Your Heaven® Audio’s Allie Trionfetti

Your Heaven® Audio’s Allie Trionfetti

Your Heaven® Audio’s Allie Trionfetti

By: Kia Davis

NOVEMBER 09, 2018

MEET OUR TEAM

Senior Manufacturing Supervisor & Sales Lead

When she’s not busy wielding soldering irons and Skype calls, Allie can likely be found engrossed in an organizational capacity—whether documenting team meetings or creating & managing company archives.

Allie is an award-winning poet and performance artist with a background in electronic writing, typography, & graphic design. She holds a BA from Brown University in Literary Arts and received her Honors in Poetry. She has performed her work on various stages, including the DOT AIR Experimental Music Festival, and was part of OpenSignal—a Providence-based artists’ collective concerned with the state of gender and race in experimental, electronic-based art practices.

I guess Your Heaven represents a new phase for me in live sound, in terms of moving from a space of near-constant feedback & earplugs to one of acoustically pure, sonically transparent amplification. 
-Allie Trionfetti

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[image credit]

While at Brown, Allie began collaborating with musicians & audio engineers in the MEME (Computer Music and Multimedia) program—work that set her on a digital audio-crossed path that would eventually lead to Your Heaven Audio. Her interest in design and her detailed attention to craft infiltrate all aspects of her production work at Your Heaven—whether she’s collaborating on product development, manufacturing design, or composing written product materials. While the jury is still out on whether her background in poetry is similarly coloring her outreach work, Allie loves connecting with fellow makers in an interpersonal space that engages her instinct for subtle listening and her background in teaching & service. 

Outside of work, Allie spends her time practicing yoga & mindfulness, pickling fruits & vegetables, hiking with her beloved dog, attending local performances, and enveloped in undoing as it pertains to her current art project at hand. 

Check out our Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

Her first live music experience was watching her father play piano in her childhood living room. [By the time Allie was five, her dad had roped her into the act—most memorably, when he got her to memorize three pages of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which he had set to music.]

Her favorite venues to listen to live music were some of the DIY warehouse spaces in Providence that have since been shut down: “These local punk spaces were so important to me finding my voice as a performer. The sound quality was often crumby. I guess Your Heaven represents a new phase for me in live sound, in terms of moving from a space of near-constant feedback & earplugs to one of acoustically pure, sonically transparent amplification.”

When faced with the question of which musician (past or present) she would choose to meet, Allie became lost in a vast sea of idolatry & influence. That said, she recently had a dream that involved skating at a roller disco with Patsy Cline & Blixa Bargeld—all set to the smooth sounds of DJ Screw. She figures that would suffice in terms of musical pipe dreams.

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Your Heaven® Chief Marketing Officer Rebecca Lister

Your Heaven® Chief Marketing Officer Rebecca Lister

Your Heaven® Audio’s Chief Marketing Officer Rebecca Lister

By: Kia Davis

November 19th, 2018

CATEGORY

21st Century Marketing Expertise

Rebecca Lister began her career as a B2B marketing specialist for a network security start-up at the peak of the dot.com bubble in 2000. After three years in this space, she was hired as a product and marketing manager by biotech start-up, American Biophysics, which was the Inc. 100’s No. 1 fastest growing company in the US in 2004. 

Her favorite music venue is Brighton Music Hall in Boston.

Rebecca Lister

Sourced from Rebecca Lister

Rebecca spent five years abroad building and managing scholarship programs in developing countries including Mongolia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and South Korea.

In step with an increasingly globalized business arena, Rebecca took a position in Asia as a project manager, focusing on international education.

She spent five years abroad building and managing scholarship programs in developing countries including Mongolia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and South Korea.

Rebecca Lister plays both cello and guitar

The Your Heaven® Audio Team accepting an award from the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition

Rebcca’s first musical obsession was with Van Halen, when she got her first album in 1984.

Check out our Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

In 2016, she returned home to join music technology start-up, Your Heaven Audio, as the Chief Marketing Officer. She currently resides in Providence, RI.

