Yes "Roundabout" Isolated Guitars

Staying with our Friday isolated tracks theme, here's Steve Howe's isolated guitar tracks in "Roundabout," one of Yes's most famous tracks. The song is off of their breakout album Fragile, which catapulted the band into a worldwide headlining act. It's a long song with a lot of parts, so here are just a few of the things to listen for.

1. Listen to the acoustic guitar harmonics on the left and electric guitar fills on right during the first verse.

2. On the second verse, the acoustic guitar harmonics are replaced with a strum.

3. A slightly out of tune electric guitar takes over in first chorus.

4. Check out the mis-fingerings at 3:08 and 3:17, something that we'd probably fix if the song were done today.

6. Listen for the chair noise on the second intro at 5:15.

7. On the last verse the electric guitar doubles the bass.

8. Check out the strumming guitar on outro at 7:50, along with tapping on the body for a rhythm percussion effect.

9. The ending guitar line (the same as the intro) at 8:18 is doubled.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

The Tale Of Two Nine Inch Nails Masters

Here's an except from a story I posted on Forbes that looks at the strategy behind the dual master release of the latest Nine Inch Nails album. Keep in mind that it's written for an audience that's not audio sophisticated.

"Don't look now but Trent Reznor has done it again. Always ahead of the pack in some way, Reznor just took a stand in the the so-called loudness wars by releasing the new Nine Inch Nails album, Hesitation Marks, with two different masters; the standard compressed-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life master, and a less compressed "audiophile" version.

For those of you not aware of the battleground, the loudness wars are basically a result of the insecurity of record execs, artists, producers and audio engineers everywhere that if their song is played right before or after another that’s louder, the listener will somehow deem it inferior. As a result, there’s a constant battle that rages behind the scenes in mastering facilities everywhere in an effort to make every song sound as loud as possible, even to the point where a mastering engineer (the specialized boffin who puts the final audio sheen on a song mix) will get the job based on being able to make the song louder than a competitor.

This is a battle that’s been raging since the 50s, and has resulted in mastering engineers usually violating their own collective good taste and judgement in making songs as loud as possible just to keep working. After all, lose a loudness shoot-out to a competitor and you might not get chance at the next record that needs mastering." Read the entire article on Forbes.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

Mix Comparison: From Rehearsal To Master

Here's a video that came from The Music Producer's Handbook that shows the differences in how the mixes sound from rehearsal, basic tracks, all overdubs, final mix and mastered track. The song is "Feedback And Distortion" which I produced for the second SNEW album called We Do What We Want.

You can hear that the rough mixes are fairly close to the final mix, but the final mastered track (done by the great Eddy Schreyer at Oasis Mastering) is definitely a lot louder.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

A Revolution In Speaker Technology

The Ionic Speaker

Speaker technology as we know it has been around for about a hundred years, yet it's never really had a revolutionary product that's changed the basic electro-mechanical engine that's been used since the beginning. Sure there's been lots of evolution, as speakers of all sorts continue to be refined, and there's even been a couple tries at using lasers and even plasma to try to take speaker technology into the 21st century.

But now it looks like there may finally be something on the horizon that can actually change the way sound is reproduced for the better that can actually be manufactured. Enter the "ionic speaker," a transparent disc created at the materials science laboratory of Harvard University.

This is not actually a speaker or even an electronic device, it's a "reproducer" that consists of a thin sheet of rubber sandwiched between two layers of saltwater gel, which makes it as clear as a piece of glass. A high-voltage signal runs across the surfaces and through the layers that forces the rubber to rapidly contract and vibrate. What's different here is that unlike traditional loudspeakers, it's not electrons that are moving, but ions. That means that there may even be bionic applications for the technology (as the in the body as a reproducer) as well.

And by the way, the reproducer covers the entire audible range from 20Hz to 20kHz.

This won't be on the market soon, as there's still a lot of research as to the best materials to use for audio, but it's a magnificent and exciting start. It sure would be nice to rid ourselves of the clunky boxes we call loudspeakers for a newer and better technology.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

New Music Gear Monday: Shure KSM9HS Microphone

Anyone who's ever been in the music business has used a Shure SM58 on a live gig somewhere along the line. That workhorse of a mic has been going strong for over 50 years and can still be found working reliably on stages all over the world. The 58 sounds good but there are times when you really need a "premium" sounding vocal mic on stage, and one of the recent go-to units has become the Shure KSM9 condenser mic. Another version of this mic has been released though, that may end up being more popular than its predecessor.

The KSM9HS is unique in a few different ways, but the big one for me is that it's a dual pattern mic, just like the condenser mics that you use in the studio. But here's where it gets cool. The two patterns are hypercardioid (great for feedback rejection) or subcardioid.

So what the heck is subcardioid? It's basically a cross between a cardioid pattern and an omni pattern, where it has greater back end rejection than your normal omni mic. The reason why this is cool is that it greatly decreases proximity effect, so you don't get as much bass boost when a vocalist eats the mic.

The KSM9HS has a street price of around $699, which is pretty expensive for a live mic. On the other hand, there are some vocalists that will find this mic to be a worthy match. Check out the video below for more about the KSM9HS and its subcardioid pattern.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

Paul McCartney "Maybe I'm Amazed" Isolated Guitar Solo

Here's the isolated guitar solo from one of my all-time favorite songs. It's "Maybe I'm Amazed" from Paul McCartney's first solo album. Paul plays basically the same solo twice in the song and you'll here them both back to back. Here's what to listen for.

1. I suspect this was played through some sort of Fender amp since you can hear the built-in reverb boing at the end of his phrases.

2. You can hear some slight mis-fingerings and undeveloped technique, but Macca makes up for it with an extremely lyrical solo melody. Most guitar players with better technique would probably just wail with a lot of notes instead, but this is a solo worth remembering. It's stands out as much as the rest of the song.

3. Listen to the string noise in between the phrases. We'd trim these in the workstation today so you wouldn't hear them, but you don't hear on the final record anyway.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

An Old High-Res Audio Format Returns

I recently wrote on the Forbes blog about the potential problems that Neil Young's Pono high-resolution audio service might have when it launches. This is nothing against hi-res audio (I'm an audio person, after all, and have recorded my share of hi-res over the years), just an observation that the public always goes for convenience and not quality when it comes to formats.

No sooner did the article post when I read a press release that audiophile music retailer Acoustic Sounds launched superhirez.com, a site that offers DSD (Direct Stream Digital) downloads, among other types. DSD, if you recall, is the technology used on the highly-hyped but rarely purchased SACD disc that was launched in 1999. Until now, no company has offered true DSD downloads to my knowledge.

Acoustic Sounds actually started as a specialty vinyl pressing house and gradually morphed into the largest seller of SACD discs in the world. The company also sells hi-res album downloads both in Apple Lossless Audio (ALAC) and FLAC as well as DSD.

Right now the company has about 30 DSD download releases for sale (although more for the other formats), with albums by Shelby Lynn, Nat "King" Cole, Counting Crows, and Norah Jones the most recognizable.

Of course, you can't just download a DSD album and expect it to play. You'll need some software first and it'll cost you around $130. That means your investment in the format is more than just buying the files, so you really have to be committed to the format.

That said, today there are more hi-res audio formats than you can shake a stick at, and I hope they all survive. We really need to preserve the best quality audio every chance we get, and there's still no other audio experience that sounds better. I'm pleased that there are at least some people out there who think highly enough of audio quality that they're willing to pay extra (at around $25 per album) for a superior product.

That said, I still think that our best chance for a common high-quality audio format lies with Apple's Mastered For iTunes (MFIT) program, which considers any file that's 24 bit as hi-res but prefers a 96kHz files sampling rate. During a brief visit with my friends at Oasis Mastering yesterday, they said that most major labels now order MFIT mastered files on their orders, which is a major improvement from this time last year.

