Paul McCartney played a very odd guitar on the December 15th episode of Saturday Night Live during his performance with surviving members of Nirvana. It was a Cigar Box guitar (or CBG for short). The body is a large cigar box with a resonator in it, which makes it perfect for playing slide guitar. The other odd thing was that it only had 4 strings. A little research showed that cigar box guitars are commonly made with only 3 or 4 strings.
The guitar was made by Matty Baratto of CigFiddle fame. You can see more of his guitars at barattoguitars.com.
You can actually make your own CBG with kits like the CB Gitty Cigar Box Guitar Kit, or just buy your own – like this CB Gitty Standard Model Cigar Box Guitar #1 – “Romeo and Julietta 3-Stringer.”
Archives for December 2012
Getting a Music Mix To Sound Good No Matter Where It's Played
A very common and serious problem for people recording and mixing music in home studios is that the recordings don’t sound the same on the big CD player/entertainment center as they do on iPod earphones, and different again in the car. This can be really frustrating when it sounded so great in the room where you mixed the music. I wrote an article about why this so often happens called Your Ears Are Lying to You – Why Your Song Sounds Great in Your Room, But Not in Your Car.
The big culprit is almost always a less-than-ideal acoustic situation in the mixing room. First, these rooms are usually coverted bedrooms, which are notoriously bad, acoustically. Their boxy shapes with flat and parallel walls create lots of havoc with sound waves, adding energy at some frequencies and removing energy from others. So if you add and subtract volume with EQ, it may sound great in that room, but terrible somewhere else. That’s because the EQ was compensating for the bad acoustics in the room.
Another problem for the home recordist is that monitor speakers are usually not that great either. Some folks don’t bother with them at all, mixing instead on headphones. Bad idea! Mixing and mastering in headphones is universally frowned upon because music sounds much different through the air than in headphones and again, you get a non-portable mix – one that won’t sound the same on different systems. Likewise using your computer speakers is not a good idea because if they are “good” speakers, they’ll have been designed to complement the sound, meaning they make the things sound better than they really are. If they are average computer speakers, they’ll simply be incapable of accurately reproducing accurate sound across the spectrum. So you need to invest in a decent pair of monitor speakers.
Lastly, a lack of knowledge about frequencies can create a poor mix. If you have taken care of the stuff above – treated the mixing room or designed an ideal space, and gotten good monitor speakers – most things will take care of themselves and you don’t need to be an expert in all the frequency and sound-y science. However, if you don’t or can’t have that awesome mixing space, having at least a rudimentary knowledge of that stuff, AND being very aware how the bad space can and will affect your mix, you can take measures to counteract the problems. In my case, I will make a mix and then take it downstairs with a notepad and write a lot of stuff down when listening on the “big” system. Then I’ll take the mix into the car and drive around doing the same thing. Though you should pull over when writing your notes:). Finally I take all the notes back to the mixing room and make corrections. Then I do the process all over again. Yes this takes longer, but it’s worth it, especially if you can’t afford to acoustically treat your room or buy good speakers.
Here is an article with several tips for treating and buying speakers and for mixing to create a portable mix.
http://www.loopblog.net/tutorials/music-production/studio-techniques/mixing-a-track-tips-getting-your-mix-to-translate-well/
What Are Gain Stages In Audio Recording And Live Sound?
The term gain stages basically refers to all the points in an audio set-up (either for recording or doing live sound) where something can be turned up. And if it can be turned up, that means it cam possibly distort, which we will state for the record is bad – in any case where you aren’t doing it on purpose for some effect. The trick is to make sure you have enough signal at every stage but not too much, or you get distortion. But also not too little at any stage, or the stage after it will have to be turned up too loud to compensate, which can increase noise like hiss and hum.
Let’s look at an example. In a live sound situation (where a band’s microphones and instruments are all going through a mixer and PA system) an electric guitar’s first gain stage is the volume knob on the guitar itself. Next in the chain is the amplifier, which also has volume and gain knobs. Next comes the mixer, which will have at least two gain stages – the input gain/trim and the master output volume. But there is also the channel strip fader, and if you run the electric guitar channel through any effects, there is another gain stage. And some PA amplifiers and speakers also have volume controls, so there is another couple of gain stages.
So in order to get the best sound out of any audio source in both recording and live sound, you want to make sure you have a healthy signal level, but nothing that will cause any gain stage to be so loud that any of the audio distorts or clips anywhere in the signal chain. That process of ensuring the proper amount of signal without going over the “red line” anywhere is called “gain staging.”
In recording vocals, the main goal is to make sure your microphone sends the right signal level to the preamp (this can be adjusted on some microphones by a pad switch), which then sends the right amount of signal to the recorder or computer. Most audio interface units have a knob to control this level.
Here’s a video from Wink Sound that shows you an example with an electric guitar in a computer recording set-up.
What Is A Delay Throw Effect?
One of the many common effect used primarily in music is called a delay. It might help if you call it an echo, because what a delay does is create a copy of part or all of a piece of audio and then repeat it just after the original. It “delays” the repeat by some set amount, usually a fraction of a second.
Now you can attach this effect to an entire vocal track, or you can just treat a single word or phrase in the track. The latter is called a “delay throw.”
So how that would sound is that the audio – let’s say a vocal – would be merrily singing along with no echo (delay). But then at some specific point in the song, maybe right before a chorus to build up anticipation or some other emotional effect, you decide to apply the delay effect to just one word or a short 2-3 word phrase.
In the following video by Dezz Asante, he shows you how to do this using Cubase recording software. Of course you can do the same thing in other DAW (digital audio workstation) programs. In Reaper there a several ways to do it. You can use an effect buss and an automation envelope line like Dezz does in the video. But in Reaper I would be more likely to slice out the audio I want (Shift-Ctrl-S) to create a new audio item, and then simply insert the delay effect onto the new item.
See the aforementioned video below:
10 Fascinating Things About Sound That You Probably Don't Know
Here is a really interesting post about a presentation made by international speaker and sound/audio expert Julian Treasure, author of the “Sound Business” blog. The video of that presentation can be seen below.
Treasure offers 10 things “you didn’t know about sound,” some of which are absolutely true, and some of which are a bit theoretical and heady – such as “your body is a chord.” Treasure makes some claims in this presentation about sound and its relationship to health that are followed by the statement – “…I hope [this] will be tested by researchers.“So just be aware of that.
One of the things he talks about is the auditory frequency range of humans – 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz – which is definitely true and impacts a lot of the standards for audio recording, especially things like digital audio and A-D (analog-to-digital) converters, and most specifically, sampling frequency. See our article What Is Sampling Frequency?
Anyway, the article is here: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/10/treasure.sound/index.html
And the video of the presentation is below.