Ok I have listened to the entire new DT album. I must say I’m not impressed. Don’t get me wrong, the musicians are amazing. That’s not my beef.
The engineering and production on this album stinks. It sounds very mid-rangey (if that’s a word). In my one car stereo all I can hear clearly driving down the streen is snare drum and vocals. Can’t hear the bass, and the guitar & keyboards just blend into each other to form foggy sort of “audio soup.” And it seems like the whole thing is damn near panned center. Mix in some stereo will ya?
The lead guitar parts are way too low. The snare drum is too loud and in fact the whole kit sounds very mid-rangey and thin. The kick drum doesn’t kick. The toms are kind of whimpy. And the whole kit was obviously recorded in a tight space and it is totally lacking “life” or some kind of wideness or ambience.
The vocals sound pretty good.
Did these guys engineer/produce it themselves? That’s just what it sounds like.
mediaguru Musicians, Rants, Recording
I ran across an old metal band I recorded years ago through myspace. They’re in the midst of hammering out a record deal and they’re in need of a drummer. Looks like I’m going to do some drum tracks for them here. When they do the real album they say I’ll do the tracks wherever they record (LA or somewhere). Sounds like a lot of fun.
If it goes well I could see doing some touring. I hated the last tour I was on but that was a little different. I hope I get along with these guys.
mediaguru Gigs, Musicians, Recording
Last weekend I had the pleasure of recording an amazing conert pianist. This lady is a stroke doctor during the day and a pianist on the side. She’s so serious about piano that she flies to New York and even to Paris to take lessons.
The setup
The hall is a great smaller venue which seats about 200 very comfortably. There isn’t a bad seat in the house and the atmosphere is great.
It’s quite simple, a Steinway in the middle of the stage.
There are may different ways to record a gig like this. If you want more of the “live” sound you could to an XY stereo mic configuration in front of the piano or even in front of the stage to get more of the ambience and the audience. I chose a more close micing approach because we were more concerned with the quality of the piano sound than the audience.
I used two Audio Technica 4050 large diaphragm condenser mics for a stereo image. I placed one over the low end strings and one over the high end. The concept is they’d share the center range and the left and right would be low and high tones respectively. I didn’t worry about a perfect 90 degree angle XY because they were far enough apart and so close to the source.
Since the recording was only two channels I was able to bring a nice small setup. I used an M-Audio USB Duo as my preamp. The Duo just hooks into the USB on my 17″ Apple Powerbook. My recording software of choice is Cubase SX.
My Cubase capture settings were 32 bit recording at 44,100 sampling rate.
Backup Backup
The small silver device to the right of my rig picture is a minidisc recorder. Whenever I do gigs like this where it’s live and you only get one shot at the recording, I run a 2nd capture device. If the laptop crashes or there’s a problem with the capture, I have a backup on the minidisc. The MD would certainly not be as high quality, but I’d have something.
The result
The performer was awesome and my rig captured her perfectly. I didn’t even get a sound check but my guess on her levels was perfect. I didn’t even adjust my input gain at all. The very peak of her volume level was 1 or 2 dB below peak.
mediaguru Gear, Recording
Hello fellow musicians and friends! It has been since September 2005 that the Pro Sound Blog Forum has been running. A hacker brought the site down completely. I had the same thing happen to two other forums I ran on the same forum software. One forum was quite large and I HAD to figure out how to recover it.
Long story short, I’ve recovered all the users and posts and installed a different forum software that is less “popular” and hopefully less prone to hacking. The only items missing are most likely attached image files and avatars so you’ll need to reload them. Other than that all is working! I’ll be working to make the “look” into something better down the road.
This board was never the biggest on the web, but it was a great spot for some very talented and smart musicians to talk about their trade. So I invite you to come back to the forum and let’s get this board rolling again!
The forum is now in a new web location: http://forum.prosoundblog.com
mediaguru Gear, Gigs, Musicians, Random, Recording
Since my switch from the dreaded blogger lame ass blogging software to WordPress I’m now able to take advantage of some new features here.
I’m now working on categorizing all the posts. I have 8 categories currently:
Boneheads: A category dedicated to stupid people and the things they do.
Gear: Recording gear, musicial instruments, computers or any gear I deal with.
Gigs: Stories about my gigs or other peoples gigs.
Random: A blanket category when nothing else works.
Rants: When shit pisses me off I use this category.
Recording: Recording studio war stories, recording techniques etc.
Uncategorized: Means I have yet to decide what category to put the post in.
Now some posts may have multiple categories. For example: A dumbass musician jumps on my stage and plays my drums. He’s drunk and he breaks my snare head and won’t get away from my kit. That post alone could be a combined boneheads, gear, gigs, musicians and rants. I can already see that the boneheads and musicians categories will be selected together many times.
