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Becoming a Ham:  Venturing into the World of Amateur Radio

 

Late last year I saw a post calling for individuals to sign up for a class to become an Amateur Radio operator.  In the back of my mind flashed the opening scenes of Contact starring Jodie Foster.  Long story short, I signed up.  The Make Amateur Radio Easier (MORE) Project was started by Dr. Rebecca Mercuri for Amateur Radio outreach in order to attract underrepresented demographics of radio operators and is backed by Amateur Radio Digital Communications and by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  Through MORE I and my classmates will receive a hand-held 2-way radio, training, and pass the Technician exam (fingers crossed) to be able to Get On The Air (GOTA).

Dr. Mercuri

Amateur Radio, or Ham as it is affectionately known, is communication by radio waves for non-commercial purposes.  Radio operators use frequencies within a designated band to broadcast text, data, voice, and even images.  They identify themselves with callsigns, a combination of letters and numbers assigned by their home country’s broadcast governing body.  While their host country is in charge of licensing, a radio operator with the right radio and antenna can broadcast all over the world.  Referencing Jodie Foster’s character in Contact again:  she contacts Australia from her midwestern home, and later is part of the search for extraterrestrial life.

Shortly after the advent of telegraphy, amateurs began broadcasting.  Women were there too in the earliest days of radio as landline telegraph operators circa 1840s.  As maritime radio gained steam, cultural ideas about the fragility of women in emergency situations led to the ousting of women from professions in telecommunications.  When the rise of amateur radio occurred in the beginning of the twentieth century, the hobby attracted fans indiscriminately.  Mrs. M.J. Glass and Olive Hearberg were two of the first women to the hobby, registering in the 1910s.  In the lingo of Ham Radio, male operators called each other “OM” or “old man” in addition to their call signs.  Starting in the 1920s women used “YL” or “young lady.”  Young Ladies Radio League (YLRL) was founded in 1939 by Ethel Smith after seeing an ad in the membership journal of the National Association for Amateur Radio.  She became curious about how many women were Hams and wanted to reach out to them.  After writing a letter of her own to the journal, she created the YLRL that exists to this day offering scholarships and networking opportunities of all kinds.

Owning an amateur radio involves more than just knowledge of antenna and equipment, there is a whole language and etiquette involved.  Morse code no longer is required for United States licenses, however, there are many Hams that still use it.  The International Phonetic Alphabet is useful for intelligibility, especially when many phrases are shortened to acronyms.  In turn, the acronyms are useful when a broadcast signal is full of distortion.  Often local Ham radio clubs offer mentorships to encourage new Hams to keep broadcasting.  Other advantages of clubs include access to more advanced equipment and opportunities to broadcast from unique locations like lighthouses.

I am excited to participate in the MORE course and find another way to marry my electrical and audio worlds.  To be fair, I am also excited to emulate Jodie Foster in some way.  Well, I need to jump off to study for my Technician exam, wish me luck.  I don’t have a call sign yet, so this is Nicole, final clear.

For MORE information: n2re.org/m-o-r-e-project

Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, Grant Administrator, rtmercuri@ieee.org

Dr. Rebecca Mercuri interviewed by SoundGirls here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAOEL-VR6yc

Website for Young Ladies Radio League:  https://ylrl.net/

Music Reading for Drama Technicians

This month’s blog will go over some basic music theory concepts that I have found useful in my work as a musical theatre mixer. Full credit for the title goes to Professor Thomas W. Douglas of Carnegie Mellon University, who taught a class by that name when I was an undergrad. I know that not everyone working in theatrical sound has a formal music education (and I am not suggesting that it’s a requirement) but I think that being able to understand what is going on in a score, follow along in the music, and in some cases, line-by-line mix from the score, are good skills for anyone in this field to have.

 

Part 1: From the Top

 

Here’s a full-size cheat sheet of music theory 101! Courtesy of Thomas W. Douglas.

As with any piece of writing, the most important information about a score is at the top of the page. This first set of symbols gives you a roadmap for what the song should sound like and how it should feel when played. Some of that basic information includes:

Tempo: the “speed” of a song. Sometimes delineated in Italian terms ranging from the slowest (largo) to fastest (prestissimo). Often in modern shows, and especially new musicals, you will see more descriptive tempo terms such as “steady rock beat” or “upbeat.” Some of the tempo descriptions for the new musical I am currently mixing include “bluesy protest song,” “Dylanesque,” “pop 4,” “feverish,” and my personal favorite, “Tempo di ‘Four Seasons.’” Also common in modern and new musicals is a specific bpm marking, e.g., “quarter note = 120.” This is often included even on songs that aren’t played to a click, just to give a specific sense of how the tune should feel.

