixes, so I can dial them in their own personal mix. The interface has 8 mono outs on the back, but the levels aren't right for headphones, so it would require a little bit of hardware. And to learn how to make an easy-to-use software resolve for each in ear mix.
• I've got one Behringer Eurolive B112D. It is a great PA. But I only have one. So I ran two cables to it (stereo left and right) into it's two inputs and ran the volumes at the same level. It easily filled the area, which was the garage out onto the driveway - with room to spare. No feedback even at neighbour annoying levels. But it was basically a mono signal on one side of the room. I need a second one for stereo balance. They are "only" $AUD450 in 2025, so I'll be getting another...
• Video cameras. I have two quite old Canon EOS M but they take a great 1080p video. I have a slightly newer version as well, so my usual setup for this type of thing is the two old ones on tripods in fixed positions. I would have liked one high up in the middle but that's where the crowd was so I settled for one up high looking down on one side and one down low looking up ont eh other side. They gave me all of 3 minutes before the show started to set them up so I didn't manage to frame them well, and within a minute of the concert starting someone stood in front of one. Not great. I used the other video as a roving camera. So when I later did a video edit my two stationary/stable feeds were mediocre. I accepted it and edited anyway, the result was still okay. Note, the "easiest" way to film and edit a live concert is to have a guaranteed stable camera or two, try not to walk your roving camera into the frame of both too much, make sure that all cameras are rolling the whole time so they are easy to sync, lay the feeds out in your favourite editor target the roving camera as priority for interest and when the roving camera is a mess fall back to the two stable cameras. I only spent maybe 2-3x realtime editing it, so maybe and hour and a half
• I worked out why old Canon DSLR cameras will only let your record video for 30mins max before they shut off. It was some tax issue - that any camera that can record more than a 30 minute video had higher tax at the time, so they baked in 30 minutes max to the firmware to bring the cost down. How stupid. So if your concert is more than 30 minutes make sure you press stop and press start again within the 30 minutes on each camera...and not all at the same time :-)
• I need to relax with my pre-gain thresholds. My sound check setting I was twisting the gains so high that I was getting hardware clipping. And it was making crackling sounds. Bad. It's a 24 bit interface, I can afford to throw away the first 4 or so bits. I should be able to see the signal as it comes in, but it doesn't need to get close to filling the available bits. And once the pre-gain is set, I should leave those dials alone. Use Reaper's faders.
• When I did a quick and dirty post mix, I added my usual compressors and EQ and saturation and reverb on the vocals and instruments. I did very little automation. Which means that I should set up all those fx for the actual live performance...

I think you are getting the idea. I learn through experimentation and then read up on what I don't understand. It's burnt into me, I don't think I can learn in a structured manner anymore. It's been a long time since I was at Uni, I don't learn like that anymore.

So Luke, dunno mate, dunno.

For the curious, here is the video I made

More cracked/torn nail repairs

Some of us guitar players like a bit of fingernail. on our right hands. Especially when plucking nylon strings, it brings out the higher frequencies. Nylon can be mellow and dull on just fleshy fingertips. As much as you try not to break fingernails - doing things left handed, avoiding some activities which are known fingernail crackers - it still happens, generally at the worst possible timing. I've written about nail repair before but now I've got some science to improve the process! And pictures!

Superglue is still at the heart of it, but if you mix superglue with sodium bicarbonate - easily sourced while grocery shopping if you don't already have some - you get a really tough substance. I was using it while repairing guitar nuts. Last time I was applying superglue and waiting, now I add superglue and sodium bicarbonate makes an even tougher thicker layer that sets hard in seconds.

The science is that when you mix superglue (ethyl cyanoacrylate) with a weak base such as sodium bicarbonate firstly it hardens extremely quickly and secondly forms long polymer bonds. That's good, it's tough!

My process is to firstly have a stash of superglue tubes at the ready. Once opened it will eventually go off even when capped, and since you can get tubes for under 50c each in bulk, just have a stash at the ready. Step 1 is to put a drop or two across the affected area, let it flow out...basically just go for the tip of the nail over where you have cracked/torn it. If it is too challenging to get any into the tear (use toothpicks to poke around) don't stress it. What can be annoying is if you get a bit of glue on the underside of your nail and it sticks your skin to the nail... If that happens you can reset and start again - Acetone dissolves superglue.

Step 2 is to sprinkle sodium bicarbonate over the glue. Just add more than you need, once it sets you dust off the rest. Be cautious, it gets hot as it reacts. Don't do too much at once.

