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Hi everyone!

Long story short, I'm finally done with my thesis and back to making music. I decided I would do some music based on the book I did my thesis on, A Voyage to Arcturus. I've also been keeping busy with music related stuff, so this track was made after I switched to Reaper, started taking music theory more seriously, started reading up on orchestration, and even rebuilt my music PC. It's definitely a WIP in all ways, but I thought it would be good to get some fresh ears on it. I might have posted a track with this title awhile back, but this is the REAL thing now.



They Came to Follow Surtur

Here's a video I made for Mother's Day.

Last year I bought myself a new MIDI controller since my Oxygen 61 3rd Gen had been deteriorating for a long time and no attempts at fixing it had any lasting effect. I kept having to redo the graphite trick every six months or so, and finally I said screw it, let's just get a new one.

My choice fell on a Nektar SE61 as I wanted something more basic than the Oxygen (in the 12 years I had it, I made use of the knobs and sliders only once or twice), and it appeared to have generally favorable reviews. When I got it, I immediately realized the keybed felt weird. The keys were sort of hard and springy. I figured it was just going to take some getting used to, so I kept it anyway.

Well, I didn't get used to it. And by the time I knew it wasn't going to happen, it was too late to return it. I begrudgingly abided the damn thing for a while, looking for some better option. I didn't want to spend even more money without having a chance to try before buy, and the local music store had nothing in stock that caught my fancy.

Then a couple of days ago a Yamaha MX49 showed up on Facebook Marketplace for around $200. I went over to the seller's place to check it out last night, and as you can see, I liked it:



Sure, it has only 49 keys, but it plays really nice. Since I'm not doing much orchestral work anymore, my need for a 61-key controller has lessened anyway. The MX49 being an actual synth rather than just a controller is a nice bonus too. It has a ton of high quality patches from the Motif range as well as some excellent built in effects; it even functions as an audio interface, though I have no intention of using it for that as it has only line-level inputs.

So, yeah. Quite a nice find I would say

Here is a truly insane experiment.

Have you ever wondered why small diaphragm mics have a ring of slits or holes about a centimeter or so back from the capsule?

The purpose of these holes is to allow a certain ratio of sound waves to enter the rear of the capsule but delayed and/or filtered. When a sound comes from directly behind the mic, the time it takes to reach the diaphragm from the front and back is equal and the sound is cancelled out. That is how single-diaphragm mics like these achieve directional patterns, a technique invented by Shure nearly a century ago, which they called "Unidyne", probably because it allowed a single diaphragm capsule to have directional behavior. A more technical term would be 'pressure-gradient'.

Before the Unidyne and of course the Dual-Diaphragm method pioneered by the Germans (which is used on almost all large diaphragm condensers, where a diaphragm-backplate-diaphragm sandwich picks up sound to the front and back, which is then combined electronically to achieve the desired polar pattern(s)), there were only two patterns available: Omnidirectional, or Pressure microphones, and Bidirectional/Figure-8 or Gradient microphones. 

While both 'pure' patterns are of course extremely useful, even today, there's a big problem in situations like sound reinforcement or critical recording where the noise (such as another instrument or a stage monitor) you're trying to null out may be directly opposite the performer/instrument you're trying to capture, and other situations where you want to pick up, say, a semi-circle of performers with a single mic, but the omni is too distant sounding while the bidirectional badly favors those standing in the middle of the semi-circle. The most rudimentary attempts to create intermediate patterns between the two involved essentially putting two capsules, one omnidirectional and the other bidirectional, in very close proximity and perfect alignment, then electrically combining their output. The problem with this is that the highest audible frequencies are only a few centimeters long, so comb filtering and other issues might occur unless the capsules are incredibly close. So, the Unidyne method was a really quite remarkable breakthrough.

If you look at an omnidirectional capsule for a small diaphragm condenser, it has NO visible holes (ok, maybe just a tiny vent somewhere to equalize pressure so it doesn't explode when a big pressure change occurs!). This is because it is designed to be, at least in theory, a pressure microphone: it doesn't matter what direction the sound is coming from, the wiggly membrane of the diaphragm in theory will respond equally (until you get into fun stuff like the body of the mic masking certain sounds, filter and mesh materials, resonator plates and cavities, but I digress).

Well... that's where things get naughty and definitely not within warranties... 

What if you took a small diaphragm condenser and covered up the vent holes? In theory it would make an omnidirectional mic, right? But what happens to the frequency response?

In theory I assumed the mic would get incredibly bright because it's commonly known that pressure microphones (omnis) are more or less insusceptible to proximity effect, and at this distance (like 6 cm from my mouth), a lot of that low end is due to the proximity effect.

I tried this experiment with an old NT5 I don't use much and some masking tape:
https://assets.versilstudios.com/media/1...wtfz3gdn6o

(masking tape or painter's tape is a no-residue, relatively weak paper tape used for making sharp, clean lines when painting; it's commonly available in the US in hardware stores, but I assume it can be found under a similar name in Europe and elsewhere. I chose it purely because it is easy to remove and in theory should be quite absorbent of sound)

A few takeaways:

1. The effect isn't that noticeable even if there is the smallest of holes left open. It's still audible for sure, just not as big as when the final gap is covered.
   
