Recording harmonica:

i’ve also had decent results with the harmonica player playing straight into an sm58/vocal mic, and driving (overdriving?) the preamp a little/lot. it’s an entirely different sound–more immediate and “direct” sounding (and can get brittle if you don’t watch out)……but one that may work depending on what the song/production calls for.

Some thoughts on recording acoustic guitar:

Vertical X-Y (SDC’s) about 1-1.5′ away (around the neck joint) to get the bulk, and maybe a LDC around the lower quarter of the soundboard.

Here’s a neat idea: Use a digital camera to capture your gear settings for easy recall later:

I’ve always seen mastering engineers complaining about the time they have to spend writing the settings of their outboard gears for recall purposes. Did any of you guys think about using a digital camera to take pictures of your gears and save them in the same project folder. That way, you should be able to recall the settings by looking at these pictures.

Tags: guitars

We’ve all experienced it: 3 seconds into a track you’ve never heard, you know instinctively that it was recorded and mixed in someone’s bedroom.

Amateur recordings often sound “amateur.” But what differentiates these hometracked opuses from professional recordings? It’s not just fidelity or sonic quality: Many competent engineers produce lo-fi or distorted mixes on purpose, when it suits the song. Rather, amateur recordings tend to share some key traits, telltale signs that the mixing and recording are the work of a novice.

You can learn to recognize and address these traits in your own recordings, and produce more polished, professional mixes:

(more…)

Tags: EQ, mixing, performance, production, snare-drum, vocals

Ticketmaster Invests in Music Site
Ticketmaster hopes to use links to iLike.com to help ticket buyers learn about new music, while iLike hopes Ticketmaster can help its users find out about scheduled concerts.

Record Labels Finally Sue Allofmp3.com
It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit turns out — as it was filed in New York, and Allofmp3 is a Russian company, meaning the laws in the US are pretty much meaningless to it.

Amazon set to flood digital music market
Already the internet’s number one destination for physical music sales, the most shocking thing about the news is that it has taken them so long. One explanation being touted is that Amazon will launch DRM-free, which will have required delicate and drawn out negotiations with nervous major record labels.

Fresh Sectors, Industries Power New Music Business
… music is now generating huge profits for a number of previously unrelated industries like mobile communications, part of a quickly-changing landscape. As digital assets grow, major labels have been feeling the pinch

Tags: newsdigest

Paul White (the editor of Sound On Sound) gives us the A Concise Guide to Compression and Limiting, a great introduction to the subject.

When it comes to individual tracks, it is pretty much routine to compress vocals, bass guitars, acoustic guitars and occasionally electric guitars, though overdriven guitar sounds tend to be self compressing anyway! The most important of these to get right is the lead vocal, because even modest dips in level can make the Iyrics difficult to hear over the backing.

The article is ten years old, so it deals with hardware compressors rather than plugins, which were essentially unheard of in 1996. But the principles of dynamics control haven’t changed, so the article is still relevant.

He also offers a handy chart of useful compressor settings. While the chart obviously can’t replace the judgement of your ears, it’s a good starting point for novices who find themselves preplexed by the possible combinations of attack, release, and threshold.

Tags: compression

Here are a couple of great articles on recording better vocal tracks.

Successful Techniques for Recording Vocals from Electronic Musician covers the entire process, from preparing the singer, and microphone selection, to compressing the final track. The 10 tips on page 6 also make a handy reference.

I want to dispel the myth that large-diaphragm condensers always make the best vocal mics. Sometimes they do, but often they don’t. Small-diaphragm condensers and moving-coil and ribbon-dynamic mics can sound incredible on the right singer. In fact, many of the revered vocal performances of the 20th century were captured by ribbon mics. Keep an open mind, and trust your ears.

From Sound On Sound, Achieving Better Vocal Sounds in Protools references specific Protools techniques. However, the tips on fattening your vocal sound are platform-neutral, and should be easy to implement on any system.