Step 3 is to then add another drop or two to float over the rough surface of bicarb. This will build a good thickness layer. Let it set, will only take a moment.

Step 4 is to do a bit of filing - just smooth it off, don't touch your actual nail. If you are a picker/fiddler, you will find having a lump of cement on the tip of your fingernail frustrating. Relax, let it go.

It will be good for a week before it will start to crack and peel away from your nail. Redo it again if you need. This time around I redid it a second time as I needed to play two gigs separated by a fortnight. After that, it will either have cracked off or just remove it with acetone.

Happy days!

Glued and powdered

Second glue coat ready for light shaping

What's happening Nov 2025

So much to do. I need to write this down so I don't forget about anything.

Record "Breathe (in the Air)" with Nay. Finish the arrangement - currently it is guitar, bass, two singers. It will be a "live" play through but I suspect we will also record the parts separately and mix it against the "live" video. To a click track, of course! This is cheaty, but for us both to sing - she's a good singing, I am not - and play complicated charts - of course I have made it complicated - is not easy. It will be fine, it will be more a music video to a studio recording. The arrangement is sounding great. We will be playing acoustic because:

Muck around with the new acoustic bass. I recorded a video about if of course, which is a story into itself. I had noticed that people seem to like short portrait videos, that people like discussions on specific types of guitars, and they reckon a good thumbnail goes a long way. Well for the first time ever I made a thumbnail...and it was specifically a video about a Tanglewood TRU7ABCEBW, and while it was portrait it was too long to be a short. Worst performing video I have done in a long time! But that is neither here nor there, I make videos because I have something I want to talk about/share. The bass itself is cool, but it's an acoustic bass, which means the only thing it is good for is aesthetics (think MTV unplugged...)

Backlog of mixing recordings from my local church - it's great, every Sunday there is 4 songs, around 20 channels each time with a huge variety of musos, gives me a chance to hone my mixing skills. I normally do one every week or two, I'm building up a collection and often share them with the team for inspiration...planning on getting my ten favourite mixes of 2025 to the music director for release on Spotify.

Record/video/edit/mix a "garage session" of the band "Solstice" my daughter plays bass in. I have ideas in my head to record them live, but also to have an almost "This Is Spinal Tap" documentary feel to it. Well, less irony, but a casual chat between songs (not necessarily me). Will probably get an audience, to give it an intimate feel, so the viewer can feel more like they are part of a small group listening/watching the music. Need to organise with Nay and Lyds when they finish exams.

Record "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" and get the arrangement finished and uploaded. It's super challenging both to play and notate out. Would be the longest song I have ever taken on. But it sounds so good. I need to get it out there so I can continue to develop it. Like Breathe (in the Air) I'm sure I will constantly be changing it as I find new treasures in it.

Record "Breathe (in the Air)" and update the arrangement and upload...again. I've changed it so much since I last recorded it, and even more since I have been exploring it as a duet. It's such a great song. I've been sitting on all my Dark Side of the Moon arrangements, to release one day as a book...but I've gotta give up on that, it might never happen. So get stuff done and recorded and scores uploaded.

Other Arrangements - I've got a few waiting to be finished, recorded, or both. Who can fit all this in?!

Continue to develop a tone for my new Cole Clarke acoustic. I'm just running it through a Zoom G1 four, which is convenient because it fits in the guitar case. It is super programmable, I reckon there is not much it can't do. It's "only" 24bit 44.1kHz 128x oversampling and a 32 bit processor so the audio purists would baulk but there is a lot to love about it. I've fiddled with it a lot, there is more to fiddle with.

Android Audio App for when I need a coding hit, sit with the Chatbots and code up an Android Audio App. Primarily I want it to be able to load an MP3 and play it AND PITCH SHIFT IT. Yes, you can download them, but they are all full of adverts or they want a subscription. With the Chatbots watching over me, I reckon I could knock this up with only a minor bit of frustration. Why? Because the songs I play at my local church are rarely in the same key as the recording and it is nice to play along with them. And I like to code. It would also be nice for it to be able to do a rough pitch detect, tempo adjust - and these are all things that exist in free libraries, so it all seems doable. But this is possibly a pipe dream.

So as you can see by my messy desk, there is always something musical going on but it's a mess...if only there were more hours in a day!

Shotcut Notes

Making video content with the free open source Shotcut video editing software

This is a reminder to myself about tips and tricks I use while editing videos in Shotcut. Yet again another piece of software that is jammed packed with everything you could possibly need, and since I only use it every few months I forget how to do stuff...

