--- Daniel James &lt;daniel(a)mondodesigno.com&gt; wrote: kick; AKG D12E <- good (this is the old square one which is better than the newer egg shaped model) snare; Sure beta 57 <- good hat; Sure 57 <- sucks for all cymbals toms; EV N/D 408 <- good overhead; Sure SM81 <- OK These are all relatively affordable microphones. I've got a slew of cymbal samples which are all run through a Nueman M 147. It's a versatile mic and for its quality pretty affordable, $1,500.00 U.S. The stereo field is highly critical in pop music which includes Brittney Spears, Death Metal and everything between. Drums are the most difficult and perhaps most important instrument in a mix. They establish the stereo field. They have the widest dynamic and Hz response spectrum. They generally are eight instruments bleeding into their neighbors microphones. All instruments are obviously critical but with drums a mistake = x 8. ron-bob07 demonstrates proper panning for building a stereo field. The remaining primary instruments can be panned within the drums as though they're on stage. Exceptions: * most keyboards are stereo * lead vox; Noon/Straight up. Backing vox; record everything at least twice. With backing vocals; if one voice, record twice and pan one of them hard left and the other hard right. This is called a mult. Extend that principle throughout all multi part harmonies. This is how pop music producers build lush wide stereo vocal fields. This principle also keeps vocal mixes balanced. Of course you have to arrange them but that's another story. On my little monitors the kick drum Interesting observation, thanks for letting me know. This sample is the result of a five minute drum mix/sound check. With the kick drum, I tried a new signal path; mic -> Solo Soundtrac (op and eq) -> Avalon Vt 737sp. The immediate result was awesome. I used the Avalon only for its tubes. No compression or EQ. Lastnite I did a black metal band and used the same kick drum signal path but spent five minutes getting the bottom end of the kick drum to sound right. Total time on that drum mix was about an hour with at least 30 mintes invested into tuning the drums. BTW, the amount of time I spend on drum mixes can be rediculously low. It should not be an indication of how much time anyone else could be forced to invest. During the last year my current band has written an album using MIDI instruments. We have begun the process of replacing all MIDI instruments with live players. Many of the songs have complex time signatures and tempo changes. With the ron-bob07 drummer, we have invested about five hours into drum setup and mix. This includes all new heads and tuning by three talented drummers. The takes all have to be start to finish with zero mistakes. Everything is done to a click. In about fourty hours of recording time, we have two keeper drum takes and those are the simplest songs. There are a miriad of variables and every situation is unique. Daniel, your observation for a lack of bass in the kick is likely my fault more than it is your small monitors. I'd put money on it. ron __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 09:15:50AM +0000, Daniel James wrote: This is common practice. Also switching to small "lo-fi" speakers in the control room and sticking a cassette mix in the car sound system to listen to on the way home from the session or wherever. Quite possibly... -- Anahata anahata(a)treewind.co.uk Tel: 01638 720444 http://www.treewind.co.uk Mob: 07976 263827