Time signature: the “meter” of the song. Shown as two stacked numbers, with the top number representing the number of beats in a measure (or bar) of music, and the bottom one showing what note counts as 1 beat. So, in 4/4 time, 4 quarter notes, or any other combination of notes adding up to 4 quarter notes (such as 2 half notes), makes 1 bar of music. Since 4/4 is overwhelmingly the most common time signature, it is often abbreviated by just writing a “C” for “common time.” Additionally, time changes within the same song are more common in show tunes than in pop music, as they can be helpful ways to revisit motifs from previous songs or highlight a shift in plot, mood, or tension.

Key signature: what “scale” the piece is in (or at least, much like tempo and time signature, what key the song starts in.) A good way to learn key signatures is by studying the “Circle of Fifths” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths), and learning the shortcuts to analyzing sharps and flats to quickly discern a key. The “signs” section in the graphic above shows the symbols for sharp, flat, and natural.

 

 

Clefs: what note range this part is written in. Most vocal parts for musical theatre are written in treble clef or G clef. A piano-vocal score (or PV) for a show will have the vocal lines in treble clef (sometimes with bass parts shown in treble clef 8vb, meaning that the notes are written in treble clef but should be sung down an octave), and then treble and bass clef lines for the piano part.

 

 

 

Part 2: Following Along in a Score

While plenty of music, both classical and pop, contains a common set of musical conventions, there are some things that I specifically look for when analyzing a musical theatre score. Some of those things are:

Repeats, Codas, Vamps, and Safeties

Repeats are exactly what they sound like: a section of music played through twice (or more times if indicated, but always a specific number of times). See the above glossary for a picture of the repeat symbols in music notation. Repeats can be useful when a song has a clear verse and chorus that are melodically identical, therefore the copyist can just write them into the music once (with both sets of lyrics under the vocal line) and delineate the first and second endings instead of writing the whole figure out twice.

Another thing that repeats allow for is Codas. A coda is the “tail” of a piece and is only played the last time through a repeated piece. When a piece of music says “D.C al Coda” this means “play the piece through as many times as the repeats indicate, but on the final time through, skip ahead to the Coda where the music indicates to do so.” Coda markings look kind of like a set of crosshairs and are often accompanied by the words “to coda” or “al coda”.

What about vamps? Romanbenedict.com defines a vamp as “a section of music that is repeated several times while dialogue or onstage action occurs. It is usually directed by the conductor’s cue, and as such can cope with the unpredictability of long stretches of dialogue or indeterminable theatrical machinations.” Vamps might be used when a song has a scene break in the middle of it because, while an 8-bar section of music always takes roughly the same amount of time to play, the pacing of the script (or the speed of a scenic transition) is not so precisely timed and may vary in length from night to night. The cue to move out of the vamp could be a certain line of dialogue or a scene change completing and will be clearly cued by the music director. It’s good to know where the vamps are in a musical number so that you can keep track of where you are in the song and not accidentally miss a pickup, band move, or a snapshot.

Safeties can be thought of as “optional” vamps, meaning that they could be played or skipped entirely based on timing variations from performance to performance.

Dynamics: Dynamics, as we learn in audio, are variations in loudness. Similarly, in music, dynamic descriptions tell us where this piece of music lands on the soft-to-loud, or in this case, “piano” to “forte” spectrum. In scores, you will find dynamics abbreviated using p for “piano” aka soft, f for “forte” aka loud, and m for “mezzo” or moderately (used in combination with p or f such as mp or mf).

Changes in dynamics: the Italian terms for these are crescendo and decrescendo. A crescendo is a gradual increase in volume and decrescendo means a gradual decrease. They are written either as the abbreviation “cresc.” Or, more commonly, by putting an elongated “<” or >” symbol under the bars of music encompassing the duration of the dynamic shift. There may also be an indication of what dynamic you are moving to or from (such as p<f, meaning crescendo from piano to forte), but this is optional. Crescendo markings are one of my favorite shorthand symbols to use in my mix scripts, so rather than write out “fade band up to -8” I will simply write “B<-8”. I also often use crescendo markings at the end of songs to indicate a big band build, or decrescendo markings on the first lyric after the intro to indicate a small band decrease when the vocal starts.

Changes in tempo: there are a lot of Italian terms for slowing a tempo down; the most common one is ritardando, often abbreviated as “rit.” Other terms include rallantando (rall. for short), or “moso” which means movement, and can have further elaboration such as piu moso (a little faster) or meno moso (a little slower).

Key changes: also called modulations. These can be everywhere in musical theatre but are most common in the final verse of a song, where the music and action take a big emotional shift. You will know there is a key change because in the middle of the music there will be a new key signature that now supersedes the original key for the remainder of the song (until you get to the next key change).

Rubato: this means played freely, without a clear tempo.

Fermata: a long-held note, often at the end of a song as part of the “big finish.”

