Prometheus

I couldn't agree more. Cubase, Reaper, Cakewalk, Pro Tools, you can get used to any of them with a bit of practice. The theory behind multitrack recording has hardly changed since the late 1950's. The only difference is that there are more tracks and the tape is a computer. It's skill, talent and a bit of hard work that produces high quality recordings.

http://www.thomann.de/gb/focusrite_scarlett_2i2.htm?gclid=CPyw09Kj5LUCFUbKtAodNWoA6A These bad boys are pretty good.

Harking back to old fashioned principles again, but if it comes from a mono source, why not record and mix it in mono and if it comes from a stereo source why not record and mix in stereo? There will never be any phasing problems recording mono sources in mono and even in modern 64 bit systems with plenty of processing power, space in a stereo field still comes at a premium if you use multiple tracks for each mix element.

The great advantage to drum machines is that they have very small egos and demand very low wages. I don't like being dependent on other musicians, and the drums are the one instrument I've never learned to play to a decent level myself. They don't sound anywhere near as versatile as a human drummer though. They probably never will.

To give the counter point (no musical puns intended) of view, and I hope I'm not being too controversial here, I'm absolutely not trying to pick a fight with fans of surround sound. They've probably never gotten into it because while it has wonderful uses in cinema, in music it's nothing more than a gimmicky parlour trick. Even Pete Townsend, who planned to be at the vanguard of Quadrophonic production with Quadrophenia ended up mixing it in stereo because it sounded so ludicrous in Quadrophonic reproduction. -- source (QUADROPHENIA 1973 ALBUM - BBC Documentary - CAN YOU SEE THE REAL ME?) In the context of current expereince it's hard to understand why Townsend thought Quadrophonic sound was such a big deal, but when you look at the time with suspended disbelief and remember the sensation that Sgt. Pepper caused being released in stereo, it's easy to see why back then he believed there was about to be another paradigm shift. The truth is though, you go to see a band, you expect them to be standing in front of you, not spread all around you. That's why surround mixes like the surround remix of Dark Side of The Moon were just stereo fields with a few doo-wangs sent out to the other speakers. It's counter to what psychology tells you should be going on when you listen to music. Great for film to create a 3D feel. For music, useless, because music was never meant to be 3D.

I agree with the 100%... There is still great rock music out there, if you do a bit of digging. I'm really loving exploring Japanese "jrock" music at the moment. As the Japanese do with everything, they take it to the extremes... Bands like Versailles for example, absolutely amazing musicianship.

I personally found it very liberating learning musical theory. Once you do, you have a transferrable skillset and knowledge that you can apply to any musical instrument ever built. If you know the theory and want to learn a new instrument, all you have to learn is the muscle memory. Does it make you play the guitar better? No. I'm still as mediocre a guitarist as I was before I learned it. Does it make you a better composer? Without a doubt. How can you compose a song with a clever mode change in it if you don't know what a mode is? Any composer with no knowledge of theory is a diliettante. Imagine Beethoven having no clue what music is about and just rattling out the Ninth by trial and error? Not likely. The other point about learning Western musical theory is that it's not as difficult as people think. It's only the amount of jargon attached to it that makes it daunting. Basically, you have to be able to count to twelve to have the intellectual wherewithal to handle musical theory.

I would not. Let the musicial coves produce the damned music and let the entrepreneurs go off and figure out how to make money out of it, but the two should be bound to a covenant where one party does not encroach on the methods and practices of the other. When the two blur together as they do at the moment, you end up with an anti artistic and anti intellectual industry that has little credibility or relevance to the consumer because the only imperative is to release one dimensional, dross, mass appeal nonsense that can maximize short term profit and minimize outlay. It's myopic and it's sad because the reality is that you can make as much money from one Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin as you can from a thousand Girls Alouds or One Directions. Let's be honest, most A & R guys these days are more at home with a really f*ck off spreadsheet and a copy of the Financial Times than a piece of well produced and imaginative music. They have apoplexy if you suggest they listen to a piece of music for more than thirty seconds. Imagine how they would keel over and pass out as the blood rushed away from their heads if they tried to get up from behind their desks and go scouting for talented bands and musicians as they did in the old days.

It's not just possible, it's actually the norm these days. Very few of the people you see in the charts write their own songs. They're faces for a record producer or entrepreneur. I don't know anything much about the ins and outs of how you would set up such a contract, but it can certainly be done.

The stereo spread sounds fine to me... I found the drum sound slightly fatiguing though. They sound very over-processed. Apart from that one point, I think it's a really good track.