--- Joe Hartley &lt;jh(a)brainiac.com&gt; wrote: This is something that all of us experience. Joe, your statement is almost a direct qoute from the opening paragraph to a document on mastering that I've written but never finished. I probably don't have alot of mastering experience. Reguardless, I think your example is the point where mastering the audio needs to happen. If the mix sounds great in the control room, it can sound great on many systems. Our studio has control and mastering rooms. Each room has its own accoustical design for reverberation times and flat EQ responses and different monitors. If the mix sounds good in the control room, the mastered version sounds good in the mastering room and the mastered version sounds good in the control room, then we're approaching sonic potential. Basically what I'm adding to the many reference monitors discussion is room accoustics and mastering. What I'd suggest to Joe and all of us when we experience "sounds like garbage on other systems" is to move from mixing to mastering. Send these mixes through JAMin and even if you only have one room to work with you should expect very significant improvements in how the audio sounds on many systems and in many environments. But do not master until the mix sounds great. Always master control room mixes because compression and limiting ontop of compression and limiting will fail. I think it's a potential mistake to build a great sounding mix in a control room, discover it sounds bad in the car and then return to the control room and remix by pulling out bass energy. Sending the great sounding control room mix through equalization, compression, limiting and gain stages can help you control and keep that bass energy. My studio partner Bill and I recently designed and built a studio for someone. I have spreadsheets for the room accoustics design and photos of the construction. The photos are interesting but only for sound containment. I'll try to add these materials to my documents. I just haven't had time to make them presentable. The spreadsheet formulas are for simple cube shaped rooms. We're not dealing with angles and such. I think they are simple enough to be comprehendible and they could help audio engineers understand the distinction between mixing and mastering. Some of what I'm stating is probably beyound obvious for many of us but not for everyone and it doesn't become simple until we're exposed. If I'm to redundant and simple shoot or suggest I shoot myself. :) ron ====================================================================== __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com

I remember in a recording class the teacher talking about (I think this is the term)... ear fatigue. It's when the ears are exposed to sound for so long that they (litterally) stop hearing "correctly". I also remember the teacher warning us about eq'ing each individual part because then they may not fit into their correct spectrum. I guess what he was talking about is how each instument has a certain (eq) range that has it's part in the song. And eq'ing seperatly can make each instument sound (for example) "full", but then (together with other instuments) it sounds "muddy" because it's not supposed to have that wide of an (eq) spectrum. I see always see sound men listing to each drum, thinking that they are getting a great sound by creating a full sound for each drum. But then they don't say to the drummer "o.k., now lets hear all of it together". And those are the times when the drums sound big a big bloated wall of mush. Rocco

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 09:37:18AM +0000, tim hall wrote: Wasn't it three track, with lead vocal on one track and band in stereo on the other two? I liked the idea of doubling backing vocals panned hard L & R. The other thing to watch out for while having all this fun is mono compatibility. Lots of music still get played on AM radio or mono portables. -- Anahata anahata(a)treewind.co.uk Tel: 01638 720444 http://www.treewind.co.uk Mob: 07976 263827

Although this can be an effect in its own right - last week we were trying out LADSPA Tape Delay, trying to get the sound of a Watkins Copicat (explanatory picture follows for the post-analogue generation): http://www.chrisguitars.com/wem-copy.jpg Using a short delay and about 2 taps, we managed to get the sound we were after. Maybe we need a user-contributed bank of presets for all the LADSPA plugins - it's much easier to get started from a good basic effect. Cheers Daniel

On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 13:29, Vincent Touquet wrote: No, ladcca mainly takes care of reconnecting jack and alsa midi ports of all applications used in a session. liblrdf is the most promising approach to ladspa presets. Steve Harris released a new version recently which AFAIK improves support for ladspa presets. You can get it at http://plugin.org.uk/lrdf/ Unfortunately the documentation is a little sparse what exactly liblrdf is capable of - just my POV - wink at Steve :). I don't think that there is currently a ladspa host which makes use of liblrdf to store presets. AFAICT Ardour still uses its own xml format. Or am I wrong? I'm currently not subscribed to ardour-dev. Yes, there was a thread when Tom Szilagyi announced the first version of its plugins on LAD. And I'd like to keep this discussion alive, too. Jan

On Tuesday 02 March 2004 10:30 am, Daniel James wrote: Did you manage to faithfully reproduce that warm muffled warble of worn tape? I love that sound. And I hope you chose from a range of 4 set delay times too :-) It always amazed me how they were precisely the right timings nearly every time. Now that sounds like (sic) a really good idea. I haven't found the good documentation for LADSPA yet, I've been hosting them with ecasound and it would be useful to know how to specify parameters as well as names & numbers, which I have sussed. Any leads welcomed. I find some of the names of the plugins a bit obscure, not being a techie or sound engineer as such, I mean "Barry's Satan Maximizer" sounds great, but what does it DO? cheers tim hall