Button: Buttons aren’t necessarily explicitly defined in the music, but they’re hard to miss. A clean, 1-beat ending to a song. Here is a great thread from Lin-Manuel Miranda explaining the emotional intent of buttons and why some songs do or don’t have them: https://twitter.com/lin_manuel/status/951215051633037312

Pickup note(s): this is when a song begins with an incomplete measure of music. For an example of a pickup, we can revisit the opening of Les Misérables which I dissected in part 1. The song begins with an eighth-note pickup, such that melodically the music starts on the “and” of the 4th beat of the 0th measure.

 

The circled notes are the pickup and first beat.

Part 3: Putting it together

Now armed with the tools to read a score more clearly, the next step is to apply your music theory in action as a mixer!

When should you opt to mix using a PV instead of a script? The answer is “it depends.” Also, the decision to mix from a score does not have to be universal but can be decided on a song-by-song basis.

There are many reasons to use score or not, such as personal preference, designer preference, lack of access to an updated or well-formatted script, and many more. But basically, as always, it comes down to picking the best tool for the job, the job in this case mixing this number of the musical.

So, for a real-world case study, here are some example PV pages for “Finale Ultimo” from my mix script for The Drowsy Chaperone, which I chose to mix on the score for ease of clarity in making the pickups for the layered vocal parts that flow in and out as the main character, The Man in the Chair, sings the melody. This section of PV matches up to approximately 0:30-1:39 in the recording from the cast album linked below.

 

 

 

 

I hope this blog has made you a little more musically “street-smart” and as always, feel free to reach out to me with any questions or suggestions for future blog topics!

 

Pick of the Best Budget Synthetic Instruments & Amp Plugins

The current economic situation has meant that many creatives are experiencing uncertain and leaner times. Thankfully, one area that has been consistent throughout this difficult climate is the offering of reasonably priced, high-quality virtual instruments and plugins. Whether you’re unsure about making a big purchase or commitment to one library, there are an array of affordable sounds and tools out there, with many packages even available completely free.

Favourite free instrument sounds

Probably my favourite free instrument sounds of late are those in Spitfire LABS. This varied collection is extremely broad, ranging from realistic acoustic instruments to ambient and Avant-garde sampled sounds and textures. The plugins are extremely intuitive and easy to use,  with the huge bonus that they are compatible with any DAW, making them great for beginners and pros alike. The collection is updated regularly, and is always completely free, making it an all-around fantastic resource.

The Spitfire Product Library is a professional standard collection of instruments, many of which are regularly made in collaboration with the world’s biggest composers and creators. Spitfire often has package deals and offers on their products, and they also give 30% off for students and educators on all individual libraries. While a full professional orchestra library or an extensive synthesizer collection is pricey (though payment installment plans are available), many of the libraries and instruments are priced under $50 and $30 – a real
bargain if you’re after a specific addition.

In a similar vein to Spitfire, many other companies have followed suit in offering free products in parallel to their bigger collections. My favourites include the acoustic instruments from Orchestral Tools SINE factory and the eclectic collection of interesting sounds from Arturia that also include handy presets for easy variation and use.

Reasonably priced audio toolkit essentials

It’s worth signing up to company newsletters for offers and deals – this can be a lifesaver when there’s a particular product you’ve been saving for and waiting to upgrade. Promotions on iZotope products are featured regularly, with some free plugins always available, and smaller clean-up packages such as RX 8 Elements are currently priced at a very reasonable $29. Another one to watch is the Waves Plugins site, as the discounts on these products can make a huge difference – both to your collection and your wallet. With up to 80% off some items currently, there are also bundle deals and various offers to choose from. As Waves make such an array of products, being ready to pounce when sale time comes around can help to make a noticeable upgrade within a manageable budget.

How To Prep For Location Music Recording

A chance to get out of the studio, have a change of scenery, record in some exciting and different spaces, and explore a new acoustic – there are many reasons why recording music on location can be rewarding and great fun. Whether it’s a live concert or an album recording in a venue chosen specifically for its marvelous acoustics or unusual character, it’s never more important to be well-prepared. There’s nothing worse than driving for an hour, arriving and unpacking all your equipment at the venue only to discover that you left behind that essential little piece of metal that connects two other essential pieces of metal, and without it, all your equipment is essentially useless!

Location recording is very common in genres such as classical music, where good acoustics are vital. More and more, artists of all genres are wanting to capture their live performances in both audio and video. Here are some things to think about when planning a location recording, particularly if you’re working solo and bringing your own gear (larger-scale productions may have more variables, more equipment, a team of people, and more detailed planning). Here we’ll focus on stand-alone recordings rather than recording an amplified concert (of course many live sound engineers also capture recordings to be mixed later, which requires a different set of equipment).

Pre-Production

Recording at a different location than your usual studio or workplace means you’ll need to be flexible and ready to deal with possible unpredictable factors or situations. Find out as much information about the production/concert and the venue as you can beforehand. Make sure you agree on a reasonable schedule that gives you enough time to comfortably set up and account for unplanned delays, such as traffic.

