Athena and I are heading to Burgson Lake out by the Dardanelles near Sonora Pass.  We’re planning on leaving reeeeeally early friday morning, grabbing the permit on the way up, and hiking ASAP on Friday.

It’ll be nice to just hang out by a lake all day long, maybe do some cliff jumping, maybe even some climbing, and just chill.  My mind could use the rest.

This will be my first trip where we leave the trail behind for about a half mile before reaching the destination.  There are no trails that go to the lake we’ll be camping at, so hopefully it’ll be just the two of us.  Very exciting!
See you all on the flip side.

Joy.

I’ve got WWDC coming up, a show to rehearse for, plus my normal day job.

As you can imagine, things can get a little draining.

Here’s a little recipe to battle the stress and the fatigue:

• Workout Daily

Admittedly, I can’t keep up with this one. It’s hard to hit the gym every day. Lately, though, I’m making an effort to get up at 6:30 and be at the gym by 7am. Then, it takes me about 8 minutes to run a mile, which I follow with some Yoga Ball exercises. This gets my energy flowing, and works my core muscles - basically helps wake me up and keep me toned.

• Coffee

A no brainer. Actually, Coffee has been shown to have detrimental effects in large doses. It will temporarily increase your blood pressure (in turn elevating your perceives stress, and making you a bit more touchy), but it still helps get you going. Caffeine is a proven performance enhancer - it helps concentration (unless you over do it), and stamina.

• Gingko

And now for some herbals.. Gingko relaxes your blood vessels, which offsets the BP raise from coffee. Studies have shown [citation needed, i know] that Gingko can relax tough blood vessels as a result of years of drinking or smoking. I take it every day, and it not only helps wake me up, but also helps keep my blood pressure in check. Also, people think it’s good for your memory, but I don’t remember where I heard that…

• Ginseng

Ginseng is believed to normalize body functions - for example, it raises BP in people where their BP is too low, and lowers it in people where their BP is too high. I found some really cool shots of ginseng at Whole Foods that I’ve stocked up on.

• Laughing

No shit. Laughing is really good for you, and if you can find something to laugh about, you’re obviously not that stressed.

Keep up the good fight. Cheers!

We’ve got another show coming up - Saturday, June 28th, again at Caffe Trieste on Market St in SF (thanks for hosting us!) - 7pm as usual.

And we’ve got a couple of new things to share with you all:
First, we’ve purchased a legitimate PA to improve our sound’s fullness.
Second, we’ll be adding a bass guitar for this next show.

We’re hoping you’ll all come and join us again.

Oh, and this time, we’re going out and getting our drink on afterwards.

Me
7:49
steve’s strange… i could see him turning it down, saying it was nothing but a material possession
something very zen
then turning around and selling a new product that makes better toast like it was jesus with a bunsun burner

R.I.P. Sonar.

Just posted that here. Kinda sad to see it go… Anyone wanna take it over?

Imagine a horizontal line:

That’s silence on an audio file, a straight line of nothing-ness. In the analog world (aka, your voice, sounds you hear from your computer speakers as they travel to your ears), a sound “looks” like a sine wave:

Figure 2. A single analog audio tone

Where the blue line reaches the first dotted horizontal line, call that the “maximum” volume. When converting this analogue sound wave to digital, it makes a transition from a wave to a sample. A sample can only have a certain range of values, where an analogue wave can have any amplitude (or volume) imaginable. This is why many people think analog sounds better - it’s definitely more forgiving, anyway.

Alright, back to the sample. Imagine after some amount of time, say 1 second, we take a measurement of how high the blue line gets. Then, 1 second later, we take another measurement. And so on. That process is what happens in an analog to digital (A/D) converter. How often that happens is determined by the frequency of the A/D converter (or sampling rate). These are usually 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz, 96 kHz.

1 Hz means 1 sample per second. 96 kHz means 96 thousand samples (or measurements of the wave) per second. It should be becoming obvious that more samples per second means a more accurate representation of the sound wave you’ll have after the conversion, right? Good.

Now, audio resolution. Every A/D converter has a resolution (sometimes known as “bit-depth”). Normal values for this resolution are 8-bits, 16-bits, and 24-bits. What do these mean?

Okay - remember that dotted line? That’s the absolute maximum our digital signal can take. This is where analog and digital differ - in the digital world, once you hit the limit, you cannot go any louder. If that happens, the wave “clips”, and your audio sounds like crap. Check out these two images:

Figure 3. Clipping (aka Distortion)

Notice how the clipped wave doesn’t look like the pure wave? That’s distortion. Sometimes it sounds good. Sometimes it makes loud clicks, and pops, and sounds terrible.

Moving on.

Back to your A/D converters. Lets take an A/D converter with an 8-bit resolution as our first example. In the digital audio world, everything is converted to binary. 8-bits means the sampled value from the original audio wave will be converted into a value from 0 to 255.

How do I get this number? Let’s review binary real quick (If you know binary, skip to the next paragraph): each bit is like each “place” in decimal, only instead of being based on 10s, it’s based on 2’s. So, 1001 in decimal as a 1 in the thousand’s place, a 0 in the hundred’s and ten’s place, and a 1 in the 1’s place. That same number in binary, sometimes expressed 0b1001 has a 1 in the 8’s place, a 0 in the 4’s and 2’s place, and a 1 in the 1’s place. Hopefully that makes sense.

As a shortcut, an A/D converter can create samples from an analog wave with values in this range: 0 to 2^(X) where X is the resolution of the A/D converter. So, a 16-bit A/D converter can create samples with values from 0 to 65536. Are you seeing where I’m going with this?

With only 8 bits of depth (or precision), the audio in your chain of processing, recording, and monitoring can only do so good a job at recreating the original audio signal. Without special processing in your A/D, the best you can do to recreate the original analogue signal out the other end of your effects, recording, and monitoring chain is this:

Figure 4. 8-bit digitally sampled audio signal

Is this starting to become clear? The more bits of precision, depth, or resolution (they all mean the same thing in this context), the better job your software and hardware can do recreating the original sound. The same is true of sampling frequency.

So, for recording, I generally stick with 24-bit audio at 96 kHz. For live audio (if I’m not recording), I drop that to 48 kHz. Anytime I plan to do further work on the audio (post-processing, mastering, or re-EQing after a show), I stick to higher sampling-frequencies.

Hope this helps illuminate anyone who is confused by all this non-sense.

She wore her bikini and a clean, white sun dress, and we went and played in the waves with my cameras. Did I mention I’m a lucky guy?? There’s some really good ones in this set.

• Southern Girl Beach Shoot
  Natural Bridges State Beach, Santa Cruz, CA - May 2008

Enjoy.

Live at Trieste - Second Show