Recording Tips and Techniques

Record Your Voice And Sound Like A Pro

October 8, 2012 by Ken 5 Comments

When you record your voice, are you happy with the result? Well, let me ask it a different way because a lot of people simply hate the way their voice sounds to them when they hear it played back on a recording, regardless of the audio quality. That’s a different thing. I’m referring to whether the sound is nice and clear without a lot of noise in the background.
A lot of people don’t really know if their voice sounds “good” or not. If they can be understood and heard by others, they feel it is good enough. And it may be good enough for what you’re doing! I mean, if all you want to do is chat with family and friends over Skype or some other internet meeting, it may not be all that important that your voice sound “professional.”
But if you are recording your voice for any kind of business reason, such as for podcasts, videos, or voice-overs, then it might be time to listen critically to a recording of your voice and assess it for how professional it sounds. Is there a lot of hiss or other types of noise in the background? Maybe the audio is “thin” sounding? Heck, even then you might not hear anything wrong! I have a friend who is a successful internet marketer, video-blogger, and podcaster. She had no idea that her audio sounded bad enough that it made her sound like an amateur. It wasn’t until someone recorded her with a decent microphone that her eyes were opened (maybe the metaphor here should say “ears were opened,” but I digress). she didn’t realize how bad her voice sounded until she heard how it COULD sound with the right equipment – in her case, just a slightly better microphone.

The Microphone

Blue Yeti Microphone — Blue Yeti USB Microphone

Notice I said “slightly better microphone” above. When people think of home studio microphones the often think expensive, assuming they will have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars. My friend was using a USB headset mic costing about $35. Someone recorded her voice with a microphone costing only about $100 called the Blue Yeti, which is also a USB mic, meaning all you have to do is put it on your desk and plug it into your computer. No mixers or interfaces are involved. Anyway, when she heard playback of her voice recorded on the Yeti, she was stunned! “Oh my god,” she said. “I had no idea.” For only about $75 more than the headset mic she was using, her voice went from sounding “OK” to “Oh my god.”
The Yeti is a good microphone, but the good news is that my friend could have gotten the “oh my god” reaction with an even less expensive USB mic such as the Samson C01U, which you can pick up at your local Best Buy store for around $75 (only a $40 difference from “OK” to “oh my god” this time).

The main reason the Yeti and the Samson C01U mics sound so much better than the headset type mic is the size of the microphone element or diaphragm inside. The bigger mics are called “large diaphragm condenser” mics. There are other differences as well, such as the fact that headset USB mics are usually dynamic type mics which are typically less sensitive than condenser mics. But you probably don’t care much about that.
What is important is that if you need to record your voice and have it sound professional, a really smart way to make that happen quickly and easily (not to mention cheaply) is simply to use a large diaphragm condenser (LDC) type USB mic. There are many levels of “OMG” above even that of course, which involve different kinds of microphones at higher cost. But for most people, the upgrade to an LDC USB mic for less than $100. It is a small price to pay for professional quality voice audio.
I’d love to hear some before-and-after audio if you decide to make this change. Send in a comment below and maybe we can post some examples.
Cheers – and happy recording!

Home Recording For Non-Engineers – It’s Not Hard Or Expensive

October 7, 2012 by Ken Leave a Comment

“Home recording for non-engineers” is just my way of saying that it does not have to be hard or expensive for just about anyone to do it.
Now, before I jump into the wonders of home audio recording, allow me to state up front.
I have a Bachelor of Science degree and a Masters degree. I mention this to you not because I’m trying to brag or anything. Why am I telling you this? I only mention it because….wait for it…..reading about audio recording STILL makes my brain hurt!

Why Is It So Hard To Understand?

I’ve been doing it for, well let’s just say more than 2 decades and leave it at that. It’s how I make a living. And usually, whenever I see some tutorial on the web or an article in a trade magazine about audio recording, my eyes start to laze over and I feel like I’m going to slip into a coma. What gives?!
I got to thinking that if I react this way, how must it feel for someone who is just starting out with home audio recording? Someone who doesn’t have enough money to go to recording school or enough time, or both must rely on the mercy of book, article, and tutorial writers to gain their knowledge. And unless you just happen to be an electrical engineer or a music major (preferably both…apparently), one look at most of the literature on how to get started in home recording will probably put you off your lunch.

Audio Recording Is Easier Than You Think

I happen to believe that home recording is much, much, much, much (getting the idea?) easier to understand than most experts make it out to be. If you follow the brief instructions I’m about to give you, you’ll be able to make an audio recording in the next few minutes! This assumes you have a computer and something to use as a microphone, even one of those plastic PC mics will do. If you don’t have the mic yet, then tack on the time it’ll take you to dash to the store and pick one up for $5.00 or so. Ready?

