New Music Gear Monday: Sound Radix Drum Leveler

Digital technology has revolutionized limiters, enabling "look-ahead" algorithms to spot transients in the signal before they cause an overload. Now that same technology is being put to use with Sound Radix's totally unique Drum Leveler software.

Drum Leveler does a lot of very cool things very easily. For instance, if you work with drum loops, it will allow you to change the level of a drum hit within the loop. That means that if the snare of the loop is too loud or quiet, Drum Leveler allows you to look inside the loop and bring the snare level up or down.

Another thing that Drum Leveler does well is adjust the level of an individual track without having to use a compressor. That means that you can keep the level of a snare or hat consistent or even exactly the same, or change the volume envelope if you choose. While you're at it, you can also decrease or increase the leakage of a drum track, something that no other plugin can do as easily.

Drum Leveler also works with other instruments, especially when connected via the sidechain, as it provides much more control over dynamics and syncing than most gates.

Sound Radix Drum Leveler is priced at $149 and is available for all computer and plugin platforms.

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Frank Sinatra "Fly Me To The Moon" Instrumental Track

One of the great things about listening to isolated tracks is that you get a better sense of what's actually driving the song. While we tend to think that it's always the rhythm section (especially the drums), that's not always the case, as evidenced from the James Brown "Sex Machine" post of last week.

This week we find another great example in Frank Sinatra's classic 1964 "Fly Me To The Moon." You'll hear just the instrumental track without Frank's voice in the first video, then the final mix on the second. Here's what to listen for.

1. The music track is great - it's the Count Basie Orchestra and a Quincy Jones arrangement.

2. That said, this is a case where the music is elevated tremendously by the vocal. In fact, it almost sounds like a different song and doesn't seem to swing as hard without it.

3. Once again, the guitar establishes the groove laying down a steady quarter-note rhythm throughout the song.

4. The drums (especially the kick) are way up front when they play loudly (the playing is very dynamic), which is quite unusual for a big band recording of that era.

5. Listen to the beautiful long reverb on the flutes and horns.



Here it is with Frank's vocal. Check out the stereo spread.

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Why Do Concerts Sound So Bad?

Most every time I go to a concert I come with the same feeling - why did it sound so bad?

I've posted the following a few years ago, but it's still holds true things never seems to get much better. Concert sound reinforcement equipment is better than ever, yet we're frequently burdened with a mess of auditory goo that just sucks the enjoyment from a live event.

Unfortunately this happens much more than it should, and I think it's a big reason for many people not wanting to attend as many concerts as they once did. It's tough enough with the high ticket prices, the "convenience charges," and the high cost of parking and concessions, but if you add to that a less than perfect concert experience, it doesn't give one much incentive to return again any time soon.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of concerts really sound bad these days and it's not because of the venue acoustics. It's the mix.

I believe that an entire generation of soundmen grew up learning the wrong way - that the kick drum and snare are the most important part of a mix. While that may be true in some small way when mixing a record (it's really important, but not the most important), it's an entirely different thing mixing live sound, where the vocal should be king.

Common sense says that the softest thing on the stage (the vocals) should get the most amplification and attention. After all, that's really what people pay to hear (and who they come to see the majority of the time), not the kick drum. And the overuse of subwoofers just makes a boomy venue all the more boomy.

So here are five reasons why I think concerts don't sound as good as they could:

1.  The vocal isn't featured. The vocalist is usually the main reason why we're there. Mix it so we can hear and understand it, please.

2.  Over-reliance on subwoofers. In real life, the only time you hear 20-30Hz is during a thunderstorm, earthquake or other natural phenomena, and adding in too much (as is sometimes the norm) can be a big distraction. Sure, you want to make the music sound bigger than life by adding in all that bottom end, but it shouldn't be at the expense of intelligibility.  

3.  Too much kick. A function of the above two items, many soundmen seem to have a myopic vision of the kick drum, spending way more time trying to get a sound at the expense of everything else on the stage. Believe me, most drummers at the concert level are using drums that sound great already. It doesn't take that much effort to make them sound good.

