I have watched a whole bunch of videos. My first reaction is that I can’t believe people are willing to sit through so many ads! I suppose this reaction is similar to my disbelief that humanity is happy to use free email even if it means giving up loads of data.
I watched a Korean woman’s YouTube videos. She has almost 600,000 subscribers and gets away with multiple ads in each video. I am convinced that most of the appeal lies in the well-recorded ASMR-type sounds.
I started wondering about the importance of the human interaction. Could the imagery be more abstract without losing the appeal? Here is an example: what if a video combined the sound of brushing hair with moving images of a field of wheat or tall grass moving with the wind. Or, perhaps, the sound of soft footsteps and imagery of water – a still lake perhaps.
Does abstraction not work, or would it be more interesting?
I am experimenting with different methods and microphones to record soft sounds and how play with them, arranging them in some way. Here is this morning’s experiment. The file starts with the sound of boiling plantains on the left side. Second, the sound of my footsteps on wooden stairs, in the center. I was wearing wide pants and one can hear the fabric against my leg as well as the foot steps. Third, the sound of typing on a laptop keyboard, on the right side.
This Earthworks SR40 is the microphone I have been using on my guitar for over a year now. I haven’t used it for recording in the studio yet, but it’s handsdown the best microphone for the stage I have ever used… and I have used a lot of different ones!
We are often asked which gear or tricks we use to ensure the guitar is loud enough, especially since I refuse to use a pickup on my guitars – I haven’t used a pickup on my flamenco guitars in at least a decade and a half.
Let’s face it, classical or flamenco guitars are puny and quiet instruments when compared against electric bass guitar, drums and keyboards. With this microphone we always have enough level and we don’t have to worry about feedback.
Of course sound level isn’t everything, the quality of the sound is just as important. I feel that this mic gives me the truest guitar tone and makes hearing what I’m playing a pleasure. And that is something we guitar players cannot take for granted.
Here is what Earthworks writes about this microphone:
You’ll love what the Earthworks SR40 high-definition cardioid mic does for your recordings and live performances. Its 30Hz-40kHz frequency response means you’re capturing a far wider range than most mics can touch. The result? Better depth and a truer sound that includes more high-frequency overtone content. You’ll also appreciate how well the SR40’s true cardioid pickup pattern rejects outside sources, and how it gives you impressive gain before feedback.
Ottmar Liebert & Luna Negra binaural: the Fritz Files “I find the binaural experience much more natural than 5.1 or anything like that,” says Ottmar Liebert. “By comparison those multi-speaker arrays sound very artificial — and are expensive….”
(read the whole review at Culture Court)
(You may ask yourself, why do we sell the HD files for Up Close now? We found out that HDTracks.com apparently does not sell outside the USA and by making Up Close available in our ListeningLounge we are making the album available in this HD version to the rest of the world.)
I bought a couple of these Japanese bicycle bells at Mellow Velo here in Santa Fe. They are made of brass and have a lovely sound – more like a temple bell calling to attention…