Download and install the open-source (free!) program called “Audacity” from their website at Sourceforge. If you just put “Audacity” software into Google, you’ll find it. (update: if you don’t mind paying $60 for incredible software, try Reaper in place of Audacity).
Find the little hole with a pink circle around it on your computer sound card. It should be right next to the little hole with a green circle where your speakers are probably plugged in. Plug the microphone into the pink hole. (Update: Though this tip is still valid, you can get much better quality by using a USB mic – especially one like the $75 Samson C01U)
Open Audacity or Reaper.
Click on the button with the big red circle on it (that means “record”).
Put the microphone close to your lips and talk into it.
Click the button in Audacity with the large square on it to “stop” the recording (or the smaller Stop button on the bottom left of Reaper).

Is that It?

That’s it! You just made a recording and didn’t need a degree in math or engineering to do it.
Is there a lot more to learn? Uh-huh. Can it be taught as easily as the above? Yup, I think so. So if you’re looking for guidance on setting up a home recording studio, whether you want to do voice-overs, narrate an audio book, produce a podcast, or record music, don’t frustrate yourself trying to decipher the “how-to” articles and tutorials out there that are hyped up on jargon and “engineer-ese.” Find the ones that make it easy and fun.
They are out there – well most of them are here:). Good luck and have fun!
Oh, and if you’d like to get an idea of what our courses are like, click below to get some free videos to see how great they are (if we do say so ourselves):).

What Does It Mean to Mix Music Down?

October 7, 2012 by Ken 2 Comments

To mix music down means to combine several tracks of audio into a single file when doing multi-track recording. The term “render” means the same thing. It’s actually more often used these days in many audio software programs.

Multi-Track Recording

In digital audio workstation (DAW) program, such as Pro Tools or Reaper, you can record several tracks of audio and/or MIDI, and have them play back together. Multiple tracks can be recorded simultaneously or one at a time. That last option is very handy if you are a solo musician. You can play a guitar on track one, another guitar on track 2. Then sing on track 3, and sing harmony 1 on track 4. Then you can sing harmony 2 on track 5, and so on until you’re done. You can listen to your previous track(s) as you record each subsequent one. It’s very cool. But I digress.

After Recording Multiple Tracks

Once you have your 5 (or however many) tracks all recorded, and they play back nicely together with each track at just the right volume (because you adjusted the individual volumes of each track – a process called mixing), you’re ready to save your masterpiece and share it with the world. But wait. In what format does the world expect to see my masterpiece audio? Well if you are creating a CD, you probably want a wav file. If you’re going to be sharing the audio on the web, you’ll probably want an mp3 file. The point is, you’re going to end up with just one file. At the moment you actually have 5 (or however many tracks) separate audio files in your DAW project/session.

Mixing Down

Your DAW will have an option called either “mix down” or “render” (more common these days). What this option does is combines the output of all your tracks, at their current volume relative to the other tracks, into one audio output. It’s like putting lots of things (like 5 audio files) into a funnel, and having only thing (wav or mp3 file) that is a mixture of the 5 sources come out the small end. See the picture on the right, which pretty much sums up (no pun intended…OK, pun intended) mixing down.

Where Does The Term “Mix Down” Come From

The term to mix down comes from the idea that you have many bits of audio spread across many different tracks when recording. But ultimately you’ll need to combine all that stuff into one audio file that someone can listen to.
Even in the old days, when we were recording on very wide strips of magnetic tape, a mix-down session would happen at some point.
Then the recording engineer would transfer all that audio onto a 2-track tape (one “track” for the left channel and one for the right channel for stereo). That tape was much much thinner and could be played back on some consumer machines (you did own a reel-to-reel machine back in the day didn’t you?). But more importantly, these tapes were used on the machines at mastering houses. See our post – Mastering a Song – What Does It Mean? for more on what “mastering” means. The mastering engineers would then transfer that mixed down audio to records or cassette tapes.

Few People Really Say”Mix Down” These Days

The phrase “mix down” is actually kind of phasing out since most people do so much stuff on computer now. I’ve mentioned a few times that people now often use the term “render” to mean the same thing as “mix down.” I believe that this is at least partially because we use the term rendering when doing the same basic process in video production. And since there is now a lot of cross-over between video and audio in the software of both worlds, terminology is becoming more standard. Just know that if you see the term “render,” it means the same thing described in this article as “mixing down.”
You can learn how to mix down your own audio, as well as tons of other awesome audio tips and tricks, in Reaper software in the Newbies Guide To Audio Recording Awesomeness 2: Pro Recording With Reaper tutorial course. Now go forth and mix down or render your masterpiece.

