My happy place and giving up on being a YouTuber

Recently I've discovered a new happy place. What I mean by "happy place" is basically some sort of ritual that I do either every day, or nearly every day, or even just now and then that I derive great pleasure from.

In the past I'd come home after a long day and watch any variety of shows... Seinfeld while drinking Arizona RX tall boys (and a Linden's chocolate chip cookie) from the deli across the street from my old apartment... Watching "How I Met You Mother" while decompressing after a long and stressful day at work (I actually despise that show, yet kept watching anyway until I finished the series)... I used to watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch reruns from like 3 until 4 AM before I would work on a computer application and then go skateboarding at a local park.... What else? Fran Drescher and The Nanny every night for at least an hour... but now? I'm onto bigger and better things.

Lately I've been returning home, wherein I will fire up Microsoft's Solitaire Collection a.k.a. Klondike for some reason... and watch reruns of Fear Factor, which airs on the TBD channel for at least two hours every night. Editor's Note: I've beaten Klondike on the Expert difficulty. Struggling to beat it on Grand Master as of now.

As for Fear Factor, I just enjoy the fact it's structured and I don't know the results of any of the challenges, since I've retained zero information from watching it when it initially aired. Come to think of it, the same logic applied to The Nanny. I watched re-runs of that and didn't remember a single story-line or plot from when I used to watch reruns of it literally everyday after school, somewhere around 2003 I'd imagine.

There are other happy places from the past, which usually involve at least two components. I used to go to a specific Chinese restaurant in Manhattan (Tang's Garden), but only when it was raining, and every time I'd bring a specific book with me (Petronius' Satyrica) to read. Other rituals include visiting a Dunkin Donuts Drive-Thru every time I logged a 12-hour shift at the postal plant, usually close to midnight, I could go on and on...

In other news, I also have started to ONLY drink decaf coffee... and the occasional cup of Matcha Tea (which according to the box, has about 30% the caffeine of one cup of coffee, which is plenty for me), prepared following along with the YouTuber Kashi Star. I think my long hiatus from coffee may have had a larger effect on me. I've noticed that drinking a full cup of coffee makes me feel wiped out, fatigued, and basically sick afterwards. It's like I developed a quasi-allergic reaction to coffee as a result of abstaining from it for so long. I guess my body had built up a tolerance, and when the tolerance was completely wiped away, my body's reaction changed into basically rejecting it. I am enjoying the Matcha tea, though, for sure.

To conclude this update... I've officially accepted defeat. I will never become a famous YouTuber. I'm officially shutting down my Mind of Mike channel as of now.  I can't keep up with how intense it really is to become a YouTuber. Not to mention, anything you can think of or imagine... someone else has already posted a YouTube video about it... so you start to ask yourself... "What am I doing this for? What's the point?"

To become a bonafide YouTuber... Not only do you have to put yourself out there completely, editing video is excruciating for someone like me who has pretty much the most basic skills you could have with it. Not to mention, churning out videos while maintaining any normal occupation is pretty much impossible. If you're going to be a famous YouTuber, you can't really have any other distractions whatsoever. At least that's my take.

I've happily demoted myself to the world of blogging and music.

The pseudo-science of digital audio recording

It wasn't so long ago that digital recording didn't exist or wasn't accessible at all to anyone with any conservative budget. Because it's so new, it should've been a red flag to me to see so much "expertise" in the area of advice to young "recording engineers" (of which I've been) and I should've done a bit more research into the history of the art-form before jumping right in. I started recording music in 2001 or so and I started digitally. My first recording device was a Fostex MR-8 Digital Multitracker. Only last year did I ever experiment with using analog tape to record live music and the experience has changed my approach, to say the least. Not because it sounds "better"... but because the way you get signals to tape (or in the case of digital, hard-drive) is, in my opinion, overlooked.

Let me elaborate... When you record to tape the audio signal needs to live on the physical magnetic tape, whereas with digital the signal is converted to digital information (i.e. 0s and 1s) and this difference has an effect on how you should be recording. Now, the size (width) of the tape is finite and so is the size of the digital storage space, but the sizes are different.

The big mistake I was making was that if you read any beginners guide to recording they tell you this: Get the loudest signal you can get without going into the red (clipping) for each component of your music, then once it's all recorded, go back and "mix" your audio and adjust the volumes. I blindly followed this advice for years but now, I don't anymore and this is why...

When you record to tape, if the signal is too hot you will achieve tape "saturation" which is generally an unpleasant sound of distortion, but before hitting this "point of no return" you will hear the tape gladly accepting the signal and letting it fill out all of the space it is alotted: generally this is what's referred to as "warmth," i.e. natural tape-based signal compression. Now the physical size (i.e. width) of the tape is only 2 inches or less, so it's generally a small space to live. I think the idea of capturing  the most digital info as possible in terms of the various components to a mix is mis-guided, almost by definition. This is because the point isn't to hoard all the sonic information just because you can, the point is to record the sound you want to hear on playback. The luxury of "unlimited tape" blinded the neophyte digital recordists ability to properly engineer mixes. The analog workflow has proven to be essential to a natural sounding recording. When you dive deeper into this subject it becomes a combination of philosophical decisions and assessment of history, but ultimately it's about one thing... what sounds good?

Of course we aren't taught this concept of commitment and technique to recreate analog warmth on a digital audio capturing device when it comes to digital recording expert advice and that's where my issue is. If you apply this strategy of get-the-loudest-signals-you-can-without-clipping-and-then-adjust-in-mixing to your digital recording, you'll make a recording where it will come out sounding not necessarily over-saturated, but somehow wrong. It's too many hot signals competing with one another... and only one or two break through at a time. It's a lot for the ear to handle. The processing power of digital recording is mis-used in this context and the results are less than good typically. At long last, clarity?

So how do you achieve tape warmth on a digital recording interface? Change the way you take in audio signals. Just take in the signal at the volume it will be heard at in the mix (i.e. an appropriate and accurate reproduction of what you're actually hearing in the room) and don't go as high as the red, don't even go as high as the yellow. Don't have to adjust any volume knobs at all in your DAW. They should all always be at zero. I personally record to peak signals somewhere between -24dB and -12dB depending on the instrument. I assess this input level as I mostly focus on what I'm hearing through the monitors. If you're using a mixer, put your faders all just below 0 and adjust your input signal volumes with gain (and EQ) only. Your results will be better because you are following an analog workflow for your digital session, and the unity gain simulates the concept of natural tape compression in that it limits the input depth? Something like that... I'm still working on articulating this properly.