Send to a subtle chorus from the main vocal track and pan the return to the left. Then repeat it and pan that to the right, but invert the phase of the second one. This gives the vocal a nice wide effect in stereo, but the effect completely disappears in mono. Watch you don’t use too much of this effect, though, as the vocal might be too low when the mix is collapsed to mono.

Tags: vocals

Unless your recording room is acoustically treated, you probably capture “room sound” in your recordings.

This isn’t necessarily bad: Some rooms have a great ambience which adds natural depth to a mix. But the room sound in smaller spaces, like most bedroom and basement project studios, usually hurts rather helps a track. Ethan Winer outlines the main issues – comb filtering and room modes – in his article on recording spaces.

For several reasons, small rooms are especially harsh on vocals:

• Vocals tend to need compression, which raises the noise floor of a track and makes the room sound more obvious.
• The best vocal microphones have omni and cardioid polar patterns, so they inherently capture more ambience.
• Many singers like to stand a few feet from the microphone, allowing more of the room sound to leak through.

Enter the DIY portable vocal booth:

Douglas realized that for a microphone to sound good and tight you didn’t need to be inside a sound box – the microphone did. So, he built a simple 16” by 16” four-sided box out of foam core, lined it with acoustic foam (usually sold in 16 x 16 inch tiles), stuck his microphone inside, and recorded with it. Dubbed the VO Box, the results were stellar even in a “bad” room.

While the project as described is easy to build, you could probably simplify it even further by using a plain old cardboard box and rockwool or stiff fiber insulation.

Tags: diy, vocals

From the film Before the Music Dies, this is basically “anti-Hometracked”:

Tags: business

Omnidirectional microphones pick up sound from all directions, so an omni mic on a guitar cabinet or vocal will capture more of the room sound. Depending on your recording environment, this can be both good and bad.

Tags: microphones

What is parallel compression and when should I use it?:

parralell[sic] compression is when you double a track and compress one copy very hard, and mix it under the original. It preserves the dynamics of the instrument but makes it sound more solid.

Help me learn to properly mix tracks.

The key lesson I learned was to use EQ to give each instrument its own clear part of the audio spectrum. If the bass is filling the low frequence, CUT BASS on everything else. Cut treble on the bass. Think of the mix as a jigsaw puzzle of frequencies, with each instrument filling a part of the puzzle.

Widening a mix:

As a sound moves further away, the treble dies away faster than the bass frequencies, so the sound becomes less clear. This is the case when using reverb; a really distant sound has very little high frequency content in the reverberated signal reaching your ears. In terms of dynamics, distant sounds are dynamically flat; ie, very compressed, whereas close up sounds are uncompressed and have strongly varying dynamics.

If you charge someone for your time as a recording or mix engineer, don’t undercharge:

$20/song is absolutely unacceptable. From what everyone has been saying, numbers like that really tend to hurt the industry, especially for engineers and studio owners. I live in Orlando, FL and there’s a guy down here (I won’t name names) that runs a studio called Gridlock and charges $700/song. And to be honest, for his level of work and list of credentials, that is still a damn good deal.

Tags: business, compression, mixing

Regardless of your comfort level with EQ, it’s worth setting aside 15 minutes to read this fantastic article in Electronic Musician: Equalizers: Equal time

“The Bonham kick drum is the quintessential rock drum sound,” Martin explains. “I usually obtain it by boosting the frequencies between 120 and 240 Hz by about 4 dB or more. You’ll also need to roll off everything above 1.5 kHz. Sometimes, depending on the drum, you also might want to notch out 80 Hz a bit-not too much, just by 1 or 2 dB. Then add a little bit of 60 Hz, but again, just by about 2 or 3 dB.”

It’s an older article (in Internet terms, at least,) that I’ve read a dozen times over the years. And I get something new from it each time.

Immediately, you’ll notice that the male vocal gets an upper-frequency boost of 1 dB with a shelving EQ, while the female vocal requires a 3 dB shelving cut at 8.8 kHz. The male vocal also needs a 2 dB boost at 7.5 kHz and a 5 dB cut at 5.1 kHz. Martin told me that this was because the singer had a cold and sounded a bit nasal.

Tags: EQ, production