Ame one Loves You

Today I started working on this remix of a Nomar Slevik song that I really like. Spent all day working on it. Well more like all day getting my drums and things organized for it. After creating this interesting intro, I realized that it’s just not going to work. The reason is simple. What I was doing and what the song is doing just doesn’t work together. I know exactly where the problem lies. I thought I could avoid it with some fancy drum editing, but it didn’t work. The failure lies in the fact that I’m trying to write a 174 bpm dnb track over a 58 bpm song. I realize now that you can’t just throw 3 measure of 174 in to 1 measure of 58. The triplets transposed over 4/4 just don’t jive in this case.

However this failure has turned out to be a small success though. There are 2 reasons. 1st, I figured out what I should do with the song and how I should remix it. That occurred by chance I just happen to load up a piano because I wanted to see if I was playing the right chords and discovered that the piano fit it so well, that I decided that I should just do a downtempo kind of remix of it. The 2nd reason is I now have an intro to what seems to be a cool dnb tune. I just need to convert it from 58 to 174. That will take some work but should not be too hard. Just a matter of moving things around.

Which is the best dither? Truthfully I have no idea. There are several different types available. Before we tackle which is the best dither, let’s examine what dithering does.

In short dither is used during bit reduction i.e. 24bit to 16bit. What it essentially does is add noise shaping to smooth out the reduction. It is something that you use only once and it is placed at the very end when you are converting the bit rate. Because it causes degradation, do not use it more than once. That is dithering in a nutshell. For a more in depth description of what dither is and isn’t check out this Article by Bob Katz Explaining Dither.

There are several different types of dither algorithms that I always hear being mentioned when people talk about it. The most commons are POW-R, UV22 (Apogee), MBit + (Izotope), and the Waves dither found in the L2 limiters. I have used all but the Mbit +. I personally don’t have a preference. I try to use the one I feel is the best available in the program I’m using. If i’m using Cubase I use the UV22hr, if I am using Logic or ProTools I use the POW-R. You have probably heard a recording that has used eachone of these dither algorithms, except you just don’t know which one.

If you really want to know which is the best, don’t depend on me to tell you. What you should do is two things. First research the different dithers and how they work. Second try a blind dither test. I have done both of those. In the blind test I found that I prefered the Waves L2 dither.

If you have come here before, you would have noticed by now that I have redesigned the website. I been on this fashion designer pattern obsession lately. I guess with living in Japan with all the brand goods everywhere you look. Even I rock a Gucci wallet (I’m just a Gucci fanboy!). Since I’m kind of into fashion, I decided that I wanted to make my own kind of pattern. As you can see it’s right there on the front page and on my myspace page One of my friends said my page is pretty loud. I guess it is, but I look at it as me being more bold with designs. I’m trying to break out of the conservative design construction that I been doing for a long time. Especially color wise. Although the only concern I have is that the pattern on the sides distracts from the content. My other friend said the colors are an odd combination but works.

If you are wondering about the design, it’s just a modified version of the red train wordpress template. As you can see I didn’t do much to modify it. I’m just lazy like that I guess. However the pattern took me awhile to make. It was my first attempt at it. I had to redo it a couple of times. I had a hard time getting it to loop properly. Although I got to repeat in a nice way, I feel that there was probably a better way to do it.