Ken

Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 2

April 15, 2014 by Ken 5 Comments

This is the second in a series of tips designed to help you record better quality audio in your home studio. Last week, I showed you a super quick and easy way to immediately improve your audio quality – when recording your voice, get close to the mic. If you missed last week’s post and video, you can find them here: Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 1.
http://homebrewaudio.wistia.com/medias/e1jms9esxq?embedType=seo&videoWidth=640
This week’s tip is actually a couple of tips together. Yay for bonus tips! First, I should mention my assumptions. I assume that you are recording in a room with poor room acoustics. Just about any room in your house, especially a converted bedroom, would quality. I also assume you have no acoustic treatment such as absorbent foam on the walls, or a treated isolation booth. Most folks are in this category, but even if you have taken steps to reduce poor room sound in your home studio, this week’s tips are still well worth knowing about.

Have a Heart – Use The Cardioid Setting

All microphones have some sort of polar (or pickup) pattern associated with them. I wrote about this in the article Directional and Omnidirectional Microphones – What Are They Good For? Most microphones default to a pattern called “cardioid” (so you will probably not have to worry about using the wrong one). If that word sounds like it has something to do with hearts, that’s deliberate. The pickup pattern for a cardioid mic looks like a heart. See the explanation in the video above. Essentially, it means the mic picks up sound from in front of it and rejects sound from behind it. So if there is a noisy computer or something else that you want to PREVENT getting into your recording, point the back of a cardioid mic at that noisy thing or area.
Some microphones have switchable patterns, so you get to choose whether to use the cardioid pattern, or one of two (usually) other patterns – figure-8, and omnidirectional. Unless you already know how best to use the other patterns, and are doing it deliberately, I HIGHLY recommend making certain your mic is set to the cardioid setting. Again, the video will demonstrate how to do this, and you’ll hear what can happen if you get it wrong!

But Which Side Is Which?

With a handheld microphone like the one in the picture above on the right, it’s pretty obvious which end you speak into. But with large diaphragm condenser (LDC) microphones, this is often NOT the case. More than one very smart person I know has recorded into the WRONG side of an LDC mic. In the video, you will hear what it sounds like to record on the wrong side. But how can you tell? Well, ultimately you can tell by trying both ends with headphones on. It’ll be obvious which is the correct side. But every LDC I’ve ever used has had the company logo on the correct side.
So if you are recording in a converted room in your house – in other words, a bad-sounding room (usually) – you now know a few things you can do to drastically improve the quality of the audio you record in that room without having to spend any money or build anything. Try them for yourself.

Don’t Miss Out

Make sure you don’t miss any of the tips in this series. Put your email into the form below and get not only the rest of this series as it rolls out, but also the first 8 videos in our tutorial course “The Newbies Guide To Audio Recording Awesomeness 1: The Basics With Audacity.” This course shows you how to set up and start using your home recording studio for a budget of about five bucks (or less) in about 30 minutes.

We will not spam you with e-mails! We typically don’t send more than one message per week, and each of those will only be intended to help you make better audio recordings in your home studio.

Improve The Quality Of The Audio You Record At Home – Tip 1

April 8, 2014 by Ken 8 Comments

One of the biggest challenges we face as people who record audio at home is that we don’t have ideal recording spaces. A vast majority of us, Yours Truly included, set up our home recording studios in a spare bedroom. More often than not, these rooms are almost perfectly designed to provide us with the WORST possible acoustic spaces in which to record. These rooms impart way too much echo-y, reverb-y (and not in a good way) crud to whatever you try to record. The problem is especially bad when recording voices for podcasts, video narration, voice-overs, etc. because there isn’t any music to cover up that “room sound” like there is when recording songs.
http://homebrewaudio.wistia.com/medias/8q52ozaez3?embedType=seo&videoWidth=640
In addition to to being poor recording spaces, converted bedrooms are also terrible at reproducing accurate audio. If you are trying to mix music listening through loudspeakers (recommended) in a bad room, you’re likely to THINK the music needs more bass, so you boost it with EQ. You may also hear too much of several other frequencies – maybe the high harmony part sounds too loud in the mix, etc. You mix until things sound good and then render it to a stereo file that sounds HORRIBLE on your iPod or in the car. There’s way too much bass and the high harmony is gone. Happened? Bad room happened. Audio waves crashed into each other, either amplifying or reducing certain frequencies.

