It has been a month since my last post, but that is for a good reason. We spent significant time on a couple of important tasks. RecordingBlogs.com finally has a good sitemap submitted to various major search engines such as Google, LiveSearch, Yahoo, and Ask.com. Also, I have now done enough work on version 3 of Orinj to know where the application is heading. This post is about the improvements to Orinj that will show up in version 3.
I am not an expert on this, but the topic keeps coming up every now and then. Some time ago I talked to a movie producer friend about his sound setup. He mentioned many interesting things. The one specific thing that caught my attention was: "unbalanced XLRs". I looked around for info on balanced signals and XLRs. This is what I learned.
I started transcribing some songs for a friend of mine who is learning piano. I do simple songs for the most part, but sometimes also more complex pieces. I use Guitar Pro 5 and I find it impressive as it can easily deal with the complex contemporary music notation: the staff, clefs, key signatures, accidentals, note durations, articulations, codas, ties, tuplets, etc. Contemporary music notation is all one needs to transcribe songs. Most contemporary songs are simple anyway: they stick to a key signature and have repetitive note duration patterns. I just finished the main theme (one repetition of the progression only) of Grant Green’s "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho". It has four underlying chords and I am guessing that it uses the harmonic minor scale (I put it in D harmonic minor). Who cares really? It was pretty easy to transcribe.
Orinj has several types of delay effects: regular delay, echo, chorus, bass chorus, bouncing echo, and reverb.
Regular delay
The Orinj regular delay takes the incoming signal and repeats it once with a certain delay in time and with a change in amplitude. The output of this effect is the combined original signal and the new repeated signal. The original signal is called the "dry" signal. The repeated signal is called the "wet" signal. The amount of time delay between the two is the "delay". The change in amplitude between the two signals is called the "decay" as the repeated signal usually has lower amplitude than the original one. The decay is also the difference between the dry and wet signal and can also be called the "dry / wet mix" of the delay effect.
I play relatively cheap acoustic guitars when practicing at home. The sound is not so important, the comfort is. Up to a year ago I was playing a Jasmine by Takamine, model no. ES33C, acoustic-electric made in Korea. It goes for about $200.
n-Track was the first piece of software that I used for recording. I used it for one song only around the time when n-Track was at version 2 or 3. I was curious how far the software had gotten from these versions to its current version 6.
Orinj version 2 (beta) was released. Orinj is designed to handle wave files, loops, MIDI files, and multi- track recording sessions. Thus, it is a relatively large software application. There are, however, infinite options for extensions and improvements.
I have not been blogging for a while, but it was all for a good cause – the development and release of a recording and mixing piece of software. Creating this software took a while, but it was worth doing. I learned a lot and I can finally "put my money where my mouth is". Orinj is not yet released. Hopefully it will be by the time you read this post.
This blog initially was about recording on the cheap. And mixing with the Line 6 PODxt is cheap. We use the POD mainly to get a good reverb and some equalizing and we do not want to pay for alternatives.
I have been eyeing the Pantheon reverb plug-in that came with my Lexicon soundcard forever now, wanting to test it and write a review. I just installed it and the task of writing a review seems daunting. This is a reverb with many options, various presets, and more controls than I expected. I am sure that whatever I write below will turn out incomplete, but here it goes:
