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    13.02 2012

    Getting Too Timid With Mixing


     

    If you want a good mix, you must mix with confidence. To mix with confidence you have to both trust your ears and your mixing decisions. To trust your mixing decisions you have to have some experience and know a bit about what you are doing (to say the least). Where am I going with this? If you lean too heavily on things like presets or settings you read on an audio blog (like this one) then you’ll always mix timidly, which isn’t mixing at all.

    At our upcoming recording and mixing workshop in Nashville, we will be teaching the students how to mix quickly with purpose and confidence. Like I will show them, when time is short you can’t be timid, nor can you drag along crutches to lean on. Here are two reasons I see people mixing timidly.

    Leaning Too Much On Presets

    Honestly, I am a fan of plugin presets. I believe that they can be a very useful starting point for the mixer. Especially when working with an unfamiliar plugin. But that is about it, a starting point. They can show you what an engineer might do for a given situation. They shed some light onto the mixing process. But there are two reasons why you can’t continue on mixing only with presets. 
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    13.02 2012

    Dae Bennett Recording Tony Bennett


      Tony Bennett’s continuing success showcases the value of old-school recording techniques — and the talents of his engineer son Dae.
    Paul Tingen
    Tony Bennett recording his first number one album, at the age of 85!
    Photo: Josh Cheuse.
    It is never too late to have a first number one. Tony Bennett recently managed the feat at the tender age of 85, when his album Duets II topped the US Billboard album charts in the Autumn of 2011. Even more impressively, the album also made it to the top five in almost every other Anglo-Saxon nation, including the UK, and reached the higher regions of the charts in two dozen other countries.
    Not only is Bennett the oldest living artist to have a number one album, but he’s achieved it with a style of music — the pre-WW2 popular song crooned in jazz band, big band and/or orchestral settings — that was, for several decades considered a relic of the past. Bennett first achieved success during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, before undergoing a resurgence in the late ‘80s, flanked by his sons Danny and Dae, respectively his manager and recording engineer. His career has been on an upward curve ever since, as has classic big-band and orchestral vocal music, so the success of Bennett’s Duets, An American Classic, released in 2006 to celebrate his 80th birthday, was not altogether surprising. Produced by the legendary Phil Ramone, it featured an A-list cast of guest singers, including Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, Celine Dion, Elton John, Michael Bublé, Sting, Bono, Stevie Wonder, Diana Krall and more.
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    12.02 2012

    6 Common Home Recording Mistakes [Part 3]


      

    We all make mistakes in life, especially when it comes to recording. Yes music is creative and an artform, but there are still some legitimate things that aren’t wise to do. If you can eliminate the mistakes, you can get better recordings. So forget your pride, spend 5 minutes of your life learning and get to making better music in your home studio right now!

    If you missed the first four recording mistakes, catchPart 1 and Part 2 of this series and then come back here. I want you to avoid all six of these bad boys. Your recordings will thank me!

    Mistake #5 – Recording Too Many Takes

    If you’ve read my free eBook, you know I’m all about setting limitations in the studio. In my opinion, they are the key to unlocking creativity. The problem with modern recording studios and our all powerful DAWs is we can easily find ourselves recording a ton of takes for each part.

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    12.02 2012

    Dallas Simpson


      Why would a rock band play live at talking volume, and in a separate room? To give their audience the unique immersive effect that only binaural sound can provide...
    Sam Inglis
    Dallas Simpson manoeuvres a ‘voice pipe’ around his head, while Swimming frontman John Sampson plays on.
    It’s Friday night, and the packed cafe bar at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema is curiously silent. In the semi-darkness, a constellation of green LEDs shines forth. Projected onto the wall is what looks like a band rehearsal, except that a man is apparently performing t’ai chi moves with lengths of plumbing pipe.
    In fact, the 150 or so audience members are enjoying a unique spectacle: a binaural gig. The band, local heroes Swimming, are performing in the same building, but in a small lounge at the other end of a corridor where they can’t be heard from the bar. Instead, the only connections between Swimming and their audience are the microphones in Dallas Simpson’s ears. He’s the man prowling the centre of the performance space, now standing still, now bending over or spinning round or placing his ear to a suspended sheet of metal. A hundred and fifty sets of wireless headphones, LEDs glowing, are conveying exactly what Dallas hears to every single audience member.
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    12.02 2012

