Thursday Gear Porn Extravaganza

Once in a while, I can't help but keel over and drool all over myself in awe of a piece of equipment which has caught my attention. Introducing the sleek, sexy and flexible MKH-800 TWIN. Hubba hubba.

A lot of mics work with selectable polarity patterns, which is an indispensable tool when you have a very specific tone/application in mind. You want to hear only one side of the room? Go cardioid (and place it accordingly, yo). You want to capture dialog for film, go up-close and personnal with your talent's mouth with a hyper-cardioid mic (you know you want to). You like a good room tone to harmonize your song mix? Omni and figure-8 are your friends. And if you're feeling kind of kinky, try a MS-style setup using a mix of figure-8 and directional. Anything goes, but you're usually limited by each microphone's available patterns (most will have one or two, maybe three). And what you capture going to tape is usually limited to what you decided to leave out when you picked your polar pattern. Anything short of omnidirectionnal will necessarily cut something out and leave you to work with it.

I've worked with the regular MKH 800 in-studio and let me tell you, it's one heck of a flat mic. Except for that alpha-plus-plus gentle peak starting at 6kHz, all frequencies are born equal when passing through the 800. End-result is moderately 'brighter', but that's actually a great asset when you're recording voiceover. Everything else is just crystal clear say-it-like-it-is, nearly-uncoloured audio.

And I mean... just look at this response curve... Yum :Þ



I'll fess up to my little Sennheiser fetish, but you have to admit this stuff is teh sex.

The thing with expensive high-end mics usually is that they tend to be highly specialized (ever use a Telefunken M12 on a bass drum? So what if it can handle the SPL? How about you save it for the overheads instead, kthxbye). At this kind of price tag, you'll want to have a few justifiable reasons to own each one. But the TWIN completely destroys that notion as it offers incredible flexibility.

Instead of featuring a built-in selector, the TWIN sends a stereo signal to your DAW, then you control it by simply muting, fading, panning, inverting the phase and whatnot. This means you can re-create polar patterns AFTER recording, and still keep your unmodified signal ready to use if you ever change your mind and want to go back without having to record again. It's almost like cheating, only not. This approach allows you to fake all the known patterns in the book and everything in between...

...and all that from a single high-quality RF condenser mic.

I'm sold.

This marks a change in mentalities, really: a move to the 'real' digital era with a lot more interaction between your gear and software. You have a shorter, stockier mic without switches or buttons on the body ( = better overall capsule insulation. Sure you can call me paranoid.) that works just perfectly if you know what to do it. And it's hella forgiving to use: when you have access to just about any tweak needed software-side, the only thing left to worry about is mic placement (don't get lazy on this).

Quick! Before you lose interest!

Cute, right? If only we were so forgiving of humans when they do the same :P

I’m ready to hork up the ugly truth and say it like it is: I’m lazy.

We all are, in a way: We shy away from effort, we don’t always volunteer for everything, we procrastinate, etc… And that’s fine. Only, sometimes, it can create some inner conflict if you're in denial about it. Let's be honest for a minute.

Laziness is not a problem if you don’t have any particular ambitions, but I happen to have a lot of interests. I mean a LOT. (The capital letters and italics should hint at just how much.) If I spend a long enough period time not pursuing any of my own goals, it’s probably because I’m busy helping others with theirs. The biggest problem is that block of time between these two modes.

When that 'block' happens, I switch to auto pilot and blindly go out of my way to begin new things or to foolishly say yes to everyone else… and that usually transforms a free schedule into a Calendar from Hell.

Le Calendrier Infernal means many things:

• Firstly, events you promise to attend will conflict with each other, or if they don’t, it’ll be the time spent moving from one place to the other that will run short.
  
• Secondly, you’ll slip in and out of focus as more and more things solicit your attention.
  
• Third..ly, you’ll forget things because you were so hyped about something else.
  
• Fourth…(-ly?) you’ll begin to hate your day job for stealing all your precious precious time, and resent having to sleep at night.
  
