…Oh yeah, so a lot happened since I last blogged. Bought a house, went through a lot of stress, lots of work to do, and winter sucks. That’s the quick wrap up of the last few months.

The house is amazing. HUGE. The show has been moved to a temp studio in one of the vacant rooms of the house. The final studio space will have a dedicated FLOOR of the house. The attic (if you can even call it that) is gigantic and is the perfect spot to put the new studio. I’ve had a few contractors come out to give me quotes on how much it will be to finish the space. So hopefully we will be moving up there soon.

Oh yeah, and I updated Wordpress to the new 2.7 version. It’s fuckin great. You guys won’t see a difference but the backend of the site is amazing.

I should just keep my mouth shut because I know I am jinxing myself, but… I think I got my audio perfect.

It’s funny, I have said that so many times before and I ALWAYS end up thinking it sounds like shit. But this time it is wired correctly, tweaked, and sounding like heaven (atleast through my headphones). The real test will be when we do a show and have 3 people talking… loudly and obnoxiously.

Last week, when I thought I perfected my audio, it turned out like shit. I sounded good, but I also had to focus too much on whether I was too close to the mic or too loud, which affected my performance. As for my co-hosts, they sounded awful. Partially because their compression wasn’t tuned right, but mostly because they won’t get close enough to the goddamn microphone! Which I don’t understand at all. YOU CAN HEAR YOURSELF! They are all wearing headphones so they should be able to tell when they sound like garbage. But they don’t do any production, they just talk and think they don’t have to worry about the sound. I don’t blame them really, I need to get it tweaked to their voices, but I would love it if they could just get close to the mics.

Well wish me luck with this weeks show. I pray that it sounds good. If you wanna hear for yourself you can either tune in live this Thursday at http://www.WrecklessMediaRadio.com or you can download the latest episode the day after. Let me know what you think of the sound.

BTW: In reply to the comment left on my last blog entry. I don’t like using plugins and post production sound enhancers. I feel like it should all be done on the fly. Not only to cut down on production time but just because I am weird like that. Also, it needs to sound good on the live show as well as the podcast. Thanks for the suggestion though.

If you’ve been following my blog or my podcast, you’d know that my studio and I have a love-hate relationship. After three years of buying equipment, tweaking, and having mental break-downs, I still am unable to achieve that, seemingly mythical, talk radio sound.

People ask me, “Brian, why do you care so much about getting that specific audio? Your show already sounds great. Why does it need to have that talk-radio sound?” I WANT that over-the-top, cheesy, over-compressed FM Broadcast quality for one simple reason. It sounds more professional among podcasts. I want to grab people’s attention right away. I want them to think to themselves, wow, this is no little show, there are sound engineers behind the scenes making all of this work.

There have been many many times I have turned on a podcast and because of the audio quality shut it right off because I couldn’t handle it. I also believe that there is some sort of hypnotic characteristic that talk radio sound puts you in that almost forces you to listen.

Anyways, down to the technical shit. I have been daisy chaining my audio for the longest time. Going from my mixer to my compressors and voice processors, then going to my interface. Well apparently that is a BIG BIG BIG NO NO. That amplifies the noise, like crazy!

The correct way to do this is to use your mic inserts on you mixer. The only problem with this is that you need a compressor channel per mic. Which can be expensive but is completely worth it if you are serious about having great sound.

I rewired the studio like this last night and i was amazed at the difference. It is still not perfect by any means but I think it is a step closer to achieving the sound that I want. I’ll keep this updated as I get closer to the sound I want.

When I made BrianBerris.com I wanted it to be a place where I could post random thoughts, photos, and videos without following any sort of professional format. I have not been keeping up with it at all because I keep on thinking I need to present it in a certain manner. I need to remind myself that this URL is BrianBerris.com and here I am god and can post whatever, however, I want. Soooooo that is what I will be doing from now on.

I just posted a bunch of photos from over the summer when I went camping up north. It felt good to get some new stuff up there. I also got the most recent photos section working on the home page (which has been bugging me for a while).

New videos will be posted soon and some original music. Now that the site is working I will be blogging also.

Viva La BrianBerris.com

So I have been toying with the idea of starting a video blog on youtube. I feel like I need to do more with the Wreckless Media Radio youtube account along with push back those old shitty videos we did so people don’t get the wrong impression of us.

I think it would be fun to just have a 10 minute blog every other day, just to talk about whatever. Maybe something that happened to me that day. Maybe news with the show. Maybe recap last weeks episode.

I’m not exactly sure what it would be right now but I think I’ll just do a test vid and see how it turns out. Now I’m not sure whether I should post them on here or on WMR. Decisions, decisions.

For the past two years I have been trying to get that talk radio sound (as my last post stated). I got it sounding better but it STILL is not where I want it. So I’ve decided… I’m gonna hire a sound engineer.

I don’t care how much it costs or if it is even worth it. I am making a personal vendetta against shitty sound. Sounds dumb but I feel like a mad scientist, ripping my hair out.

Read the rest of this entry »

After 2 years of podcasting and experimenting with settings and spending weeks and weeks tweaking audio I was never able to get the sound quality I wanted. I have always been seeking that deep, punchy, talk radio sound quality and it always seemed out. I’ve spent tons of money on equipment that people promised would give me that sound with no results.

FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY, late last night after 7 hours of being in the studio tweaking audio I have FINALLY figured it out! I needed to reverse the polarity, no I’m serious. Sounds like something a crazy scientist would only say. Yesterday after reading around the internet for 2 hours I came across something called Phase Reverse. Now the description of phase reverse was in regards to an effect in Cubase. What this effect does essentially, is flip the sound wave on the timeline. I did this to a test recording and it looked more like the FM talk radio clip I was comparing my levels to. Read the rest of this entry »

We all knew that it was coming. We could hear the squawking of the Vultures months ago. Deminski and Doyle (D and D) are no more. The Day we have been dreading is among us.

As soon as 97.1 Free FM’s untimely death at the hands of CBS executives, all of us Detroiters let out a collective gasp of horror. All of our favorite shows were gone in a flash (and a lot of our not so favorite). Due to the overwhelming popularity of Deminski and Doyle, they were kind enough to spare us and move them from drive-home to mornings.

D and D have been in Detroit for almost 9 years. They embraced Detroit and in return we embraced them. They held a mirror up to life in Southeastern Michigan and we could see ourselves in it and relate. Besides being genuinely nice guys, they were damn good entertainers. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past week or so I have been trying to replicate a film look with my Panasonic DVX100b. The whole reason I got the DVX was to do this and it has the ability to do it, A lot of indie film makers use this exact camera, I just don’t know what the fuck I’m doing yet.

I have learned a lot so far and I am getting closer, but still not perfect. Believe it or not I have learned A LOT from a 15 year old kid from Tennessee. I found him on the DVXuser.com forum and I am in awe of his work. Take a look for yourself: http://www.mattmatheson.com/rage/film.php?…

That looks like FILM and he is using the same camera as me. Read the rest of this entry »

Well I haven’t made a blog entry in a while and I figured today would be a good time.  I am at work right now pondering how I can best spend the next 8 hours until 5 rolls around.  I’m all caught up on my AutoWeek work after being out sick for most of the week.

I have a few projects that I need to work on and finish soon.  I have to finish up a shopping cart application for this guy here at work that is trying to sell his artwork from his site.  Hopefully that goes smoothly.  I’ve never made a shopping cart before for a site, but I can imagine paypal makes it easy.  The other site I need to finish working on is the new Hometown Tales website.  Which is what I might finish today.  It should only take about 2 hours of solid work to get this thing up (crosses fingers). Read the rest of this entry »