find the bad spots in your room

use this bass tone (wave sweeping from 40Hz to 300Hz) to hear the bad spots in your room. it will sound like the volume goes up but it's actually the bass waves building up. if you use logic you should put eq on it and see how the eq graph "walks" from left to right. so as soon as you hear the bass waves clash in your room - getting louder - check where the eq graph is peaking - that's where your problem eq is.

http://www.hometracked.com/2008/01/25/quick-home-studio-monitor-tests/

Logic Express 9 and Guitar Rig 3 - bug?

installed logic express 9 yesterday and - yup - it's worth all the hype! just one thing that caught my attention, when i load Guitar Rig 3, with a few amps and FX, everything works fine until i try and select another preset. for example: if i want to select a different reverb preset and switch from the default "init" to "nice room" it doesn't work. it took me a while to figure out that you have to hold your mouse down and slide/drag it to the preset you want to select instead of clicking on the drop down menu - release the mouse button - look at preset list - click on the preset you want to select. a bit annoying really but i guess they made up for it by adding other cool stuff!

Room Acoustics by Steve Kindig

hey everybody! i just found this really good article on room acoustics.

glass for bass traps?!? "...The sound-absorbing effectiveness of some common room surfaces. Fibrous materials like carpet and drapes provide significant absorption above 500 Hz, but have little effect on lower frequencies. Conversely, window glass and drywall can absorb bass frequencies, but are very reflective above 500 Hz. The most successful approaches combine materials like these with professionally-designed room treatment products..."

glass? (:0

enjoy!

after recording a band

now i've recorded the band. now what? here's a snippet of an email that i send to one of the band members that i recently recorded.

..."just want to give you an update of what's happening... for the next week or so i'm going to go through the material with a fine tooth come and select/match up the good bits of Craig's guitar parts. that means listening through all the tracks and making notes of the track number and where in the song the good parts are i.e. "song one" - great solo at 2:15 - track 3) - with the help of some red wine :) 'For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.' - Friedrich Nietzsche"...

after that; the mixing begins!

joemeek threeQ

i think that technology has advanced so much that it doesn't really matter that much anymore if you buy $200 or $1000 dollar piece of recording equipment. i'm sure there's going to be a difference but it i doubt if you'll hear it in the final mix/master... if you do hear it, it might be 1%, max 2% improvement. the only drawback with the cheaper stuff is durability and that's the only reason i'd go for something a little more expensive. i don't want to buy it today and then replace it six months down the line! i also look into how flexible it is going to be in my studio setup. i would definitely want to use it on more that one instrument...

so when i was looking for a mic pre i decided to go with the joemeek threeQ. the joemeek threeQ is a half-rack metal case and powered from an adaptor. but the cool thing is that it's not just a preamp it's got some other goodies too:

• preamplifier - with phantom power and a front switch to toggle between XLR connector for Mics, and a Line connector for everything else.
  
• Joemeek optical compressor
• equalizer
• and makeup gain

so in a nutshell - it takes a signal, amplifies it, compresses and equalizes it ready to be recorded.

preamplifier:
it takes a microphone, instrument or other source of audio signal. i love recording guitar and bass with it because you can plug the guitar directly into the 3q and then split the signal - one goes to the amp and the other goes directly to your DAW as a clean signal so that you can re-amp it later if you feel the need to. it's a clean robust sounding preamp and i personally think that it's a bit of a step up from similar products in the same price range.

compressor:
this is not just any compressor it's a PhotoOptical compressor! this thing can slam the life out of your audio signal so apply sparingly - the louder you get the harder it slams - so to avoid squashing the life out of your audio apply a slow attack and fast release... to be honest I just use the compressor on the threeQ to take off the spikes, i'll do more compression once it's in the DAW. the "compression ratio" is fixed at 5:1 so you can see why i love using it on guitar and bass and especially rock vocals - for vocals 2msec attack should sound natural if your signal is not too hot - anyway 5:1 is a good compromise between gentle and slamming.

"meequalizer":
the "meequalizer" is a very musical three-band equaliser. its LF (bass) is fixed at around 80hz - nice for pushing bass or kick. mids can be tuned anywhere between 300Hz and 5kHz and the highs are fixed at about 12kHz, nice to give vocals some sparckle. personaly i prefer to record "flat" but i do however switch the equaliser on, this gives the audio a little bit of that nice meek colouring.

and lastly there's the makeup gain knob which, well, makes up the gain you reduced/lost with the compressor. so if you want a clean pre, tight compressor and musical equalizer you can't go wrong with the joemeek theerQ.

using the joemeek threeQ on vocals:
start with the preamp at 25 (0db) and sing into the mic. now turn the preamp gain until the peak light starts to flash when you sing at your loudest - it should only flash now and then. move on to the compressor... switch the compressor on :) and compress at about 3 or 4, the attack at around 5, and the release somewhere between 0.3 and 1. if you're not hearing the compressor work, increases the amount of compression by turning the compress knob clockwise. you should start to hear the softer passages come up in level, and if you scream, you'll hear it start to squeeze the audio. set it so that it doesn't sound unnatural. next i turn the EQ on, and set the Low, Mid, and High frequencies at 0. now you can turn up the output gain. also experiment with mic placement and proximity of the singer. a setting that works for one singer may be completely wrong for the next.

dithering

dithering is - man this is difficult to describe - i guess i can say that it’s adding noise to your audio to prevent harshness. in other words, it smooth things out and make it sound less jagged and raw. it's almost like a filter on a camera to soften the image or like blurring the lines of your pencil drawing... i'm more of a picture person so i’ll explain it with a few illustrations below where i'll use colour instead of sound. i guess the guys from Izotope Ozone describe it best - quite a good read. if you want to know more about 16-bit vs. 24-bit TweakHeadz is the place to go.

the gradient fill on the left represents the audio we want to capture... :)

we record at 24-bit (bit is short for binary digit = 10110 etc). i’ll illustrate 24-bit as 24 colours.

when you export your mix/master to CD it goes down even further to 16-bit. why? because CDs can only read 16-bit data.

to fix this raw sounding audio file you apply dithering. now it looks (sounds) more like the original audio we intended to capture :)