A gear checklist is essential, and we’ll go over this in more detail later on. If there’s a chance to go and scout out the venue beforehand, this could be extremely useful for testing out the acoustics, deciding how the musicians and instruments might be placed in the space, checking for traffic and other noises, and determining the quietest time of day to record, and for other practical matters such as power outlet locations and figuring out an appropriate spot to set up your recording station.

Questions To Ask Beforehand

These are some things to think about, research, or ask the artists or venue directly:

Basic Gear Checklist

Additional useful bits and pieces: multi-tool, string, scissors, measuring tape, spare batteries, pen/pencil/highlighter, coloured tape for marking positions, torch/lamp, XLR and jack turnaround adaptors, headphone adaptors, mic stand thread adaptors.

Why Get Into Location Music Recording?

What makes recording music on location so enjoyable is the variety of projects and music you can work on, the thrill of capturing a live concert, the chance to explore new and interesting spaces, and the challenge of working out how to best capture music in an unfamiliar acoustic. You’ll learn how to problem-solve, you’ll likely never be bored from repetition, and you’ll have memorable recording sessions in beautiful, epic, and quirky spaces.

Learning a New Console

As I’ve started working more on the production side of things recently, and my home venue is replacing its beloved but falling-apart SC48s, I’ve found myself learning new consoles left and right. This month I thought I would lay out the process I use to get the hang of things when walking into a board I’ve never used before, although, of course, everyone will have their own method.

STEP ONE: SURFACE LEVEL

The first thing I do is open an existing file that is pre-routed to play around in. That way I don’t have to worry about the deeper settings and configuration yet. My goal is to get comfortable on the board at a surface level, so that I could theoretically walk into a room with someone else’s start file already up and mix a show on it.

I start with the simple: 

Can I pink the monitors or PA system?

Can I get music playing through the monitors or PA system?

Can I label and/or color-code my inputs?

Can I connect a mic and get my voice sent to the monitors and/or PA?

Can I put some basic EQ, and compression, on that mic?

Can I save, load, and transfer files easily?

Then I move on to some more complex things:

Can I route that mic through some reverb or other effects?

Can I link channels or make them stereo?

Can I change my patching efficiently?

If there’s a virtual soundcheck set up, how is that routed?

Can I build a mix relatively quickly?

STEP TWO: BACKEND

The next thing I do is load a default template file and try to build myself a start file. This way I can get familiar with all of the deeper functions of the console, see what settings exist, and configure and patch the file from scratch.

Can I configure my number of inputs, auxes, etc., and patch them correctly?

Can I route my matrices (for FOH) and/or auxes (for monitors)?

Can I configure my solo bus, talkback mic, and oscillator?

Can I set my customizable user keys?

Can I customize my fader banks and layers?

Can I set up and route effects?

Can I color-code my channel strips?

STEP THREE: BUILD A MOCK FILE

The last thing I do, if there’s time, is to build a file from scratch. Starting completely from scratch (or, if it exists, the start file I’ve already made), I go through the entire process as if I was running a show for a specific band. I normally build a file for the artist I do sound for because it’s an input list I know off of the top of my head and then I have a starting point of a file for if we ever do a show on one of these consoles, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re building a file for a specific artist or a generic rock show. The goal is to start from the ground up and do the entire process from start to finish: inputs, outputs, labels, arrange layers and locations, route effects, talkback, monitoring, house music, and pink noise.

Digital is Dull

 

A few years ago I purchased a record player. The purchase shocked my baby boomer parents as they were confused on why their Gen Z daughter was ditching her iPhone and AirPods for old A and B sides. However, upon receiving the record player I began to gather a collection of vinyl that spanned Creedence Clearwater revival to Taylor Swift.. Upon seeing my parent’s shock, I began to show them that record players weren’t for the 20th-century melodies, it was becoming a music medium for new and old music consumption. Recently I  surprised my 1980’s-DC-Punk-scene father by borrowing his cassette player to listen to a 2020 album I had bought on cassette tape.  However, I am not the only 2000’s baby who is listening to my favorite artist on physical manifestations, it is a growing trend spanning the 14-year-old Olivia Rodigo fans to late 20s One Direction fans.

Cassette Tapes

A new addition has emerged on artists’ online merch shops. Cassette tapes. From Dua Lipa to Harry Styles to Olivia Rodrigo, the rectangular boxes are the hip new collector item. Furthermore, the boxes are decorated with unique stickers and hued plastic to elevate the aesthetic appeal of the tapes. And while the convenience of an iPhone and headphones cannot be beaten, there are numerous websites selling portable cassette players. Stores that are frequented by the under 25 crowd, such as Urban Ourfitters, are stocked with cassette players in numerous colors for purchase. The vast option of cassette player colors and artists’ clear attention to cassette case design represents the aesthetic importance of the cassette tape.

