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Archive for the ‘Tutorial’ Category
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
double-neck guitar optional
Double tracking is a very common recording/production technique for almost any genre of music. When it comes to rhythm guitars, this technique is almost a standard method of recording with single tracking used only for solos.
This is also a technique that is often confusing for beginners.Double tracking simply means recording the same part twice and panning each to opposite sides. This creates a wide stereo spread based on the unique nuances in timing and dynamics of each performance. This is the guitarist playing a section of the song perfectly, then repeating it as closely as possible on a second track.
This isn’t the same as recording in stereo, using two mics, using a chorus effect or duplicating and delaying one side. Some of these techniques are ways of ‘faking’ or ‘automatic’ double tracking, but are simply no substitute for an expertly performed double track. There must be two separate performances for the effect to work.
How To double track guitars
- Record mono rhythm guitar, with either a microphone on a real amp or virtual amp. This track would be panned center.
- When a good take is achieved, and any punch ins are finished, go through the recorded track and tighten up any timing issues.
Here’s how it sounds with the first guitar along with drums. The guitar is in the middle.
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(warning heavy metal!)
- After editing, pan this guitar (and any extra mics for this performance) to the left.
- That was perfect, now play it again! Make a new track and pan it right.
- Repeat steps 1 and 2 using the same guitar, pickup selection, amp, microphone and any other variables unchanged. Making a change will increase the stereo width but will often result in an unbalanced tone.
Here’s the same part with the doubled guitars.
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This repeats for each section of the song and if there are multiple guitar parts written or two guitarists in the band, usually each will be double tracked. If there are two guitarists in the band, there could be some confusion. Guitarist 1 plays all his parts twice, guitarist 2 plays all his parts twice. In a simple song this would mean 4 tracks for the rhythm guitars. Often this gets up to 12 or 16 tracks pretty quickly. Guitar solos are usually right up the middle or ‘stereoized’ with other techniques to make them pop out.
You have to be careful playing the doubled part, if it’s too far off from the original it will make a unwanted ping-ponging effect especially in headphones.
Quad Tracking is exactly the same, but you record each part 4 times. Each take has to be perfectly in sync or it just sounds like a terrible mess.
Poor alternatives
So why can’t we just duplicate and delay/shift the recording a little for the same effect? Well, simply because it sounds like crap and I’ll show you.
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This is what happens when you copy the original mono recording, delay the copy by 20ms and pan each hard left and right.
Similarly, why not use a stereo chorus?
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Still sounds really bad compared to double tracking. I’m not saying don’t ever use Chorus, just don’t use as an alternative to the big wide powerful double-track sound.
I hope you have found this article useful.
Any questions? Let me know in the comments below.
Posted in Recording, Tutorial | 10 Comments »
Friday, March 30th, 2012
This guest post comes from Barry Gardner, mastering engineer at Safe And Sound online mastering.
Equalization is an incredibly powerful tool used in virtually every area of audio production including music recording and mixing. A lot of people initially feel equalization is a complex process but I would like to explain it as simply as possible but embellished with enough technical information to make it useful and valuable. At it’s most basic implementation an equalizer could be described as a tone control such as that on a hi fi amplifier. On an amplifier there are just 2 tone controls, bass and treble, as you turn the knob in either direction you either get an increase or decrease in the amount of bass or treble in the music, this is known as altering the tone.
When thinking of eq it is useful to imagine a horizontal line with the audible audio spectrum running from low frequencies (left) to high (right). Adult humans can hear from around 25Hz to around 20kHz (best case scenario). An equalizer allows specific frequencies of the spectrum to be focused upon and amplified or attenuated (reduced). (more…)
Posted in Tutorial | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
Nick Lewis is mastering engineer at online mastering studio Brighton Mastering. Check his music production blog for more tips, tricks and opinions.
5 Tips for DIY Mastering
As a mastering engineer, I would always encourage home recordists to send their music to a professional for mastering. Aside from finely tuned monitoring set ups, ultra-high-end equipment and the benefit of experience, a professional mastering engineer offers a valuable second opinion.
However, if budgets don’t allow or if you’re really set on doing it yourself – here are 5 tips for DIY mastering.
Essential Mastering Tools
Reference exhaustively
One of the most difficult things about mastering (and mixing for that matter) is maintaining objectivity. Your ears will always get used to what they’re hearing and if you’re bogged down in the same track you’ll very quickly find you can’t see the forest for the trees.
The solution? Rack up at least one similar track in your DAW project to constantly refer to and give yourself a reality check. You’ll never match it exactly but it’ll give you a good idea if you’re on the right track.
Check, check and check again
Unless you’ve dropped a cashbomb on your monitors, and crucially, your room acoustics, you’ll need to compensate for a less than perfect monitoring environment.
That means every time you think you’re done, burn it onto a CD, check on your hi-fi, check it in your car, on your iPod, round your mate’s place, anywhere you can think of. If you can’t depend on your studio set-up to reliably translate you need to check the long way in as many real world situations as you can.
If in doubt, take a break
If you’ve been at it for a while, been checking against your reference track(s) and checking on as many playback systems as you can find, but still can’t tell if it’s right – take a break.
