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eTel tidbits starting to trickle in
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Tag Archives: bass
Get any ‘new presence’ for Christmas?
The identity problem goes way beyond presence, and way beyond telephony even. I define identity as the trust of another node’s credentials, be they human or machine. I am who I say am. And WHY? Because I am trusted. As trust can only be established by an authority, we have a real problem on our hands.
But it’s not a problem that’s new.
Take DNS. The fact that we, as thought leaders, haven’t solved the dilemma of securing the identity of domain wielders is a shame. This is why e-mail spam is consuming a pathetic amount of bandwidth, and also why old friends like Carl Sassenrath and even Tom Keating have been forced to “privatize” their e-mail.
Comment spam on blogs would also be eradicated if we all subscribed to a common trust authority for domain-wielding credentials. And prosecuting abusers would simplified. Everybody wins, right? You would think Google would be on this concept like white on rice. (How much Goobandwidth is sucked up by spiders crawling splogs and spam comments designed to enrich page rank for such nefarious keywords as ‘pissing’, ‘ugg boots’, and ‘hillary duff naked’?)
Of course, creating a centralized authority for granting domain-wielding identity might not be easy. There IS that painful little issue of privacy. And of course, the entire industries that have sprung up to counter the abuse of software aren’t lobbying really hard for a central identity authority. Plus, you’d be hardpressed to push this through as law without some knuckleheaded buttnut Ivy League professor labeling it as some “unilateral move” designed to disenfranchise SOMEBODY.
But I digress. There is good news, however. My Strep is almost gone.
Flight 93
I just saw the movie Flight 93 and I it was the most devestating thing I think I’ve ever watched in a film. I just can’t imagine what the people onboard that flight went through in reality and I hope so much that the man that orchestrated it is found and dealt with, soon. God Bless the victims and their familes.
Use EQ, not panning, to remove low-end mud
Drum-kit.com has a great little tutorial answering this question: Is it OK to pan low-frequency instruments to the left and to the right in order to restore clarity and get rid of that mid-low muddiness that always seems to be such a nuisance. The answer is essentially “no”, for a number of reasons:
- Bass isn’t as directional as treble, so panning doesn’t have the same perceived effect on the stereo image with low-freqency instruments as it does with high-frequency ones.
- Certain analog media–especially vinyl–just don’t deal well with low-frequencies that are too far to the right or left. In fact, some producers master vinyl with certain low frequencies at dead center, regardless of how they’ve been mixed.
- EQ is much more effective in bringing clarity to the low-end. Check out these tips:
Rule number one is to to cut the bass below around 100 Hz for any instrument or sound source that has not been specifically included in the mix for its bass content. Anything else is just mush, and should be filtered out.
In many cases, that will be enough to provide clarity in the bass. However if you wish to combine several bass instruments, you need to carefully EQ them so that each has its own little space in the frequency spectrum.
For example you could tune and EQ a kick drum to say 80 Hz, then cut the bass guitar slightly in this region while boosting it in the 150 Hz -200 Hz zone. These are not hard and fast figures, just instances.
Geddy Lee’s Fender Jazz Bass
Geddy Lee’s Fender Jazz Bass
Rush fans have long been obsessed with the bass habits of the band’s front man, Geddy Lee. His aggressive (and often trebly) playing style make him the ideal power-trio bass man, but it’s Rush’s sense of humor that appeals to less gear-obsessed fans. Check out this snippet from a recent Fender interview:
FN: How important has Rush’s sense of humor been to its longevity?
GL: Well, I would think that—from an insider’s point of view—it’s extremely important from a not-so-overt point of view, in the sense that I think the basis of our friendship is the sense of humor that we share, and the way that we’re able to deal with all the various aspects of the music business and the interpersonal stuff.And that’s always been the case, and it’s always been a means of us bonding with each other on a personal level. And it’s always crept into our music, but for many, many years we were accused of being deadly serious and humorless.
FN: But that’s clearly not the case. You guys are a riot.
GL: I guess you can look at our music and see what you want to see in it. I know our hardcore fans have always detected it, although as we get older—and maybe this is just another sign of senility (grins)—our sense of humor has become a bit more obvious.FN: You have two clothes dryers and a snack machine behind you onstage in lieu of amps, a concert intro film starring Jerry Stiller, a website feature called Big Al’s Tiki Bar, and an animated mid-concert episode of That Darn Dragon starring bobble-head versions of yourselves. That is not deadly serious.
GL: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I look at it like, when you come to a Rush show, it’s over three hours long, and, you know, you need comic relief. Every form of entertainment can use a little comic relief. So we try to throw some of that in there to make people walk away with smiles on their faces.
Clearly, for a guy who has played a Rick, a Steinberger, and a handful of different makes, the Fender seems to be the quintessential “Geddy bass”. Indeed, Fender produced a limited Geddy edition of the axe just a few years back.