4.  Low intelligibility. Again a function of the above items, many concert soundmen seem happy if you can just hear the vocal. But what the concert goer wants is to understand every word. Let's spend some time on that instead of the kick.

5.  Bad mixing habits. It seems like many soundmen never listened to the CD of the band they're mixing. Sure it's different mixing live. Sure you have some wacky venues to contend with. But 1, 2, 3, and 4 on this list leads to #5.  Now's the time to break the cycle.

I'm sure this list won't change the mind of a current concert soundman. But if just one kid starting out decides that it might not be the best thing to emulate that guy, we'll all be the better for it.

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Engineer Ed Seay's Approach To EQ

I was looking back at some of the interviews included in the latest edition of The Mixing Engineer's Handbook and found this from the great Nashville engineer/producer Ed Seay, who explained his approach to EQ in such a great way that I thought I'd post the excerpt.

Getting his start in Atlanta in the 70's engineering and producing hits for Paul Davis, Peabo Byson and Melissa Manchester, Ed has become one of the most respected engineers in Nashville, with hit making clients such as Blake Shelton, Lee Brice, Martina McBride, Ricky Skaggs, Dolly Parton, Pam Tillis, Highway 101, Collin Raye and a host of others. He's also a great teacher, as you'll see in this excerpt.

What’s your approach to EQ?
Ed Seay: "I just try to get stuff to sound natural, but at the same time be very vivid. I break it down into roughly three areas: mids, the top and the bottom; then there’s low mids and high mids.

Generally, except for a very few instruments or a few microphones, cutting flat doesn’t sound good to most people’s ears, so I’ll say, "Well, if this is a state of the art preamp and a great mic and it doesn’t sound that great to me, why?" Well, the mid range is not quite vivid enough. Okay, we'll look at the 3k, 4k range, maybe 2500. Why don’t we make it kind of come to life like a shot of cappuccino and open it up a little bit? Then maybe I’m not hearing the air around things, so let’s go up to 10k or 15k and just bump it up a little bit and see if we can kind of perk it up.

Now all that sounds good but our bottom is kind of undefined. We don’t have any meat down there. Well let’s sweep through and see what helps the low end. Sometimes, depending on different instruments, a hundred cycles can do wonders for some instruments. Sometimes you need to dip out at 400 cycles, because that’s the area that sometimes just clouds up and takes the clarity away, but a lot of times adding a little 400 can fatten things up.

On a vocal sometimes I think, "Does this vocal need a diet plan? Does he need to lose some flab down there?” Sometimes we need some weight on this guy so let’s add some 300 cycles and make him sound a little more important. It’s kind of contouring.

Also frequency juggling is important. One of the biggest compliments people give me is that they say, “You know, Ed, on your mixes, I can hear everything.” There are two reasons for that. One is, I’ve pushed things up at the right time when they want to hear it, but the other thing is I don’t EQ everything in the same place. You don’t EQ 3k on the vocal and the guitar and the bass and the synth and the piano, because then you have such a buildup there that you have a frequency war going on.

Sometimes you can say, "Well, the piano doesn’t need 3k, so let’s go lower, or let’s go higher." Or, "This vocal will pop through if we shine the light not in his nose, but maybe towards his forehead." In so doing, you can make things audible and everybody can get some camera time.

Also frequency juggling is important. One of the biggest compliments people give me is that they say, “You know, Ed, on your mixes, I can hear everything.”

There are two reasons for that. One is, I’ve pushed things up at the right time when they want to hear it, but the other thing is I don’t EQ everything in the same place. You don’t EQ 3k on the vocal and the guitar and the bass and the synth and the piano, because then you have such a buildup there that you have a frequency war going on. Sometimes you can say, "Well, the piano doesn’t need 3k, so let’s go lower, or let’s go higher." Or, "This vocal will pop through if we shine the light not in his nose, but maybe towards his forehead." In so doing, you can make things audible and everybody can get some camera time."

