building a ribbon mic: part 1 - construction

Way back in July 2011 recordinghacks.com did a $60k ribbon mic shootout, and I had the opportunity to listen to a wide variety of ribbons on different sources due to the hard work of those dedicated pros. 

Around the same time, I was making a big personal aesthetic shift away from bright and quiet mics and towards warmer mics with more character - especially for recording bright and transient sources.  I knew then that I had to have at least one ribbon in my collection.  The problem of course, is that ribbon mics are expensive and I only spend so much money on gear any given year.

The solution to my problem ended up being the DIY Austin ribbon mic.  I don't have a ton of DIY experience, but I can work a soldering iron competently, so I felt like I'd have a shot at building the mic successfully.  I googled around a bit and found a few people that had built the mic with relatively little experience. 

In the end, the audio samples and the $200 price tag had me sold, so I took the leap.

Initially I didn't know exactly how much pride of ownership I'd feel or deserve after assembling the mic.  I certainly wasn't the one who designed it or even who sourced the materials.  In my mind, I was just going to essentially step into the shoes of a mic plant assembly line worker, so how would I feel when the mic that I built with my hands was complete?

Within a short time of the online purchase I had full detailed instructions in my inbox and a link to a series of videos detailing the construction.  It was great to get this in my hands early, as I was able to review the videos and instructions a few times before the mic even arrived at my door. 

The instructions and videos are not high on production value, but they are entirely informative and thorough.  I never felt wanting for instructions or reasoning in assembling the mic.

Once I had cleared out my workspace I set about building the ribbon motor, which meant gluing the two powerful rare-earth magnets onto the brace with a plastic spacer holding them against the walls. Next was to glue the conductive sheet to the edges of the brace and solder the lead wires to it.

All of that was the easy part.

The trickiest part was cutting and mounting the ribbon.  The ribbon in these mics is made from aluminum leaf whose thickness is measured in millionths of an inch.  It is incredibly fragile, and the process requires cutting a 1/4" ribbon with an exacto knife and then corrugating it with a wooden dowel inside of a sheet of paper to make it springy.

I shot a little timelapse of my building the first part of the mic, but the camera ran out of space as I tried again and again to cut and mount a proper ribbon into the ribbon motor.


first part of assembly-austin ribbon mic from rene coronado on Vimeo.


The kit only comes with one sheet of aluminum leaf, and by the end of the evening (and the timelapse) I had ruined all of it.

Undeterred, I went to hobby lobby the next day and bought more.  I spend the next evening ruining even more, but with every attempt I got further and further into the process before making some fatal error.  At one point I had cut and corrugated 3 consecutive ribbons with my exacto knife in a row, and was only breaking them in the mounting process, so I knew I was getting close.

Finally somewhere in the middle of my third sheet of leaf I managed to get a proper cut, mount and tension and I was so excited I was texting pictures to the wifey. 

With the ribbon motor built, I soldered the screen together and assembled the rest of the mic.  A quick test through a sound devices mixpre confirmed that I had a working mic, and I went to bed exhausted and happy.

So what kind of pride of ownership did I have at the end of this?

Tons.

Cutting and mounting that ribbon required a fair amount of skill, and that skill had to come through repetition.  It really took some stiking with it to make the thing work but knowing that I cut and mounted the ribbon that's translating the air movement into the sounds I'll record through it offers a very high sense of pride and ownership of the process.

With that said, Rick at Austin Microphones has put an incredibly high amount of research and development into this project, and I'm positive that even though I spent a few long evenings putting this mic together, Rick has invested far more hours than I have into the creation of this mic. 

In part 2 I've put up some listening tests through different preamps and with a cloudlifter in line.  The impedance of the preamp actually makes a huge difference on these mics, and I'll share some advice that Rick gave me in some subsequent correspondence regarding that and other things.

In the meantime, here's a much better timelapse of Rick building the mic to completion and testing it over a 2 hour period.


 

a short love letter to Mike Monteiro

My phone is constantly loaded up with podcasts done by people I enjoy listening to.  Many of them are audio related, some are not.  But some of them fall in between, and the Lets Make Mistakes podcast on the Mule Radio Syndicate is one of those. 

First a little background - LMM is hosted by Mike Monteiro and Katie Gillum of Mule Designs.  Mule Designs builds websites, but they podcast about design which is what interests me.

Mike is one of my favorite types of internet people.  He's intelligent, opinionated, a little eccentric and not entirely full of himself.  Matt Gemmell and John Gruber also tend to fall into that category.

