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Thursday, December 9, 2010

Getting A Bass Sound - The Drum And Bass Blend

I've been asked by a few people how I would go about getting a bass sound, since I mentioned that I'd approach things differently from the way Yossi Fine did in my recent Getting A Bass Sound In The Box post.

Actually, the sound of the bass isn't as important as the relationship it has with the kick and snare drums, since they all reinforce one another if blended correctly. Here's my approach, assuming that both the bass and the drums are recorded well and sound pretty good to begin with, which is key.

1) Bring up the bass and drums together and have a listen to how they work together first. Don't solo anything and especially don't solo, then reach for the EQ just yet. Just listen to see what's needed.

2) It's usually a good idea to take the high pass filter and set it to about 40Hz (maybe a bit lower, depending upon the Q of the filter) on the kick and maybe as high as 50Hz on the bass to get rid of any of the unwanted and unneeded frequencies down below that get in the way. You'd be surprised how much this one trick cleans things up.

3) While listening to both the bass and the drums, add some low end on the kick between 60 and 80Hz if needed. Some kicks also require a small (2-3dB) dip at somewhere between 400 and 800Hz. To add some definition, boost a little between 3 and 5kHz, but realize that whatever you do here might get in the way of the vocal.

4) The bass usually speaks best if any low end added is about an octave above the kick, so if the kick was EQ'd at 60Hz, then try boosting at 120Hz first. Keep in mind that it might sound better at 100 or 150Hz instead, depending upon the instrument, the song, the arrangement and the player, so try all those frequencies before you settle on one. Remember that you should be listening to the drums at the same time you're EQing the bass.

One of the problems that inexperienced mixers have is that they boost the very low frequencies (40-60Hz) of the bass first, which only muddies things up and makes it disappear on small speakers. A solid round low end with better definition usually comes from 100Hz upward.

5) For more definition on the bass, add a little 700Hz or so, or at the exact frequency that you dipped the kick drum.

6) For some snap or buzz, add some 1 to 3kHz on the bass.

7) Make sure than any frequencies that you boost on the snare haven't already been boosted on the kick and bass. 125Hz gives it some bottom, but if the bass is already boosted there you have to go a little higher or lower (usually higher) to make it fit. Add some 1 to 2kHz for attack and 10kHz for some snap.

8) Sometimes it sounds better on a song if the frequencies of the kick and bass are reversed, with the bass getting boosted at 50 to 60Hz and the kick an octave or so above it.

A little juggling of these frequencies should give you a great drum and bass blend. You can find a lot more on recording and mixing bass and drum sounds in The Mixing Engineer's Handbook and The Recording Engineer's Handbook.
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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

How Ma Bell Killed Audio Recording

I just read a great article about how the famous Bell Labs, the R&D arm of the original phone company, actually came up with multiple innovations way back in the 30's that could've started the information age some 50 years earlier than it actually did.

The story goes that in 1934, Bell Labs engineer Clarence Hickman  created a phone answering machine that used magnetic tape. Now keep in mind that the first known development of magnetic tape recording was 1935 by BASF, which was kept secret so it could be used by the German war machine. German tape recorders were only discovered by the Allies at the end of World War II. It wasn't until the late 40's that magnetic tape recorders became a commercial product (thanks to, of all people, Bing Crosby and his considerable financial resources) and it wasn't used for computer storage until the early 50's. The first viable tape answering machine came on the market in 1971.

So if Hickman invented a magnetic tape recorder before anyone else, why haven't we heard about it until now. Because Ma Bell, the phone company monopoly, killed it, afraid that such an innovation would hurt their business instead of help it. The execs at the company did such a good job of suppressing Hickman's creation that it wasn't found for 60 years, and only then by a Bell Labs historian.

Imagine what could've been if only the company had been less paranoid. Modern recording technology could've had a head start by at least a decade, if not more.

Read the entire article here.

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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Getting A Bass Sound In The Box

Here's a video that shows an interesting technique for getting a bass sound while mixing in the box. It's a Waves promo piece, but it has an different take on how to make the bass sound bigger and more distinct. I personally would probably approach it differently, but it's good to keep an open mind.



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Monday, December 6, 2010

The Sound Of Converters

It used to be that the sound of a DAW was dictated by the kind of A/D and D/A convertors you used, so much so that studios and engineers went to great lengths to buy the best, highest end units they could find. But as the years have gone by, prices of expensive chip sets used in converters have dropped so much that even the cheapest now uses almost the same components as the current best, which results in about the same sound quality.

This was recently perfectly illustrated in a shootout conducted by the excellent UK magazine, Sound On Sound, where they compared the new Avid HD Omni, and original Digidesign 192 IO, a Prism Sound ADA-8XR and a new Apogee Symphony I/O in a blind test.

