The best way to learn is to say something confidently wrong on the Internet haha

Yeah you know what, I definitely am wrong about this, I totally thought they were using AI but that makes way more sense

I know it doesn’t need AI for older versions of feedback suppression, but there are newer systems using it that are more effective at dynamically subtracting those frequencies

Oh yeah you’re right! It’s the same for all unwanted noise. Rustling, wind, buzz, ac noise. All of it can be filtered out now! You can even take away the reverb from an untreated room and add in your own reverb. Convolution reverb is amazing, you can actually capture the reverb of any space you want and add it into your recording in post. I honestly don’t know how much an expensive treated room matters over some investment in the plugins that let you do those things.

An example for movies: instead of trying to capture the actors talking inside their helmets for Interstellar, they actually made an IR inside of the helmet itself and added that to the overdubs!

The way you create an IR (impulse response) to capture the reverb of a space is you take a speaker and play a sine wave (or a gunshot/balloon pop,) then record it with a good mic. Then just take that WAV file and put it into a convolution reverb plugin. It sounds identical, the technology is amazing! You can use this to capture all kinds of analog circuitry like guitar amps also, that’s how they make those guitar amp plugins.

An amazing use for it in audio engineering is for feedback suppression. The old way to give yourself more headroom required you to sit there and turn up the gain until feedback happens and cut that frequency. Now you just turn on the feedback suppression and it does all that for you on the fly. It’s game changing for live sound, every major venue has it now.

My cat Lola in the best picture I took of her as a kitten

My dog Joanie who has her ear protection on for band practice

Them together as babies (they play together and are best friends)

Playtime

Daily outdoor adventures

You’re right, I need this room in my life

Blood Sweat & Tears had like 200 members, my dad knew one of the founding members and went to one of their concerts a couple years back. Got to talk to them after the show and not one of them had even heard of the guy. Feels like the ultimate example of this

I use the mpk mini play and it’s super handy all the time with those onboard effects! Bring it all the time in my backpack for noodling when I know I have hours to kill. Had it for 7 years and no issues at all. Although I will say the new mpk minis went through a massive upgrade, worth splurging for.

I wonder if it would sound better taped on, in the drum itself, or on the floor in front. Seems like there would be minimal bleed too haha, might be a cool lo-fi thing

Well now I kind of want to mic up a kick drum with my gaming mouse for fun lol

The biggest thing that helped me was art. I’ve played music most of my life, and made the decision to move out to a city with a great music scene 4 years ago where I knew nobody. It took me 3 years of exploring open mic communities and such for me to finally find the one for me. Built up an amazing friend group from there and I feel so emotionally and artistically fulfilled now! I was so lonely those first 3 years, but the second I found my people it was night and day. I think the best thing everyone can do is hone in on a hobby you love and connect with the community surrounding it if you can, sometimes the hobby can be enough too though!

I would happily contribute to this, lmk if we decide on a specific community to all join in on, I think it would be cool if it was musician’s interests in general. Like I’m an audio engineer as well as a guitarist so it would fun to have a space to have deep conversations about both, as well as other musical niches people have an interest in.

My field recorder! Chilling after band practice right now, and being able to clearly listen back to my jams has been invaluable in progressing my musicianship.

Same issue I mentioned in my comment! There’s a constant battle happening between the audio engineers and the noise floor of the the venue. It surprisingly doesn’t take too much more db to be heard above the crowd, like in a perfect world, if the crowd is sitting at 90db then 95db would be ideal. But unfortunately a crowd’s loudness ebs and flows and that can easily get drowned out so most just default to 100db and embrace the inevitable tinnitus. I recommend everyone invest in Earasers or something of that quality so y’all can appreciate music safely without losing all of the dynamics.

I’m taking live sound classes at my community college right now and we talked about this yesterday. The biggest issue with a large venue packed with people is the noise floor is very high. For instance if the crowd is 90db, then you’ve only got 10-20db of headroom to work with. 90db is already enough to cause hearing damage after 8 hours, and it gets exponentially worse with just a few db more, by 100 you can only safely be in that for 2 hours and that is generally the ideal loudness for that kind of venue. Of course since the engineers probably have hearing loss, they tend to raise it even higher to 110 which is loud enough to still cause damage over time even with regular earbuds unfortunately. So unless you can have a quiet crowd there is nothing you can do about needing ear protection, I recommend hanging by the engineer booth because they tend to be just far enough away to comfortably hear everything around 90db because they generally can’t use earbuds while actively mixing.

A Kora! It’s an African instrument that is considered a guitar harp, with 21 strings ranging from the size of bass guitar string to fishing wire. The way it is played allows you to play the bass, lead, and rhythm at the same time. Here is a short example of a master kora player Toumani Diabate showcasing the instrument: https://youtu.be/8luhdxS2KuM?si=llpa2YVyIOf77_Nd

As a guitarist I found this guy who transcribed Toumani’s work onto a classical guitar, very interesting listen https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=55QnOlXckOk

My other thing would be trippy out there instruments that seem to put you in a different state of mind like the Yaybahar or “The Beam” that the grateful dead likes to break out sometimes

Yaybahar example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_aY6TxC1ojA&pp=ygUWeWVoYWJhciBhdCBpbnN0cnVtZW50IA%3D%3D

The Beam example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0h8o-1IQ5G0&pp=ygUSZ3JhdGVmdWwgZGVhZCBiZWFt