Topic: Curious about what everyone does with matrix

[capnhook]

Personally I like to do this on the fly. So far the results have been nice. I power my mics with the phantom power on my preamp. Then I send the analog out from the preamp in to a small mixer. I also send the sbd signal to this small mixer. That gives me four channels. Mix these down to two and send it out to your recorder.

+T

I did it like this all weekend in the dancetent at Great Blue Heron last year, and had a nice result.  My mics were centerFOB, and the board was only about 24' from the stage.  I used about a 80:20 board:mics mix ---- just enough to get a little of rowdy ambience into the recording.  Take a listen to this one.....nice one-disc d/l........................


http://www.archive.org/details/Donna2006-07-09.buffalozydeco.flac


The little bit of delay helped "wetten up" the result.....sort of a free bit of reverb.   

[dgodwin]

Syncing the beginning of each source together is only part of the battle - due to drift, one must re-sync over and over throughout the course of the recording.  How often one re-syncs depends on how far off the clocks are from one another.

Or, much better, time-scale one source to the other by stretching or shrinking it appropriately so that you do not end up with drift at the end of each track and brief gaps in one source at every point you have to re-sync it.  Time-scaling is much easier w/ software that supports it, and much more accurate IMO, than cut and paste re-syncing...and it is only a couple steps (sync at the beginning, calculate drift, time-scale) instead of very many steps (re-sync and chop between every track).

I spent a couple hours doing the chopping/resyncing today in audition.  On some of the longer tracks, the 2 sources start drifting enough so that is sounds like theres some reverb.  I'll look more into the stretch/shrink method....  http://www.upstatetapers.org/tracker/index.php if you want to hear my attempt.  It's the top show (Ron Hawkins and Lawrence Nichol)

[easy jim]

Out of curiosity, what apps did you try and give up on?

CEP/Audition and...probably WaveLab (not positive, though, it's been quite a while).

Interesting...is anyone aware of a freeware program that offers detailed time-scaling?  I thought you could do it in CEP, but I don't know from experience. 

Once I learned on AudioDesk/Digital Performer since I have the MOTU gear, I've stuck with what works (for me, that is).  In these two programs, you click and 'grab' the end of the wav on your time ruler and drag it to where it 'should be' based on your calculated drift.  The software then re-calculates the samples/wav file and creates a new time-scaled version.

[SmokinJoe]

I realize if clocks aren't synced there will be difference, but with modern digital recorders it should be a consistant linear difference, right?  I.e. if one records a little faster than the other, chances are this will be consistant over the course of an evening?

Let's say I take two sources, then pick a particular drum beat for the beginning, and another one an hour later, and they are seperate by 2.13 seconds, then mathematically, I should be able to dither it by a factor of 2.13/3600 = 0.0005916666, and apply that to the whole file using accurate software, right?  Unless you have a supercomputer, this will probably run very slowly (think over night).  But when I get done, I should have a mixable result, no?  I haven't done it, but that's my plan for when I do.

Now, the real heros are the people to mix 1970's vault tapes with lineage like MSR > Reel(2) > DAT > WAV against a MAC > DAT > CDR > EAC > WAV, because there you have 2 fluctuating analog signals, plus several other clocks.  That would be no where near as consistant as modern digital recordings.  You read stories about dan@amdig doing that for many many hours.