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Six Must-Sees at Summer NAMM

Six Must-Sees at Summer NAMM

Six Must-Sees at Summer Namm

By: Devanney Haruta

JUNE 27th, 2018

MUSIC NEWS

The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For

You’ve waited all year for this… and now it’s time for Summer at NAMM! Get ready for an amazing week of gear, networking, instruments, and more, all in the heart of Nashville, TN. From June 26 – 30, NAMM offers no shortage of events, from concerts to education panels to jam sessions to exhibits. There’s so much to see and hear and do, so where should you head first? Here’s a list of highlights you should be sure to check out:

Opening night concert – Georgia on My Mind: Start off the week with a great concert, “Georgia On My Mind” (Tuesday, June 26, 2018, 7:30 – 10:30 pm at the Ryman Auditorium). Hosted by the Peach Pickers, this show features artists in a musical celebration of their home state of Georgia. Proceeds go to the Georgia Music Foundation to support music education, preservation, and outreach.

Crafting a Hit Record: Working on your latest album? Check out this session, “Crafting a Hit Record,” where a multi-Grammy panel shares their tips on how you can craft your best record yet. (Thursday, June 28, 2018, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm at the Music City Center, TEC Tracks (Booth 153))

Photo by Stelios Kazazis (via Unsplash)

Check out our Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

New Trends in the Guitar: Calling all guitar fans: check out this presentation, “New Trends in the Guitar,” led by Laura B. Whitmore of Mad Sun Marketing, where you’ll hear about the future trends of the guitar in a digital world. (Friday, June 29, 2018, 4:00 – 5:00 pm at the Music City Center, NAMM Idea Center (Booth 453))

The guitar enters the digital world.

Photo by Sergio Alejandro Ortiz (via Unsplash)

World’s Fastest Drummer: With a packed schedule of events, time can pass in a blur… but it might literally, at the World’s Fastest Drummer Finals (Saturday, June 30, 2018, 10:00 – 10:40am at the NAMM Reverb Stage on the Terrace). If you can’t make it to the final showdown, be sure to catch the prelims on Thursday or Friday.

Best in Show: It’s the end of the week, and why not top it off with the NAMM “Best In Show”? Sip your coffee, join your friends for breakfast, and hear about the newest best new tech of the year. For everyone – musicians, retailers, or exhibitors – this is an event not to miss. (Saturday, June 30, 2018, 8:00 – 9:30 am at the Music City Center, Davidson Ballroom)

Photo by gbarkz (via Unsplash)

Your Heaven Audio exhibit booth: Come say hello! Looking for a microphone that isolates and captures your true, beautiful acoustic sound? We’ll be demoing systems for mandolin and strings, as well as our new and updated built-in version for acoustic guitar. Plus, we are excited to meet manufacturers to establish partnerships. Stop by the Your Heaven Audio table to say hi, meet our team, and learn more about what we’ve been doing to help make your sound even better. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

The Your Heaven Audio team at NAMM 2017

Photo by Your Heaven Audio

Symphony of Horrors: The Sound of Scary Movies

Symphony of Horrors: The Sound of Scary Movies

Symphony of Horrors: The Sound of Scary Movies

By: Nico DeLong

October 27th, 2017

AUDIO HOW-TO

The role of music and sound in making horror scary

Sound is incredibly evocative. It can soothe us or set our teeth on edge. It can transport us back into memories of the past or deposit us in a totally unfamiliar world. Sound adds sensory intensity and emotional resonance to our experiences. Film, even though it is considered a visual medium, has a longstanding codependent relationship with sound. Today, in honor of Halloween, we’ll be exploring the role of sound in scary movies (defined broadly).

A single railroad track curves to the right through a forest of barren trees.

What sounds do you think might accompany this spooky setting?

Image via Visualhunt

“Any good soundtrack must complement and enhance the sensory world of the film. So, soundtracks for scary films must be some combination of unnerving, unsettling, and uncomfortable.”