5 Audio Recording Tips – Part 2: Recording Loud and EQ

October 6, 2012 by Ken Leave a Comment

Girl and EQ This is Part 2 in the series 5 Audio Recording Tips For Newbieswhere I tell you about the 5 things I really wish I had known about audio when I first started recording it. This way you don’t have to wait for years to find out about them! In the last (which was also the first:)) article I talked about stereo. Yes, even in this day of surround and 5.1 or 7.whatever, stereo is still very important.
In this post I want to tell you about tips 2 and 3, recording a good strong signal and understanding the seemingly baffling concept of EQ (short for “equalization” which is just about as confusing a moniker as it can be for what it describes).

2. Record As Loud As You Possibly Can

Noise, like the tools in your garage that you haven’t used since last century, will be with us always. Technically, noise is any sound in your recording OTHER than the thing you tried to record. It could be a bird outside your window, computer fans, lawnmowers, or all the electrical junk that is a fact of life when you use electric stuff. Generally speaking, the less noise, the better your recording. OK, so why do I wish someone had told me this at the beginning? I mean, it’s obvious isn’t it? As with so many things, “knowing about it” and “knowing what to do about it” do not always go hand-in-hand.
A LOT of programs are available for reducing noise in audio recordings. But the truth is, once the noise is in already in your recording, it’ll be very difficult to get rid of. Allow me to give you an example. Podcaster Pete goes to lots of trade shows and records interviews he on his iPod to publish on his website monthly. Before publishing, however, he sends his raw audio to an “audio guy” to have it turned into something publishable. But when said guy opens the audio and sees the signal on the computer, he is amazed by how quiet the recording is! It barely even registers on the playback meters. In order to even hear it at a reasonable volume, he has to increase the volume of the entire file, noise and all. Then, he hears the voices talking, but it’s on a backdrop of god-awful hiss and crackle. The only way forward now is use digital noise reduction tools to try and filter out the hiss as much as possible, which leads to a passably listen-able interview, but one that sounds a little like it was recorded underwater, a typical artifact of noise-reduction.

The bottom line is this: The best way to fight noise is to limit how much of it gets into your recording in the first place. In order to get the best quality possible when recording, make sure you feed the recorder a loud enough signal. But you have to be careful. Too loud, and you’ll get distortion; too quiet, and you’ll get too much noise.

You can only do so much to FIX a noisy recording after the fact. So what could Podcaster Pete have done to make a supremely better recording to start with? Some might say, “dude, just stop recording with that inexpensive mic going into your iPod!” Sure, he could buy a “digital field recorder” for between $200 and $400. Or he could find a way to make the recording LOUDER in the first place by feeding his iPod more signal, which is a faster and cheaper solution. My guess is that Pete wanted to avoid being TOO loud and overloading the input (a good idea!), but in doing so, he erred on the side of recording at too low a volume. THAT is almost as bad, since you have to crank the volume on both the tiny signal AND the noise in order to hear anything.
The bottom line is this: The best way to fight noise is to limit how much of it gets into your recording in the first place. In order to get the best quality possible when recording, make sure you feed the recorder a loud enough signal. But you have to be careful. Too loud, and you’ll get distortion; too quiet, and you’ll get too much noise.

3. EQ…That Thing You Never Knew Quite How To Use

[captionpix imgsrc=”http://homebrewaudio.co/wp-content/themes/eleven40/images/Smiley_Face_EQ-250.png” captiontext=”EQ Frequency Slider Smiley Face”]
Have you ever seen one of these things? They used to be common in “entertainment systems.” Right along with your CD Player, Cassette Player, Record Player, amplifier, and “tuner” (meaning…”radio”), would be this other big boxy thing with nothing but a row like 30 vertical (meaning “uppy-downy”) slider controls across the face of it. These sliders had little square button-like thingies that you could slide up or down. They usually started out in the middle (at the “zero” mark). About the only thing they seemed good for is making funny patterns, like smiley faces, or mountain ranges, by moving the sliders up or down in the right way. Besides maybe making you feel better by having your stereo “smile” at you, I really don’t think anybody ever knew what to do with one of these things. With a scary name like “graphic equalizer,” it sounded so important. It also sounded like a good name for a “rated-R” action movie, but that’s another story. Anyway, you had to make everyone think you knew why you had one, so you pretended to know what it did. But in reality, you felt safer just leaving it alone to sit there with its straight row of slider buttons right down the center, the way it was the day you brought it home because it came with all the other stuff.
You are probably familiar with some kinds of EQ without realizing it. You know those controls on your music player labeled “bass” and “treble”?” That’s a crude EQ! If your graphic EQ box had only 2 little sliders on it, it would be the same thing. One control makes the sound “bassier” (the low sounds) and the other makes the sound “treblier” (the high sounds). I always laugh when I see someone turn both controls all the way up or down. They have accomplished absolutely nothing that the volume knob wouldn’t do. If both (all) the sliders are up, you just turned the radio up. Congratulations. An EQ is only useful if you can make shapes OTHER than straight lines with the sliders.
So now you’re wondering what the heck an EQ IS good for aren’t you? Well for one thing, it turns out that our ears lie to us! Can you believe it? I know! It’s crazy, right? Every human has lying ears. I was floored when I first heard. See, it turns out that there are all kinds of sounds out there in the world that we can’t hear! As a matter of fact, MOST sounds are inaudible to humans. The only sounds humans CAN hear are those in the range between 20 hertz (abbreviated as “Hz”) and 20,000 Hz. A “hertz” is a measure of how often (or “frequently”) something shakes back and forth (or “vibrates”) in one second. Sound is just energy that makes air particles shake back-and-forth. When these air particles vibrate with a frequency of between 20 times and 20-thousand times per second, it makes a sound that is in the “range of human hearing.” Though if you’re 21 or older, good luck hearing things above 16,000 Hz;) (where the so called “teen buzz” or “mosquito frequency” lives. Confused? Ask a teenager.
That’s part 2 of the series. In part 3 we’ll reveal some wacky-but-true stuff about EQ.