On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 10:40:00AM +0000, Daniel James wrote: There are actually some internal problems when you slow the "tape" down too far - you get some digital aliasing. Should be fixed, but these things take time. If people submit sound-quality bug reports those things get moved up my todo list, and there are things on my todo list that have been there for a year or more, so dont hold your breath :( Yeah. Its not exactly useful for many people, but there are a handful of people who really wanted it :) Sadly the documentation for it (http://plugin.org.uk/ladspa-swh/docs/ladspa-swh.html#id1408) is full of typos, but homefully you can make out what I meant. - Steve

On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 12:59:09 +0000, Chris Cannam wrote: The documentation is written in TeX (I tried embedding docbook in ladspa XML, but it was hard work and doing the maths in TeX is easier). I use perl+tth to build the docs. I could add URLs to the docs of each plugin to the LRDF schema though. - Steve

--- tim hall &lt;tech(a)glastonburymusic.org.uk&gt; wrote: And how about the talent that Wilson was working with. I was never really into their songs but the talent was insane. If Wilson was here now, I'd have to fight him. :) The engineer I learned most of what I know from is a master at timing delays, gated reverb lengths and bouncing these things across the field. Everything he does, I try to do. He's a master drummer so I've started playing the drums--monkey feel, monkey do. :) I guess the key to this type of thinking is to really feel the groove. For example, if the drum kit beat and conga track combined create a swing, maybe a reverse gated verb on the snare can be timed to open wide and stay open right to the conga swing note. The idea being to exagerate the relationship and emphasize the swing. It's hard for me to articulate what I'm trying to describe. Maybe it doesn't make sense. :) Exactly right. I worship building rock solid foundations. and possibly leave the bv's Decisions like this might go beyound the "foundation" and perhaps be dictated bye each song's requirements. For example, if the singer is a great lyricist and the story is compelling, I might decide to close mic the lead vocal and produce the person to sing/talk--think of whispering in your lover's ear while hitting the notes. With that type of print, I might compress that vocal 10 or 20 to 1 with a low threshold, fast attack and release. Basically smack the crap out of it so the compression is an effect and then mix it way up front in the mix. In this example, I want to hear the singer's lips smacking. Now, the backing vocals in this production could be heavily effected. This mix production I'm describing is no more or less interesting than what you are defining. The point is learning to hear what a song dictates. I suppose when engineers have a bag of mix tricks and know how to listen to songs then they can pull a rabit out of the hat and produce something that no one was hearing. :) I see we both love instrument relationships and arrangements. Sometimes, probably not often enough, I try to think in terms of building tension and expectation and then delivering the unexpected bridge/baseball pitch. If the batter knows your pattern, knows you're going to deliver a fastball down the middle and you throw the breaking ball, it's strike three you are out. I think listeners have an inate sense for what to expect next. They know a chorus is coming but if you deliver a breakdown bridge with the chorus vocal melody performed by picsacato strings and then cut back into the familar verse groove it could cause them to pass gas. :) On the A good friend of mine is a great piano player. Several years ago we recorded a batch of songs where one of them is a speed metal tune that includes his accoustic piano. He did a perfect job and I was especially happy because I know one of his peeves is people think they need distortion to create deathly havoc. :) If my recolectulator is accurate, I think we had Brazilian percussion in that arrangement. The chorus lyrics are pig latin--some of it off the back of the U.S. dollar, other lines we've heard in church, etc. I stole few old famous Elvis Presley lyrics for the lead vocal. The basic story is a goon in a bar that falls in love with a girl that is so drunk she's falling off the bar stool and of course he must save her. Definitely a death metal theme. Not! Well, it seems we've dropped your egg into boiling water. Hey, I love all the topics you introduced. Great stuff! Now I want to go listen to some Brian Wilson productions. ron This is __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com