One Thing At A Time

If you are good at building and installing things like extra walls in your studio, or wealthy enough to pay someone to do that, you can improve the acoustic properties of your room for both recording AND mixing. But as with most problems, it’s usually best to take it a step at a time. Let’s leave the mixing issue for later and deal with making things better in the recording realm first.
With that in mind, this post and video starts a series that will give you tips you can use to improve the quality of the audio you record. Each week for the next several, I will provide you with a technique or two that you can implement immediately – without having to build or buy anything. Free and easy. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Tip Number 1

This first technique has a huge impact on recording quality, and it’s something you can do right now without, as I said, having to buy or build anything. And you won’t believe how simple it is. Ready? Just move closer to the mic! See for yourself – and more importantly – HEAR for yourself how much difference it can make in the video above.

Don’t Miss Out

We will not spam you with e-mails! We typically don’t send more than one message per week, and each of those will only be intended to help you make better audio recordings in your home studio.

What Is The $63,000 ZRX90 Video Camera From Suits?

April 4, 2014 by Ken 2 Comments

Here is another “audio-stuff-on-TV” post inspired, once again, by the USA Network show, Suits. In the season 3 episode that aired on March 20th, “Moot Point,” there is a scene where the main characters take a camcorder to one of the technical guys to try and get some audio for a case. When the tech says he can’t find ANY audio, even after the most powerful and extensive audio restoration editing, he (the tech) says he cannot “enhance sounds that weren’t picked up by a used camcorder, because the firm is too cheap to go with my recommendation of the $63,000 ZRX90.” He later says that the camcorder he recommended is also good for making independent films on the weekends. So apparently this super expensive camcorder is much better at picking up audio. I don’t know because I would have to mortgage my house to afford something like that:).
I thought I had spent a lot of money on my camcorder – a Canon Vixia. But to hear that there was one that costs $63,000 blew my mind. I did a search on the internet for what that camcorder could be, but nothing – at least in 2014 seems to cost $63,000, like the mythical ZRX90.
“Suits” has used made up model numbers for real products before. In June, 2012, Louis Litt’s famous XJS 5000 Dictaphone made its debut. It turned out to be the Sony ICD-SX712 digital recorder. Read more about that at my post – The XJS 5000 Dictaphone From Suits. So it got me wondering if there was also a real camera behind the ZR-X90. I asked on the Sony forum, since the dictaphone was a Sony product. My replies were interesting, stating that it could be a package of multiple things adding up to $63,000. For example, it could be the Sony HDW-790 HDCAM High Definition Camcorder, which runs about $58K, with $5K worth of accessories. Or it could even be a Panasonic GH2 (an incredible DSLR camera that beat out a bunch of “professional” video cameras in the Zacuto Shootout) which costs a mere $1,000, with a really expensive lens. Yup, there are lenses THAT expensive. For example, the Fujinon 18-85mm T2.0 Premier PL Zoom Lens cost $87,000 clams! Amazing.
So my guess is that it is a Sony product, based on nothing more than the fact that they used a Sony product for the dictaphone. And right now, the only Sony camcorder I could find that costs in the same neighborhood as the ZRX90 seems to be the Sony HDW-790 HDCAM as I mentioned above.
I’d be interested in your opinions. Please leave a comment below if you think you have a better idea what the ZRX90 is.
Cheers!
Ken