• Lastly, anything that was already on hiatus may rear its fugly hear and come bite you in the arse, begging for attention. You may even find yourself trying to find new things to do just to avoid your earlier engagements. And then you build a precedent for ‘creative procrastination’ which, while fascinating, might be a really bad habit.

So okay I’m lazy. I only feel really 'lazy' when I have a thousand things to do and I'm not doing them. But, but but… right before I had a thousand things to do, I wasn’t really lazy yet, was I? No! I was idle. And that’s far worse!

What makes me lazy? My interests.

Wait, what? The reason for Avian’s trouble in pursuing his interests are in fact the very same interests?

Ah, but it’s the truth. I have too many interests and not enough true passions (You know, the all-encompassing kind that could destroy your couple?). Some passing interests motivate me to work on new things, some others cause me to procrastinate and abandon them. Mainly though, other people’s projects (which I almost unerringly find interesting) interfere with my personnal things, and those personnal things draw me away from my promises to others. Oh the drama! Now I know what my computer feels like when I run over 9000 applications at once.

Managing your time is almost always a question of balancing what you want and what you need.

Whew…

But after all this, even when you succeed in getting everything done (or mostly everything done), even when you know other people appreciate you and what you can offer them, you still have to hang your ego on the rack and get things back into perspective.

Here’s my main man Fred Gallagher on humility and the willingness to improve yourself:

I would never call myself an artist. I'm not. 'Artist' is a gift word. I can't recall who the poet was (I believe it was Frost) who reacted to a student who called himself a 'Poet'. Frost reacted to this by saying you can't call yourself a poet, it's a gift word - it's something that other people have to bestow upon you. The same goes for artist. And even if people say that you are an artist, you have to be at a point that you are willing to accept that term. Me? I'm not quite there yet.

So slap that moniker on someone all you want, a person has got to feel worthy of the praise he/she receives before feeling it.

Funny how some of my art teachers (thankfully not all) back in college totally disagreed with this. They offered instead that artists were born, not made, and that technical skill was only an accessory to the ‘real thing’ (which you obviously can’t develop on your own, right?). Also according to them, thinking critically about art was just another way of acquiring ‘technique’. When you put it this way, Art itself (capital A, yeah) begins to sound like this untouchable divinity. That’s dangerous. It means you can't explore it without thinking you aren't qualified to do so. It means you can’t make any progress without feeling like a hack who could never hope to rival The Greats.

Sorry to disagree, but I don’t compete with the past. I compete with me.

Speaking of the past, the ancient greeks had a word: “techne”, which they used to describe both the art and craftsmanship. To me, they are nearly indistinguishable. If you do something well enough to get hired for it or innovative enough to influence the generations to come: it’s Art. If you push the envelope, develop new techniques or if you create new concepts: it’s Art. Nuff said.

Ian McConville has dealt with similar frustrations during his college days. I can empathize.

His own teachers postulated that ideas were more important than technique. That vision lends itself well to the field of art history. It’s also useful if you’re aiming to become an art critic. But when you want to be the creator, it’s counterproductive to think in these terms. It undermines your progression because it contradicts the age-old ‘practice makes perfect’ maxim.

Art is a convoluted process, and things are never that clear-cut when you get down to it. In this whole debate, the truth is probably somewhere in between the different worldviews, but a fellow’s entitled to his opinionated opinions, right?.

Avian out.

And now for something completely different... NOT!

"One of these days I might be tempted to ressurect Sato just for the fun of drawing her"

- Me, yesterday

Look at me being all eager and stuff :P

Some things just can't leave you. I've been trying to shake off the manga influence from my drawings for some years now, but I think it's just stuck with me for so long that it's going to stay forever unless I get post-hypnotic suggestion to the contrary. Regardless of what I try to do, all my characters are going to have huge heads and eyes hehe...

Wish the pose was more dynamic. Satoshi doesn't look like she's going to throw that basketball at all, just going to hold onto it for an hour or two.

And the hands, my god the hands. I think I'm going to set my house on fire right now, thanks.