‘Father’s Hands’ still seems to be dominating the newsfront. Except this time mine are involved to as I’m helping with triggering and setup.

It’s instrumentals today and sounds here are really pristine - pure and virtually untouched by digital manipulation (actually I tried but failed). So dip into this demo mix especially if you’re in the mood to unwind to some light improv. If you love these, you’ll also be amazed how far talent could take a short recording session. Meric’s from Turkey where his first instrument is the oboe so saxophone isn’t even his strongest suit!

01 Saxophone Song (Improv).mp3 

This one’s done completely as improv by Meric, on keys first then sax.

02 Quiet Night (Improv).mp3

03 Psalm 1 (Improv).mp3

Dad on keys and Meric on sax.

04 Autumn Leaves (Violin & Sax).mp3

05 Shadow of Your Smile (Violin & Sax).mp3

Dad on violin and Meric on sax.

Glad to have had you all come by to visit!

We’ve released a complimentary key to our new EP on the Peopod main site itself. Check it out! Let us know what you think here.

This new digital music album features full releases with enhanced vocals for ‘Summer of Life’, ‘Skidmarks’, ‘The Tolls of Twelve’, and ‘In Your Eyes’, a song for that special someone!

Step 1: Download the Free Album at CD Quality - 320kbps
Step 2: Access your Complimentary Key

So onto planning that acoustic space. The quietest spot at home is not necessarily the furthest from the main door. Don’t make the mistake of just looking at the sound sources within your home. Often, sounds from outside your home are louder and harder to control than those inside. That deserted corner of your apartment or garage might just be the most vulnerable to overflying planes or the honk of the garbage truck along the road. Instead, what you want to isolate are the loudest sounds that could reach your mike. One simple way to do that is to use an air buffer and build on a room-in-a-room concept.

Now, assuming you have control of the internal environment (i.e. you can arrange to have your kids out with family when you’re recording) here’s how to deal with the external. The walls of your home in contact with the outside will resonate with the sounds from the outside. So look at your internal walls and find a nice junction or section that isn’t in contact with the outside. Think about building a physical structure around that (with a door of course). It can be large, or in the example below, as small as a 1m x 1m vocal booth. What that creates is an air buffer or dead space between the ‘external’ walls of your home and the ‘internal’ walls of your recording room. 

This was an amazing shot to discover. Couldn’t quite figure how to capture the DIY vocal booth but finally got this from a bottom up angle. The vocal space was designed into the intial room restructuring with a double wall filled with rockwool. Unfortunately that left one slight problem on the sound isolation front: the fully solid single-layer glass door with gaps all around. The solution was to sheetblok the entire room and door surface in such a way as to create an ‘airlock’ when closing the door fully. Mounted on this layer were the sound absorbers that very successfully eliminate all reflected sounds.

Facing the light would be the RodeNTK, an awesome condenser microphone. Behind that is the wall-mounted Samsung monitor that allows me to trigger recording and playback directly from this booth. How that works is simply through a wireless keyboard that’s sitting on a ledge below the screen.

Seems like setting up a personal studio’s all the rage now. If you’re trying this from scratch you might want to check out this DIY version that is designed around the concept of a single-operator vocal booth. You don’t need a garage for this, just a small room in an apartment.

First question to ask is simply what are you going to be recording: Vocals or Instruments? If the latter, Acoustic (e.g. Folk Guitar) or Electronic (e.g. Keyboard)?

If you’re doing Vocals and Acoustic instruments, you need to seriously look at the acoustic space and budget some money to treat the room. Sound dampening and isolation are the key problems in getting a nice clean recording. For midi work and electronic stuff that can be piped directly to your onboard sound processor/virtual studio, the requirements are relatively simpler. However it’s not to say that all you need is a table and keyboard. Chances are you’d want to do some mixing so that means you’d need to consider acoustic issues too. So the first tip really is to head here to get a good sense of what acoustic spaces demand. 

http://www.acoustics101.com/

Taylor 614 CE. Unmistakably Folk.

Just what do you do with inspiration?

The creative impulse comes from almost about anywhere and we often find a need to express and share it. If you have a blog, chances are DIY music is something you’d have thought about bringing into your personal publishing world. Afterall, words on a page only travel through the visual medium, and music has that strange ability to reach into the soul.

Modern technology can help us express and share our moments of inspiration in some form of DIY music and make it highly accessible. You might be curious about how far you could go with turning fragments of poetry into listenable indie pieces, and it’s not really so tough. But it’s a journey nonetheless to develop and nurture that seed of inspiration.

DIY music is the future less travelled. It’s going from expressing your personality through buying the music you like, to actually learning what goes into creating the music you like. And it might lead to you learning a little about everything from songwriting to miking, designing a home studio to distributing music online. 

The best part is, you’d have something that’s personal and performable. Who knows where this might end up? 

www.peopod.net