2. The cavity seems to become resonant as the tape covers more and more of the vents, you can hear a few particular bands of resonance.
   
3. The final result is... a super bassy sound? This went against my prediction that it should get brighter. My best guess is this has to do with dampening of the diaphragm being calibrated to compensate for the sound of the capsule with both sides active, OR that the tape is actually acting as a filter as it just can't absorb low frequency sound that well?
   
4. The mic gets CONSIDERABLY hotter as the holes are covered. Again, totally unsuspected.
   

Just in case someone finds this amusing, here's a music video animation I created a few months ago but haven't shared here until now.

So, I've decided to rebuild VCSL as '2.0' with a totally new categorization, some of the worse samples stripped/swapped out, and integrating in woodwinds and brass. I am abandoning Hornbostel-Sachs classification system because it was confusing people more than it was helping. With the help of a few folks via e-mail, I worked out a new 'hybrid' classification system to use:


[*]Winds

• Brasswind-Lipped
  
• Flutes
  
• Single-Reed
  
• Double-Reed
  

• Bowed Strings
  
• Harps & Lyres
  
• Guitars, Lutes, & Mandolins
  
• Zithers & Dulcimers
  

• Strings
  
• Pipes
  
• Reeds
  

• Drums
  
• Cymbals
  
• Gongs
  
• Keys-Mallets
  
• Struck
  
• Plucked (Lamellaphones)
  
• Rubbed-Friction
  

• Acoustic
  
• Mechanical
  
• Analog
  
• Digital
  

Here's another question for everyone, just because I'm curious. When composing from an empty project, do you start with a chord progression or do you star with a melody (or both at the same time)?

For me, I quickly realized that I have to create a melody first. Any time I start with a chord progression, that chord progression is inevitably repetitive, unimaginative or sounds random and leads to an uninspiring melody.

If I start with a melody, the melody is free to wander wherever my imagination takes it and the chord progression is dictated by the melody. For me, this results in a more interesting chord progression that I would never have dreamed up otherwise.

I figured it might be fun to open a topic on photography/videography, in particular the budget/scrappy variety. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts, stories, suggestions, feedback, etc.!

A few years ago, my great uncle passed away. He was at one time a photographer and left a collection of photographic equipment, mostly Nikon/Nikkor cameras and lenses from the 60's and 70's, behind. Somewhat unsurprisingly, nothing is worth that much, the most maybe a few hundred dollars, some even under $100, and certainly not the thousands of dollars that modern professional lenses go for.

Photography (and moreso videography) has always interested me, so rather than see the lenses and such thrown away, I took them and started trying to learn. 

My first camera was a budget Nikon DSLR. It took a long time to figure out things like exposure and focus, and the camera was pretty limited even for the time. However, it did force me to learn the basic relationship between ISO (sensitivity), Aperture, and Exposure (time).

Photography is a balance between those three aspects to get a good exposure. If any one is too high or too low, the exposure will be too bright or too dark. Too high of an ISO will cause grain, whereas too long of an exposure time may cause smearing due to shake unless on a tripod. The lens itself dictates the maximum and minimum aperture. It reminds me a lot of sampling, where we have to add together pitches, velocities, and articulations or round robins to get a good instrument. Each plays a role in the performance and quality of the final product.

The big thing I learned early on was how "big glass" and "big sensors" allow for much nicer looking out-of-focus areas than, say a smartphone camera. Distant light sources appear as balls or other shapes, called bokeh (most seem to suggest one should pronounce the word like the English term 'bouquet', i.e. 'Boh-kay'), and the rest of the image becomes smoothed the further it is from the plane of focus. The more open the aperture, the larger the bokeh 'balls' appear, and the 'shallower' the depth of field becomes. Similarly, the closer the subject is to the camera relative to the background, the more exaggerated the separation and bokeh become. Lastly, using a larger lens (higher size in mm = 'tighter' image) increases the separation and bokeh as well, so, for example, generally an 85mm will give more separation of the subject from the background than, say, a 20mm. Even objects 10-15 feet behind the subject can be smoothed into a rich blur with a 135mm!

Different lenses also allow you to 'compress' the distance between the background and foreground, as they grow larger. Long lenses like telephotos (above 100mm or so) also allow you to squish down the distance between the background and foreground; at an extreme, if you had something crazy (and totally not affordable) like a 2000mm lens, you can actually start to approach an isometric perspective!

I used to play with 'virtual' lenses back when I did 3D work around 2009-2012, so this was somewhat familiar to me, although there we could specify the depth of field manually. 

The second thing I learned is that even very old lenses like these can perform very well, especially when 'stopped down', or shot using a slightly smaller aperture than their maximum. In general, lenses tend to perform their sharpest around 2-4 stops closed from maximum ('full open'), although newer lenses perform decently even at just one stop down and sometimes even when fully open.

