Blog Changes

To the absolute non-readers who read this blog, I'm going to move the blog over to be hosted on my own server and modify the hell out of the code to really customize it. I need the challenge and to see if it can be done (which it can and will).

So, this blog may look weird for a bit. Just putting it out there.

Cajon Micing Tips

This past weekend, I did a recording session and we had to mic a Cajon. For those who don't know what a cajon is, it's basically a wooden box with a port hole about 5" in diameter in the back center. The player sits on the box and hits the front and sides. The front panel has snares attached. (I think they are sandwiched between the front/sound board and another piece on the inside.

First, the cajon is rad. It basically sounds like a snare drum when played on the front and a kick when played else where.

OK...on to micing it.

I did a search on the internet prior to the session and people basically said toss a SM57 in the hole and then place a large diaphragm condenser about 2-3 feet away from the front at cajon level (so about 1 foot off the floor).

This micing technique is pretty spot on. What we did differently is used a Heil PR20 for the port and a U47 Fet for the front. PR20ss are awesome (so is the FET 47 but were talking budget here). For $150 MSRP they are full and nice sounding. We used it on vocals once for a scratch track, and decided to keep the mic for the overdubs because it sounded great (male voice, not too deep). I'm thinking I'm going to pick one of these things up.

For placement, when the cajon was sitting flat, we placed the PR20 so the grill was just outside of the hole. That way when the player sat on it and leans back, the mic actually goes into the hole about 2-3 inches. We then placed the U47 FET about 3 feet in front and hand slap level.

This combination gave the cajon a rich sound quality with out distortion. Mind you, we were using NEVE outboard pres. Just blend the two signals to taste. If anyone wants to hear the recording, let me know and I'll post it. The rough sounds incredible.

FOCUS

So I've decided on a focus for this blog. It's a tiered focus, but focus nonetheless.

In a nutshell: I'm going to cover recording techniques (mic placement on instruments, patching techniques) that I've used and found to be successful and I'm probably going to talk about design related stuff (CSS/XHTML/Photoshop/etc.)

So in honor of this newly-found focus I'm going create another post!

Awesome Design Blog

An ex coworker of mine (and friend and fellow Packer fan) started up a design blog aimed at young designers (but with tips for seasoned pros as well). She offers great hints, resources and ideas to get you ready for the "real world".

You can check it out here: http://www.creativeopera.com/

CSS Image Replacement

After search in the blog posts far and wide for a solution to replace text with an image, yet still remain functional with images and css turned off for accessibility reasons, this is the best:

Shea Image Replacement

I know there are tons of blogs on this, but I enjoy it so much I feel to need to spread the love.

Bullets in Photoshop

So, I'm doing comps for an eblast template and, of course, I'm mocking it up in Photoshop. I never thought of how to make a bullet list in photoshop so I would just use tabs. This is tedious. Google to the rescue. I found this great blog post. However, the tutorial stops short of something important. If you have a text box with normal paragraphs and a bullet list, you actually need to do one more step.

After you do the first line indent with a negative value, select the bulleted text and indent the whole text the same value or greater than the negative value. For instance, if you use -15pt for the first line, indent the whole paragraph 15pt or greater if you want the bullet list to be indented more than the paragraph.

I've attached 2 photos (one of the palette and one of the text itself). Hopefully this helps someone.

whoops.

I need to get back on this train. Recording stories ahead!