Hivemind Times Issue #66

Welcome To The Hivemind Times!

What up doe. It’s The Hivemind Times back at it again with stuff to read, listen to, and enjoy on this beautiful Friday. 

The main channel was back in action this week with a Sam Tallent collab. A crazy moment for me truly as a friend gave me his book a few years back and through the magic of the universe he ended up living in Detroit and then on our show. Hope you got to check it out and enjoyed it. 

Cheapseats powers on despite the pathetic season being put forth by our Cleveland Browns. Unlimited should have some new heat hitting the airways today too. 

In the meantime and in between time suck on this juicy piece of written media supplied by the talented fucks that are employed here at HQ.

One love.

- Riley & Graydon

WEEKLY PLAYLIST

A new edition of the Bootleg series from Bob Dylan landed a few weeks ago.

For those unfamiliar with this series, Columbia and Bobby D have been releasing these big compilations of unreleased tracks since like the mid 80s. Having the insane fan base that he does, he has always had this community of people that release pirated versions or live versions or alternate takes kind of like The Dead. 

So this new installation is vol. 18 - what got me stoked is that it is the earrllyyyy stuff like ‘56-’63 so there are plenty of Woody covers and just young voiced real folkster Bob cuts in here. 

I’ve selected my 10 favs off the 42 track compilation for you here and encourage you to dig around the Bootlegs if you are a Bob boy like me.

- Graydon

QUINN’S CHEMISTRY CLASS

Hello, I am writing this like 20 minutes before the Newsletter drops, because I spent 3 hours looking for my car keys this morning but I did just find them magically appear in a spot I already checked 5 times. 

I have no idea what I’m going to write about, I like to at least double check any science stuff I write here against peer reviewed sources but I won’t have time to do that right now. I could do a really quick mini-mixing advice. I was going to write a 4th fundamental of mixing, but I couldn’t decide if compression or reverb and delay were more fundamental. 

I’ll just do a quick explanation of compression and what it is and how it can be used in music production.

People seem to have a very hard time understanding what a compressor is and does, I know I did when I first started mixing music. Compressors were like this mysterious thing that changed the sound a little bit but could also completely destroy the sound in an interesting but impossible to explain way. So, I will try my hardest to explain it. 

A compressor takes an audio input and reduces the volume of any part of the input that is louder than a volume threshold, which is set by the user to any value between 0dB to -60dB. So, in essence, a compressor makes the louder parts of a sound quieter, while making the quieter parts seem louder by comparison. The threshold is what determines which parts are considered “louder” or “quieter” in the sound. 

There is also a setting called ratio which tells the compressor how much to reduce the input signal per dB it goes over the threshold, so higher ratio means more compression at a given threshold. Here is a picture of a plug-in digital version of one. The grey waveform is the input signal, the orange line is the volume reduction being applied by the compressor over time. As you can see, the compressor only begins reducing the volume once the signal passes the threshold (white line labeled “threshold”)

I just realized I have to stop writing now but I will give examples of when it can be useful in mixing and production next time I write an article.

- Quinn

THIS WEEK’S COMICS

MERCH