In the end, Superhirez.com is definitely cool, but Mastered For iTunes is where the high-quality action really is at the moment. If you want to learned more about how to prep your songs for MFIT, check out the Lynda.com Mastering For iTunes course. You can get a free 7 day Lynda.com trial, which you can use for lots of other programs and courses as well, here.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

The 440Hz Conspiracy

When it comes to tuning an instrument, we think of the standard A note at 440Hz as the reference standard, but it wasn't always that way. Prior to 1940 there were a variety of standards, although A=432Hz (also known as "Verdi's A") was the one most frequently used. It wasn't until 1940 that the US adopted A=440 as the standard, with the rest of the world following in 1953.

But why did the world change in the first place? For one thing, A=432 is supposed to be a more "natural" vibration based on the fact that it's divisible by 3, unlike A=440 which is only divisible by 2.

A=432 is said to just feel right, and when tuning without any pitch reference, trained musicians are said to automatically tune their instruments there, and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks have also been found to have tuned their instruments at 432. The science of Cymatics, which is the study of visible sound and vibration, is apparently on the side of A=432 as well, as you can see from the graphic on the left.

The physical nature of the two frequencies are pointed out by Dr. Leonard Horowitz in his paper Musical Cult Control, but he goes even deeper into what he thinks are the reasons why we went from A=432 to A=440.

Horowitz claims that there was a conspiracy between the Rockefeller Foundation and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in changing the standard because"herding the populations into greater aggression, psycho social agitation and emotional distress" was necessary to create a war mentality. Supposedly the Rockefeller Foundation had strong financial interests in weapons of war at the time, and of course the Nazi's had strong interests in, well, war.

But the ultimate test is listening, so here are two versions of the same piece - one tuned to A=432 and the second at A=440. See which one you prefer.



I liked the A=432 better, but then again, I believe that the guitar should be an Eb instrument because it just feels and sounds better. What do you think?

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

5 Tricks For Adding Delay To Vocals

 

Sometimes getting a vocal to sit right in the mix takes as much time as mixing the entire rest of the track. Just finding that right combination of space that makes the vocal sound more glamorous without pushing it back in the mix can be something that seems so easy, yet takes so much time to make work.

Here's an excerpt from the 3rd edition of The Mixing Engineer's Handbook that looks at 5 techniques to make that vocal work better with the track. I've also added a quote from my good buddy Dave Pensado (his interview is also in the book) about one of the techniques that he uses.

"Here are a number of techniques often used for particular mix elements. Don’t limit yourself to the examples cited though, as they can easily work for other instruments, vocals or program sources as well.

1. A stereo delay with a 1/4 or 1/8^th note delay on one side and a 1/4 or 1/8^th note triplet or dotted note on the the other provides movement along with depth and is a favorite trick of EDM mixers.

2. To simulate a vocal double, dial in a 1/16^th note delay, then modulate it (see the Modulation section of this chapter) so it slowly raises and lowers in pitch. If the modulation can be set so it’s random, it will sound more realistic.

3. For a quick vocal effect to give it some space and depth during tracking or overdubs, set up a mono 220 millisecond delay with a couple of repeats.

4. Paul McCartney reportedly uses a 175 millisecond delay on his vocals almost all the time.

5. For getting a dry vocal to jump out, use two bandwidth limited (at about 400Hz to 2.5kHz) delays in the neighborhood of 12 ms to the left and 14 ms to the right each panned slightly off center. Bring up the delays until you can hear them in the mix, then back it off to where you can't. Occasionally mute the returns to make sure it's still bringing the vocals out as they sit well into the rest of the balance. You can also time the delays to a 1/64^th note on one side and a 1/128^th note on the other.  

I like a vocal mostly dry, but then it usually doesn’t sound big enough. You want the vocalist to sound like they’re really powerful and dynamic and just giving it everything, so I’ll put an 1/8th note delay on the vocal but subtract a 1/16th, a 32nd or 64th note value from that 1/8th note. What it does is give a movement to the delay and makes the singer have an urgency that’s kind of neat. I put the 1/8th minus 1/64th on the left side, and put the straight 1/8th note on the right side. You can experiment with pushing the pitch up a little bit on one side and down on another too if your singer’s a little pitchy, since that usually makes them sound a bit more in tune. Sometimes putting the 1/8th note triplet on one side and the straight 1/8th note on the other, if you’ve got any kind of swing elements of the track, will make the vocal big, yet it doesn’t make the singer sound like he’s taking a step back.  Dave Pensado

To read additional excerpts from The Mixing Engineer's Handbook or other books, go to the excerpts page of bobbyowsinski.com.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

New Music Gear Monday: SoundRadix SurferEQ Plugin

Here's an idea that could totally change the way we think about equalization. The SoundRadix SurferEQ plugin is different from other equalizers in that it tracks the pitch of an instrument or vocal and changes the EQ on the fly, staying relevant to the music or program. This is some revolutionary thinking about equalization that for the last 60 years remained fixed and static.