• Portrait mode: when you have landscape video that was actually recorded as portrait, to get it into portrait, apply the filter "Size, Position & Rotate" and use parameters something like position -420,420 size 1920,1080 rotation 90.
• Envelope audio volume/amplitude adjustments: add the filter "Gain/Volume" to the clip, select the clip, then click the stopwatch icon to enable keyframes. You can now double click to add points. Note that you can later switch from Timeline to Keyframes in the bottom left to re-edit.
• If you want to do more than just a fade out, say a variable opacity, you will need to add a black layer, File->Open Other->Colour Black. You can then add Opacity to your video, click the stopwatch and set keyframes to envelope your levels.

Restoration: Cassette

A mate of mine pulled out an old cassette of a recording from the late 70's that he played on, and ripped it to digital, handed it to me and said "if you feel like a challenge, see if you can clean this up." I do like a challenge.

The songs were really well done - great old Gospel hymns sung by a talented dude, backed with piano/guitar/bass/drums and a Gospel choir - I could hear through the bad quality that they were pros. But yikes, how do you recover that? Armed with my ability to use an AI model to do isolation, I set about trying to separate the instruments and vocals. Clearly the model was not made for such recordings, it couldn't separate out vocals/bass/drums/other, but it did a pretty reasonable job of separating vocals and other. I then had a chat to the Chatbots about what is going on a learnt a few new things.

My main issues were the usual hiss, boxiness and lack of sparkle, but the two other things that bothered me was the recording drifting from left pan to right pan, and the times the recording seemed to be out of tune. Some other minor things like vocals too loud at times and the drums were so mashed into the mix they were barely discernible.

So far, I have used the following approach and the initial results are quite satisfying:

• Separate vocals from everything else. The lead vocalist, not a problem, but the choir sometimes appeared in the lead vocals and sometimes in the other. Kinda makes sense, it was a dense choir, it wasn't too bad I found I could volume envelope my way around most of it.
• Collapse both tracks to mono, then re-expand them with:
• a hard left/right two tap delay which gives a mud-free perceived stereo effect. Depending on the difference in delays you can tweak how much expansion you want. My ears can detect even a 1ms left - 2ms right difference, it's subtle but it is there. At 5ms - 10ms it is quite clear. >50ms is starting to sound cavernous.
• Magic 7 is my favourite reverb at the moment which adds spatiality, but also adds muddiness for me, so I dial in a room sound and then adjust the wetness.
• EQ - lows and mids: I found the bass was booming annoyingly and the low mids were too prominent. I used a normal EQ to get this more like what I wanted to hear. I wanted to do a multiband EQ compressor but I find them hard to use - I need to practise more - so where there were sudden thumps I used a volume envelope to contain them. It's brutal, but if you don't push it too hard I don't hear it "everything suddenly ducked". Hmm, I really do need to practice using EQ compression.
• EQ - highs: Cassette seems to rob us of sparkle. When I tried to push it back in I was just increasing the hiss. So I used a little bit of EQ in the areas that didn't sound like his, and a saturator to create more high frequency overtones to "artificially" add more sparkle back. This seemed to work okay - what else can you do?
• Compression and limiting to help smooth out the dropouts and dips. And this might just be me, but I like smoothness and consistency in what I listen to. I like swells but I don't like to be jarred. Dynamics in music is great, maybe my ears are already too shot, but I like only subtle dynamics, I prefer a consistent balance. I don't want everything to be the same perceived loudness the entire time...well, maybe I do a little :-)

I noticed while trying to sweep the EQ listening for what annoyed me that "it seems to ring everywhere!" When I chatted to the bots about it, it's all artifacts from tape. Head misalignment, tape speed inaccuracies and just the nature of tape as a data storage medium. I found a compromise...these recordings are never going to sound crystal like they were recorded with modern gear, my main aim was to remove the panning warble, to balance the EQ, some re-producing/mixing to smooth out the dynamics, and I had to accept pitch drifts and out-of-tune sounds.

"Old school analogue vibe."

Steve Slate VSX Listening Routine

What to Listen For, What to Check, How Do You Use These Things Anyway?

This is a reminder to myself about how to do a mix translation test using VSX headphones through the VST plugin, after doing the bulk of mixing in Linear Mode.