You can hear Ed's interview on episode #24 of my Inner Circle Podcast.

You can also read more from The Mixing Engineer's Handbook and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.

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The Making Of David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust Album

Major Tom has left the planet, and I can think of no better tribute to music legend David Bowie than an excerpt from producer Ken Scott’s memoir Abbey Road To Ziggy Stardust (which I had the pleasure of co-writing) about the making of what may be Bowie’s most enduring work - The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Ken co-produced three other Bowie albums from that time period (Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane and Pinups) and knew the Thin White Duke well. This is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of the book.

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“David had a few demos prepared for the album, but interestingly two of the songs that he decided to record were actually from that first day I reconnected with him (the day of the possible wardrobe malfunction nightmare) when he produced Freddi Burretti - “Moonage Daydream” and “Hang On To Yourself.” Even though David had originally written these songs for Burretti and not for himself (they had been eventually released under the name of Arnold Corns), David thought they might fit nicely in this record, and they did. One song that eventually made the record, “It Ain’t Easy,” had initially been considered for another album. It was a leftover from the Hunky Dory sessions and so was the only track on Ziggy that Rick Wakeman played on.

As with Hunky Dory, what was to become Ziggy was recorded at Trident [Recording Studios in London] in about two weeks, with another two weeks for mixing, but this time we had moved from 8 track up to the relative luxury of 16 track, thanks to the addition of a brand new 3M M56 tape machine. The sessions themselves weren't much different to any of the other Bowie sessions. The basics took about 4 or 5 days and were virtually the same for every track. It was only the nuances in each song that would vary. What’s more, nothing was recorded 100% live. There were overdubs on every track, and as is usually the case, some more than others. 

There were a lot of tracks recorded for Ziggy that didn’t make the album ( most of them I had forgotten about until I began mixing Ziggy for 5.1 release recently) - “Velvet Goldmine,” “Bombers” “Holy Holy” and Jaque Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam”. If I remember correctly, for “Velvet Goldmine” we put a lot of work into it and so it was fairly finished, “Bombers” was only somewhat finished, “Port of Amsterdam” was David with just an acoustic guitar, and “Holy Holy” was only a basic track and I don’t think we even got a good one. Originally one of the tracks intended for Ziggy was “Round and Round,” the old Chuck Berry rock n’ roll classic. Now that one had the least number of overdubs of all the songs that weren’t strictly acoustic and was completely finished.  It was actually supposed to be on the album until RCA decided they needed a single and that was the track that got kicked.

As I said before, David is an amazing singer, and 95% of his vocals on Ziggy and every other album I recorded with him were done in a single take. There was one completely calculated exception however. In the first part of the song “Rock And Roll Suicide” David sings very quietly, and so in order to optimize the sound quality, I had to crank the level of the mic preamp. He eventually becomes a power house and his vocal range was quite different for the latter part of the song, so I had to readjust the levels to compensate for that, hence the vocal for that song was recorded in two parts - each part a first take of course. I learned not to expect anything different.

As with everything Bowie, there are lots of myths and misconceptions and the so-called “sax section” on “Suffragette City” is certainly one of them. The fact of the matter is that it’s not a sax section at all, but a synthesizer. We thought we had finished the song but, as these things often go, it was lacking something. I'd been spending a lot of time messing with the ARP 2500 synthesizer that Trident had recently purchased and suggested we give it a try. I got the sound, and Ronno played the part that David came up with. We were not specifically going for a sax sound and to me it sounds nothing like saxes so it always surprises me when people tell me they thought it was a sax section. Then of course came the really big surprise when David told American DJ Redbeard during an interview that he played all the saxes in the song, but then again, lest we forget, we’re talking about Mr Bowie. One can never tell if he really didn’t remember or he was just telling the interviewer what he wanted to hear.