    Mixing Live Legends


      With a stellar client list that now ranges from Sir Paul McCartney to AC/DC, Paul Boothroyd has risen to the top of the live sound industry.
    Mark Cunningham
    Over the last 30 years, live sound engineer Paul ‘Pab’ Boothroyd has worked with some of the world’s greatest artists, including one of the ‘fab four’. 
    Paul McCartney’s return to touring after a 10-year break was big news back in 1989. With his best album in years on sale, the most successful songwriter of all time previewed his hot new band at an invitation-only pair of shows, in London’s compact and bijou Playhouse Theatre.
    It was at the second of these previews, on July 27, that I first shook hands with Paul Alexander Boothroyd, also known as ‘Pab’, Paul McCartney’s new front-of-house sound engineer. He would not only soon embark on a world tour — the first of many with the later-to-be-knighted icon — but also go on to mix AC/DC, Michael Jackson, the Eurythmics, Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, P!nk and country star Faith Hill.
    More than 20 years on, Pab continues to push the faders for his fellow native Merseysider, a length of unbroken, loyal service that few professionals have equalled, let alone surpassed. Given McCartney’s status, it’s easy to see how the hysteria surrounding each stop on a tour schedule often compares to that of a state visit.
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    11.02 2012

    6 Common Home Recording Mistakes [Part 2]


      

    I want you to make the absolute best recordings you can. That’s why this blog exists. One way to get better is to stop making dumb mistakes. We’ve all make them, but it’s time we make a course correction and get to better recordings. If you missed Part 1 of this series, head there now to see the first two big home recording mistakes. Then come back here and read on my friend!

    Mistake #3 – Out Of Phase Stereo Recording

    It took me a while to figure this out when I was getting into recording, but if you can understand this concept you will have crisper, and punchier sounding recordings every time. If you use two (or more) microphones to capture a certain source (drums, acoustic guitar) as opposed to one microphone, you introduce a potential threat: your tracks being out of phase.

    The idea is simple, without proper attention to placement the sound from your source could easily hit one microphone a few milliseconds before the other, causing it to be slightly behind in one track than in the other. The audio wave forms are therefore smeared as it were and you can have actual sound cancellation happening, causing your tracks to become hollow or thin. Not a good thing.

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    11.02 2012

    Big Fish Audio | Brush Artistry 2


      R
    ock drum collections are plentiful, but as soon as something slightly out of the ordinary is required, such as a comprehensive selection of brush samples, the options die off rapidly. The first Brush Artistry collection plugged a hole in the market, and the second builds on its success, being produced by the same team, comprising composer Kent Carter and drummer Patrick Campbell.
    5
    Campbell claims that he found other brush samples to be bright, tinny and thin, so he based his on warm-sounding jazz albums of the ’50s and used vintage kits.
    Supported formats include Acid WAV, Apple Loops, REX and RMX, with the WAVs alone amounting to nearly 3GB. The samples, which are categorised as fills, intros, endings, loops and snares, form as many as 68 construction kits. As is the way with construction kits, everything therein shares the same rhythm and bpm speed (there are 20 tempo variations), so that it can be combined in various ways to form coherent compositions.
    The number of samples in each kit is about 18, on average, which is enough to make a composition without it sounding too repetitive, particularly if a little DAW editing is brought into play here and there.
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    10.02 2012

    6 Common Home Recording Mistakes [Part 1]


      

    If you’ve just recently gotten into home recording, you’re probably making some of your worst recordings ever. No offense, but that’s just how it goes. You’re brand new to an artform that requires both technical skill, talent, and experience. You’re probably making a lot of mistakes along the way. But guess what, so did I! In fact, I still make mistakes. It’s all part of the process.

    Houston We Have A Problem

    That being said, if we can learn somethings that will minimize our mistakes and the pain involved, then chances are good we can get to some better recordings faster, right? Don’t worry, I’m here to help. While there are so many things that CAN go wrong in a recording session, today I want to highlight six of the most common “mistakes” I see home studio owners falling prey to and how if you reverse these, you can improve your recordings right away!

