Category : Blog Post

A front-page feature on JayIsGames.com for When Orcs Attack!  The author was very complimentary of the game, though he has one comment:

When Orcs Attack carries its tongue-in-cheek theme of justification well, complete with a theme song that makes you think of a Fox reality program.

I’m not sure if I should feel good about this or insulted, but I’ll go with good as it seems like it fit the piece as a whole.

Ha!

Venture Arctic has received some nice critical acclaim in this feature on Kotaku, a gaming website.  I worked on all of the sound design and music for that game which is currently popping up for sale on portals as well as its own website.  A PC version is out now with a Mac version in the works!  You can read about it here.

The Season 1 DVD of Hey, Shipwreck is now released! The disc includes all 15 episodes from season 1 in high-resolution DVD quality video and sound as well as a special “behind the scenes featurette” available exclusively on this DVD. Makes a great gift for your Navy friend for the holidays or any other member of the armed forces. You can check out more about it and order by clicking here.

I just added a video of myself I found in my “archives” and posted it to YouTube, so I thought I’d link it from my site as well You can click here to see it on my “Demo Reel” page or click here to see it on YouTube. This is from 2004, and I am conducting the Serenade String Ensemble, a group I started at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 2002. I am conducting Benjamin Britten’s “Simple Symphony”, mvmt. 1. Enjoy!

In the audio world, there are a lot of places where you can lose money. You can underbid contracts, run out of time thereby inducing costly make-up procedures or just have instruments/computer equipment/random electronics break on you when you least expect it. However, the best place that you have control over your money is when you originally invest it in the gear you use everyday. There are a few areas here that have been written about endlessly. One of those is cables. Another, is microphones.

When I first started to aim at going “pro”, I read up on microphones and decided that my little SM58 probably would not cut it for everything and so I went shopping for a bargain condenser mic that could be used for many different applications.

It wasn’t long before I was shocked at how large of a price range there is in the condensor microphone business. At the low-end, you can get buy for somewhere around $75, or cheaper used and at the high, end, well, $3,000 and up!

As I was just getting started I wanted to find something clean that had a nice deep sound to it that worked well on a variety of material, including spoken voice. I opted for the RODE NT1 condenser. It is very basic, but performs well! I was happy with my purchase. However, when a recent VO gig came up, I decided to investigate again, to see what a higher costing mic might afford me.

Fortunately for me, the local public radio station, KMST, and the friendly folks there including John Francis and Chuck Knapp, had purchased a pair of KSM 44′s for field recording and agreed to loan me one, along with a small tree stand, for the purposes of this shootout.

What I then did was mount the mics right next to each other, and spoke some rather uninspired dialog inbetween them. I recorded them both into the basic preamps of my MOTU 828MkII audio interface, and recorded them at 24-bit/44.1Khz. All of this was recorded in my isobooth. The picture you in this post illustrates the setup used.

Now, there are a few disclaimers I need to make during this test. This was not performed with world-class, ultra-precision hardware and tuned within .05 dB gain or anything ridiculous such as this. For this test, I was more interested in the bottom line: when doing voice overs, that are often compressed down to 128 kbps MP3 (or worse!), will there be a noticeable difference in the quality of the VO when using the KSM 44. There are many, many more tests that COULD have been done for instruments, field work, sound design, etc. But they were not. The critic reviews have shown that the KSM 44 is a fantastic microphone offering not only huge value, but superior performance. Street price on a KSM 44 is currently around $800 with the Rode NT1 being about $200. (more…)