Ken Theriot

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Gaudete – From Our CD: The Gifts of Midwinter

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Gaudete is a medieval Christmas carol that I first heard by the English folk rock group, Steeleye Span. As it turns out, this is true for a LOT of people in the last few decades. Well we (Ken and Lisa Theriot) decided to put the song on our Christmas Album – The Gifts of Midwinter, and do it a little differently. We added a middle-eastern beat with a tupan, dumbek, and riq (these are types of middle-eastern drums and percussion instruments) and add a bit of a hitch to the melody line, giving it a nice little syncopation. Now you can dance to it if you want to;).

Yesterday I finally finished a music video for this song. Which you can see below. Be warned – it contains scenes of up to four “Kens” on the same screen:).

View Gaudete on YouTube

Enjoy the song on this (ironically) Gaudete Sunday. Traditionally, Gaudete is associated with the 3rd Sunday of Advent in the Christian calendar, and that makes it December 16th, 2012. If you were wondering why you felt especially joyful today, it may be due to the fact that the Latin lyrics of the chorus translate to:

“Rejoice, rejoice! Christ is born Of the Virgin Mary — rejoice!”

You can hear this song, as well as all the other songs on The Gifts of Midwinter, as well as download the liner notes, here: www.ravenboymusic.com/christmas-album-the-gifts-of-midwinter-by-ken-and-lisa-theriot

We made an effort to put songs on this album that are not the same songs you hear on every other Christmas album. So although there are a few familiar tunes like Do You Hear What I Hear? and Cantique de Noël (O Holy Night in French), there are two original songs and several medieval and traditional songs, some in Latin, French, and Spanish (Riu, Riu Chiu). We think we struck a pretty good balance. I hope you enjoy the album!

Recording Your Voice And Sounding Awesome

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Yeah, it’s another post on recording over at Home Brew Audio (the new one).  But this one pretty much covers most of my life’s endeavors: music, voice-acting, and showing others show to record stuff.  If you record your voice for any reason that could be considered professional, such as podcasting, narrating videos for your on-line business, conducting webinars, etc., then you should probably take a look and a listen to your current audio.

For example, if you use a headset with the little tiny mic attached, you probably aren’t putting out a very professional sounding audio product.  But the good news is that it won’t cost you very much time or effort to move to a professional level.  You would be really amazed at how much better your voice will sound just by grabbing yourself one of those large USB mics from your local Best Buy store- a Samson C01U is a good example.  I got one a few weeks ago at my BB for $75.

See the full article here: http://homebrewaudio.co/record-your-voice-and-sound-like-a-pro/

Recording Stuff – Phantom Power

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I mentioned in my last post that I was spending a lot of time rebuilding my recording site Home Brew Audio.  The old site at www.homebrewaudio.com is still there, but the new posts are going to the new site, which is only different in that it ends in .co instead of .com.  What a difference one letter makes:).

Anyway, the latest post talks about something that is important to know about in the music recording or performing world – if you’re using microphones that is.  That something is called phantom power.  It can be awfully complicated if you try to dig into what it is and all the technical stuff.  But in reality there are only a few very simple things anyone needs to understand.  And that is what the post is about.

If you are interested in ever recording or playing live with microphones (specifically condenser microphones which, truthfully, aren’t very common in the live-gigging world), check out the article here: What is Phantom Power Really?

Google Changes And Other Stuff

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Well I thought I would update the blog with my name on it.  I know – shocker, right?  Here is what has been happening in my world.

Many of you will know of me through my music, primarily the Raven Boy Music albums and songs I do primarily for the medieval re-creation group The Society for Creative Achronism (SCA for short).  But what I’ve been spending most of my time on is a project called Home Brew Audio, which is a web business I created to teach people about audio recording so they can do it themselves. The idea is to provide lots of free content in the posts and via Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, etc. with tips, videos, audio examples, and equipment reviews.  There are also tutorial video courses and eBooks. I also want the site to be a place where people can get the equipment they need.

Things were actually going pretty well with www.homebrewaudio.com.  Lots of people were visiting the site regularly, signing up for the mailing list, commenting on posts, etc. And then came the dreaded Google update of April 24th, 2012.  That update was nicknamed Penguin.

Penguin was designed to penalize sites that were using spam-like tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.  The examples of sites Google was going after were those that simply stuffed their web sites with keywords or just stole content from other websites and spun (using a program to replace words and phrases with similar words and phrases – the result is usually an unintelligible mish-mash) that content to try to make it look unique. One other thing Google was trying to stop was “over-optimization” in linking.

Of course search-engine optimization (SEO) is something every web business is supposed to do in order to make it easier for people to find you when they search for things related to your site.  Google even teaches people how to optimize their sites for that.  One was that search engines decide what sites to put ahead of others is by looking at how many “inbound links” a site has for a particular keyword.  Basically, the more inbound links you had to your site, the better it would rank in the search engines. So as with any system, people will find a way to abuse it.  Services offering to build in-bound links to your site using relevant keywords in the anchor text became quite popular.

So to make a long story short (too late, I know:)), www.homebrewaudio.com was caught in the wide net intended for bad actors (yes, that was me saying I don’t think I was a bad actor) when Penguin rolled out.  All attempts to address and fix the issue have so far been unsuccessful.  So I felt I had no choice but to start a fresh site and put all new articles and posts up there.  Last week I bought http://homebrewaudio.co and started putting the new content there.  The idea is to be ultra super careful about any linking I do to the new site so that I can get the content back up in the search engine rankings where people can find it.

So that has been taking a lot of my time and will continue to do so for awhile.

I have also been busy doing voice-over work.

But on the music front – I’ve been recording Andrew Heinrich (Don Mateo in the SCA) so he can release his next CD.  And I also plan to have a new CD out for Gulf Wars 2013.  We will not be going to Pennsic this year.

So there is an update.

Cheers!

Ken

Building Your Home Recording Studio – Part 3 – Microphones and Sound Cards

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I just put up Part 3 of the “How to Build a Home Recording Studio” series on the Home Brew Audio website. This installment digs into the kinds of microphones and sound cards you’ll need for both kinds of home studios (configuration #1 and configuration #2) – in order to get into the realm of pro audio.

For configuration #1 (where it’s just a mic going directly into a computer), the tiny mics like plastic PC mics that plug directly into a computer’s built-in sound card will probably not get you anywhere near pro quality audio. You’ll need a USB mic for this configuration, and not the small headset kind (or even most hand-held ones) either. Look for a large diaphragm condenser type microphone.

It’s also interesting that USB mics don’t need a sound card, per se. The analog-to-digital conversion that sound cards provide (including external “interfaces”) happens right inside the USB mic.

But true pro quality comes from configuration #2 – a standard (non-USB) mic is plugged into an external sound card (interface), which then is plugged into the computer, usually via USB.  Again you’ll be wanting large diaphragm condenser mics for vocals. For music, things open up a lot more depending on what you want to record (small diaphragm mics for instruments, dynamic mics for drums and electric guitar amps, etc.).

See what mics and sound cards (interfaces) are recommended and how much they cost in the full article here: www.homebrewaudio.com/how-to-build-a-home-recording-studio-part-3-microphones-and-interface