Week 1: Testing 1.2.3.

This week, I began to experiment with my recording setups and started to learn the nuances of the editing process in Reaper. 

The instruments are currently housed in the percussion studio practice rooms located in the basement of the Conservatory of Music. These are great practice spaces, and the rooms are relatively soundproof, however, the excess of hard surfaces and parallel walls creates a less-than-ideal recording environment, especially when trying to capture clear, high-quality samples. The size of these keyboards makes moving them to more ideal spaces almost impossible. So this week I created test recordings in the spaces for both the Musser Vibraphone and the DeMorrow marimba. 

Some of my fears were confirmed, but I was also pleasantly surprised at the quality of certain ranges of the instruments in these rooms. Generally, the low end was incredibly “boomy” leading me to believe that I might need to change the mic placement based on the range of each octave I am recording at the time to increase or decrease the presence of the fundamental frequency. 

The undesirable resonance and standing waves in the rooms were most heavily showcased in the middle of the keyboards. Some notes would resonate within the room to create an extremely muddy sound. In others, the high-harmonics would make the room buzz to create a harsh high-end in the recording. To combat this, I plan to acoustically treat the room by hanging various blankets from the walls and bringing in large foam dividers to create a make-shift isolation booth.  

In the high end I encountered another problem, the frames of the instruments would buzz or rattle when activating certain bars. Unlike the other issues which I believe can be fixed with mic placement and acoustical treating, this is an issue inherent with the instrument. Mic placement might help in reducing the issue, but I plan to treat the bars individually when this issue arises. There are several ways to silence their rattle for recordings. By tying a small piece of string between the cross boards that hold the bars this can reduce by rattle by keeping the pieces of the instrument in place. 

Here are some examples of the marimba recordings at different ranges:

Of course, the main objective of these recordings was to learn about the instruments and the spaces so I can solve these problems for the final product. However, these recordings have also doubled as wonderful DAW test subjects! I recorded these tests directly into reaper using a Scarlet 2i2 interface with a 96kHz sample rate and a 24-bit depth. (In the final product I will likely reduce the sample rate to 48kHz as is standard in Kontakt instruments to maintain good fidelity, but reduce the hard drive space needed.) Once recorded I imported the recordings into RX Elements, an iZotope software/series of plugins that specialize in cleaning and repairing audio. Within RX I applied noise removal to get rid of any unwanted ambiance or otherwise distracting noise.

I then re-imported these cleaned files into Reaper. Once in Reaper, I began experimenting with the wide variety of actions available. There is a built-in function called “Dynamic Split Items”  that is similar to “Strip Silence” in Pro Tools. This function allows me to both remove period of noise beneath a certain threshold but also split the clips at the beginning of loud enough transients. In short, this function both removes excess times, and separate each sample into its own clip. From this stage I selected every clip and using the “relative edge edit” function was able to trim the clips further and apply a fade-out to every clip. The next step was to go to each individual clips and label it with the note name, and take number. With 5 octaves and 3-6 takes of each note this is a very tedious process that I am researching some ways to streamline. Until that method is found I did practice going clip by clip and renaming them. 

Next week the plan is to go back into the spaces and make another set of test recordings implementing the various things I learned about the instrument and the spaces. I also plan on diving into the Kontakt implementation process to make “Alpha” versions of the instruments with the revised recordings! 

Thanks for checking out my project update! 

Until next time, 

Eli Shapiro