By 'perform well', here's an example shot with the 35mm f/1.4 at both f/1.4 and f/2.0, a really awesome lens which seems to have been my great uncle's favorite, from the wear:
   
   

Even at a distance, you can see how many things end up "soft" at "full open". It actually reminds me of the appearance of some old TV shows or movies from the 60's and 70's. By f/2.0 though, it is behaving much more nicely and would probably pass at least as a modern 'kit' lens which comes with a camera.

Eventually I ended up going mirrorless with a Sony a6500 and now a7SII (since I primarily do video now). The advantage of mirrorless is you see EXACTLY what you are photographing/filming electronically on the screen or in the viewfinder; no test shots, no tweaking, WYSIWYG. It also gets around the problem that these older lenses are designed to work with mechanical cameras and aren't directly compatible with modern Nikons unless adapted (which these are not). Overall, mirrorless is definitely the way to go in my opinion; way less hassle, plus the cameras are smaller and lighter too.

The a7SII is particularly nice for video nowadays as it shoots 4K/30p at very decent quality and only costs $1k used (from places like Adorama in NYC), due to its successor, the eye-watering $3.5k a7SIII, being available. The a6500 is even cheaper now used, but it is the smaller APS-C sensor size so everything will be 'zoomed' in about 30%. For general use, something like an a7II or whatnot might be a better option. Regardless the a7SII and original a7S was and is still used by many youtubers as well as professional videographers and news organizations around the world.

Honestly with how good cameras have gotten now, there are lots of great older/used mirrorless options available now for under $1k for anyone looking for a professional experience, and vintage lenses are surprisingly affordable. The sensors are still surprisingly improving quite a bit with each generation, but even older digital cameras can perform very well. Just by eye, I'd say something like the a7SII looks as sharp and clean as films and TV shot on digital about a decade ago. That kind of price drop is insane compared to the music industry, where the "industry leading" stuff just floats around out of reach in the $2,000+ range seemingly forever. Imagine if U47's cost $200 today!

With a simple 'dumb' adapter, I can use the cheap but surprisingly decent vintage Nikkor lenses directly on the Sony alpha cameras. The colors sometimes need a little tweaking as some of the coatings seem to have slightly discolored in some of the lenses, but the results are still remarkable.

One good source I found for reviews/information on old lenses, and not just for Nikon, is a fellow named Ken Rockwell. His site is a bit of a trip to a time when the internet had a different vibe, but the information is great and plentiful:
https://www.kenrockwell.com/

A friend of mine is into Canon lenses and cameras and has found a lot of great info on there to help him as well.

The highlight lens for me is the 85mm f/1.8. It is perfect for portraiture, and when stopped down slightly gives these characteristic hexagonal bokeh (at full open bokeh is round):
   
   

Here is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken on the 85mm, full open at f/1.8: 
   

Rockwell claims this 85mm f/1.8 is Nikon's "worst" 85mm (albeit still very good) and yet it can still produce some pretty wildly gorgeous images, even fully open! Rockwell thinks you can get one for as low as $200 USD or so, which seems to me to be a bargain. Again, imagine if you could get such a beautiful, rich sounding microphone for just $200! Even the cheapest 'decent' ribbon mic I have found starts at $400...

It makes it seem relatively silly that some smart phones costing well over $1k take way worse photos than a lens from the 1970's adapted onto some few-years-old camera. Obviously all lenses and cameras now are wildly superior to what we were dealing with 20 years ago, a smartphone is way more compact and portable than this giant honking thing, and in all honesty, you can get great photos with literally anything, even early digital cameras like that Mavica. However the results from these old lenses are just really remarkable and beautiful in a way I can't really describe.

Apparently I read somewhere that Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was shot partially with Nikon (Nikkor) lenses, as they were the primary lenses used by war photographers and he wanted to capture that feeling. Whether or not that's true, it fits I guess, and the lenses are very sharp even today on digital equipment (when used appropriately).

Probably the most 'worthless' lens is the 80-200mm f/4.5 zoom. It is 100% manual like the other lenses, so no one really wants it, and you can't 'lock' the zoom in place (it slides with gravity if you tilt the camera too much!), but, it produces surprisingly impressive photos and costs under $100:
https://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/80-200mm-f45-n.htm

By the way, there is a small easter egg on the Versilian Studios website: on the home page, one of the photos was taken with a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera from the early 2000's! I doubt anyone really notices, as it's rather small. So, just like in music, it is all about how you use your tools, not necessarily what the tools are. Most of the other photos on the VS website and manuals were shot either with my phone or with one of these vintage lenses.

Something Sam said in a different thread prompted me to ask these question (and we need to spark some more conversation around here).

For a composition that will only ever be played by virtual instruments, how far do you go to make it realistic?

For example:

•  do you ensure your virtual woodwind and brass players would actually have a chance to breathe?
  
•  do you ensure they won't become exhausted by playing too long at the top of their range?
  
•  do you ensure you don't use more instruments than would actually be in an orchestra? By this I mean do you take care not to end up with something that would actually require a hundred string players or 40 horn players?
  
•  do you consider if a part you've composed would be boring for a player to play?
  

• is there enough for each virtual musician to do?