Of course there’s always a favourite track and on Ziggy it’s “Moonage Daydream”. All the songs work for me but that one just works a couple of percent more for some reason. David has said in interviews that he’s always been like a chef. He takes ingredients from all of the music that he’s heard, mixes it all together, and it comes out being his own. In this case, he took an idea from the B side of the 1960 Hollywood Argyle’s #1 hit “Alley Oop” called “Sho Know A Lot About Love,” where a baritone and flute play the same line together (well, a couple of octaves apart, but I think you know what I mean), and used that same concept for the solo of the song. The only difference on “Moonage” being that it was a recorder not a flute playing with the bari, both of which David played.

He was incredible in that he’d see a trumpet or an accordion or some other instrument in the studio and say, “Let’s find a way to put this on there.” We were so into rock and roll and wanted to remain true and pure, and we’d think,”Oh, God (covers his eyes and hangs his head), he’s not going to put that on it?” He’d do it and place it somewhere back in the mix and it would work. That amazed me. 

The same with takes. We’d do the second take and feel, “Now I know the song,” and he’d go, “That’s the one.” We’d all argue that we could do a better one but he’d say, “No, that’s the one.” After a while we’d begin to think, “We’d better get it by the second take.”Woody Woodmansey [Spiders from Mars drummer] 

Read more on Forbes.

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Studio Bass Player Paul ILL On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

The studio business has changed drastically in recent years and it's been especially hard on studio musicians.

My guest this week is Los Angeles studio bass player Paul ILL (Pink, Tina Turner, Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love and many more) who gives us a sense of being a studio musician in today's new music world.

In the intro I'll discuss the significance of dipping into Virtual Reality for concerts and videos, the surprising year-end Nielsen music sales and streaming data, and why a major defense agency is going back to vacuum tube technology.

Remember that you can find the podcast at BobbyOInnerCircle.com, or either on iTunes, Stitcher and now on Mixcloud and Google Play.

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New Music Gear Monday: The Marshall Smartphone

If you're a hard-core Marshall guitar amp fan, then you're going to love this one.

Marshall is expanding their product line to include a smartphone, and it concentrates more on music than most other smartphones on the market.

The Marshall "London" is an Android phone that's styled after its famous classic amplifiers, right down to the texture and feel. It has a 4.7 inch 720P display, 2GB of RAM, a removable 2500 mAh battery and a Snapdragon 410 processor like some of the best phones already on the market.

Unlike other phones, there are two headphone jacks at the top and two front-facing speakers, plus a dedicated M button on the top of the handset for instant access to your music, which it takes seriously enough to the point where there's also a separate processor just for audio. The London also supports the Bluetooth APTX connection, so wireless audio transfer will stay hi-quality. The phone also comes with a set of Marshall Mode in-ear headphones.

Oh, and the phone works on 3G, 4G and LTE as well.

The Marshall London smartphone is available for pre-order for $499 in the United States. You can find out more about the Marshall London here.

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James Brown "Sex Machine" Instrument-Only Track

Here's a real treat. It's the instrument-only track from James Brown 1970 classic "Get Up (I Feel Like A) Sex Machine."

The song was recorded live with no overdubs, but thanks to some clever processing, you hear the band like never before, with some vocal leakage in the background.

Here are some things to listen for.

1. The panning is interesting in that the bass is in the center, but the drums are a little to the left, piano  and horns hard left, and guitar to the right. The vocal leakage is also on the left.

2. The horns have the studio reverb while the guitar uses the amplifier reverb. Everything else is dry.

3. Most of the song is just guitar, bass and drums, with the horns punctuating the intro and turnaround, and a couple of brief piano lines.

4. For all we hear about the kick being so important in funk, you can hardly hear it in this song, yet the groove is awesome.

5. Speaking of groove, it's mostly coming from guitarist Catfish Collins (Bootsy's brother). Bassist Bootsy Collins plays a line that's not as disciplined as you might expect. The discipline comes from Catfish and drummer John Starks, as they play their parts that hardly ever move.