SurferEQ uses a real-time pitch detection engine that triggers a low pass, high pass, bell, shape or harmonic filter (that's a new one) to make sure that the EQ is working at the right frequency during the song. It's available for Mac or PC in RTAS, VST and AU, and retails for $199.

Check out the video below to see it in action.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

Queen "Bohemian Rhapsody" Isolated Guitar Solo

Here's the most beautiful and passionate solo that guitarist Brian May played on Queen's magnificent "Bohemian Rhapsody." He's always been one of the most underrated players, both for his soulful playing and for his smooth-as-silk tone, and this isolated solo track shows him in all his glory. Listen for:

1. The amplifier noise before the solo starts.

2. The string noise in between phrases. We guitar players sometimes obsess over getting rid of it, but you never hear it when the other instruments are added to the track.

3. How unprocessed Brian's sound is. What you hear is a man with a guitar and amp, with no special effects added. He obviously knows how to drive his gear very well.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

The Pros And Cons Of M-S Recording

My pal and reader Gian Nicola asked about the pros and cons of M-S, or Mid-Side, stereo recording so I thought I'd respond with a passage from the upcoming 3rd edition of The Recording Engineer's Handbook (due to be released in October).

"M-S stands for Mid-Side and consists again of two microphones; a directional mic (an omni can be substituted as well) pointed towards the sound source and a figure 8 mic pointed towards the sides. Once again the mics are positioned so their capsules are as close to touching as possible (see the graphic on the left).

M-S is great for stereo imaging, especially when most of the sound is coming from the center of the ensemble. Because of this, it’s less effective on large groups, favoring the middle voices that the mics are closest to. 

M-S doesn’t have many phase problems in stereo, and has excellent mono compatibility which can make it the best way to record room and ambience under the right circumstances. In many cases it can sound more natural than a spaced pair, which is covered later in the chapter. If the source is extra large, sometimes using M-S alone will require too much distance away from the ensemble to get the whole section or choir into perspective, so multiple mic locations must be used. If a narrower pickup pattern is required to attenuate the hall sound, then a directional mic such as a cardioid, or even a hypercardioid, will work for the “M” mic. Just be aware that you may be sacrificing low end response as a result.

For best placement, walk around the room and listen to where the instrument or sound source sounds best. Note the balance of instrument to room, and the stereo image of the room as well. Once you have found a location, set up the directional mic where the middle of your head was. 

M-S Decoding

Listening to either of these mics alone may sound OK, or may even sound horribly bad. That’s because in order to make this system work, the mic’s output signals need an additional decoding step to reproduce a faithful stereo image. The directional creates a “positive” voltage from any signal it captures, and the bi-directional mic creates a positive voltage from anything coming from the left, and a negative voltage from anything coming from the right. As a result, you need to decode the two signals to create the proper stereo effect.

While you can buy an M-S decoder, you can easily emulate one with 3 channels on your console or DAW. On one channel, bring up the cardioid (M) forward-facing mic. Copy the figure 8 mic (S) to two additional channels in your DAW. Pan both channels to one side (like hard left), then flip the phase of the second ‘S’ channel and bring up the level until the two channels cancel 100%.

Now pan the first ‘S’ channel hard left, the second “S” channel hard right, balance the cardioid (M) channel with your pair of “S” channels and you have your M-S decode matrix.

A nice additional feature of this method is that you’re able to vary the amount of room sound (or change the “focus”) by varying the level of the bi-directional “S” mic."

To read additional excerpts from The Recording Engineer's Handbook and other books, go to the excerpts section of bobbyowsinski.com.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.