With that said Mike is more on the eccentric opinionated side of that scale, which is why I love his stuff so much.  He also gives excellent advice to audio guys about the business and process of design just about every time he opens his mouth.  My first exposure to him was this video (which is NSFW if your job frowns upon frequent cursing)


so there's that.  The podcast actually doesn't have that much cursing and it rambles a bit more than a formal presentation like the video above would, but its very worth it nonetheless.

The episode that inspired this blog post was a recent one called "Another Stupid RFP process" There's just so much gold in there that it's difficult to do justice with a quick blurb, but I'll try:

An RFP is a Request For Proposal and is typical of agency workflow.  In it, multiple vendors will make a pitch to work on a specific job at the same time, and the committee needing the work done tends to decide who gets the job based on a number of metrics the derive from the pitches that are made.

It's also an awful awful process, and Mike and Katie just do a masterful job of taking down the entire RFP mentality.  In the audio world RFPs are common to music composition (even if they aren't labeled as such), and so many musicians make their livings writing and pitching music for free to committees on corporate boards.  Its also a dynamic that comes into play when pitching one's self as a sound designer for a project.

In the podcast, Mike illustrates that a good working relationship requires both give and take, not just give - and when you enter into a relationship where you'll be making emotional decisions you have to be able to figure out if you can work together. 

"it's more important to have people who can work together than it is to have like the smartest people possible" - Mike

"at my most pessimistic I think all of that stuff is an elaborate trap to make sure that nobody can be blamed if the project goes wrong" - Mike

"There's a huge difference to the relationship you end up having with a group of people, or even just the conversations you have when you're being called a 'vendor' and when you're being a design studio" - Katie

"There's something about the process that makes it seem more like picking a commodity than on creating a relationship" - Katie

"A 'vendor' is somebody who sells you things, and its the things that have the value.  A 'partner' is somebody who works with you, and its the working together that has the value" - Mike

"If you show up at an initial presentation with comps of what you're going to do for that company's site you are an idiot.  You are an idiot.  And you should be laughed at and you should be thrown out of the building and you should never get to call yourself a designer again, because what you're doing is making shit up out of your head and putting it in front of a client irresponsibly and passing that off as design work.   You have no idea what they're trying to solve, you have no idea what their internal mechanics are, you have no idea where they're trying to go in the next two, three years.  And yet somehow you've pulled a solution out of your ass.  And then you have the balls to take it into a presentation and present this as 'this is how we think, this is what we think you should do'" - Mike

"I think 'let me tell you how we approach design, ' and you can actually say 'let me tell you how we'd approach your problem'" - Katie

"This is a goddamn endemic with designers.  They are afraid to do the thing they know is right...I'll be sitting with a designer and going over some work and it looks dead.  It looks like they don't know what they're doing.  They're pushing their food around their plate. There's no joy in it, they're not trying things.  And at some point they'll say something to the tune of 'well if I were doing this my way...' and I'll just say nothing and let that silence hang like a Mike Daisey apology interview, and eventually they'll realize what they just said, and they'll get back to work." - Mike

"It's a really sad form of self-censorship, and it kills designers because they do crap work, and its also incredibly unfair to people who hired you to do this work because they hired you to do the best work that you possibly can, and instead you think they could think of." - Mike

anyway, I could transcribe the whole episode or you could just take my advice and listen to the podcast.  Also, don't follow @Mike_FTW on twitter, its a little too erratic.

-enjoy!

contact mics and guy wires

Everyone knows that Ben Burtt made the blaster sounds in Star Wars by striking guy wires and recording them with contact mics.

Countless others have done this as well, but I needed to test out some new gear so I figured I'd give it a go.

Gear included my recently acquired Jez Riley French contact mics and my new Sound Devices mixpre that I bought to use as a front end for my PCM D50.

The entire signal path was:  doublesided carpet tape --> JRF contact mics --> Hosa MIT-129 impedance transformer --> mixpre mic ins --> mix pre tape out --> PCM D50 line in.  These recordings are 100% unedited (including gain changes - this is the level I cut them at)

re: contact mics, Tim Prebble has an excellent post outlining the entire process, but the long and the short of my setup was that the impedance transformers were absolutely required to get all of that low end out of my rig.  This is because contact mics are high-z sources and the mixpre is a low-z preamp.  In the past I've also had good luck running straight into an H4 with other contact mics, but I suspect that's because the H4 takes hi-z inputs by design.  With that said, I've never quite recorded low end like this with contact mics to date, so I was very happy with the result.

Also, I laughed a little when I saw that the BBC went into an anechoic chamber and recorded a few very tiny insects using these exact contact mics and preamps.  It's quite the testament to what they're capable of to hear them seamlessly running from centipede feet to the huge guy wire hits I got.