6. Listen for the distortion on the bass when Bootsy hits it hard.

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Listen To A Record Made From Concrete

Vinyl sales just seem to keep growing, but the concept of information stored in grooves doesn't have to be confined to just a piece of plastic. Here are a couple of examples of records made out of concrete that actually play.

The first was created to showcase the features of Ultra High Performance Concrete by German engineer Ricardo Kocadag and actually sounds pretty good. You can hear it on this Facebook video. Read more about it here.

The second you can hear below and was made by Kulish Design Company for the 2015 World of Concrete exhibition.

I don't see concrete catching on as a storage medium any time soon, but it does show the technology isn't limited to plastic.

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The 6 Categories Of Tours

If you've never been on a real tour, it's easy to think that they're all like U2 or Alecia Keys, but there are actually a number of different types, categorized by their duration. This excerpt from The Touring Musician's Handbook outlines the differences in each.

"Tours can be divided into six general categories of duration; local shows, one-offs, fly dates, mini-tours, full tours and corporate gigs. Let’s look each one.

The Local Show
Local shows are easy. You get to sleep in your own bed, you probably have a good bit of the day (at least the morning) to attend to personal matters, and you get to play in a familiar venue in front of friends and family. You can’t really call a local show part of a tour (unless you happen to be passing through town during a real tour), but these types of shows are frequently used as a warm-up before the tour starts. It’s a good time to fine tune the set list, hone the production, and tighten the band. It’s a sweet gig, but there’s never enough of them and they’re all too short. Fun, though.

The One-Off
The one-off is a single show where you return home after it’s completion. It can be relatively local or it can be half-way around the world, but regardless of how long it takes you to get there, you’re still only playing a single show.

The typical one-off generally means that there’s at least some travel time involved (you might arbitrarily say a couple of hours) which basically means that your entire day is consumed leading up to the gig. If you can’t do much else in your day but travel, sound check and play the show, you’ve experienced a one-off.

The Fly Date
The Fly-Date is the most desirable type of one-off that you can get, and means that you’re flying on a plane out of town for the show, then directly returning either the same day or next (it might take a little longer it your gig happens to be in an exotic place). You may do a series of fly-dates, but you’re always returning back to your home base after the gig.

Acts like Aerosmith and Madonna might only do fly-dates for an entire tour, but they have private jets that can take them exactly where they need to go and bring them back to their airport hub directly afterwards without having to worry about the rigors of commercial aviation. That’s not the case for the players in a touring band, who may have to fly commercially, although it may be in business or first class.

The Mini-Tour
Anything that’s two dates to a week on the road is considered a mini-tour. This means that you’re away from home for that entire duration and don’t see your bed at home until you return. If a band from Boston books a show in New York and then returns directly home after the gig, that’s a one-off. If it books shows in Providence and New Haven on the way and doesn’t return home to Boston after either one, that’s a mini-tour.

Mini-tours are inefficient and difficult to make money on since there are are few economies of scale with labor and rentals. The bus, bus driver, techs and tour managers usually cost more since everyone would rather take a longer gig for the job security, and a short gig might get in the way of that happening. Aside from the money aspects, it is a desirable gig, since you’re not away from home for very long.

The Full Tour
Once you get past a week out on the road where you don’t return home, you’re on a full tour. Tours can range from a week to a couple of years, in the case of a major act with a hit album. If the album continues to sell, the tour will keep going in order to take advantage of the sales momentum, even returning to play the same city a second and third time.

Many touring musicians refuse to sleep at home even when a tour travels through their home town, preferring to stay in the mood and rhythm of the tour. Even though it might feel good to sleep in your own bed, it can be mentally disruptive, not to mention financially harmful since the business manager might decide that you don’t need the per diem for the day since you’ve telegraphed that you didn’t use your hotel room. It’s OK to go home to do your laundry and check in on things though.

The Corporate Gig
The corporate gig is a somewhat modern event where an artist or band plays what amounts to a private party for a corporate entity. Once upon a time this type of gig was frowned upon and deemed a “sell-out,” but as the touring business has become more mature and financially aware, the corporate gig is now the industry’s cash cow. It’s now become commonplace for a Fortune 500 company to hire superstar acts and pay them sums that exceed their normal nightly take when on tour, but much smaller acts (including many that don’t have national visibility) benefit immensely as well.

