Thursday, February 16th, 2012
Producer, engineer and host of Ronan’s Recording Show, Ronan Chris Murphy has released Audio Recording Bootcamp, a 99¢ eBook for charity. Go get it: Audio Recording Boot Camp
Ronan’s unique perspective and down to earth advice on recording and producing makes it a really enjoyable read. In just a few days of it’s release it’s already ranking highly in Amazon’s charts.
“Audio Recording Boot Camp” is a for charity book, eBook and video series presented by Recording Boot Camp.
Culled and updated from many articles and essays over the years, Audio Recording Boot Camp features over 40 pages of recording advice and perspective from Ronan Chris Murphy. 95% of the net proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to the recording program at Phoenix House, a center dedicated to helping teens with drug addiction and uses music recording as a tool to help with recovery.
Go get it: Audio Recording Boot Camp
Posted in New Product Announcement, Producing, Recording | 3 Comments »
Monday, February 13th, 2012
Introduction
T-RackS 3 is a suite of high-quality digital and analog-modelled VST/AU/RTAS Dynamics and EQ processors, for mixing and mastering. T-RackS can also be used outside of your DAW as a standalone mastering application. Version 3.5.1 is the latest at the time of this review.
T-RackS Standard comes with the 4 ‘classic’ processors and metering suite as individual plugins also available within the T-Racks Shell or standalone.
T-Racks Deluxe has all the same functionality but adds a few more processors for a total of 9 including two analog modelled devices, the Fairchild Limiter and Pultec Tube Equalizer.
Each of the processors are also available for $99 each. The two newest additions to the T-RackS family – Black 76 Limiting Amplifier (modelled after Urei 1176), and White 2A Leveling Amplifier (Modelled after Urei LA2A Tube compressor/limiter), are only available as add-on purchases.
The decision to offer the individual processors was based on user feedback and common use. When T-RackS 3 was first released it was considered a mastering plugin, but users started liking the effects for mixing as well. Splitting up the system outside of the T-RackS Shell has made things much more convenient. (more…)
Posted in Mastering, Mixing, Plugins, Review, Software, Virtual Effect | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
In this article I’ll explain how I use Mid-Side processing on stereo sources for practical or creative effects.
Mid-Side?
Two channels of audio can be combined in a way that gives us control over what is the same in each signal, the middle, and what is different, the sides. The middle is where the kick drum, snare, bass, vocals and a lot of other instruments are, the sides have any hard-panned instruments and spatial effects like reverb. It can be pretty interesting to listen to music like this, there can be a lot hidden in the side channel.
MS is also a stereo microphone technique using a cardioid microphone facing the source and a bidirectional mic turned 90 degrees away just picking up ambience. In this situation the two signals would need to be decoded into stereo. The side mic signal is duplicated, polarity inverted and the two side signals are then panned hard left and right. This is not a true stereo mic technique but can sound very nice. The balance of mid and side signals can be adjusted as needed by changing the level of the 3 tracks.
You can manually encode and decode stereo files to MS and use mono plugins to process mid or side individually. A lot more plugins have an MS mode now. Many of the modules in the T-Racks suite allow mid side processing, as does Ozone, a few compressors and equalizers and a distortion also come to mind.
You can do this for subtle or crazy effects, its a fun way to experiment with plugins and get some unique sounds.
Loud and wide
For a recent mastering job I used a Fairchild compressor plugin in MS mode (Lat/Vert) to compress the middle and increase the level of the sides. I did this in parallel so I could blend the effect in easily. I was also using this to get a lot of extra loudness. You can call this parallel MS Compression.
Compare the master without the parallel MS compression, then with, then the parallel compression soloed.
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Parallel Mid-Side Compression with Fairchild
No more messy verb
I had someone ask about clearing up the middle of a mix when using a lot of reverb. Using Mid-Side Compression on the reverb return can work well. Compress the middle more than the sides and increase the side volume if you want more width.
Here is an example of that on some drums. The drums are Steven Slate playing in KONTAKT. The whole kit is sent into Valhalla Room. With the Fairchild after the reverb I’m lowering the middle by 2dB and raising the sides by 2.
Here you can listen to this effect with lots of reverb on the drums.
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An now with MS compression on just the reverb bus.
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There is NO compression on the drums themselves, I’m only compressing the reverb return and widening it.
Wacky effects
Here is an example of what you can do with a stereo loop and any plugin. This is a little more complicated, and only works if there are hard panned sounds. The loop I started out with had a hihat that wasn’t panned very hard, I copied it to a new track, filtered out all the lows, boosted some highs and then panned it hard left. I recorded the combined original and panned track to a new file.
Here is what I’m starting out with
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Now that I had something on the sides I could mess around with Mid Side Processing.
The first thing you have to do is convert Left – Right to Mid and side. I use the free +matrix MS decoder from SoundHack.com. After that I used a delay plugin to add some filtered echoes just to the middle by disabling the right side input.
In the next insert I used a distortion on just the right side. This brought out a lot more of the reverb than was heard in the original loop. Lastly, second MS decoder was used to bring it back to stereo.
Soundhack +matrix MS encoder/decoder
Here is how the loop sounds now with delay in the middle and distortion on the sides.
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Pretty cool right!? I hope you have found these tricks useful.
Posted in Mixing, Techniques, Tutorial | 7 Comments »
Saturday, January 21st, 2012
The final video series on recording techniques from Recording Magazine is on electric bass guitar. This 4-part video demonstrates several microphones, placement and distance, combinations of mics, DI boxes and reamping.
CLICK HERE to go to the Recording Magazine video page for this lesson.
Posted in Amps, Bass, Recording, Techniques, Tutorial, Video | 1 Comment »
Saturday, January 21st, 2012
This 4-part video series from Recording Magazine demonstrates mic placement, types, proximity effect, reamping, and much more. Awesome videos, the only complaint is that the high-gain tone they got was absolute crap.
CLICK HERE or on the image below to go to the Recording Magazine Website.
Posted in Amps, Guitar, Recording, Techniques, Tutorial, Video | 4 Comments »
Saturday, January 21st, 2012
More from Recording Magazine. This is a 5-part video covering mic placement, distance, types, mono and stereo techniques. All the videos Recording Mag has up on their site are excellent, I’ll post links to Electric Guitar and Bass series later today.
Since these videos can’t be embedded CLICK HERE to go to the video page.
Posted in Guitar, Recording, Techniques, Tutorial, Video | 3 Comments »