Records

Last week on April 23 crowds of patrons lined up outside record stores around the United States. Across the 50 states, reports began to emerge that a large chunk of buyers were young people. This news came as no surprise to those that have been watching the upwards trend in Gen Z record collectors. Most artists these days release vinyl copies of the albums. Artists like Maggie Rodgers, Taylor Swift Bullie Eilish, and  Lizzo have partnered with Target to make vinyl with exclusive colors or covers that are only sold through Target.  Major corporations like Target actively promoting and selling out exclusive vinyl is one piece of evidence to support the claim that records are back for 21st century Top 40.

So why is this happening? While there’s no clear answer, I have a few theories. Anti-vax discourses have caused artists like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young to pull their music off the top streaming platform, Spotify. Furthermore, streaming platforms give little money to the artist for the number of plays listens to. These two issues with digital platforms could be at the root of the turn to physical copies of music. When a consumer buys a cassette tape or record, they are buying straight from the artist, cutting out any streaming platform conflicts. In an age where money and cooperative responsibility merge closer and closer, buying from the artist becomes a more promising avenue for music consumption.  Beyond the financial and morality theory, is the aesthetic theory. A quick look at social media trends will show that influencers have been promoting the aesthetic of records and cassette tapes. From room tours to outfit inspiration, the aesthetics of 70s florals and 90s mom jeans are back. To further fit the popularization of the 70s and 90s is the promotion of the music consumption styles of these decades.

Five Tips for Spicing up your Audio – Music Career

A lot of the time we think that joy and satisfaction need to come from an external source. They need to come to us from something we experience or from something that lands on our laps…

But I think that some of the most rewarding experiences come from the ones we create.

So, you’ve been feeling a bit down? Perhaps stuck in mundane cycles that leave you feeling demotivated and bored?

Why not look at these five tips to help “spice up” your audio career? Trying just one of them with the intention of creating your own bliss, may very well add to your sense of joy, accomplishment, and overall satisfaction.

Collaborate

We get so used to working on our own, stuck behind a laptop in our office or studio. These days it’s even more so with isolation and virtual experiences becoming the norm after Covid-19.

Something that can be super encouraging is to work with others.

Now, it’s a male-dominated industry, which means you will mostly be working with men on collaborative projects.

But what if you were to reach out to women? Perhaps even someone you don’t know?

Find a fellow lady on one of the SoundGirls pages or another community you are a part of.

It could be someone in your area or even across the globe. See how you might be able to work together and support each other.

Perhaps it won’t take immediate effect, but the next time she is looking for an extra set of hands-on a project or someone she can connect with for support, she’s more likely to reach out to you because you put in the effort to build a relationship.

Make yourself known and be open to simply networking. You never know what projects you may stumble across and what lasting friendships you might be able to build.

Work on passion projects

This can be done alone or with others (it’s more fun when you do it with others!).

You may find yourself feeling frustrated at the fact that your job mostly comprises of removing “um’s and ah’s” from a podcast episode on fitness, or that the bathroom tile advert you worked on felt like a chore rather than something you could enjoy.

So why not get yourself out there to create something that brings you joy? 

Whether it’s working with an artist to record a song or collaborating with a videographer to do a cool short film.

Do something creative, after all, that’s what drew you to this industry in the first place!

If you deny your creative self in this industry you will most definitely find yourself frustrated and questioning why you do what you do.

Learn new stuff

Whether you are doing a course, reading a book, or watching YouTube tutorials, expanding your knowledge and creative abilities can feel super rewarding. If you’re not sure what to learn, try finding something that inspired you.

For example, Blade Runner 2049 had some incredible SFX. If that blew your mind as much as it did mine, why not go teach yourself how to creatively apply yourself in the same way?

Find out what methods were used, how they created what they did, and work on a project where you can apply yourself in a similar way. Achieving things that inspire you will bring a sense of fulfillment, and potentially be a great addition to your portfolio!

Get out of your comfort zone

This one is huge!

You can’t expect to experience new things if you aren’t willing to move away from your routines.

Getting out of your comfort zone could look like taking on a project you’re terrified of, and learning on the job. It could look like changing the space you work in for a day, getting to bed at an earlier hour, or even working with someone you don’t know.

Perhaps it’s a chance for you to expand yourself creatively. Trying new things can only result in two outcomes.

Firstly, failing and learning from your experience.

Second, succeeding and learning from your experience.

Either way, you are moving into an unknown space which increases your chances of new experiences, new people, new ideas, and new learning curves.

Take a break

We can get so bogged down by deadlines, that we forget what life feels like outside of work.

Intentionally creating time and space to remove yourself completely from your workspace is a fundamental element of overall work-life balance and feelings of satiation.

