AUS230 Learning Journal - W1

Wednesday Session

Being that it was week one of the trimester there was not much content covered during class though Nick and Guy gave us a run down on the work expectations throughout the Trimester. Due to a change in the academic direction, our final deliverable to be geared towards a social cause and will need to either bring light on the subject or discuss it in detail. During this session I guess the biggest elephant in the room was poked when Nick suggested that doing a project topic related to the Coronovirus would be a good project. As an Australian born Chinese, I did feel during this time that I was wearing my race more than ever.

A message from a mate I knew since primary school, so we have no filter :P

Although I've never been to Wuhan personally I got messages from friends and felt the "look" when I walked into SAE, I don't blame them since media has painted the epidemic as a fault of Chinese people and anyone looking remotely Asian got stigmatised. Personally I felt that this epidemic was bringing up undertones of bygone bias and discrimination that I have not seen since my Primary school days. Academically though this social issue has helped me think of an idea that I could create a project around and since I don't have any other better idea so far.

Wednesday night

Lost Goat Found members - Ben (Guitarist), Morgan (Guitarist, Vocals)

At night I recorded Lost Goat Found and this time we focused on getting the guitar parts down for "open invitations". They are already playing at gigs around Brisbane and write songs together on a regular basis. I organised a session in the NEVE which allowed me to practice my signal flow again in the NEVE like the basics again of running headphone mixes to the live room and getting reverb into the musicians headphones.

Thursday - relating experience to Calibration

2 trimesters ago I worked at the South Leagues and did Live Sound for their open mic nights. On the last night of the open mic nights I met David who was the drummer of the band the Octofunks who also owned a small hobby PA company. To cut to the chase I started working for him on a casual basis and did a gig the Saturday before Week 1 for him at the Princess theatre which was huge success. During the stage setup I was able to employ the skills taught last trimester but we did not calibrate the room using Pink noise.

SONG BIRDS - The story of Linda Ronstadt & Stevie Nicks

On Thursday night I was tasked by David was to setup for a comedy night at Bellbowrie Tavern.

Calibrating the loudness for the room in Bellbowrie Tavern.

We then use a Behringer ECM8000 and a DBX DriveRack PA2 to calibrate the room. Technology has given FOH engineers an edge where instead of using Pink Noise the DBX unit plays out a sine wave sweep at increase volume while we placed the ECM8000 where the audience sat in from of stage. The software then required that we move to 4 difference positions as it performed the sine wave sweep each. At the end it calibrated the room to have no higher than 75db and EQ'd the room.

Friday Session

A Quiet Place II Trailer assets were introduced to us as well as the website for this unit.

Figure 1 - AVID S6 setup at SAE

For this session we were introduced to the AVID S6 and the way it was described to use is that although it looks daunting at first it was essentially a "big computer mouse" for use with ProTools HD.

Figure 2 - Big toys from AVID ("Avid S6 - Avid", n.d.)

After some explaining by Guy, AVID has mapped almost all the controls for the ProTools DAW to a analogue equivalent and I guess this gives it an edge when editing video.

Guy then led show us how to calibrate your speakers using Pink noise at -20dB and slowly raising the volume from each speaker to the required level of 75-85dB. For a studio you leave the master volume at unity gain and play the pink noise while calibrating the speakers volume knob from zero until you get to the required SPL reading at the sweet spot in the room.

Week 1 summary

After being loaded with information during the first week I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of new material that needed to be covered in this Trimester. This means that it will push me to learn material at a quick pace and keep on top of things like looking after my new born son, studying and working. I had to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, I immediately booked a studio session for the S6 to get use to the equipment that was available in there and have a play around with the desk.

Having the knowledge from last Friday in Guys class allowed me to see the technology with a different lens of understanding and that there are commercial devices that take the manual work of calibration out of the Engineers hands during a live gig. The unfortunate part was that I did not understand how to manually calibrate my own room without hundreds of dollars worth of fancy gear.

During Guys' session we were taught to manually calibrate the room with Pink Noise. I picked up an extremely useful method to calibrating your own room. In the past I have looked at several YouTube videos and have read up that the correct levels were to have your SPL meter reading out 85dB but this was too loud for my environment and began to question the recommendations. After talking with Guy I found out that as long as your speakers were placed correctly and that your output from each speaker was the same from your left and right monitor that you can monitor at a lower dB. Armed with this knowledge I went online and found an article by Karl Skivington.

It's worth noting that calibrating the studio monitors to the required sound pressure level could result in playback volume that is considered too loud. If this is the case, simply playback at a more reasonable level, one that is close to the target level whilst protecting your hearing.

(Skivington, 2018).

The last part I finally understood completely that even though the industry standard apparently is to use pink noise at -20dB and measure from each speaker to get 75dB - 85dB, depending on your room and your perception of loudness you can lower the volume to a safer listening level so long as your know that at that particular "loud" level for your room it will translates to the loudness level in a larger playback system.

Looks like this trimester will be one that will be full on and I'm looking forward to it.

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References

Avid S6 - Avid. Retrieved 5 March 2020, from https://www.avid.com/products/Avid-S6

Skivington, K. (2018). Quick Tip: How to Calibrate Studio Monitors. Retrieved 5 March 2020, from https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-calibrate-studio-monitors--cms-31703