Most of us record drums, guitars, and the like with multiple microphones. We place a mic up close for presence, and another mic a few feet away for air. We mic up a drum set with as many mics as we can beg, borrow, or steal. We mix the signals from these mics together to achieve the perfect balance, agonizing over the subtle nuance of change in minute fader movements. However there are devious gremlins lurking way down in our lower bits where we sometimes don’t see them. These gremlins use the very fabric of the space/time continuum in a conspiracy against us. They bounce our pristine signals against each other in a quantum game of pocket billiards. Once they finish with their mischievous tricks they scamper away, and our spheres, once aligned, are now scattered. Our image is smeared, a sonic veil has been drawn, and the groove is no longer in that pocket where it once nestled so snugly.

Time alignment, my friends, will cast out the gremlins. True, this topic has been covered in these pages, even recently, but follow me a few more steps down the path of true alignment and discover the inner peace that it brings.

Phase I: Indoctrination

Any disciple must receive dogma before the inner teachings are revealed, and only through diligence will true enlightenment be achieved. So first comes a basic review of the way of things in our imperfect realm. Read and comprehend the fundamentals of sound and then I will take you to the next level.

A sound wave travels, or propagates, through a substance, or medium, at a speed that is dependent on the density of that substance. A sound wave propagates through a solid in a different way than it propagates through a gas, but in general, it moves faster through a dense medium, like stone, than it does through a sparse medium, like the atmosphere. This is why in western movies you see the bandits pressing their ears to the railroad tracks in order to hear the train coming long before it arrives! The sound travels much more quickly through the steel tracks than through the air. This is also why in space, nobody can hear you scream.

The speed of sound in the air is approximately 1130 feet per second at sea level. At higher altitude, like here at the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver, in Denver Colorado, sound travels a bit more slowly. This is because the atmosphere up here (about one mile above sea level) is less dense. Usually this distinction is overlooked and we casually consider the speed of sound to be 1130 feet per second. This means that a sound wave travels a distance of 1 foot in 0.0013 seconds, bit one can generalize further and say that sound travels one foot in about 1 millisecond (0.001 second).

So, Mr. Spock, why should I care? Bear with me through just a little bit more of my simplified physics and then I’ll deliver the goods.