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    10.02 2012

    Vocal Production


      Just how do you achieve that extra bit of professional polish for your vocal parts? Find out with our in-depth guide...
    Paul White
    Any attempt to explain the process of vocal production in its entirety, with all the different genres, styles and subjective opinion that this would entail, is, to some extent, doomed to failure — there’s just no way to pack all that we have to say about this topic into a magazine article. But so critical is the role of the vocals in most contemporary music styles that we thought we should give it a go anyway — so whether you need help with arranging or performing, recording or mixing, there should be something here for everyone.
    One notable contemporary production fashion is to keep vocals sounding relatively forward and free from obvious reverb without allowing them to dry out altogether, and that’s one area we’ll focus on. However, along the way we’ll be throwing in a few other tips and tricks that will allow you to add variety to the vocals in different parts of a song while still retaining the illusion of minimal processing. I can guarantee that you won’t learn everything there is to know about vocal processing, but at the same time I’m sure that you will take away something useful that can be applied in your own mixes.
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    09.02 2012

    Get On Pitch Vocals Without Software


      

    I don’t care what the “purists” might say, a true mark of professional recordings is a singer who is on pitch and in tune. Now just how MUCH in tune the vocalist sings is completely subjective. But let’s be honest here. If your vocalist is off pitch in your mix, listeners are simply going to move on.

    That being said, the solution to on pitch vocals isn’t always pitch correction software, although it is a legitimate tool. With some simple fixes and sneaky moves you can help your singer deliver a great on pitch performance every time!

    It’s All In The Monitor Mix

    Plain and simple, the singer’s monitor mix determines everything about the outcome of his or her vocal performance. Obviously the better the vocalist can hear herself, the better she will sing. You want to spend as much time as necessary to help your singer feel comfortable. But here’s a dirty secret: you can control how on pitch your vocalist is without her ever knowing it.

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    09.02 2012

    Studio SOS


      This month’s challenge was to turn a heap of boxes into a fully working studio!
    Paul White
    In the box: there was plenty of setting up to do before Bill could call his room a studio!
    Bill Price took up guitar playing and singing later in life, to discover that he was actually a very capable singer/songwriter. After making a few recordings in home studios belonging to his friends, he decided to set up his own studio in a spare bedroom in his house in Stourbridge, in the West Midlands. After he’d sought advice from various quarters and checked the suitability of his proposed shopping list with me via a couple of phone calls, I agreed to help him set up his studio with a Studio SOS visit.
    So it was that, some weeks later, Bill called me to say that he had a pile of boxes sitting in his spare room, and to ask me to come and help him turn them into a functioning studio! He’d settled on an Apple iMac, Logic Pro and a Cakewalk UA25 EX two-input interface. He’d also bought a pair of Alesis Monitor 1 MkII active monitors and an Audio Technica AT2020A mic for his vocals. However, he hadn’t yet got a mic for his acoustic guitar, so I took a spare mic and stand along just to get him started.
    Bill’s room turned out to be fairly small, at around two by three metres and not much over two metres in height. He had a desk set up at one end of the room facing down the three-metre length, with a window to the right and a mirror-fronted cupboard to the left. A few guitars and other instruments inhabited the rest of the room, but first we had to deal with that pile of boxes!
     
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    08.02 2012

    Should You Mix With A Limiter?


      

    I seem to get this question a lot, “Should I use a limiter in my mixes?”. Usually what people are asking is whether or not to mix with a limiter on their master fader (mix bus). Some of the confusion may even come from people like myself who tell you to use a limiter for reference mixes. But that is very different than mixing through a limiter or limiting your mixes before mastering. Let’s clear things up.

    Why A Limiter Is Helpful

    In case you weren’t aware, a limiter is basically a compressor with a super high compression ratio. It is built to really turn down peaks, limiting the dynamic range, thereby allowing you to turn up the volume of your track. At it’s core, a good limiter can help make your mixes nice and loud. Sweet!

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