It happens to the best of us. Sometimes, listening to it again is not the solution. Leave it for an hour, a day, a week even and then come back to it. You’ll find that things become a lot clearer. And it’s remarkable how much louder things will sound when you haven’t been listening to them for hours on end.
Give the limiter an easy ride
One of the most common mistakes in DIY mastering is relying too much on the limiter. Brickwall limiters and loudness maximisers are not a magic bullet – they will not give you the loudness you’re after by themselves. Or at least, not in a pleasant way.
Achieving commercial loudness is by and large a matter of EQ, gentle compression, possibly some light distortion/harmonic excitement and finally the limiter. A good rule of thumb is to let the limiter impose no more than 3dB of gain reduction. In practice though, many mastering engineers use much less.
Leave the multi-band alone
Another common misconception about modern mastering is that multi-band compressors are essential. In actual fact, unless you have a good reason for doing so, you’re likely to do more harm than good with multi-band processing.
Break out your best broadband bus compressor and leave the multi-band for specific tasks. As long as your mix is good enough, you won’t even need to think about multi-band compression.
Multi-band processors are most commonly used by professional mastering engineers to target specific problems e.g. de-essing or taming the bass. Rarely are all bands used, and even rarer is using them for bus compression.
Mastering is about making a big change through a series of small changes. If you find yourself making radical changes with one processor, chances are you’re doing too much.
Nick Lewis is mastering engineer at online mastering studio Brighton Mastering. Check his music production blog for more tips, tricks and opinions.
Posted in Mastering, Techniques, Tutorial | 3 Comments »
Monday, March 5th, 2012
Do you have kids?
Think about losing every photo of them from birth to now with no way to replace them.
Not a good feeling right?
To avoid this terrible feeling, get a solid offsite backup plan.
Cheer up now, I have a plan.
I was looking for a way to safely backup my some irreplaceable photos of my daughter. I already have a time machine backup but wanted a third offsite location that would automatically update.
I couldn’t use dropbox without moving the photos out of the the library, and that would really use up a lot of my Dropbox storage allowance. I already have a Gobbler account with lots of space for my studio projects, so that seemed perfect. If only Gobbler worked with photos.
Well Gobbler does sort-of work with photos already, but I didn’t want to back up EVERY photo in the library, just the ones of my daughter. These are just jpgs in two folders organized by age.
The solution was to trick Gobbler into thinking that this was an audio project. It was really easy too.
Just make a new blank file or folder give the filename an extension for an audio project and put it in with the files you want to back up. I used the name “Alice-photos-backup.rpp”.
Gobbler automatically found this blank file and is now chugging away uploading 2GB of photos to cloud. As I add more photos to the folder, Gobbler will automatically update in the cloud without any further effort from me.
Sweet. Now I don’t have to feel sad anymore.
This trick works for other files too, I just can’t think of any that are this important.
Gobbler's project name comes from the parent folder of the dummy project file
Posted in Tutorial | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
Today I’m sharing something I’ve been doing a lot lately and can make mixing a lot of fun.
Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy analog delay pedal
Use guitar pedals for mixing
Plugins are great but its just not the same as running sounds through real analog circuits. You can send sounds out of your audio interface, tweak the pedal settings and even ‘play’ the pedal to do realtime automation. It can be a lot of fun to work this way.
For the demonstration I’ve recorded an electric guitar directly into my DAW with Amplitube for amp and cabinet simulation. I’m going to then run the signal through an Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy analog delay pedal.
Here is the sound of the direct guitar.
Direct Guitar
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Here is the guitar with the Amplitube 3 plugin added (stereo, amp+speaker+mic)
Guitar + Amplitube
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Now I’m going to run the sound through the pedal. To do this in your home studio you need an audio interface
with a couple spare analog outputs, if your interface has 4 analog
outputs, that’s perfect. (more…)
Posted in Gear, Hardware Effects and pedals, Mixing, Techniques, Tutorial | 9 Comments »
Saturday, February 18th, 2012
This is a guest post from Samuel Allen of Extreme Studios in Perth, Australia. This article has been edited, the original can be found here.
This is a quick how-to for the technical aspects of preparing a master CD in Wavelab. This article does not explain audio processing techniques for mastering such as How to make a song louder in mastering, How to use Ozone for mastering, or How to use Multiband Compression.
I personally master in Wavelab, which is pretty straightforward for Cubase users, as it supports VST plugins. Although, it can be a bit counterintuitive when coming from Cubase if you expect it to work in the same fashion. If anyone is interested I can go into a more in depth tutorial about fade ins/outs on tracks, crossfading, etc, but for this one I’m just going to show how quick and easy it is to create a duplication ready DDP or physical master with ISRC code, EAN/UPC code and CD text embedded and ready to go.
New Audio Montage
Step 1 is creating a new Audio Montage, do this from the floating panel by clicking the button as per the image below, after which you want to select Stereo, CD compatible, 44.1khz from the dialogue box which pops up afterward
(more…)
Posted in Mastering, Tutorial | 8 Comments »
