This post focuses on an experiment with my new Focusrite Liquid Mix, with which I mixed and mastered a song of mine that was in need of polishing.
First of all, I will be out of town until the 19th… meaning that I won’t be making any posts here at TSB until then. But, I thought I’d offer you something to make up for it: free music!
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This post focuses on how to group tracks to save CPU or DSP processing.
When I first started mixing using a computer, I would throw up inserts on everything. Everything was processed independently. As you might imagine, my mixes were insanely CPU intensive and hard to manage. Soon I realized that many of the tracks were being processed in exactly the same way and that I didn’t need to have separate DSP processes on each track.
The solution? Groups (or auxes in Pro Tools land)!
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This post focuses on the use of analog tape’s warm, unique compression as an effect.
When engineers and producers started to make the switch from analog to digital, they found that digital was not only cleaner sound, but it was also somewhat unforgiving. Most producers were quite fond of ‘driving’ the tape a bit by sending it slightly higher levels than the tape was normalized for. Turns out that the sound produced by this overdriving was a subtle compression resulting from the saturation of the magnetic medium. If you try to throw signal at digital above and beyond what it is normalized for, you’ll end up with brick-wall distortion. This is one of the reasons why tape is considered by many to be warmer and ‘fatter’ sounding. Drums, in particular, work extremely well with tape because the compression allows for a rounding of the transients and a certain punch not typically found in the digital domain. I know some engineers who still track drums to 2 inch tape.
Digital captures exactly what it’s given, whether good or bad. As a result, piping in warm, punchy signal from an analog tape machine will be captured warm and punchy. So, if you have access to a high quality tape machine, why not take advantage of it?
This post focuses on the process of getting the vocal chain right for the given performer.
The signal chain for vocals is probably one of the most important production choices in pop music. Of course, it helps to have a healthy selection of devices to choose from. Every voice has unique qualities, some of which should be emphasized and some of which should be de-emphasized. The tools available to accomplish this are, in order of affectiveness: microphone selection, mic placement, and preamp selection.
This post focuses on the topic of using direct injection/input to bring clarity to traditionally recorded tracks.
When you were first starting out in the world of audio, you probably tried something along the lines of plugging a guitar or bass directly into your audio interface or mixer. I know I did this and learned very quickly that the tone that results is less than stellar or interesting. It’s extremely dry, lacks harmonic content, and sounds brittle. But, in the right situations, these very same qualities can be a godsend when blended with a regularly amped sound. Hence we end up with the technique of blending DI sounds with their amped counterparts, which is most commonly used with electric bass.
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This post focuses on the classic challenge of how to record a band in a single room and not have it sound completely awful.
Lots of us have small production studios and tons of bands have single room practice spaces. Inevitably the question arises: “How can I record the band live in a single room and not have it all turn to mush!?” There are some strategies for accomplishing decent results from this situation and, although it won’t sound like a record that was recorded in a multi-room facility or overdubbed, for some music that’s for the best. It’s an incredible challenge that can be really rewarding.
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This post is going to focus on getting a solid balance between the two main sources of bass in pop music: the bass and the kick drum.
Few things are better than mix that gets the low end right. It can be really tricky to accomplish (or downright impossible if the environment isn’t right). But, there are a few general conventions that can help in the quest for the right thump.
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.
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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