All microphones have proximity effect. This means that the closer your mouth is to the mic, the more bass frequencies it captures. If you move away from a mic, the bass diminishes. Professionals know how to use the proximity effect to their advantage. It's almost a way of "tuning" a microphone.

I just stumbled on two very nice Lightroom tutorials by George Mann that you may want read. The first one, Basic Color White Balance Corrections, shows you examples of "cloudy," "daylight," "shade," etc. applied to an image. Great way to see the differences among the various settings. The second one, Presets Browser, illustrates some of the interesting effects, such...

I went to see "The New Cars" in concert a couple of nights ago; Todd Rundgren has replaced Ric Ocasek as lead vocalist and frontman. (Disclaimer: having been Todd's business partner for many years, I'm probably a wee bit biased). Having been a fan of the original Cars line-up, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. The show was fantastic;...

It surprised me to learn it, but one of my most-cited posts has been 10 Journalism Tips For Bloggers, Podcasters & Other E-Writers. It turns out there's a lot of interest in using the web not just for sounding off, but for practicing real journalism. And as in so many areas--music, video, politics, etc--the amateurs are crashing the gates that...

The One Laptop Per Child program has posted pictures of the first working laptop model. Interesting!...

BBC News recently ran a wonderful article on the tritone, beginning, “A new film about the history of heavy metal highlights the so-called Devil’s Interval, a musical phenomenon suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages.” A tritone, as you probably know, is the interval from C to F#, which spans three whole tones. Subjectively, it has an unresolved...

Hey look! It's another tag cloud. This is a map of my interests for the past few weeks, based on the bookmarks I have been saving to my del.icio.us account.Del.icio.us will make tag clouds for you, but sometimes you just have to roll your own. So I wrote an article about how to make these amorphous wonders in Perl...

Poking about on a Japanese gadget site, I came across an illuminated, motorized, fish-shaped speaker called the iFish. The description was intriguing: “5 kinds of LED lights flash in many different patterns when music is played through iFish. iFish is capable of changing its feelings from happy to angry by waving its body side to side and by changing...

Pearl Jam has a new album out, and has just opted to release its first video in over eight years, "Life is Wasted", over Creative Commons. The video, which premiered on VH1 last Friday, can be downloaded for free from pearljam.com and video.google.com through May 24th. After that, the video will be positioned for sale through paid distribution channels. Pearl...

By default, Lightroom frames your viewing area with two side panels, a top module picker, and a filmstrip on the bottom. This is a good starting place to work because you have all of your tools readily accessible. But as you begin to drill down in your workflow, you may want more working area during specific tasks. This could...