5 Audio Recording Tips For Newbies – Part 1: Stereo Or Not?

October 5, 2012 by Ken Leave a Comment

The following is a list of 5 really important things about audio recording that would have made my life soooo much easier if I had known them when I started with my first home recording studio. Hopefully this article will be of great benefit to you if you want to learn home recording. This is part 1 in a series.
Since there is so much awesomeness in these 5 audio tips, I’m going to break them into 3 different posts so they can sink in better:).

1. It Is Only Stereo If The Sound From The Left Speaker Is Different From The Sound Coming From The Right

I THOUGHT I knew what “stereo” meant. Heck, when I was a kid that’s what we called our music players. “Hey, turn on the stereo and play some Queen.” It just means coming out of both speakers (left and right), right? Now this may sound silly, but just because you have sound coming from both left AND right speakers does NOT mean you have a stereo signal. Forget about dictionary definitions for a second. THIS is what you need to know: It is only useful stereo if the sound from the left speaker is different from that coming from the right. And get this… to be truly effective that difference must be so slight that we aren’t consciously aware of it!
Let me clarify. If you listen closely through both speakers, you’ll hear that most music has different stuff coming from different sides, like the lead guitar part coming completely from the right speaker, and the rhythm guitar coming completely from the left. If you turn the “pan” button on the stereo all the way to one side or the other, you can’t hear the other guitar at all… or maybe only very faintly. But everyone knows that right? Well that still isn’t really the COOLEST thing about stereo. So “what is?” I hear you cry.
This: a single instrument (or voice) that somehow comes from the speakers with some differences between the left and right parts of the audio, is WICKED cool! You’ve heard us talk about the magic of audio? Well THIS is one of those magical things. An entire chapter (or book) could probably be written about this – and we will go into lots of depth in the tutorials. But the basic idea is that the human brain picks up on differences in sounds on left and right UNCONSCIOUSLY if the differences are subtle enough. This is NOT some freaky-deaky new-age hooey! Modern recorded music (in fact our very survival as a species… but that’s another book) depends on it.
Let’s say you have a recording of a piano that, for some reason, was recorded in mono (maybe you only had one microphone). Even though it is possible to tell your recorder to “record in stereo,” that just means it is going to split the audio into two “identical” sounds, and send one to the right channel and the other to the left channel. This is NOT a stereo signal, based on our definition above. Remember why? Correct! There are no differences in the sounds coming from left and right. If you were to play this recording through headphones, you’d notice piano sound coming from both speakers, but your brain would tell you that there was only one lonely, rather thin-sounding piano, right in front of you.
If you remember your vocabulary, or just read a lot of Readers Digest, you’ll know that the word, “mono” comes from the Greek word, “monos” meaning “single” or “alone,” also meaning “not stereo.” BUT if you take one of the two identical piano signals (one going left, the other going right still), and delay it in time by just 10 milliseconds, you’ll still THINK you’re hearing only one piano, but suddenly it will sound bigger, fuller, nicer. You can increase the delay by up to 40 milliseconds for an even wider sound, and still your brain will think it’s just one single piano that sounds much better than before. THAT is magic (at least I think so)! It isn’t until the two sounds get well over 40 milliseconds apart in time that we start to hear two different and distinct sounds.
Discovering this principle of audio enhanced the quality of my recordings immensely, as it will yours when you learn all the ways you can make use of it. The above example used only “timing differences” to create this man-made (fake?) stereo signal. But other differences like pitch, EQ, etc. can also be used.
Tune in next time for part 2 of 5 Audio Recording Tips For Newbies when I will tell you about why it’s better to record LOUD (just not too loud) and what the heck people mean when they say “EQ.”
Cheers!
Ken