Blogs

Digital Signal Processing for Audio Application. Second Edition was published on November 18, 2014. What's new in the second edition? A few things.

I am a bit behind the times. Until yesterday, I didn't even know SoundCloud.com existed. I do now, but only because I landed on a random tweet about it (thanks to Scottkerrmusic). I should have expected it. It was just a matter of time, before a site like SoundCloud pops up. This one has apparently been running for 6 years and already has over 10 million registered users, including some popular names in music.

Some time ago I received a copy of a book – The Music Producer's Survival Guide. Chaos, Creativity, and Career in Independent and Electronic Music – by Brian M. Jackson, published by CENGAGE Learning (ISBN-13: 978-1-285-19892-7, ISBN-10: 1-285-19892-1). First, I should apologize to the author and publisher for taking so long to write this. I was traveling over the past one month. And the book is dense.

Arobas Music just released Guitar Pro for mobile phones and tables. This is good. I have always thought that this is great software for guitar players and I have used to learn various pieces and to create pics for music scales and licks for this site.

The time has come to have some fun with this blog. I just did some research on what the worst song ever could be. Here is what I found:

This is the third article about deconvolving a reverberated sound to get the impulse response of natural reverberations. If we can do so, then we can use the impulse response as the artificial reverb. In the first post, we created a possible impulse response of a reverb. In the second post, we used the impulse to look at what a drum hit could look like after the reverb. In this article, we will do the opposite. We will try to get the original impulse response, if we assume that we only have the original drum hit and the reverberated drum hit.

This is the second post in a series of articles about deconvolving a reverberated sound to get the impulse response of natural reverberations and then using this impulse response as the artificial reverb. In the previous post we created the impulse response of an example reverb. In this post we will take a short sound – a drum hit – and we will reverberate it with the impulse response developed before. Later, we will take the reverberated drum and we will pretend that we do not know the impulse response. We will try to recreate the impulse response and see how well we do. As a reminder, it should be possible to record the natural reverb of a short sound, such as a drum hit, in a room or a hall and to deconvolve this natural reverb to create an artificial reverb.

A short drum sound may look something like this.

This should be an article about deconvolving an actual recorded reverberated sound to produce the impulse of a reverb, but we do not have all the needed tools to do so yet. To get there, we will prepare several articles. Once we are ready – and if we succeed – we should have a reasonably good imitation of the actual reverb and should be able to use the resulting impulse to simulate the actual reverb on any recorded sound.

I received, several weeks ago by now, a copy of a book by Mike Major called Recording Drums. The Complete Guide. Now that I have had the time to flip through the book, I'd say it is definitely worth having.

This post is here to present an illustrative and intuitive example of compressing drums. It includes a number of graphs that show the effect of a compressor on a drum snare. There are a number of explanations of how compressors work on the net (including on this site), but there are virtually no good intuitive examples of what compressors actually do with audio data.