Audio Recording Forensics On CSI

March 28, 2014 by Ken 1 Comment

We just finished watching the March 12th episode of CSI, and yet again, it involved something relating to audio recording. Usually it’s some totally impossible “isolating background sound” from a mono recording made on a phone or some other lo-fi device. They always seem to be able to remove everything but the exact sound that will solve the crime. Unless they already know what they are looking for, and have a sample recording of that thing, they wouldn’t be able to subtract the audio that wasn’t that. And even if they did have this sample recording, it’s doubtful they’d get anything very clear or defined. But that isn’t what this particular post is about.
In the episode, Long Road Home, a character recorded a demo at a studio, and the CSI team bring the audio up on their screen to analyze it. One of the team says, “look at the wave form here.” There was absolutely nothing odd about the audio he was pointing at. And the audio itself was mono. Any kind of commercial recording studio – heck, any kind of ANY kind of studio – would record a song in stereo, not mono. That was the first stupid thing. Then there was the part where they hit a button and magically hear some 2nd person who was singing backup in the studio and “bled” into the lead singers track. So if they were recording multitrack music, why did they mix it down to mono? Never mind that. Trust me when I say there is no way they could have eliminated all the main audio, which was guitar and a male lead vocal, and leave behind the voice of some other mystery person, also a male, who was singing into a different mic and being recorded onto a 2nd track. Gaahh! They also said the microphone was “omnidirectional.” But if you were recording a guitar and lead vocal along with a backup singer, who was supposed to be on a separate track, you would NOT use an omni. It would be exactly the wrong kind of mic to keep the lead somewhat isolated from the background vocalist so you could mix them. You’d use directional mics. Sigh. But I digress…again.
OK. OK. Some of you may be wondering why I say it is not possible, when you can fairly easily remove a lead vocal from some music recordings in order create, say, a karaoke track. In editing software, that is usually called “center-channel extraction.” Wanna know why it is called that? Because in a stereo recording (99.99999999999999999 – are you getting the idea? – 999999% of any commercial music recording since 1970), instruments and vocals and effects are spread across the audio stage from left-to-right. And the lead vocal is always (well, 99.99999% etc.) panned dead-center, which really means it isn’t panned at all. So with a bit of audio manipulation, like folding all the stuff left of center over and on top of the stuff right of center (like an audio taco), and then cutting out the part in the crease, then opening the taco again, you can leave everything but the lead vocal. So it might JUST be possible to hear some other voice that drifted in from left or right. But it would STILL be mixed in with the music, so it would be barely audible over the remaining music and certainly not clear enough for a “voice print match” or whatever other audio nonsense they dabble in on the forensic shows.
But the CSI folks didn’t have a stereo file. It was mono. That basically means that everything is panned dead center, by default. If you tried the trick of folding an audio taco on a mono file – well, you couldn’t fold it because there is no “left-to-right audio field” with mono. There’s only a string of audio up the center. OK, weird metaphor I guess. Maybe a blender is better. If you put a tomato, an onion, and a celery stalk into a blender and whipped it into juice, it would be impossible to “isolate” the onion after the fact, right? You did say “right” didn’t you? OK, that’s sort of what the CSI crew supposedly did.
Don’t you just love posts that get my inner audio geek all revved up? The bottom line is that you should not get your knowledge of audio recording and editing from CSI. Home Brew Audio is a much better bet;).

Sing Harmony Like Billy Joel And Jimmy Fallon

March 21, 2014 by Ken 2 Comments

On last night’s Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon had one of my all-time favorite singers – Billy Joel – on the show. They did something really, REALLY cool. They used an iPad looping app to create a 4-part harmony doo-wop group with just the 2 of them right there at the desk. See the video below.
I’ve been showing people how to sing harmony with themselves since I started this site. In fact, the desire to sing harmony with myself is the reason I became a recording engineer in the first place!
I demonstrate how awesome this can be on the Harmony Experiments page here: https://www.homebrewaudio.com/vocal-harmony-experiments/
But back to Billy and Jimmy. What they did was use a looping app, which Jimmy Fallon mistakenly called “The Looper.” It was actually the app called “Loopy HD.” The way it works is that you record a short piece of music or a short beat, and the app lays it back over and over again until you tell it to stop. Playing the same short piece of audio or video continuously, over and over again is called “looping,” hence the name of the app. Then while the first loop plays back, you layer a 2nd loop over it (yes, like overdubbing), like a harmony.
The main difference between what Billy and Jimmy did, and what I do, is that I don’t have a time limit on my tracks. Nor do I have to set a loop time (when using Loopy, or any looping program, you have to set a loop time and all parts have to be the same duration or they wouldn’t stay together). That’s mainly because I’m not using looping at all with my harmonies. I simply record one track. Then I start a 2nd track and sing along with the 1st. Rinse and repeat. Billy and Jimmy used about a 10-second loop, enough time to record 4 bars of the “wimoweh” part of the song “the Lion Sleeps Tonight. Check it out below:

If you have an iPhone or iPad (it works on both), you can download the app for $7.99 and start playing with it right away. It’s amazingly fun. And of course you can do more than just be your own doo-wop group. You can use it for beat-boxing, singing, practicing lead guitar parts (by repeatedly having the rhythm part playing over and over again), or any cool thing you can think of.
The first time I saw someone use a looper (though this was before the iPad) in a solo live musical performance was KT Tunstall doing “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” on The Today Show. It was just her, a guitar, and a “stomp-pedal” looper. She started out by recording her muted guitar strings for rhythm. Then while that was looping, she sang “woo-hoo.” Then while the guitar beat and the first “woo-hoo” were playing, she layered the harmony “woo-hoo” part. As soon as those 3 things were going, she just sang the song with her own 3 loops as her backup band! Pretty amazing stuff. The recording of the loops was part of the performance and took up only about 30 seconds before starting into the song itself.
Anyway, now you see the potential for hours of addictive fun using loops! Enjoy – but do not annoy your family and friends;).