Music Production Tips – The Stereo Bus Blog

This post is going to highlight the ribbon microphone: the neglected and underutilized black-sheep citizen of the mic locker.

If I do a session without using a ribbon mic, I get cranky. What’s a ribbon mic? Why should I care? Ribbon mics are the stepchildren of dynamic microphones. Dynamic mics such as the Shure SM57, Electrovoice RE20, and Sennheiser 421 have circular diaphragms that are coupled to their transformers. This coupling of the diaphragm and the transformer means it moves slowly, producing a gutsy but somewhat unarticulate sound. Ribbon mics work in much the same way but instead of having a circular diaphragm, they have a thin ribbon element. This ribbon is not mechanically coupled to a transformer, producing a smooth, even vibration with a faster articulation. Ribbons are totally unique. These days everyone and their cousin has a large-diaphragm condenser and a collection of dynamics, but when you break out a ribbon mic you’ll turn some heads. Contrasting the clear, bright sound of condensers with the roundness of ribbons helps bring balance to the modern digital production sound.

Back in the day ribbon mics were the standard in the 30s, producing such classics as the RCA 44 and the RCA DX77. Traditionally these microphones had a substantial high-end roll-off that resulted from the need to protect the fragile ribbon element from being knocked or damaged by a strung gust of air. These days there are quite a few choices and many of these choices are employing newer materials that are more resilient, allowing less protective material. The result? Ribbons are more articulate than ever and still produce that much sought-after smooth, round sound.

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This post is going to focus on the subject of latency in the digital medium, mainly adjusting the audio buffer to achieve the results needed.

One thing that people who are new to the realm of recording on a computer will notice is that there is a lag between what goes into the computer and what comes out. This is due to the nature of how computers work. Computers are number crunchers. When audio goes into the computer it turns the audio into a string of digital information, ones and zeros. In order to play back the audio recorded, it has to convert those ones and zeros back into audio information and then present that information to you via the sound card. All of this takes time. That time is called latency.

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This post is about techniques for scouting and following through with potential clients.

Unless you’re an institution in the industry, whether locally or internationally, chances are clients won’t be calling you or knocking on your door for the chance to work with you. It used to be that labels would almost always choose the producers for a project. That’s not the case anymore. These days it’s more likely that the artist will have more of a say as to who they will choose to produce their material, especially if the artist is not signed. That said, record labels who have found success with a producer will often recommend that producer again for future projects. It’s just about impossible to walk in off the street and secure a production deal with a random artist. So how do you find artists and labels that are willing to talk to you?

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This post focuses on ideas for choosing the track order of an album.

You’ve completed your songs, all the details are done, the mixes are smashing, and you’re ready for mastering. But wait… we need to arrange these things somehow! An often overlooked and often very arbitrary step in the production process, track order can literally make or break a release. Countless albums simply run out of steam by having either too little variety or too many of the strongest tracks in the first half of the album. It’s very important to have a good variety of moods, keys, and tempos throughout. I’m going to organize this post by philosophy and general practices.

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This post is part 2 of 2 on audio data compression. The first part focused on lossy compression whereby audio quality is decreased and quite a bit of size is reduced. This post will focus on lossless compression whereby quality is retained and some size is reduced.

As I mentioned in the previous post, there are folks out there who are paranoid about their audio. They feel that anything that touches their audio will degrade the quality. These fears are unjustified in the case of lossless audio compression. Whatever goes into lossless compression is exactly what comes out of lossless compression. In fact, with most modern lossless formats, if you were to compress a raw audio file into a lossless format and then uncompress it back, the two files would be exactly the same, bit-for-bit. As a result of this integrity, lossless compression is perfect for applications where quality is more important than space or bandwidth like archiving or transfering masters. Many folks, myself included, keep lossless backups of their CDs so that they can recreate the audio from the source discs should anything happen to the originals. There also is an added benefit of being able convert these lossless files into any lossy format without having to re-rip the source media. It’s very convenient. But, I digress. For pro audio there are two main applications for lossless compression: archiving and the transfer of masters.

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This post will focus on lossy audio data compression: the types, the pros and cons, and how to get the most out of the most popular format.

In the audio world you will no doubt run across some very paranoid people who believe that anything that touches your audio will degrade its quality and, in the realm of analog this is often true. One world-class, platinum-caliber mastering engineer that I worked with was convinced that transferring my 24-bit broadcast wav files from my hard drive to his would cause fidelity loss. So, in the interest of easing his concerns, we ran the entire session directly from my drive. Now that digital has firmly seated itself as the storage and transfer medium of choice, it’s important to know what steps do and do not influence the quality of our audio. When something does influence the quality of our audio, it’s important to know when and how. There are, in the most general terms, two kinds of compression: lossy and lossless. Lossy compression reduces the quality of the material while lossless compression can reproduce the original source material perfectly, as if it were never compressed at all. This post is going to focus on the lossy side of things. Tune in tomorrow for a crash course on lossless.

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This post describes how to create your own multitrack drum kits by creating and layering samples from existing multitrack drum recordings. Despite the samples being sequenced, you’ll end up with separate, mixable tracks for each mic just like you would have from a live drum performance.

Samples are a reality of modern music production. Whether you’re recording a live band and need to augment a weak drum sound or you’re putting together a song that’s entirely created electronically, samples have become a indispensable tool for the producer. The most common application for samples is definitely percussion. One thing that kinda sucks about straight up samples is that they aren’t very flexible. With professionally recorded live drums you generally will have your choice of room, overhead, and close mic tracks with which to paint your the kit’s sound. A single sample is the equivalent of a single microphone – not too much to choose from. There ARE a big variety of sample packs available out there from hip hop kits to samples that mimic the feel and sound of live drums.

Despite the inherent limitations of standard sample packs, one of the coolest features of the more expensive ‘live’ packs is the ability to change the sound through the placement of virtual microphones in a virtual room inside the virtual instrument’s interface. I know the BFD series has this sort of flexibility. You can actually adjust the type and placement of things such as the rooms and overheads. Each of these virtual microphones can be mixed as if they were genuine tracks that you recorded into your DAW from micing an actual kit. But you don’t necessarily have to pay big bucks to get that kind of flexibility. Nor do you have to use someone else’s sounds. What I’d like to show you folks is how to roll your own multitrack drum kit with a virtual room track, virtual overhead track, and individual close mic tracks.

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As I have worked with artists and discussed what it is that I do with people who are not directly involved with the music industry, one of the things that has become very apparent is that not many people are familiar with the role of a producer. They listen to produced albums, love them, but are not aware of the crucial role the producer plays in the process of making a truly professional, effective record. I’ll admit that it’s a little abstract – producers do a lot of different things and not all producers do the same things. To boil it down to its essence, the key role of a producer is to provide the integrity of the project. By integrity I mean several things: producers are responsible for focusing the creative vision of the project, for acting as an intermediary between the artistic and technical worlds, and for overseeing the logistics of the project.

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