I am constantly saying that knowledge trumps gear when it comes to producing good sounding audio. Its actually pretty common for someone to record really bad audio using really expensive gear. That boils down to good old-fashioned not having the right knowledge. I am also always saying that you don’t need a lot of knowledge, or that the knowledge isn’t too hard for anyone to understand. I still stand by that. But that does not mean that more and deeper knowledge isn’t better. Quite the opposite.
For those who really want to dig into the fine details of audio, getting to understand the properties of sound and acoustics is an excellent thing.
This article by Neil Thompson Shade is an excellent primer on sound and acoustics. Not only does it cover some of the basics, but it also covers the myths and what Shade calls “outright errors” that pervade the audio industry.
Check out this interesting article at the link below:
http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/dbasics_acoustic_fundamentals/
Enjoy!
Ken
Recording Tips and Techniques
How Delay Effects Help Us Mix Audio
The use of delays in audio recording, either in between a sound and the reverberation that follows it, or between two otherwise very similar or identical sounds, is very useful for a number of reasons. But all these reasons have to do with the way our brains tell us which direction some sound is coming from, or how far away it is.
Thanks Mother Nature for that. These kinds of things help us to survive in the world, and understanding how our brains interpret sound location and distance can also help us do things to our audio productions in the studio to make the sounds more meaningful and rich to the listener.
The tips in the article referenced below are mainly focused on how we sense the front-to-back sources of sound. If you add these tricks to the other ways to make sounds appear to separate side-to-side (using the panning controls on a track) and even bottom-to-top (using EQ to help separate sounds with high and low frequency controls), you can start to create awesome mixes.
In Des’ article here: http://www.hometracked.com/2008/03/04/using-delays-for-3d-sound-placement/, he talks about these things and even provides a few audio examples. In one comparison, he makes a drum kit appear either closer or farther away by inserting a delay between the direct sound of the drum and the reverb that follows (if the reverb hits your ears after you hear the direct sound, the drums appear closer).
Have fun fooling other people’s neurons to make audio sound better!
Reaper’s 5 Tips For Using Plugins
There have been some really useful and awesome tips and tricks for recording by Reaper – tracking, mixing, and arranging, etc. Well here are more for you. In this article, you’ll see how to more efficiently work in the FX window, which is where you see all the plugins on a particular track. check it out here: 5 Tips For Using Plugins. http://reaperblog.net/2016/05/5-tips-for-using-plugins-in-reaper/
Should You Use A Click Track?
I always use some form of tempo guide, like a click track, when recording music. For one thing, it leaves open the option to add MIDI drums or percussion later in the project. But it also allows you to copy and paste parts of, say, a guitar part that may have had a buzz, or a screw-up. If the whole song is locked to the same beats per minute (BPM), it’s a lot easier to copy a section of it (say the same guitar chord without the buzz or screw-up) and paste it into another part of the song. And if you plan to send your part of a recording to a drummer who lives in another state, it sure helps him/her to lay down the drums after the fact if the song has a steady and consistent tempo.
So for me the only question is whether I want to use my recording software’s built-in click track ( I use Reaper for my main DAW), which is the tiny beep-bop sound made by the metronome, or put a MIDI drum part onto a separate track. It’s easier and faster to just turn on the metronome. But it’s hard for some people to “groove” to that mechanical clip-clop sound of a click track. So I prefer to just load up a MIDI drum kit, enter a kick, snare and hi-hat pattern, and just paint that across the track for the duration of the song (or more accurately, my estimate of the duration, since I use the click track or drum track to record the very first thing in the song.
But some folks don’t like to use any kind of rhythm or tempo guide when recording. Some even detest the sound of the built-in click track and simply cannot follow it. Others may say that a song recorded to a click track is too mechanical sounding, lacking the human variations in tempo. For some drummers it may seem to be an outright insult to suggest they can’t maintain a perfect beat for the duration of a song. That’s OK too. There is no rule that says you have to use a click track. In fact, if you have an entire band recording all at once (as opposed to recording piecemeal and having each band member add their part at different times), it’s often preferable. It makes things easier and eliminates two of the advantages I mentioned in the first paragraph (adding drums or percussion later and/or sending a track to a drummer after the fact).
I suspect anyone you ask about whether they prefer to record to a click track (or even a MIDI drum guide track) will have their own opinion, and it’s probably split 50/50. But I’d really like to know how you feel about it! Let me (and the world) know your preference by leaving a comment below. “Click Track: Yes or No?”
3 Audio Mixing Habits To Avoid
I recently read an article that has some tips on a few very common mindset traps you should avoid. As I read through them I realized that I have had them all at various times, and it never ends well.
The first bad habit is to assume your tracks will sound better once they are mixed with the other tracks. Now I actually don’t think it’s 100 percent wrong all the time. But in general, you should make each individual track sound as good as possible and not count on the “bad” to be less noticeable when in a crowd with other sounds.
One exception that comes to mind though is how sometimes individual tracks, when soloed out of a mix, may not sound great on their own after you have applied EQ and other effects to individual instruments to allow them all to be heard in a mix. For example, it is not uncommon to scoop out a band of frequencies of an acoustic guitar to allow a piano to poke through the mix better. The parts of the guitar that sound good blended with the piano may be the high parts, and the piano may fill the middle frequencies to provide a balanced mix. But when soloed, the guitar might be missing a bunch of the middle frequencies that the piano is providing, making it sound too high and thin all by itself. In this case, the guitar really WOULD sound better in the mix. There are lots of examples like this all over the frequency spectrum. So keep that in mind when avoiding this particular bad habit.
The next one was to assume your mix will sound better when it’s mastered. While it might be true, you should never count on it. In fact just never think this way at all, ever. Just mix your songs as if your mix is what will be heard by the public. Then all you have to do is leave enough headroom for a mastering engineer to do his or her job to make it even better.
The last bad habit is the assume everyone will listen to you mix in stereo. The idea here is that when all your tracks are panned, they may sound great. But when “folded” to the center things might very well not play well with each other – with frequencies possibly cancelling each other out or combining to become too loud, or both. So it is often recommended that you test your mixes in mono to see if you have these phase problems. On the other hand, I think in this day and age, it is actually true that most folks will be listening in stereo. Also, I remember reading an article a few years ago in Recording Magazine by a producer who said he didn’t care (and his name was not “Honey Badger:)). He said if someone listens to his mix in mono and it sounds all whacked out, so much the better. It might be interesting to the person who dared not listen in stereo. Of course, I paraphrase.
Anyway, read Graham’s article about these three habits here: http://therecordingrevolution.com/2012/08/27/3-dangerous-assumptions-in-the-studio/