Here's that BBC vid (check out the contact mics visually at 2:00 and then the recording at 3:40):





Now onto my vids. First up are the guy wires.  The single most interesting thing that I discovered was that I could resonate one wire by striking the other, probably through some connection that they were making underground.  You'll see in the vid that they're not buried right next to each other though, so it's possible that the contact mics are actually just picking up sympathetic vibrations.  It's all very cool though, and there is TONS of low end, so crank up the speakers.

Again, this audio is 100% unaltered - not even gain changes.




Next up is the metal fence that was nearby.  I did some similar stuff where I was striking the surrounding objects and getting indirect vibrations, which was pretty cool.  The distortion sound in one of the channels isn't clipping, its the effect of the sticky tape losing its grip.


And for fun, here's a 96k downloadable soundcloud vers of the guy wires.  Enjoy!

it depends: condenser or not?

One of the more important decisions you make when deciding how to record something is what type of mic to use for any given perspective.

My default position tends to be to go with a condenser and then make further decisions from there because condensers are going to (generally) give me the quickest path to a flat, true recording.

In fact, there are times when you have no choice but to use a condenser to get what you're looking for.  Specifically:

• when isolating sources in moderately noisy environments

I use this description because it generally describes the reasons for using interference tube (shotgun) mics, all of which are condensers.  Shotgun mics are essential for extracting interesting sources from noisy environments, and those only come in the condenser flavor of mic.


With that said, there are some important reasons to deviate from the condenser mic perspective:

• when recording super high dBspls

When recording incredibly loud sources many condensers will blow out more quickly because they tend to have higher output than other types of mics.  Loud sources such as weapons and explosions tend to ask for multiple mic setups regardless though, because you'll tend to want to hear that loud sound reverberating out in space.  As such, I'll often pack and record with dynamic mics aimed at the source of loud things and have some condensers out and aimed at the reverberations that those things create.

• when recording super bright subjects

Condensers mics tend to be naturally pretty bright, which is great when recording things in a way that increases their ability to cut through a dense mix.  That strength becomes a weakness when the source is exceptionally bright, however.  Things like metallic impacts and electric shocks can end up sounding a little too brittle and harsh if miked up with something too bright.  Dynamics and ribbons are often good choices for balancing out the brightness of certain harsh source materials.

• when looking for non-linear sounds

Condensers are great for getting realistic representations of the things that they are aimed at, but sound design often requires some not quite true to reality sounding perspectives, and to really go there you'll need some other tools at your disposal.  This is where things like contact mics, electrostatic mics, stethoscope mics, hydrophones and the like come into play.  I'll often roll both a condenser path and a non-linear path and blend the two in post.

--------
 
I think a great recording kit can be built with very few mics, and the majority of the weight falls on the condensers.  When recording extreme sounds or looking for non-linear though, it's important to have other tools in the toolbox.

slingshots and dishes

I have a project in the house that requires the creation of a ton of bullet impacts, and while I'd love to do what Frank Bry does and go record some targets shot up with custom subsonic ammo, I don't have the resources to get that done for this specific project.

I had to get creative for many of the surfaces, using a rockhammer and a mobile rig for many things, but for the glass impacts I found myself with a slingshot, a stack of dishes and about 45 minutes in an empty warehouse to get the sounds I needed.

Since the warehouse wasn't onsite and I knew I had limited time, I decided to roll with the venerable Sure VP-88 and a 744t as my rig.  The VP-88 isn't a great ambient mic because of its relatively high self noise, but it works great as a spot fx mic when the preamps are going to be at 12 o'clock or below, and I wanted a stereo rig that would be quick and easy to set up and tear down.  I set the pre's down to zero with no pad on the 744 to leave enough headroom for the close miked impacts I was setting up to record.

I needed the sounds to be able to pass for outdoors, so that meant I had to dry up the verb in the space as much as possible for recording.  I also needed to contain and direct the debris to keep myself safe and keep cleanup quick.  I solved this by building a little pup tent using packing blankets and laying down a cheap plastic tablecloth on the floor with a light layer of sand.   I also placed a board against the wall as a backstop, and angled it away from me so that any projectiles that hit it directly would (hopefully) direct away and into the side of the tent.

I protected the mic by placing it behind a heavy wooden box that was holding up the left part of my pup tent, and just poking it through the packing blanket.  Next I set up the plates.

 Not the best picture, but you get the idea.  I stacked several towers of glasses and dishes with the intent of getting as much peripheral debris as I could when stuff fell down.

I also ended up with a happy accident regarding ammo, since my original intent was to buy solid metal slingshot ammo for the recording.  It turned out that I didn't have time to make the purchase before I had to record, so I opted for quarter sized rocks from outside. That ended up being the superior choice though, because the rocks tended to shatter on impact, and if they didn't do that they would riccochet and make generally interesting whizzing sounds on their own.