If you don’t make time for rest and recuperation, your mind can become cluttered and fatigued.

Creativity needs space. It needs room to stretch and play. 

If your mind is filled with cobwebs, you are not only diminishing your chances of feeling more joy, but you are also suffocating your creative self.

With these 5 tips in mind, which do you feel resonates with you most? How will you integrate one or more of these into your day, week, or month?

I challenge you to try the one that feels the most daunting to you because you never grow if you don’t try.

Until next time,

Kirsten xoxo

Jeanne Montalvo – Grammy-Nominated Audio Engineer and Radio producer

 

Jeanne Montalvo is a Grammy-nominated audio engineer and radio producer. In 2017, she was nominated for a Grammy Award as Mastering Engineer for Vladimir Horowitz: The Unreleased Live Recordings, and her recording of Multiverse by Bobby Sanabria’s Latin Jazz Big Band was nominated for Best Latin Jazz Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards. In 2018 Spotify awarded her a residency at Spotify Studios and Electric Lady Studios in NY, where she assisted on recordings for  John Legend, Cultura Profética, Alessia Cara, Anitta, and many more. She has worked at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Tanglewood Music Festival, and has also worked on live recordings with Spike Lee and Al Kooper.

She broke into radio after receiving her Masters in Music Technology from New York University, working as an audio engineer and producer for National Public Radio, Bloomberg Radio, the Duolingo podcast, and projects for the New York Times and Sony. She is also a creator of “Live from Latino USA” a live and (mostly) unplugged video series that features Latinx talent from Jessie Reyez to Jose Feliciano. She is currently freelancing in the city and the treasurer of the New York Section of the Audio Engineering Society.

Jeanne attended The University of Central Florida, where she minored in music and mass communications and was looking into a Master’s in Music Business when she saw a brochure with music business on one side and music engineering on the other. Jeanne says “a light bulb went off. Now I look back and it was obvious. I used to edit for fun on cassette tapes as a kid, stay home to record the radio, play with microphones, and then in college got a copy of Cool Edit Pro and started doing digital editing for dance groups and school projects. But it wasn’t a job I saw really, so how would I have known?” Jeanne would go on to attend Microfusa for audio and enrolled at NYU for a Master’s in Music Tech.

What did you learn interning or on your early gigs?

I learned work ethic early on. When I didn’t understand things, I asked, but if I had a bigger learning curve, I stayed late or came in early to do extra time to try to figure things out. If it was allowed I’d come on weekends. After a while, I caught up to the workflow, but it was on me to make sure I could stay on point. At the beginning of my career especially because I was working in older technology, analog tape, and sometimes tapes from the 1930s I was always really nervous about breaking things. It’s one thing to make mistakes at school, but real life has real-life consequences. So I was always focused, I paid extra special attention to detail, and if something didn’t sit right with me, I went to someone to ask for help. And eventually, that became less and less.

In 2016, I landed the engineering gig at Futuro Media home to NPR’s Latino USA (now on PRX). It was a breath of fresh air. I really refined my skills in podcast mixing and mastering, and eventually became a senior engineer. As time wore on, the creativity itch started to take over, and when I came back from the Spotify residency, I dug into production full on. I was tapped to work on Loud: The History of Reggaeton because the bulk of my productions were all music stories, and I go heavy with music sound design. The project was 10 episodes and spanned about two years – I even had a baby in the middle of it! My maternity leave ended just in time to sound design and help produce all 10 episodes. It has been some of my most rewarding work there, and the podcast itself has received reviews in some of the biggest news outlets which has been really exciting to see.
Producing has really connected a lot of dots for me of work I’ve done in the past and the research I love to just nerd out on. It just goes to show why it’s important to do a lot of things. It took me a while to get here, but I was using Izotope and denoising software back in 2007 when I was archiving and restoring old opera recordings. So you really never know!

Career Now:

What is a typical day like?

Depends on the day, but I am still very much working from home. If I’m sound designing or producing podcasts, I may be getting music from a sound library and efx and going through scripts. I tend to work best hearing things, so while I do use scripts, I will score and put sound efx in on the fly as I hear things. If it’s music, lately I’ve been more on the post side. So it usually involves receiving tracks, organizing my session, and mix prepping. Then mixing of course!

How do you stay organized and focused?

I have a lot of Excel spreadsheets, and to-do lists, and I use Trello. Because I tend to do a lot of different things, I start to get scattered if I’m not organized. And for me, that means seeing things written out.

What do you enjoy the most about your job?

I love seeing people do what they do best. I never aspired to be a performer, but I love helping talented musicians produce the best version of themselves. It’s important they don’t have to worry about the tech, so they can just focus on their craft. And I get to be the one that captures that moment. And with podcasts, I love hearing a story come to life with music and efx. It’s the best moment when a piece is scored and you listen back and all of a sudden you can see everything in your mind.