* * *

1. Linear (Flat / Microscope View)

Play 20–30 sec mid-strength section

• Check local loudness relative to snare/kick.
• EQ balance has no harsh spikes, not dull anywhere.
• Bass and kick drum has nice separation.
• Listen for sibilance, cymbal/hi-hat/high end harshness
• Mono check (quick flip: does vocal stay centred? Does low end collapse?).

2. Mix Room – Nearfield (Producer’s Laptop Monitors)

Play the same section.

• Vocal placement sits in the mix, not on top or buried.
• Snare/guitar/keys clarity in the mids.
• Kick vs bass relationship in low end okay?
• Does reverb delay stick out?
• Small level tweaks (1-2 dB) often shine here.

3. Mix Room – Midfield (Full Mix Perspective)

Play peak song section.

• In low end does kick + bass still feel solid.
• Panning/reverb/stereo balance feels okay, no phaseyness.
• Automations and arrangement flow - do transitions lift the energy?
• Overall size - not too thin, not boxy.

4. SUV (Car Test)

Play full chorus/bridge at a higher volume.

• Vocals still audible? (cars bury them if too low).
• Kick + bass groove not too boomy?
• Sub-bass control - does anything rattle or overwhelm?
• Harshness at loud playback - does the mix stay smooth?
• Does the song feel exciting/hyped?

5. SA-Pods (Earbud Reality Check)

Play chorus at low–moderate volume.

• Vocals cut clearly (lyrics understandable).
• Snare/guitar mids provide drive even if bass vanishes.
• Quiet-volume test - does the mix still feel compelling?
• If it works here, it works anywhere.

What's happening Sep 2025

I have spent a number of weeks compiling an album. Nah, not an album from me, it is a live album, a production of originals showcased at my local church. There are 19 songs/poems, and many have introductions so the file count is actually 31. That's quite a lot of work. The styles were eclectic! From ballads to singer songwriter pianist to grunge to rock band. Each one I painstakingly reworked from the multi-channel recording from a trusty old M32 deck with SD card module added.

I had to think about stuff I don't normally have to think about - how will the songs all cohere together so they all sound like they belonged to the same event. I think some of that naturally happens because it is me mixing each one, and unknowingly I will already have a style that will carry through. But I considered how some of the quieter ones should sound quieter compared to the loud ones, but at the same time be just fine standalone. Some sort of album cohesion.

It's all but finished, which is great, because I've run out of steam for it... would be at least 50 hours invested to date.

To make my life harder while mixing all that, because of course you'd make life harder, I bought a set of Steven Slate VSX headphones. The ones which emulate a room, so you can say "this is what it would sound like sitting in a recording studio close to the monitor speakers. Or far away from the speakers. Or in a car. Or with earbuds." My youngest daughter kept stealing my Sennheiser HD280s...so I gave up and bought a set of VSX as my headphone replacements. They aren't as easy as they sound, it takes getting used to. Initially it just sounded like different EQ and different reverb. Which I guess it kinda is in a simplified sort of a way. Which is why it made my mixing more difficult, because I was now listening for other things.

I'm still getting used to them, I find I leave then in flat frequency response mode most of the time and only switch to a room as I'm finishing off a mix to see how it translates. It's interesting, well worth the effort. The sales pitch says "best mixes you've every made in your life" but I don't think it is that easy, it's not a silver bullet, I can see that they make a useful difference though. I just need to think differently, listen differently. Listen. Know what to listen for.

Meanwhile I play "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" twice or thrice a week. It would be around 7 minutes long at the moment - hmm, I should time it - okay, done, 8 minutes. It covers parts i-iv and end at the start of v, there are a few elements not included, but it's quite nice and definitely passes the pub test. There are a few more things I'd like to put in there, but history has shown the harder I make a piece the more likely it is to later fall out of my head and I stop playing it regularly. The song is already complicated, so I think if I'm going to do anything more to it - keep it simple! Well, "simple" is a relative term.

I've played it several times on my Friday work lunchtime hangout, there's one lady who stops past for a chat quite often, she doesn't recognise many of my songs because all she listens to is heavy metal and rap! The other week I played a few Metallica riffs, which she knew, I said I've work out something for her. "Enter Sandman" is a great Metallica song, I think we all know the intro, but I was sure I could do more than that. And you know what - I did - and not only is it relatively easy, but it sounds great! It is based on a listen through from Josephine Alexandra's cover, greatly simplified but still super cool. I even played it for my youngest daughter and she had a crack at it. I think that might be the highest compliment I can get - she hears it and wants to try it for herself :-)