A Kid At Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory – NAMM

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If I were to guesstimate the value of all the sound gear and instruments at NAMM, one trillion dollars would be a fairly conservative estimate.  There was so much gear and so little time.  At first I wanted to stop at every booth and check out what each manufacture offered, but this would be an unrealistic goal unless I had a full 40 hour week on the show room floor.

I had to be very selective and luckily I had my good friend David Sooter guide me through the weeds.  He attended NAMM last year with a few veterans who passed on their experience to him.  I saw speakers, microphones, headphones, line arrays, interfaces, mixing consoles, guitars, basses, plugins, guitars, drums, wireless microphone systems, guitars, cables, parts, guitars, guitars, mini guitars, and a sea of pony tails.

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NAMM – Need I Say More?

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Tomorrow and Saturday morning I will be attending the NAMM show in Anaheim, CA.  I will be testing some of the new equipment, taking pictures and interviewing companies (like Universal Audio) and posting a few blog posts.  I will probably have a quick overview post after I attend tomorrow morning with anything that caught my eye.  After interviewing UA Saturday morning I will have a post on just them unrelated to NAMM.  Lastly I will have a post on how these new technologies will influence us in are respected studios, stages and screens.

If anyone out there wants me to ask any specific questions on any equipment you may have already heard some buzz about, just let me know.  I am kind of curious as to how Behringer’s new iPad mixers feel and sound.  I predict that I will expect nothing but an equally high quality Behringer product (please note the sarcasm in my typing).

GW – This is how I sound design

Randomizing – Unique Sound Design

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Sound is an art form that exists “in time”.  By that I mean to experience the art of sound, it takes x amount of time, unlike a lot of visual art forms (granted there are some sculptures that evolve over a period of time, I am speaking in absolutes; sculptures “can” exists in time, not “must”).

I will be discussing two sound art forms that exist in “real-time” (this is in a specific moment in time and cannot be reproduced), theatre and video games.  I will be omitting music because originality in a performance of a piece of music is fairly obvious, jazz music being the most prevalent.  Of the two, I will be sharing techniques for both, and when/why/where to use them.

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SWD – Convolution Reverberation

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This type of reverberation is based on a mathematical functional analysis equation: convolution.  To simplify this complex integral function: it is an operation on two functions, producing a third.

For an audio applications, it can fairly accurately create a digital representation of a physical space.  One basic way to do this is by having a microphone record a space while a short electrical pulse is played through the venue.  The recording then represents the physical room as a waveform.  When a new signal is desired to have this reverberation, each sample is multiplied by the convolution waveform (with variations depending on the convolution processor and its parameters).

GW – This is how I sound design