Welcome to "Sierra View Studios!" I call it that because you can actually see the Sierra Nevada from the window next to my monitor. In fact, on a clear day, if you go into the next room you can see Half Dome, Angels Rest and other peaks in Yosemite National Park. The studio serves as both sound recording and art space.

I'm running Cubase LE 3.0, which came bundled with my PreSonus Firebox sound card. Yeah, I'm still doing fine, so I haven't upgraded. I may have to buy it outright eventually! My synths are all over the map, mostly freebie stuff I picked up from KVR Audio--great site, if you're not familiar with it already. I've gotten more great VSTs from this place than anywhere else. I purchased ProteusX, but it's not currently working--some sort of driver mismatch, it says. I think I'll reinstall it and see what happens. The program is very powerful and customizable, and I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do.

My main piano and all strings and horns are done using East/West Gold Symphonic Orchestra. The samples are fantastic, and the algorithm will even call up the sample for the slap-back off the back wall if you set the velocity of the trigger above a certain level. Very nice. The harp is amazingly realistic--makes you want to write music for harp! The percussion section has some great timpani, roto toms, woodblocks and the like. I had to up my RAM to 4GB to handle the program, but it's been great. I think next time, I may partition the hard drive first so I can put the samples on a separate drive, as suggested by the manufacturer. I do still crash on occasion, and this might be one factor. My version is no longer available but you can get a free version of Quantum Leap's newer release here:
http://www.soundsonline.com/free-orchestra

My main drum sampler is ezdrummer, another great bang-for-buck investment. I like their choices of drums, and it's good to be able to mix the overhead and room mic. The "humanize" feature is good for ensuring that successive hits aren't too robotic; I just leave it on. Every once in awhile it gives me a bit of a heavier hit than I want, but that's a rarity.

My acoustic guitar is made by a Canadian company called Art & Lutherie. It's a lovely blonde guitar with a sweet, intimate sound when played fingerstyle. And it KICKS when I grab a pick and go for it! I came across these when I was looking for an instrument for someone else at 5-Star Guitars in Portland, OR. I was amazed at the tone and playability. For the price, they're the best value I've found anywhere. Back in the 70s, I think Yamaha made the best instrument you could buy on a budget. In the 80s, Takamine made good, affordable guitars. I would highly recommend that you look into an Art & Lutherie. Below is a link to my specific instrument. I have the acoustic/electric version which sounds great through my late 70s Randall Switchmaster FET transistor amp when I run it straight into the clean channel with no processing. I don't use the transducer for recording, though, preferring to hear the sound of the cedar and wild cherry.
http://www.artandlutherieguitars.com/dreadcedar.html.

My electric guitar is a cherry red Epiphone Dot. I swapped out the stock pickups with a couple of Seymour Duncan "Jazz" humbuckers, but I think I'll have to rewire the whole guitar if I'm going to get all the juice out of them. The original wiring is very light gauge and just doesn't carry all that signal. I'm running the guitar through a Boss VF-1 preamp/effects processor or, for very clean sounds, direct into the sound card.
http://www.epiphone.com/default.asp?ProductID=4&CollectionID=1

An M.V. Pedulla "Thunderbass" 5-string goes direct into the sound card, most of the time. I do use the bass patches on the Boss every once in awhile. It's an amazingly versatile instrument. The bartolini pickups have wonderful definition and punch in active mode, and are almost acoustic-sounding in passive mode. My bass playing jumped to the next level almost immediately when I picked up this instrument. Stuff I had struggled with for years took so much less effort. I have an Ampeg amplifier which I'm not using for recording and which is a bit big for what I need now, so I'm considering selling it and getting one of the newer compact bass amps which can still handle that low B string.
http://www.pedulla.com/html/thunderbass.html and http://www.pedulla.com/html/et_5_zebra.html

I also have a Chapman Stick (serial # 1530!) which I picked up after seeing Tony Levin play one back in 1984 with King Crimson. I'm still exploring the possibilities on this instrument! I started playing bass on it first, and then began to explore the right hand. Since I don't have that left/right separation that keyboard players and drummers do, I'm still working on my right hand technique. Totally different music comes out of that thing. I'm hoping to re-record some pieces that I put down ages ago on a Ross 4x4 4-track cassette machine. Emmett and Yuta Chapman are very nice. I've talked to Yuta on the phone several times. They completely refurbished my Brazilian ironwood 10-string stick. I was thrilled when they shipped it back, all set up perfectly with new strings and their latest, more powerful pickup. Wow! Some years ago, I emailed them asking if they had suggestions about how to set up the belt hook since I have a long torso and was having difficulty getting good hand positioning. I'd cut a block of wood to raise the position, but it was putting some strain on the bracket which was beginning to crack. Yuta said to just drill new holes in the bracket where I wanted them, and sent me a new one. It worked great!
http://www.stick.com/instruments/stick/ Check out their shop slideshow, especially his setup bench. I love it! World-class instruments come out of this unassuming house in Woodland Hills.

Microphones include my good ol' Shure SM58, an MXL 990 large condenser, and an Apex 435 large condenser for vocals and acoustic guitar. I'm going to post a whole discussion about acoustic guitar miking on this blog at some point. I have a pair of Grado Labs SR60 open headphones for all my mixing. Again, bang for buck, these have been great. Back when I was 18 years old, I spent thirty hard-earned dollars (count 'em: 30!) on a pair of fully- enclosed Sony headphones which I still use for vocal and acoustic guitar recording to minimize bleed-through.

