Hi, I’m umdesch4, and I’ve been a hobbyist audio engineer for over 35 years, ever since the age of 4 when I figured out how to thread an open reel tape machine, and hit the red button. This was much to the chagrin of my parents, when they came into the room and discovered I had managed to erase a significant chunk of one of their good reels. Oh well…
Through the years, I’ve done all kinds of crazy experiments, making tape loop collages from dissected cassettes, chaining together tape decks to painstakingly achieve some tape delay effects, and do very rudimentary overdub recording. Once I got my hands on a computer (the first serious one with musical possibilities being the Commodore 64), I incorporated that into my toolkit. I’ve written SID chip compositions, later MODs on the Commodore Amiga, and began messing around with digital sampling. Also being a musician, I got deep into MIDI sequencing, at various points writing my own bits of software to accomplish various things.
I never let the real-life aspect of things slide either. Around that era, in the late 80s, I was also a DJ, and went the extra mile to make sure everything sounded good, and there were racks of lights with chase and strobe patterns linked up to the music I was playing.
Since those days, I’ve taken audio engineering courses, so I know my way around mic placement for a drum kit, studio multitrack recording, various automation systems, and I’ve helped bands record demos, done some ADR and foley work, even multi-track recorded a string quartet in an apartment with double mics on each instrument and an array of room mics too! I’ve done live sound for bands at local festivals, and done a lot of my own field recording. For every situation where the average person would be taking video or pictures with their mobile gear, you’ll probably find me with a “prosumer” digital audio recorder taking high resolution surround sound audio field recordings.
Oh, did I mention, I’ve also done a lot of surround sound recording, composing, and mixing? I started by developing my own “poor man’s surround” where I reverse-engineered Dolby Pro-Logic Surround, and injected my own filtered sounds into a stereo mix to produce the same effect. Then I figured out how to do true surround sound, and master it to DVD-A, which is still my preferred format.
Anyway, it seems like everything that I learn in my life…physics, math, electronics, programming…I try to relate back to how it can be applied to audio, so that’s very much a part of the kind of person I am.
Of course, I spend the bulk of my time these days doing various little audio tasks for people, and myself, entirely in software on a PC. That’s mostly what the next few posts in this blog are going to be about.
I hope some of the things I’ll be talking about are informative and interesting
Cheers!
umdesch4
umdesch4 