Today, I read this inspiring story by Charlene Costanzo, that I am summarizing below:
Long long ago, royal children
were given twelve special gifts when they were born by twelve fairy godmothers of the kingdom. Each fairy godmother pronounced a noble gift upon the
royal baby.
With passage of time, the fairy godmothers realized that the
twelve royal gifts of birth belong to every child in the world, but most of them are not aware of these gifts. The godmothers made this
prophecy:
Some day, all the children of the world
will learn the truth about their
noble inheritance. When that happens a miracle will unfold on
the kingdom of Earth.
Finally, the day is here.
Here is the secret they wanted you to know.
At the wondrous moment you were born, as you took your first
breath, a great celebration was held in the heavens and twelve
magnificent gifts were granted to you.
The first gift is STRENGTH.
May you remember to call upon it whenever you need it.
The second gift is BEAUTY.
May your deeds reflect its depth.
The third gift is COURAGE.
May you speak and act with confidence and use courage to follow
your own path.
The fourth gift is COMPASSION.
May you be gentle with yourself and others. May you forgive
those who hurt you and yourself when you make mistakes.
The fifth gift is HOPE.
Through each passage and season, may you trust the goodness of
life.
The sixth gift is JOY. May
it keep your heart open and filled with light.
The seventh gift is TALENT.
May you discover your own special abilities and contribute them
toward a better world.
The eighth gift is IMAGINATION.
May it nourish your visions and dreams.
The ninth gift is REVERENCE.
May you appreciate the wonder that you are and the miracle of
all creation.
The tenth gift is WISDOM.
Guiding your way, wisdom will lead you through knowledge to
understanding. May you hear its soft voice.
The eleventh gift is LOVE.
It will grow each time you give it away.
The twelfth gift is FAITH.
May you believe.
Use your gifts well and
you will discover others, among them a gift that is
uniquely you. See these noble gifts in other people. Share the
truth and be ready for the miracle to unfold.
This is the third post in this series about my experiences with music. In earlier posts, I talked about my experiences with music before it became digital, and on the advent of digital era. In this post I take it further to the time when computer recordings at home became possible for me, with smaller MP3 files and my new computer with a 120 GB disk. This unleashed an unending chain of fun and discoveries. Here is a summary of the exciting journey.
Initially, I connected my all purpose Onstage AS400 microphone to the computer and used an audio editor called Audacity for recording and mixing. Audacity let me listen to the music track on headphone while recording the song on a separate track. Later on I would mix the two tracks to produce a final recording. Soon I learned that a good recording needs to have proper balance of the volume of each track, and I have to avoid clipping of sound by excessive levels. I also found out how to spruce up the vocals by adding an echo effect, or how to clean up the background noise using DSP techniques in Audacity. The results at this stage were better than anything that I had done so far.
Around the same time, I started using AVS Video Editor for video tasks like video editing, creation, and DVD burning. I decided to buy it as it is a complete suite of media tools that help you handle audio, video, pictures and all kind of media files. This video software came in handy when I wanted to share my recording on Facebook, as it does not allow to upload audio files; so I converted my recording to a video file with a static picture and shared my first song on FB on April 17, 2011. Bol Radha Bol was my first track on FB, and I am glad that I published it. The likes and encouragement I got from the friends acted as the fuel that gave invaluable support to my passion, and kept me trying to do better. You can listen to the track below.
At that time, I was also looking for a way to add the lyrics display to a Karaoke music track, so that it can be used for fun in a party. I found a great tool Karafun Studio that does exactly that. However, you have to teach the timing of the song to the tool painstakingly. I started creating one karaoke song at a time using it. Over time, I have prepared more that 100 hindi songs, that are a great source of fun in music parties.
In an attempt to discover new audio techniques, I researched the Internet for tutorials and articles. I came upon a good article on how to mix a song using Audacity. From this article, I learned several aspects. One was about perfect timing. I found out that the computer recording adds about 200 ms delay in the track, so my vocals so far were slightly out of timing with the music. Once you know it, it can be easily fixed in Audacity. In fact I measured the exact delay with an experiment and learned to compensate for it. Another key aspect was about vocal compression. Most modern songs use compression extensively to create a wholesome sound. When I added compression to my vocals, the results were amazing. Third learning was about creating space in the background music for vocals. I learned to use techniques like eq and ducking to make room for vocals. The results were clearly much better.
My disk was getting full again with all these audio, video, pictures and other media files. It was not long before I had to add a 250G, 500G, and finally 1TB external USB disk to my computer to cope with this demand for space. I am currently using a 1TB disk to store media and another USB disk to back it up.
Next I found out that to get the next improvement in my mix, a technique called mastering is must. Audacity does not do mastering, so I found out another tool Kristal, which is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). In October 2011, I tried mixing and mastering with Kristal on the Mukesh number - "Main to ek khwab hun", and I was thrilled with the outcome. Listen to this number to get a feel of it.