While there were some differences heard between the interfaces, just about all the people involved admitted that they were splitting hairs to hear them, which I think is a good thing. While this may seem like a recipe for buying the cheapest unit possible the next time an opportunity presents itself, keep in mind that:

1) the sound of your system is culmination of your entire signal chain, not just the converters. Certain gear plays nice better with certain gear than other gear, which means that one unit might just sound better than anything else.

2) the feature set of each unit has now become more important than the sound quality, if they're all pretty much in the same audio quality ballpark.

3) you can still use the same components in different interfaces, but the way they're used can make a big difference. For instance, a bigger, better designed power supply with allow the unit to provide more headroom before distortion.

4) converters might not mean that much to your setup if you're mixing in the box.

Ten years ago convertors made a huge difference; today not as much. For once, quality gets better as time marches on.

Read the entire Sound On Sound article here.

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Sunday, December 5, 2010

"Gimme Shelter" - Isolated Vocals

This isolated vocal track from the Rolling Stone's great "Gimme Shelter" just came to light recently on the Dangerous Minds blog and it's a mindblower. On it we hear Mick Jagger, Mary Clayton and an uncredited third voice singing the song like you've probably never heard it before. Here are a few things I noticed.

1) What jumps out is how thick and long the reverb on the vocal track is. The verb is delayed so it stays out of way of the lead vocal a bit, but there's a lot more of it than I ever remember hearing on the record.

2) The other thing that jumps out is the third harmony vocal on the choruses in between Mick's lead vocal and Mary's high part. Never heard that before, but I like it.

3) It's interesting to hear how distorted everything is, especially on Mary Clayton's parts when she begins to belt it out.

4) Mary Clayton's part in the bridge is still great, no matter how many times I've heard it before. What a performance. Gives me chills!

UPDATE: Sorry, but this video has been removed due to a copyright claim by ABKCO. 



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Thursday, December 2, 2010

Michael Jackson's Vocal Lessons

One of the things that distinguishes a superstar from a star is the amount of work they put in. A star may be able to get by on superior talent alone, but a superstar strives to be the best, which takes constant, incessant work.

Below is a video of the late, great Michael Jackson having a voice lesson with celebrity voice teacher Seth Riggs via phone. Supposedly Michael warmed up for several hours and had a voice lesson before almost every vocal recording session. Of course, we all know the results.



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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Bruce Swedien - Mixing In Colors

When I wrote The Mixing Engineer's Handbook in 1998, I was lucky enough to get to interview the Godfather of recording engineers, Bruce Swedien. During our interview, Bruce talked more about the philosophy of mixing rather than the nuts and bolts. Here's an excerpt from that interview, where he talks about hearing in "colors."
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Is your approach to mixing each song generally the same?
I’ll take that a step further and I’ll say it’s never the same. And I think I have a very unique imagination. I also have another problem in that, I don’t know what the hell it is, somebody told me once, I hear sounds in color, with colors in my mind.  And I can frequently do EQing and so on and check the spectrum of a mix or a piece of music, if I don’t see the right colors I it, I know the balance is not there.
What do you mean?
Well, low frequencies, low sounds appear to my mind’s eye as dark colors.  Black or brown. Bass can usually be black or brown or dark purple. And then high frequencies are brighter colors. Extremely high frequencies gold and silver. And so, it’s funny, but that’s, that can be very distracting. Drives me crazy sometimes.
There is a term for it, I don’t know what it is. [It's called "synaesthesia"]
What are you trying to do then, build a rainbow?
No, it’s just that if I don’t experience and see those colors when I listen to a mix that I’m working on, I know that there’s either an element missing, or that the mix values aren’t satisfying.
How do you know what proportion of what color?
That’s instinctive. Quincy [Jones] has the same problem. It’s terrible! Drives me nuts! But, it’s not a quantitative thing. It’s just that if I focus on a part of the spectrum in a mix, and don’t see the right colors, it bothers me.  
I have a feeling it’s a disease, but people have told me it isn’t.  
How do you go about getting a balance? Do you have a method.
No, purely instinctive. Another thing that I’ve learned from Quincy, I think, that started with my work with Duke Ellington, is to do my mixing reactively, not cerebrally.  
How do you mean?
This is when automated mixing came along, I got really excited because I thought, “At last, here’s a way for me to preserve my first instinctive reaction to the music.”  And the mix values that are there, rather than, you know how frequently we’ll work on a piece of music, and work on it, work on it, and we think, “Oh boy, this is great! Wouldn’t it be great if it had a little more of this, or a little more of that.”  And then you listen to that in the cold gray light of dawn and it sounds like shit. Well, that's when the cerebral part of our mind takes over, pushing the reactive part to the background, so the music suffers.  
Do you start to do your mix from the very first day of tracking?
Yes. But, again, I don’t think that you can say any of these thoughts are across the board.  here is certain types of music that grow in the studio that don’t, you go in and you start a rhythm track and you think you’re gonna have one think, and all of a sudden it does a sharp left and it ends up being something lese. While again, there are other types of music where I start the mix before the musicians come to the studio. I’ll give you a good example of something. On Michael’s History album, “Smile, Charlie Chaplin.”  I knew what the mix would be like two weeks before the musicians hit the studio.  
From listening to the demo?
No. It had nothing to do with anything except what was going on in my mind because the orchestra, the arranger and conductor, Jeremy Lubbock and I had talked about that piece of music. And the orchestra that we were gonna use, it’s a big orchestra, and I came up with a studio setup that I had used with the strings of the Chicago Symphony many years before at Universal.  Where the first violins are set up to the left of the conductor and the second violins to the right, the violas behind the first fiddles and the celli behind the second fiddles, which is a little unusual.  So, I had that whole mix firmly in mind long before we did it.  