I’m about 25% of the way through categorizing the old posts so be patient.
mediaguru Boneheads, Gear, Gigs, Musicians, Random, Rants, Recording
I do a little “consulting” now and then for people who can’t figure out why their recordings suck. This is one of those occasions:
This guy has a home studio and he’s got a TON of killer equipment. His gear is top of the line, worth thousands and thousands of bucks. But for the amount of gear he has, he can’t make a decent sounding recording. (Most crappy studio engineers think buying more gear is the answer, but it’s not)…
He has me listen to one of his recordings and sure enough, it sucks. It takes me about 7 or 8 seconds to figure out what his problem is. I reach down to his console and “do my magic.” BOOM! His mix opens up and all the sudden you can hear everything much more clearly!
He starts to freak out. “Wow! What did you do? That sounds so much better! You’re amazing!” I then inform him what a frigging PAN KNOB is. He had all of his channels panned dead center. $50,000 worth of gear and he doesn’t know what a pan knob is.
Someone shoot me now.
mediaguru Boneheads, Recording
One of my buddies is having hum problems in his home studio. He asked some advice on getting rid of hums in the studio. He is Q, I am A:
Q: First of all the outlet I have isn’t grounded, and there is only one in the room. So I know I need to get the electricity grounded.
A: You should have all the gear on the same circuit, and only ONE piece of gear grounded to the wall. Use those little orange lifters on everything else. If you ground to multiple locations that’s where the hum comes from.
Q: It’s still humming a bit if I run an extension from a grounded outlet, so I think that my next course of action would be to replace all the dimmer switches. But would this need to be by the circuit they are on? By vicinity if they are not in the same area?
A: The dimmers may cause a problem if they’re on the same circuit, or if you have guitars and other items which pick up the RF. Turn the lights off and see if the hum goes away.
Q: Route power cables separate from audio cables, and if they have to cross, do it at right angles?
A: If you have shitty cable I guess. I never needed to worry about that. I just had to worry about power supplies getting too close to each other so their magnetic fields interfered with each other. Get rid of the Radio Shack cable and get some Mogami or Canare cable.
Q: Any other suggestions? Have any of you had luck with power conditioners and such? Replace the Alesis RA-100 with a better amp? Run only balanced cable? Add isolation transformers? Buy new cable? Buy cases for the computers that are isolated? Buy LCD displays instead of CRT’s?
A: Maybe the CRTs might cause some problems. Turn them off and see if the hum goes away. That’s a similar situation to the dimmers. I’ve never had to go the power conditioner route. The RA-100 wouldn’t be the problem. Balanced cable can’t hurt, but I’ve had hundreds of unbalanced connections at my place with no hum problems. GET RID OF ALL BAD CABLE, GROUND CORRECTLY AND START FROM THERE.
mediaguru Recording
The vast amount of knowledge I have in analog recording technology is immeasurable. I’ve decided to open up my brain vault of information and techniques just this once to show you some of the amazing skills and knowledge I have in the analog world.
This image shows what is called the “put the screwdriver under the pinch-roller pin and pry it up so it pushes against the capstan hard enough to make the tape travel moderately at the correct speed” technique.
Only here can you get such precious and valuable information about the dying world of analog technology.
mediaguru Gear, Recording
A client brought in some old reels from the 50′s or 60′s. These are cherished recordings of his now deceased mother performing plays back in her college days. These tapes show some new ways of storing irreplaceable analog recordings.
The two newest and best ways of storing analog reels are:
- Partially wrap the reel in aluminum foil. Be sure NOT to completely wrap the reel as the desired “effect” will not be achieved. It is also best to use foil that was previously used to wrap your last remaining piece of pizza when you went out to dinner the week before. The grease from the pizza serves to coat the tape with a lubricant which ensures smooth running operation of your old Teac 4300 reel machine.
- Stuff toilet paper into 2/3 of the reel. It is crucial NOT to stuff the toilet paper completely around the entire reel, or the desired “effect” will once again not be achieved.
mediaguru Boneheads, Random, Recording
I got a call from a desperate band manager yesterday. They were recording in another “new” studio in town. Great, another shitty studio to compete with…
They wanted to pull the project and finish it somewhere else because the band “didn’t like the engineer.” It’s hard to get a quality album or recording done when there is tension between the engineer and the musicians.
I inquired about what the status of their recording was and what format it was recorded in. He couldn’t tell me what format so I couldn’t be sure if I could help them. Then he said something that shocked me: “All we have left to record is the drums.”
It was at this point that I realized their recording is probably bad. I informed him that typically the drums were the first thing to be recorded and you’re putting the cart in front of the horse. I pointed out that I had doubts about the studio and engineer they’re working with if the last thing they need to do is the drums.
He said “yeah, and he’s now saying the drum tracks are going to cost another $1200 than he originally quoted us.” These poor guys. They not only spend a bunch of dough for an obviously shitty studio and engineer, now they’re bait and switch victims that will have to fork out another $1200 to get their bad recording done…
Then again, it may be their fault for trying to save a buck by going to the “cheaper” studio to begin with…
mediaguru Musicians, Recording