20 minutes of recording yielded these final results and a few others: (these sounds are unprocessed except for MS decoding and some slight limiting)


In the end, I was surprised by how happy I ended up being with both the noisefloor and the debris detail I managed to get.  I didn't get the warehouse verb all of the way out, but layered with an ourdoor ambiance those sounds will play.

I also don't think the soundcloud conversion does these particular sounds justice, so feel free to download them to really hear what went on there.

Here's the aftermath:

on aesthetic and effort

I was GTD and listening to the audio nowcast today and they had Dave Pensado as their guest.  (AudioNowCast ep 115)

He was great throughout, but at about the 37 minute mark he really layed down some knowledge.  It was so clear and lucid that I marked it as it was playing back and came back later on today to transcribe it, so here it is (emphasis mine):

I noticed that guys that I respect so much that I admired their abilities, they didn't get get good because they tried, they got good because they couldn't help it.  The just couldn't help working 25 hours a day while everyone else is out getting laid...

There's something about our profession that's just special, and I know that's a chauvinistic thing to say, but we call came up the same way - hard work and at some point the harder we worked the luckier we got, that old saying, and that creates a certain camaraderie amongst us, you know? 

You'd think we'd all be jealous and envious, and there is that element in our profession, but by and large what you see on the show is genuine love for this profession…at any cost. 

I mean we've all sacrificed.  Family…health… everything for this.  And we'd do it again knowing the outcome.  Its just so much fun you know...

But making records and the creative process is, we talk about all of the technical stuff all of the gear…but at the end of the day they're selling their taste and taste is a function of your life's experiences.  If you're Donald Trump's son it's hard to sing the blues authentically.  And we're a product of our life's experiences and I think that's why some of the people are so fascinating because they've had some incredible life's experiences and that creeps into your work and I like that.

-Dave Pensado

And of course that's really reminiscent of the Ira Glass quote that came out a little while back (and circled the internets quickly):

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me . . . is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

-Ira Glass

I find both thoughts to be incredibly lucid and IMO, the common threads between to two thoughts are that

• taste is formed through life experience, therefore the more one experiences in life the more refined one's taste may become.
• refined taste raises the bar on the acceptability of our own creative works
• the better one's taste the harder one must work to achieve acceptable results

This all may be very self-evident, but I think its interesting how clearly two completely different sources can articulate the same fundamental concept.  I also think that this concept mirrors my own personal experiences.

An allegory to this would be that heavily observing and consuming the art of others may not be the straightest path to a well-developed aesthetic.  Instead, doing things like traveling, learning new skills and meeting new people may actually develop one's aesthetic more quickly.  This is because going out and actively experiencing life forces us into situations where we examine and measure ourselves more often, which is really the key to defining the things that we like vs the things that we don't.

I feel like I have some travelling to do...

execution vs scope

I recently played through a couple of platformers that I found in the app store, and had a subsequent twitter conversation that got me thinking.

First off, the two games I played through were Rochard and Limbo.

Here's a taste of each:



Both games were inexpensive on the mac app store.  Limbo was $10 and Rochard was $6.  Both were relatively quick playthroughs - about 3-5 hours each.

The main similarities the two games had were the narrow scope, the low price and the high level of artistic execution.  (Here's an excellent interview with Martin Stig Anderson who did all of the sound design and score on Limbo.)

Immediately after having reveled my way through those two works I had a conversation with the voice producer of a AAA game in real life, and then a subsequent conversation with AAA game sound designer Mike Niederquell on twitter.

The end result of both conversations was what I think is an important (though obvious looking) conclusion:

The resources needed to execute art on a high level rises disproportionally with the scope of the project.

This is because good art takes time, and lots of iteration and refinement.  Every new weapon, gameplay parameter, or other artistic cog in need of creation requires time and expertise to develop, iterate, reject, recreate and revise in order to arrive in the end at high art.  This is doubly true in complex mix environments where implementation is at least as intense as the creation of the audio asset.

3 hour platformers are not AAA games.  They're casual games, and they require far fewer resources to execute.  They also cost far less money to create and bring to market.  But when you compare the level of the art achieved in those smaller games to some AAA titles you'll see that when you can over-allocate artistic resources by limiting scope you can really achieve something special.

Now, this is not to say that AAA titles cannot achieve the status of high art.  I think games like Battlefield 3, Red Dead Redemption and Bioshock have proven where the art can go in a large scope game given the proper resources. 

This is really just to say that sometimes the best way to up the quality of the art you're trying to achieve is to limit the scope of the project, even when the budget is bigger than that of a 3 hour side scroller.