What do you like least?

I hate that I can’t turn that off. Sometimes I go to bed still thinking about things or reading about something. If I could work all the time, I would because I enjoy it. But that’s not necessarily good for you as a human being.

What is your favorite day off activity? 

I love to spend time with my family. I have 2 young kids, so anytime I can, I am with them and my spouse.

What are your long-term goals?

I would love to be able to do more music, so I try to take as much of that as I can. My husband is a singer/songwriter and we also would love to build out our own studio to be able to produce and do more work.

What if any obstacles or barriers have you faced?

I think the main thing I dealt with in the beginning was being taken seriously – having to prove to someone I knew what I was doing.

How have you dealt with them?

I just did the work. I didn’t let it get to me, and I worked hard. And eventually, those people grew to respect me because they realized that I could in fact do what I was hired to do. The work speaks for itself. If you get too much in your head about things, it’s easy to think that people are against you. But if you do good work, then actions speak louder than words.

Advice you have for other women and young women who wish to enter the field?

Keep at it. Don’t give up. There will be time to do everything you want to do, so don’t feel like you’re not where you’re supposed to be. Take the job that’s on the table. It may not be the one you want, but it’s the job that may take you to the one you want. You will inevitably learn something there and those are the building blocks to being the badass engineer you are. The dots will connect.

Must have skills?

Attention to detail.

Desire to learn. You never stop learning.

Quick thinker/ability to react and troubleshoot quickly

Favorite gear?

I think Izotope RX is the best and I’ve been using them for years.

I also have been using my Sony MDR-7506 for over 15 years!

More on Jeanne

Jeanne Montalvo on The SoundGirls Podcast

Jeanne Montalvo-Grammy nominated audio engineer and radio producer talks about music, mother & more!

 

Lunch and Learn: Recreating a Musical Tune as a Sound Effect

On occasion, a sound editor’s musical skills are put to the test when they are asked to recreate a tune or song for a specific sound effect. For example, in the second episode of Yuki 7, the alarm clock that goes off matches the theme song of the show, which you can listen to starting at 1:11 in the video below. For sound editors with no musical training, this task can be particularly challenging. So for this blog, I’m going to teach you how to recreate a melody to use with any sound effect just by listening to it!

 

 

Just kidding. For that to happen, we’d need to review a lot of music theory and ear training, which takes more than a blog post to get the hang of. Identifying a tune in order to recreate it involves understanding what musical key it comes from, the pitches and rhythms of the notes, and sometimes, harmonic analysis of the song. Even though I come from a musical background, I want to offer methods to replicate a song for a sound effect efficiently, and while we’ll scratch the surface of music theory, a music degree isn’t necessary.

 

Example of melodic contour in “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

 

There are some simple concepts in music theory that can help to build confidence when listening back to a song you need to decipher. The first idea I want to introduce to the non-musician editors out there is melodic contour. This just describes the shape and sequence of notes in a melody. There are actually a number of studies in which infants were able to discriminate basic changes in melodic sequences, so it’s likely that you already have years of practice learning this concept!

Let’s take a look at “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” as an example. If you were to draw a line on a whiteboard that follows the melodic contour of this song, it would look like a weird set of stairs. The melody makes the largest leap between “twinkle” and “twinkle,” and descends after the second syllable in “little,” eventually returning to the same note we started on. Even if we don’t know the exact notes or the key of the song, we can start to visualize the melody of the song by looking at its shape.

Depiction of the rhythm of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with lyrics and line measurements.

 

The same can be said for rhythm. As pattern-seeking animals, melodic contour and rhythm come rather naturally to most humans. Motor areas in the brain help us perceive consistent rhythms so we can follow the beat of a song. Early thirteenth-century rhythmic notation called mensural notation generally divided up the pulse or beat of the music into long and short patterns, and present-day notation still does pretty much the same job because it’s the best way that we can understand a song’s rhythm.

So let’s look again at “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to identify long and short notes. As you sing along to this song, tap along to each syllable with your finger, and notice how you hold your finger longer at “star” and “are.” These notes are twice as long as all the other notes in this passage, but what is important is that you start to pick up the difference between a long note and a short note, rather than the specific division of the beat. These two simple ear training exercises of drawing melodic contour and tapping along to short and long beats will get you comfortable with the basic structure of the songs you need to replicate. We can even utilize these exercises by mapping out songs with MIDI.

 

A look at the User Interface for audio to MIDI conversion with ProTools 2020.11

 

A valuable tool we can use for this replication task is MIDI because we can draw in notes without needing to learn how to play or read music. Plus, MIDI lets us use software synthesizers that we can manipulate into any sort of musical-based sound effect such as an alarm, car horn, or bells. I will note that many DAWs including Pro Tools version 2020.11 have an Audio-To-MIDI feature where you can take an audio clip and drag it into a MIDI instrument track that automatically converts the melody into MIDI. Here is a simple tutorial on how this works in Pro Tools. Nonetheless, not everyone has access to this version of Pro Tools which includes Melodyne Essential as a means to “convert” audio pitch and rhythmic information into MIDI, so let’s learn how to manually map out our song.