Corporate gigs are normally one-offs and fly-dates, since most are so lucrative that they’re worth playing even if the artist or band is not currently on tour."

To read additional excerpts on The Touring Musician's Handbook and my other books, check out the excerpts section of my website.

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DARPA Brings Back The Vacuum Tube

Vacuum tubes once ruled the world, and they still do when it comes to guitar amplifiers, but by and large tubes seem like they've seen their day in the sun. Except that's not completely true, as there's a magnetron tube inside every microwave, and tubes are still found in communications satellites and even modern aviation radar systems.

In fact, tubes may soon be an integral part of the circuitry in even more equipment, as DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has instituted a new program called Innovative Vacuum Electronic Science and Technology (INVEST) to take tube technology to the next level.

Why? Tubes have an unmatched ability to generate high-frequency signals at a power that would melt a solid-state device. We're talking about operating frequencies at around 75GHz. And tubes are impervious to EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) coming from a nuclear blast which would fry solid-state gear.

There are two upsides for the audio business that could come about because of this new program.

1. Tube technology has been fairly static for about 40 years. An improvement in the technology may overcome some of its problems like the heat, efficiency and fragility.

2. Most audio vacuum tubes are manufactured overseas. Since the tubes that DARPA will create will be for national defense, they'll be manufactured in the US, which could open up another source for the tubes we commonly use.

It's pretty cool that tubes may be staging a comeback. It's just another case of what's old is new again.

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Gear Review: PSP 2445 Reverb Plugin

For the last few years on this blog, Mondays have been dedicated to previewing recently released gear. This year we're going to change it up a bit with some mini-gear reviews. The first one is on PSP's new 2445 reverb plugin.

Overview
The PSP 2445 is an emulation of both the EMT 244 and 245 digital reverbs. The 244 was intended to be a simpler version of the famous EMT 250 (which was the first digital reverb ever released, way back in 1975). A few years later EMT released the 245, which had a slightly different reverb algorithm and added predelay and first reflection controls.

PSP's 2445 is a dead ringer for both in that it has the sound and the look of the original 245, complete with the level meter, predelay, reflection, time (reverb decay), low frequency boost (at 100Hz) and high frequency roll-off (at 6kHz) switches, and algorithm selection (244, 245 or both).

The 2445 augments these parameters with input level, output level, and output mix controls, plus a hidden panel that provides access to several other tweaks. These include output channel assignment for each reverb engine, a high pass filter, low reverb time and high reverb time controls, width and balance of the reverb signal.

In Use
As you'll hear in the video, the 2445 sounds great even with it's default setting. This is because the original 244 and 245 were essentially very dark sounding reverbs due their 16 bit convertors and 18kHz (yes, that's right) sample rate. The result is a smokey sounding reverb that blends into almost any track.

In reality, it's difficult to make this plugin sound bad not matter what the setting. That said, I found that it does something very well that most other reverb plugins just can't keep up with, and that's a very short bright room.

Short bright rooms work especially great for electric guitars and for snare drums, but that's where most digital reverbs fall short. While a reverb might sound pretty good at a medium or long decay setting, if you back the decay time down to its lowest, you'll often find a boing or hollow feedback-type sound that's pretty unusable. This is were the 2445 shines though, as it only gets better as you back the decay time down and crank up the Reflections control. Check out the video below for more.

The PSP 2445 is available in VST, AAX and RTAS formats for Windows, and AudioUnit, VST, AAX and RTAS formats for Mac. It's currently available at an introductory price of $99 until January 9th when the price will return to $129.

Find out more on PSP's 2445 page. This is my new favorite reverb and well worth checking out.



By the way, if you want to learn more about my 101 Mixing Tricks Program, go to bobbyowsinskicourses.com.

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