Next couple of months I played with Kristal, discovering its features, and various sound effects possible to be done with it. I came to a point where the clarity of my recording was limited only by the quality of the mic and its connection. I measured in an experiment that the in-built audio card in PC add about -45db noise to the captured signal even when there was no input. Nothing could be done to remove this noise once it gets in your track. Thanks to eBay that allowed me to get an item from Amazon.com to India, I bought an external audio interface - Blue Icicle to tackle the issue. In January 2012, I did "Mana Janab Ne Pukara Nahin" with this, and got a huge improvement in the quality. Listen to this song to make out the difference yourself.
As a result of compression and reverb, the quiet parts of a vocal track are also heard very loud and clear. That became a problem for breathing sounds and plosive sounds - sound of "p", "s", etc that cause an air shock on the mic. I bought a pop filter and in June 2012, recorded "Yeh Jeevan Hai" with it. It was very effective in eliminating the plosives. For the breathe noises, there was no option but to edit the track in Audacity, find the point of breating noise and suppress it manually. This was a painful process, but it had to be done. I was sure that there must be a plugin that can automate it, and I started looking for it.
That's when I hit upon Reaper, a new Digital Audio Workstation that is much more capable. I recorded "Aap ke pahalu me" on it in July 2012. I found out about the use of dynamic splitting to remove breath noise, using stereo width and spatial mixing, and I am still discovering more new ways to improve my mixes.
Along with this, I also took the plunge and got myself a studio quality condensor mic to improve my recordings further. On July 28, 2012, I recorded my favorite number "Pukarata Chala Hun Main" on my new Behringer C1U microphone, and mixed it with Reaper.
So, this is the story of my exploration so far. But picture abhi baki hai mere dost! I feel like a small kid in the candy shop, who has goodies scattered all around him. There is so much to enjoy, learn, and discover. The journey goes on..
With the introduction of digital technology, the world of audio
went through a revolution. Initially, most people experienced the effect of
this revolution indirectly, when the recording and processing in the studios
switched to digital. The music was still distributed on cassettes, but one
could see a marked improvement in the quality and fidelity, as the digital
process provided advance techniques to do so. These tapes used to be labeled “Digital
Recording” to highlight this switch.
Soon afterwards, Compact Disks (CDs) and CD players arrived on
the scene, allowing the music to be delivered in digital form. It resulted in a
several folds improvement in the quality of sound. When I first listened to a
flute recital by Pt Hari Prasad Chaurasia on my friend’s CD player, I was
completely amazed at the clarity of its sound. It was apparent that this is the
future of music. The CDs were hard to afford in the beginning, and very few
titles were released on CDs. However, with time, CD players became more common,
and availability of CD titles improved as well.
With this, a new class of CD based Karaoke systems were
available, that played the background music on CD, and recorded the mixed song
on tape. I got myself such a system from Panasonic in 2001. Around the same
time, sensing the interest in Karaoke, music companies came out with good
quality Karaoke CDs of Hindi songs. I was a regular buyer of these CDs at the
nearby PlanetM stores. I had a lot of fun doing recordings on my Panasonic. Using
digital techniques, it allowed change of pitch of music to suit your voice. I
found it very convenient to use “Key Down” feature to lower the pitch for songs
that go very high. I was still using the CDs for background music only and the
recording was analog on the tape. As an example of the recordings done at that time, listen to the tracks below - chand si, koi jab, and chookar mere man ko.
While these "key down" tracks were convenient to sing with, they sounded somewhat off-color, and dull. And this was the second important lesson for me. You have to sing a song in its original pitch if you want it to sound good. I made tape copy of the karaoke tracks and used my long daily commute hour to enjoy and practice singing with these tracks. With the passage of time, I regained the ability to render these songs in the original pitch, and that was a big relief.
Around the same time, I had my first brush with digital
recording when I used my home computer to record a few songs in my brother’s
voice using the PC microphone and Windows Sound Recorder. The recording itself
was very clear and noise free. I also used Cool Edit audio editor to add reverb
to the recording, and the results were cool. Listen to the tracks below as an example - aise to na dekho and aadmi aadmi ko kya dega.
However, I knew that the digital recording was not feasible for
me at that time as each wav file was taking close to 100 MB of disk space and
my 20 GB hard disk would have been filled very soon. So, I did not pursue it
for next few years. It would return when the disk space issue is resolved with
availability of large low cost USB hard disks.
After a few years, when I got a new computer with a bigger 120
GB disk, I tried to revive the digital recording again. I had also learned to
use the compressed MP3 format, which takes just 5 MB for a song. In the next post, I will recollect the fun unleashed by bringing a computer in my music
activities.