 

Image of Xpand!2 settings for bell sound effect.

 

I like looking at this sort of musical replication through the lens of a MIDI editor because it’s numerical, and you can match melodic contour and rhythm in the editor just by drawing it in. In Pro Tools, I opened up a blank session and created a mono instrument track. Then, I inserted a really simple software synthesizer called Xpand!2 which was included in my Pro Tools bundle when I purchased it. I played around with some of the presets in Xpand!2 just to get a musical sound effect going, and I blended together some chimes, a digital glockenspiel sound, and a detuned telephone dial for an old ballerina jewelry box sound.

In the View drop-down menu in Pro Tools under Rulers, I unselected Time Code and chose Bars|Beats and Tempo to represent my edit window measurements. Setting your grid up like this will make the rhythmic replication of the song much easier. To find the tempo or beats per minute, listen to the song you want to replicate and tap along to the tempo yourself. Make sure you have the MIDI controls transport window open, and the Conductor Track icon unselected. Then, highlight the tempo in the window above, and tap along to the song by clicking T on your keyboard. Give yourself some time to let your internal groove settle into the rhythm of the song, and you’ll be able to get near or on top of the BPM of the song. Click return to lock-in that tempo onto your edit window grid.

With the Bar|Beats grid set up in Pro Tools, measures are much easier to read in the grid-like time code is, so you don’t need to fully digest the unit of a measure since Pro Tools does it for you. For the measures in “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” we can identify this by how the phrase is broken up. The lyrics “twinkle twinkle little star” and “how I wonder what you are” have the same number of syllables and they rhyme, two indicators that each of these phrases take up an even number of measures. It is likely that in your replication, you will be dealing with a tune that is either two measures or four measures long. In my instrument track, I just highlighted the first two bars following the Bars|Beats grid, and I held Option-Shift-3 to make a blank clip. Then, I double-clicked on the clip to open the MIDI editor.

Depiction of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in Pro Tools MIDI editor.

 

The piano to the left of the MIDI editor has spaced out numbers that represent each octave, a set of twelve values that start at the note C. So, where the four is along the piano marks the octave that begins at C4. The editor is set up this way because each note translates to a MIDI number value from 21 to 127, so C4 represents the MIDI value 60 (most MIDI values range from 0-127). There is a super handy chart here that translates frequencies to notes to MIDI values for reference. For “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” I’m starting at C4 by placing my first note using the grabber tool and clicking next to the little 4 along with the piano. If it started at G4, I can look at the chart and see that the difference between G4 and C4’s MIDI values is seven, so I would count up the grid seven steps from the little four on the piano, and start on that grid line.

With the first note placed, I can map out the rhythm with the trim tool. Following the grid and using my short vs. long identification exercise, I know that the first six notes of the song are shorter than the seventh note, and they are equal in length too. So I copied and pasted my first note five times, and then once I got to the last beat of each phrase (“star” and “are”), I made the note twice as long in the editor. Even if you don’t get the rhythm perfect the first time, you can still get close to the rhythm by following the grid, listening back to the rhythm, and making adjustments with your trim and grabber tools. You’re approaching the MIDI notes like clips in a track that you’re editing.

Once I’ve mapped out my rhythm, it’s time to shape the melody. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is an easier example because it has many notes that repeat, so I grouped each pair of short notes together throughout the passage. To make my melodic contour, I highlighted the pairs of notes, and moved them up and down the grid along the piano, holding the rhythm in place. Once I got the contour to look like what I drew in my melodic contour exercise, I could reference each note of the song by listening and dragging the notes around the grid until the pitches match. Having the contour set up already helped me get close to the original melody, so I only had to make a few adjustments. The nice thing about the MIDI editor is that you can hear each pitch as you drag the MIDI note clips, so it’s just a matter of matching the notes in your song.

Now that I’ve got my song put together and created a sound I liked, here is my result. Since I started this process in MIDI, I can change the voices on my synthesizer to a different sound or I can use a different synthesizer like Massive and design a sound from scratch with any waveform and synthesis technique. While this process is limited to the DAW and software synthesizers to which you have access as well as the kind of information you can get about the song you’re replicating, I think utilizing the tools you have as the talented editor and listener that you are in Pro Tools and MIDI can help you achieve your goal without diving into unfamiliar music theory concepts. That being said, you might read this and think, “I’d rather take the time to learn music because it seems fun!” And you’re right, it is!

This Blog Originally Appeared on Boom Box Post – You can listen to Zanne’s Finished Song Here

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