cutting noise music

[tragwag]

just curious if other people have a certain approach to cutting noise music, including white noise and harsh feedback tones, etc.
I do heavy EQ to find those frequencies and scoop them as much as possible, but sometimes I have to turn down entire sections volume for the safety of the cutter head.
certain pieces I won't do at all, because they end up very low in volume due to how much I have to turn them down.

just looking for others tactics and ideas

[mossboss]

You are doing the right thing
Is tbe best way to cook any head
You can use filtering to chop out freqs to upper and lower limit of your cutting head
Best

[opcode66]

As Mossy stated, roll offs are standard practice.

I also use High frequency Limiting. I use a banded compressor VST. Bypass all but the top band. Set to start at 16k. Adjust the rest of the settings based on the program material. Some needs more severe and quick reduction. Other music not so much. I use HFL on everything I cut that is loud. But, only as much as is required to get you out of the "danger zone".

As Mossboss also wisely advised, cooling is essential for cutting hot highs. With a mono head, just popping the cover and cutting with the coil exposed helps to allow heat to dissipate and not simply build inside the casing. Troll life hack #53

One last piece of wisdom. The smaller a coil is in diameter, the hotter it will get faster than its more widely wound counterpart of the same dc resistance given the same signal. Makes sense. More surface area means more cooling from the top layer. More widely scoped, less tightly packed turns means easier heat dissipation through the core. Smaller coils get hot fast. If you have something like a small RCA head, it will quickly get to a hot state.

[tragwag]

ah yes, good thoughts!
thanks all

[jesusfwrl]

Are you referring to your VR stereo system or to the Presto?
There is basically two considerations regarding the white noise type material. One is the bandwidth, and the other is the continuous power.

The bandwidth in itself does not seem to be a big issue on a mono head. If you want to keep it really wide band the head won't let you!
Magnetic heads are essentially mechanical band pass filters. If you feed it a signal exceeding the bandwidth of the head, at LF the increased excursion will get you to the point of the armature reaching its limits of excursion and creating severe distortion. At HF exceeding the response of the head generally tends to reduce the amplitude of modulation and increase distortion, without much audible benefit as it will not go much higher than its limit no matter how hard you push it. The bandwidth in itself would not be destructive to a magnetic cutterhead.

This is also why feedback tones are just as dangerous: Most coils on heads are designed for more dynamic material. For instance, a snare drum hit which would normally require enough current to really heat up the coil is short enough in duration and followed by much less demanding signal that the coil does not have enough time to heat itself up dangerously. The heat effect averages out on dynamic material.

On steady state material, the coil is working constantly at high currents. And it heats up. On my RCA head, the coil seems to generally be over engineered and quite difficult to destroy. The head is sensitive enough that you will reach the limits of excursion long before the coil gets even remotely hot. Even with steady state signals such as noise music, it doesn't seem to heat up for short duration pieces. I don't know what the effect would be if I would have to cut a 20 minutes side of such material. Never tried this. I would probably do it with the cover off the head and use an IR thermometer to keep on checking the temperature of the coil.

Is there any other way apart from experience with a particular head, to be able to tell how long you can keep on cutting a steady state signal at a particular drive current, before you fry the head?

These observations and comments mainly apply to magnetic heads. Moving coil heads are a different beast and feedback heads complicate things further. They also tend to be much higher bandwidth heads so bandwidth actually becomes a more important consideration there. I don't have any useful comments about stereo moving coil heads yet, I am learning the particularities of these myself at the moment.

[mossboss]

All quite sensible however apart from hobby or semi pro well semi well below the threshold, no pro cutter uses a magnetic head
The limitations are exactly what you pointed out, the flux available is a severe limitation which makes them a far cry of what a client expects today for his records.
Moving coil heads need to have far more extensive head protection electronics due to the accelerations involved apart from the feedback system which adds another level of complexity.
Keep at it
Best

[jesusfwrl]

For cutting noise music though, a magnetic head might be handy to have around since sound quality is rarely of concern in this style of music. I am not sure if I would want to even try running this type of material through a professional stereohead.

Having said that, I have some harsh noise records here with fairly long sides that were cut very loud. I have to dig them out and see if there is any mark suggesting who cut these.
One of them was a pizza picture disk that is meant to emulate the four season pizza idea: there is four artists, each contributing one song per side and the song changes on every quarter of the record along with the pizza ingredients on the picture. Awesome concept.

[tragwag]

yeah I do definitely tell the clients that because of the material, I cut it MUCH softer, in taking every possible safety.
I would turn down a stereo VR job for this style, and tell them I can do it with the mono presto setup,
use my 1C on it, with more used stylus, just because it doesn't make a lot of difference really.

[mossboss]

There are numerous ways to deal with this kind of cut there's many many examples out there
When you get your pizza record out do a freq analysis, also take a look at the cut you get the depth by looking at the width see the range, you'll get the idea
Best

[jesusfwrl]

So, the pizza went under the microscope... the tomato sauce was from a tin!

There's a 12db/octave LPF at 8 kHz, and I couldn't see any vertical modulation, although the grooves are hard to see clearly over the pizza toppings! As expected, there's also no variable depth action and hard to see the variable pitch, since the material is a constant fshhhhh... Well within the range of a magnetic head, and probably few could tell any difference!

The pitch is around 140 LPI and groove width around 2.4 mil (1.2 mil depth). I was expecting to find something more radical there, but this looks fairly normal. What did you mean about the depths, Chris?

The level is fairly high. Did not take note of the exact reading, but I wonder what head was used. In such cases, do you adjust for a specific value of current or for a specific value of groove excursion? How can you tell when it's enough?

[sat159p1]

I cut some noise music in the past with no problems. Also some shelving EQs of course. I think that sine wave can do more damage to the cutterhead than white/pink noises.

[tragwag]

Nice pizza! Thanks for checking that out, shelf at 8 kHz is even more radical than I usually do.
Since the record is pressed, I would think it was cut on a neumann or scully most likely?
Can you read the run-out to see where it may have been done?

[jesusfwrl]

No information suggesting where it may have been done, but I do know that it was an Italian record label and I got it from one of the artists in 2009 or 2010 at a noise festival in Slovenia. I would think it is very likely that it was done in Italy, so possibly Phonopress or perhaps the cut may have been done at Elettroformati. I don't know if there was anyone else active in Italy at that time. The label was http://belligeranza.c8.com/ and the only scribing in the run out is belligeranza05. This could either imply release number 5 or it could imply year 2005. The label is still active as far as I can see, and it seems like you can still buy pizza from them! No expiry date on this thing...