#eningeering

[lotxsam-blog]

Rappers and producers in the sa area

If you need mixing holla , i can have you sounding great ! Get at me with a budget ! Small or big

[kendrawiig]

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty– but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

R. Buckminster Fuller

[aebeats]

I always like seeing how other folks set up their home studios. This is quite an in-depth video breakdown from the dudes at The Recording Revolution. Enjoy! AE|Beats

[penguingirl]

Engineering will never outgrow hobbyists

[jdpink]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/08/cockpit-automation

This Economist article on airline automation is was off base. It argues that reliance on automated systems is causing pilots’ manual flying skills to atrophy so they can’t cope when the automated systems break down. You’d think from the article that we must be seeing an increase in the number of these issues and that it is causing air travel to become less safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Airline crashes and fatalities are at an all time low, and its largely because of increased automation.

I think the author has an image in his head of how flying an airliner works that is very different from the reality of a modern jet. In The Economist version of the world, flying an airplane is like driving a complicated car. You need to have some training and then pay attention while you look out the window and steer. The autopilot is like a fancy cruise control that can handle flying over the ocean for six hours, but its prone to malfunction just like your laptop.

The reality is that airlines are highly automated machines, with lots of subsystems that are essential to staying in the air but are never actually “flown.” Steering and speed control - what we think of as “flying” the aircraft - are just one of the many systems that keep the airplane in the air. The pilot’s job is more about monitoring the performance of all of these systems and taking action when something goes wrong. Speed and steering could be an issue, in which case the solution might be for the pilot to take control of the stick and throttle and steer manually. But it’s probably more likely that the pilot will be dealing with some other malfunction.

There is an example in “The Checklist Manifesto” where Atul Gawande talks about the procedures pilots follow when a light indicates that a cargo door is loose (which could cause the airplane to rapidly depressurize and explode). The solution is to descend as safely as possible to 8,000 feet and equalize the pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the plane, while notifying the closest airport and arranging for an emergency landing and inspection. Managing a loose cargo door isn’t solved with “piloting” skills. It doesn’t require precise steering or deft handling of the throttle. Keeping the aircraft flying safely is much more about managing the aircraft’s other automatic systems and following procedures than it is about steering.

But didn’t Sully take manual control and fly his plane into the Hudson? Not really. From the Checklist Manifesto: “The plane’s fly-by-wire control system was designed to assist pilots in accomplishing a perfect glide without demanding unusual skills. It eliminated drift and wobble. It automatically coordinated the rudder with the roll of the wings. It gave Sullenberger a green dot on his screen to target for optimal descent. And it maintained the ideal angle to achieve lift, while preventing the plane from accidentally reaching ‘radical angles’ during flight that would have cause it to lose its gliding ability.”

People are imperfect. They get tired, they get bored, but more fundamentally they can not react quickly and consistently enough to deal with all of the complexity of a modern airliner. Automated systems removing pilot error have made airliners incredibly safe (much safer than they were even 20 years ago). Aircraft continue to get safer as engineers learn from every incident and modify the planes so they never happen again. The best way to continue making airlines even safer is to continue the process of automation even further. We still need pilots for some parts of flight, but increasing their involvement in managing the aircraft would make us less safe, not more. When it comes to aircraft (and most things really) the quality of the engineering that designed the system is much more important than the skills of the person sitting in the cockpit.

[zmaudio-blog]

Mastering & It's Importance!

People are always wanting that professional shine on their home recorded tracks, and sometimes they get lucky, they mix it themselves, get the balance and the EQ near enough right, and end up with a mix that sounds great, polished and loud. But that's not the common outcome.

Busy In The Studio!

Most home mixes suffer from a fatal flaw in that chain of getting a polished recording. They're not mastered. Mastering is not a dark art, like many may say it is, it's more like the polish and sealant you put over a table, it's not always essential, but it can be what's needed to smooth over the wood and make it into a professional quality item. Mastering, when you look at it in a simplistic sense is trying to balance out the peaks in the song, and remove a little of the dynamic range, whilst making parts more punchy. A good example of this is the snare drum. Before a mix is mastered it can be good to leave the snare just a little bit louder in the mix, when the mastering stage comes around it'll start to squash things down, and you usually end up with a very nice balance between snares and guitars. Another stage of mastering would be EQ.

Equalisation of your mix on a proper monitor system really can make a huge difference, allowing your mix to be more balanced across all of the devices it's played on, though it's better to get this right in mixing, thing's can be done at the mastering stage and often are.

Finally there are plenty of other stages specific engineers might use, and they'll apply them to taste, but the main feature here is that the mastering balances out the mix a lot more, and add's the professional sheen that can be needed to turn a good mix into a great song.

Zack McAuley offers a basic mastering service for £20 a song.

[calvindidwhat]

Fuck Bitches, get Discrete Fourier Transform Eigenvalues

[simplypi]