Fun Update

[Matt Picone]

Here's a fun update from "the virtual road, day 2".

Dweezil is now in Japan gigging with the rig we built. Last night there 
were level problems-- lots of volume pedal riding to keep any semplance 
of balance. We had spent some time back in "virtual L.A." normalizing 
levels across programs, but it was a rush and done in a situation of 
sleep deprivation. The gig yesterday revealed obvious shortcomings in 
the method used. The job at hand was to help make fixing this situation 
a little easier.

One's instinct asserts that rudimentary quantitative approaches to this 
problem will only goes so far-- psychoacoustic differences make programs 
which appear the same on your meters to sound dramatically different. 
and then there's Fletcher Munson to argue with... but I needed to find a 
some way to identify troubles, and quickly, with just hours until the 
next show.

I connected my own Ultra (loaded with the sounds for the gig) then 
hooked up some white noise (-15db) to its input. I connected the outputs 
to sound forge, then stepped through all the programs, counting 
carefully. Hitting stop, I could instantly see the desired outcome had 
been reached: the waveform display showed clearly which sounds were the 
major offenders at each end of the level scale.

Porting some screen captures of this file over to Photoshop for some 
labeling revealed that it was hard to read across the full horizontal 
spread, so I added some color bars for reference. Now, rhythm, leadm and 
"wild" sounds had target zones to sit in... Making some adjustments 
followed by a listening check set the stage for big improvement. Stand 
by for the final analysis.

The completed graphic can be seen here:

http://www.mysticworks.com/dz/all.gif