Soundtracks

Music has accompanied film from the very beginning. Early films were themselves silent, but audiences often experienced them accompanied by live music, which was usually provided by a pianist working for the theater. The first commercially distributed “talkie,” The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, came out in 1927, and the landscape of motion pictures was never the same again. The first Academy Award for Best Original Score was presented in 1935 to Victor Schertzinger and Gus Kahn for their work on One Night of Love, a musical romance set in the world of opera singers.

Any good soundtrack must complement and enhance the sensory world of the film. So, soundtracks for scary films must be some combination of unnerving, unsettling, and uncomfortable. Every composer will do this in their own way, but there are undeniably some tried and tested techniques.

“Scary movies can be quite extreme—extremely suspenseful, extremely gory, extremely upsetting—and the music must keep up. Many composers accomplish this by going to extremes with elements of their musical language.”

One key concept: extremes. Scary movies can be quite extreme—extremely suspenseful, extremely gory, extremely upsetting—and the music must keep up. Many composers accomplish this by going to extremes with elements of their musical language. Take for example, texture. An extremely full, thickly orchestrated texture can overwhelm the senses and intensify whatever emotions viewers are experiencing (think Danny Elfman’s score to Sleepy Hollow (1999), which makes use of a full palette of strings, brass, percussion, and chorus). On the other end of the spectrum, an extremely sparse, bare texture can put viewers on edge, in a state of nervous anticipation (think Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s score to The Shining (1980), with its plain cantus firmus melody and spans of near total silence).

A movie poster for Tim Burton's 1999 film Sleepy Hollow depicts a twisted dead tree in the foreground, and a rider on a rearing horse wielding a hatchet silhouetted against the full moon in the background.

Heads Will Roll

Image via Schmoeville

Check out our Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

Extremes also play into which instruments that have a reputation for being particularly ~spooky.~  In this case, it’s extremes of pitch and tone. Instruments with extremely high registers, such as the violin or piccolo, or extremely low regsiters, such as the double bass, are often considered to be more eerie. Instruments with extremely pure tone (tubular bells, the theremin, and the soprano or countertenor voice) are also generally thought of as ethereal to the point of being unnerving. What horror film soundtrack doesn’t feature at least one violin tremolo or soprano descant?

A bleached human skull lies face up, jaws open.
Horror films often feature violence, injury, and death.
Image via Visualhunt

In the age of the “talkies,” music is only one component in the overall sonic landscape of a film. There are also all of the voices and sound effects that occur in the course of the story.

Two main sound categories needed for horror films are screams and gore sounds (bones breaking, dismemberment, etc.). A Sound Effect has a great horror sound design guide, which includes a whole section devoted to gore sound effects. Generally, the goal is to produce sounds that are not realistic but hyper-realistic. Viewers should not just hear but viscerally feel the physical trauma the onscreen bodies are undergoing. Common tools for making such sounds include humble fruits and vegetables: watermelons, carrots, tomatoes, etc.

A pale-faced man with hollow eyes and blood on his forehead and mouth walks through a crowd towards the camera.

Zombies invariably take a beating

Image via Visualhunt

When it comes to screams, again the goal is to convey through sound the type and intensity of emotion and sensation that the onscreen character is feeling. Is it the long drawn out scream of someone falling into an endless pit? Does it trail off into a gurgle as someone’s throat is cut? The job of screaming falls not so much to the character actors as to sound design professionals and voice actors. They may hold recording sessions entirely separate from the filming, just to capture a satisfactory palette of screams (and perhaps other exertions too).

So next time you watch a scary movie, take a moment to think about all the work that went into making it not just look but also sound scary.

Recording at Home

Recording at Home

Recording at Home

By: Nico DeLong

OCTOBER 22nd, 2017

AUDIO HOW-TO

Save money, take control

So you’ve been practicing a lot lately, and you sound really good. Maybe you’ve got some gigs coming up and you want to advertise yourself, or maybe you’re trying to break into the internet music scene. Either way, you need some tracks to put out there. But what if you can’t afford to pay for expensive studio recording time? What do you do then? You go DIY. In this post, we’ll discuss how to build a home studio that can save you money and give you full creative control of your music.