I was a studio rat in junior high and high school, fortunate enough to be allowed fool around on radio station equipment with knobs made of Bakelite. You could actually hear the VU meter needles smack the upper limit when somebody popped a "P." I even got to work on both sides of the glass in a four-track studio in the mid-late 70s. It had a mixing board the size of a kitchen counter, a dishwasher-sized 2" reel-to-reel console and a plate/spring reverb or two. I'm amazed that I can do more now with a desktop computer half the size of a toaster oven. Music that I simply couldn't have made back then is possible now because of the available tools. For that, I'm most grateful!

Ping was born in Taiwan and has lived just over half her life in the United States. I was born in Wisconsin and spent most of my growing-up years in Ecuador, South America. So we cover three out of four quadrants of the globe between us. English is a second language for Ping. She speaks it very well; we carry on very deep conversations all in English. My second language was Spanish, which has been marginally useful as I slowly learn Mandarin. Having wrapped my tongue around different sounds as a kid has helped me shape the vowels and consonants of Chinese. Ping is very good at helping me figure out what sounds right.

But there's something about Chinese that is completely absent in both English and Spanish: tones. Asian languages are often described as "singsong." This is because each word has a tone associated to it, a particular relative pitch or pitch shift that determines what word you are saying.

Here are the very basics. There are five tones in Mandarin, referred to as First, Second, Third, Fourth and what they call "Light Tone." The first four are the main ones; the last one, Ping and I call "Fifth" for short. Your voice has to hit a pitch or make a shift relative to the average pitch of your whole sentence.

“First” is a little higher than the average pitch and it’s a steady note, no wavering allowed. If you were to say “ding dong” imitating a door bell, the “ding” has the First tone.

“Second” starts at the average pitch and rises “like an airplane taking off, it just goes up,” says Ping. Second tone sounds to me like you’re asking a question. You know how some people talk in phrases and never actually make what sounds like an affirmative statement: “So there’s this guy? And he’s talking to me? And he’s not really making sense? And then I discover he’s on his cell phone?” The last word of each of those is Second tone.

“Third” can morph a bit, depending on what’s next to it, but Ping describes its pure form as a bungee cord or trampoline sound. If you were to describe the action of someone bouncing at the end of a bungee jump you might say “boing, boing, boing…” That’s Third tone. It starts around the average pitch, drops low and then hooks back up again. Sometimes the bungee breaks, but that’s another story.

“Fourth” starts higher than the average pitch and drops down quickly. To my ear, unfortunately, it sounds like “POW!” or “BANG!” More on that in a minute.

The fifth tone, “Light Tone,” is just a dot. It’s slightly above the average pitch, like First, but it’s as short as you can make it. I can’t think of an English equivalent. Ping describes it like a non-committal nod of acknowledgment, just a “dip-of-the-chin sort of sound.” A dot.

So using a different tone means you’re saying a different word, even if you make the same sounds with your lips and mouth shape. For example, if you close your lips and hum, and then open your mouth while still vocalizing, you can make the sound "ma," which to English speakers is a slightly colloquial reference to a mother, yours or someone else's. That same consonant/vowel combination can mean at least five totally different things in Chinese: mother, numbness, horse, scolding, or a question mark. That’s one distinct definition for each tone!

What Ping and I have discovered is that she sometimes applies Chinese tones to her English. Early in our relationship, I thought she was making accusations every time she asked a question, especially when it was an emotionally loaded issue and my “what are you really saying” radar was on high alert. She couldn’t figure out why simple questions made me so defensive. “Why is everything a hot button?” she wondered.

In Mandarin, you simply say “ma” at the end of your sentence, using Fifth tone, and that makes it a question. Or you make a statement and then just say “yes/no” at the end of it to allow room for the other person’s point of view. That’s a normal, gentle, kind way to have a discussion in Mandarin. But since there’s no “ma” question mark in English, I would hear this statement and assume that it was now up to me to prove or disprove it. She wasn’t asking me, she was challenging me!

To make matters worse, many of the positive, nice things to say in Mandarin, like “yes” or “thank you” or “you’re welcome” or even “love” are Fourth tone which sounds like “POW” or “BANG” or “NO!” or “OUCH!” or “STOP!” to English speakers.

So when Ping said what she wanted to say in English, it sometimes came out with that Chinese tone and to my Western ear, she sounded harsh or combative. How confusing for her! “I felt like a monster!” she says. “I felt like I had to watch everything I said because I could never tell when I would hit another hot button!”

Another good example: I can say “Huh-uh” (“no”) in several different ways. Most are pretty casual. “Are you hungry?” “Huh-uh.” But the same two syllables can be argumentative, as in “Huh-UHH! I did NOT!” The last syllable is drawn out and goes down harder, or down and back up with a little squiggly at the end. Ping used to always say it as Fifth-Fourth, which sounded to my ear like “Ka-POW!” I would wonder, why is she picking a fight; what did I say to provoke that? She was simply using the same tone for the polite Chinese phrase “bu-yong” (“no, I have no need”) when she said the English phrase, and out of nowhere I got quiet and irritable.

Even now that we’ve figured out this is happening, we often don’t recognize it right away in a new context. The other night, I was working on the slide show, and I was moving very fast through the pictures as we discussed what might make a better ending shot for “Clear Blue Sky.” She found herself suddenly thrust into a reflex test situation or video game where she had to react quickly to make her point. So she used English words like “yes!” and “no!” with the Chinese Fourth tone. I heard “good dog!” and “bad dog!” when all she meant was “yeah, that one” or “not that one.” I had to smooth out my reaction to it, reminding myself that she has really good ideas, she respects my ideas and she’s just trying to help me see her vision, which I know will have value, even if I disagree with it, which would be ok, no, really, it would be just fine…

The cool thing was that we were able to talk about it later and laugh about how it went. Now I know to slow down a bit, and she understands how I might get it wrong.