This post focuses on how to reduce the noise produced by gear, thus producing cleaner recordings.
Anyone who has worked on audio with a typical desktop PC gets to know the hum and fan noise of their PC very well. There are lots of different ways to get a quieter environment, from moving the equipment to custom silencing solutions.
This post focuses on describing MIDI - what it is and what it does.
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was created in 1983 to address the need for controlling instruments electronically. As synthesizers grew more and more common, it became more and more difficult to control them all. MIDI was created to allow musicians to control many devices from one ‘controller’ keyboard. It was also created with a number of relatively robust features to aid in the creation of digital music.
This post focuses on some tips for getting the most for your equipment when you decide to flip it on the market.
I worked in used music store for three years not only as a salesman but also as a buyer. It’s an interesting job, particularly in the city: I caught some thieves, made some really good buys and some really bad buys. I learned a lot about what makes gear sellable. Sooner or later, no matter how well you choose the equipment you use, you’ll be in a position to get rid of something (often for something better).
Read the rest of this entry »
This post focuses on capturing ambience by playing back and re-recording sounds in acoustic spaces.
The idea of piping sounds into a space and retracking it isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. Before the advent of reverb processors it was common practice to route audio to speakers in reverb chambers to achieve ambient effects. Now it seems rather quaint to do so, but there are a good number of engineers who simply don’t like using artificial ambience. And real rooms offer a very different, tangible process as opposed to the knob twiddling of ‘verb processors.
This post focuses on the trick of increasing the attack of sounds using gates.
Most people reach for EQ or compression when they want to add punch to their sounds. But I’ve found another way to accomplish a very specific kind of attack transient using gates. I sometimes use this trick to add attack kick drums.
This post focuses on the basics of equalization.
Equalization is something that most people are probably pretty familiar with on a basic level, having some EQ capacity in their car stereos and portable players. Essentially, EQ is cutting or boosting of frequencies or frequency ranges.
There are fundamentally two kinds of equalization: graphic and parametric. Graphic EQ usually has set frequency points with sliders to boost or cut at those points. Parametric usually has a set of moveable frequency ‘centers’ with a width control, combined with a cut and boost knob.
This post focuses on the various parts of a song and many typical ways in which they are arranged.
Over time several tendencies in songwriting have emerged as far as the arrangement of music is concerned. It all comes largely from classical music, which often is composed with attention to variations in musical ‘motifs’.
Read the rest of this entry »
This post focuses on using delays to subtly add or change the energy of a sound.
I’m a big fan of delays. They add a lot of the depth and texture that people usually grab reverbs to achieve without taking up as much of the space. This distinction helps avoid sandboxing your mixes in the 80s and 90s sound (unless you’re going for that, of course). Delays also can dramatically change the feel of a sound, particularly with drums, in very subtle ways. Often a delay can be used to add energy in a way such that the addition isn’t obvious, but when you remove the effect it’s apparent that something was changed. The original vocal effect was a 15 or 30 ips tape delay, after all (heard all over John Lennon recordings, for instance).
This post focuses on a technique for the tricky task of recording guitar and vocals at the same time.
One of the classic tricky engineering situations is recording guitar and vocals at the same time. Generally they bleed into each other and effects that make the guitar sound good make the vocals sound horrible and vice-versa. There are a number of things that can be done to isolate the two, including using a DI for the guitar, but I’ve found that there is only one really good mic arrangement that gets the job done.
This post focuses on a trick I learned in choir to avoid a large number of conflicting sybillances when stacking vocals.
If you’ve ever listened to a high school choir concert recording, chances are good that you’ve heard some outrageous sybillance happening. Getting fifty people to sing their esses at the same time is pretty much impossible. On thing I learned when singing in college is that you don’t need that many esses or hard consonants to make the word intelligable. In fact, only about 1/3 the choir really needs to sing them at all. If you’re singing ‘voice’, 2/3 of the choir can effectively drop the ess sounding c to sing ‘voi’. The result is a much cleaner presentation of sound. The same thing works in music production when layering vocals. Let one or two similar takes contribute the sybillant sounds while the others drop them. It works great. You can even edit out the sybillant sounds after-the-fact, if you’d like. Just add a short fade at the end of the word to make it sound more natural.
I did this in my song Vocal from my album, Sonoluminescence. You can listen to it here. I dropped almost all of the ess sounds from ‘voice’ in the backgrounds.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