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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

The "Thriller" Intro - Bruce Swedien

Here's another Bruce Swedien video, this time from his keynote speech during Sweetwater's GearFest in 2008. In it Bruce discusses the intro to Michael Jackson's seminal single "Thriller."

Of even more importance is the beginning of Bruce's address where he talks about producer Quincy Jones saying before they began the Thriller recording sessions, "We've got to find a way to get people back into the record stores." What everyone seems to forget is that from 1979 to almost 1982, the record business was in a very bad recession. Disco had just burned out, there was no new trends on the horizon, and record sales were declining fast as a result. It seemed almost as bad as it is now, except for the fact that several things came to the record labels aid - the CD, MTV and Michael Jackson and Thriller.

When the CD format hit, suddenly everyone wanted to buy all of their records all over again, so the label's catalog sales became hot (which was a huge money maker), MTV pushed sales of new acts to greater heights, and of course MJ eventually sold over 100 million copies of Thriller, which certainly helped to bring people back into the record stores.

By the way, the historical perspective mentioned above is covered from two different angles in both The Music Producer's Handbook and Music 3.0: A Survival Guide For Making Music In The Internet Age.

Tomorrow, we'll take a last look at some words of wisdom from the great Bruce Swedien.



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Monday, November 29, 2010

Bruce Swedien On "Thriller"

This week we'll look at "the Godfather" of modern recording, Bruce Swedien. If you don't know who Bruce is, then that's an especially good reason to watch this video. Besides engineering Michael Jackson's biggest sellers, Bruce has engineered projects for such legends and best sellers like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Quincy Jones, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Patti Austin, Natalie Cole, Roberta Flack, Mick Jagger, Jennifer Lopez, Paul McCartney, Diana Ross, Rufus, Chaka Khan, Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, and Sarah Vaughan. His sense of instrument balance and ambient/effects balance is second to none, as you'll hear if you listen to any of the records that he's done.


Here's an interview he did with Dutch television station NPS about a year ago.


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Sunday, November 28, 2010

8 Ways To Get The Best Out Of Singers In The Studio

One of the hardest things in making a record is trying to record a vocalist who is uncomfortable. Even a seasoned pro sometimes can’t do his best unless the conditions are just right. Consider some of these suggestions from The Music Producer's Handbook before and during a vocal session.
  • Make sure the lighting is correct. Most vocalists prefer the lights lower in the studio and control room when singing.
  • A touch of reverb or delay in the headphones can help the singer’s comfort level with the headphones mix.
  • If you need to have the singer sing harder, louder or more aggressively, turn down the vocal track in the phones or turn the backing tracks up.
  • If you need to have the singer sing softer or more intimately, turn the singer's track up in the phones or turn down the backing tracks.
  • Keep talking with the artist between takes. Leave the talkback on if possible. Long periods of silence from the control room are a mood killer.
  • Try lowering the lights in the control room so they can't see you. Some people think that you're in there judging them when you might be talking about something completely different.
  • If the take wasn’t good for whatever reason, explain what was wrong in a kind and gentle way. Something like "That was really good, but I think you can do it even better. The pitch was a little sharp at the end of the phrase," lets the singer know what needs to be improved and makes her feel that you’re on her side.
  • Keep smiling.
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Thursday, November 25, 2010

The Purdie Shuffle

We talked about legendary James Brown and Steely Dan drummer Bernard Purdie and his "Purdie Shuffle" beat a couple times this week, so here's an explanation of just what it is from the man himself.






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5 Reasons Why Concerts Sound So Bad

Happy Thanksgiving for those of you celebrating the holiday in the U.S. I thought I'd repost something from a couple of years ago for the holiday. This is a pet peeve of mine regarding the bad live sound that we're forced to endure way too much these days.
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The majority of concerts really sound bad these days and 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), not the kick drum. And the overuse of subwoofers just makes a boomy venue all the more boomy.

So here are five reasons why 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.

2. Over-reliance on subwoofers. In real life the only time you hear 20-30Hz is during a thunderstorm, earthquake or other huge natural phenomena. Yes 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 make it sound "big" 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. We want 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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