Broadly speaking, home recording advice can be divided into two general categories: equipment (what you use to record) and process (how you go about setting up and recording). We’ll focus mostly on equipment here, as that seems to be the area about which people tend to have the most questions, but we’ll also include a few process tips towards the end.

Recording studios are a great resource, but not everyone can afford them.

Image from Your Heaven Audio

Recording Equipment

There’s no exact consensus on how much equipment you need to set up a functional home studio, but most sources recommend between 5 and 10 different items. And of course, what choices you make for the various components will affect the overall amount of gear you need to acquire. Here we’ll be breaking things down by function.

“Different microphones have different frequency responses and thus may work better for some instruments than others, but most beginners will be well served by getting just one or two pretty good all-around mics.”

Behringer B-1 Large Diaphragm Condenser Mic, $99.99

Image from Sweetwater Sound, Inc.

1. You need something to capture the sound of your instrument (and yes, the human voice is an instrument too): that’s your microphone. Pickups and MIDI interfaces can also be used, but microphones are the most flexible in that they are compatible with the largest number of instruments. Different microphones have different frequency responses and thus may work better for some instruments than others, but most beginners will be well served by getting just one or two pretty good all-around mics. Gearank has a guide to mics under $100 that can help you pick an affordable option than suits you.

The unique CloseUp® mic system

Image from Your Heaven Audio

Check out our Your Heaven Audio CloseUp System on the Products page.

2. You need something to get your sound from your microphone to your computer (yes, I am assuming you are using a computer to record): that’s your audio interface. There are your traditional standalone box audio interfaces, such as the PreSonus Audio Box. There are also some USB mics that can connect directly to a computer and record without a separate audio interface. These are great if you want to hit the ground running and get right to recording with minimal setup. However, their sound quality isn’t always as good as a traditional XLR mic connected to an audio interface. You can also save money by buying a microphone and audio interface sold as a bundle. For guitars and violin-family instruments, our CloseUp® system is a great example.

3. You need something to edit your sound once it’s on your computer: that’s your DAW (digital audio workstation). If you just want some basic track alignment, cut-and-paste, and fade-in/fade-out capabilities, you can probably get by with an freeware audio editor like Audacity (open source). Audacity isn’t a fully featured DAW, but it can get the job done in a pinch. If you want more sophisticated controls, such as a larger palette of post-production effects, graphical EQ, and maybe some virtual instruments, then you’ll need to pay for some software. ProTools (Avid) is the “industry standard,” but you can also make perfectly good music with something a little cheaper like Audition (Adobe) or Reason (Propellerhead). If you make sample-based music, you’ll want to check out Live (Ableton) and FL Studio (Image Line).

A digital audio workstation (DAW) is a key component of home recording in the 21st century

Image from Your Heaven Audio

“There’s nothing wrong with technological limitations. You don’t need all of the latest gadgets to make really cool music. In fact, limitations can drive creativity rather than stifle it.”

Recording Process

Now that you’ve got all your basics, what will you do with them? How will you make the music you want that sounds the way you want? Possibly the best advice we can give is to work with your recording set up. There’s nothing wrong with technological limitations. You don’t need all of the latest gadgets to make really cool music. In fact, limitations can drive creativity rather than stifle it. CHVRCHES made their debut album, The Bones of What You Believe, with very few synths at the home of one the bandmembers, and yet it’s one of the lushest, fullest albums made in recent years. The shaker in Tegan and Sara’s “Back in Your Head,” off their iconic album The Con, is actually a jar of chocolate covered sunflower seeds. The best percussion sound I ever made was achieved by rubbing crumpled paper sandwich bags on the floor. You never know what’s going to work until you try it. So get experimenting.