In the UK, they most certainly shouldn't be. The fact that they are doesn't surprise me. Copyright and Patent Law is not there to protect artists and inventors, it's there to protect corporate interests. Why would I need copyright protection for seventy years after I cease to exist? The pretext is that this is to give your kids time to profit from the restricted works, but when you actually look at how copyright is used, the pretext turns out to be a pretext. It's a gravy train for lawyers and corporations. it would be a lot more beneficial in many ways if a corporate entity was given a reasonable time to profit, say ten years after the purchase of a restricted material, and then it went into the public domain where it could be used for the pro bono. In music and art the world is merely denied works of beauty, but in other areas of restriction there are consequences ranging from misery to multiple fatality, for example when gene sequences or drugs are patented. Before anyone says it, I already know... I'm a socialist extremist.

Just to give a couple of counter examples, The Sisters Of Mercy and Underworld have both done very well with automated drums. Instead of trying to hide the fact that the drums were artificial, the Sisters of Mercy made the machine drums an integral part of their sound.

Bear in mind I'm explaining this in very simplistic terms. The maths behind this is very complicated, and I'm not much of a mathematician. Fortunately, computers handle the maths so sound engineers, unless they specialize in sampling theory, don't have to. Every sound wave is a sine wave, and every sine wave looks like this: You have zero amplitude at 0 degrees, a peak positive amplitude at 90 degrees, a peak negative amplitude at 270 degrees and zero amplitude at 360 degrees et cetera, all in increments of 90 degrees. In order to have enough information to recreate this sine wave as digital information, you have to sample it twice within each 360 degrees. After that, the microprocessor in your analogue to digital converters can interpolate the rest of the information. The reason that it's required, whether you're working this way or the old school way of working with voltage analogues, to have a spectral domain of 20Hz to 22KHz is because that encompasses the entire range of human hearing. In much the same way that if you want to visually simulate a rainbow you have to encompass the entire visual spectrum, the same goes if you want to acurately represent a sound. To cut to the chase, the human hearing mechanism is geared towards amplifiying sounds at the key frequencies of the human voice, that is the midrange frequencies. In sound engineering, the mixing engineer and to a lesser extent the mastering engineer have to undo this feat of biomechanical engineering that goes on in the human ear. That is why a lot of midrange has to be subtractively EQ'd out at the mixing and mastering stage.

Additional: The reason low frequency instruments and sounds should be panned centre is two fold. One reason is that they cause far worse phasing problems than high frequency sounds and the other reason is that bass sounds have long enough wavelengths to hit both ears simultaneously, which means that basso frequencies are omnidirectional to humans. That's why surround systems only need one sub woofer.

Okay... On the point about having a flat spectral domain. Here's a video, a very poor quality one, that I captured from a mixdown that I did. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVR7dSrQOB8&feature=youtu.be As you can see, from 20Hz to 22KHz , the peaks graph roughly a straight line. There is slightly higher peaks at low frequencies, but it's a straight line all the way up to 22Khz where it's low pass filtered to keep within the standard Nyquist Limit, which is 44.1KHz. The reason for this figure of 44.1KHz is that to recreate a sine wave acurately you have to sample two points on it. This works because every sine wave is a predictable shape and the highest audio frequency a human can here is 20 KHz, and that's actually being kind. It's nearer 16 for most people by the time they reach adulthood. So, to sample two points in a 20Khz sine wave, you need a sample rate of 40KHz . Sampling at 44.1 adds a bit of attrition to this which is done because of other factors that aren't really important in this explanation. Low pass filtering at 22Khz means that there will be no alaising errors. Not that you'd be able to hear them. More importantly, it means that you're not wasting disk space and processor time reproducing frequencies that only the cat could hear and no household stereo systems would reproduce. On the other point about panning, that's already been dealt with on another thread. Here's a copy and paste of what I posted on it. First of all, if a sound comes from a mono source, it should be mixed in mono, so it's far better to use panning than stereo enhancers to create the stereo field. Stereo enhancers are usually single band, so if used at the mastering stage they tend to widen the parts of the mix (low frequencies) that should actually be mono. If you want a wide guitar sound, record the guitar part twice or double mic it with the two mics equidistant from the amp then pan one track to the left and one to the right. It's a mistake to do a panning hardover (panning all the way to eight o'clock and four o'clock) on both tracks since the field becomes too wide and leaves a "hole" in the centre of the mix. The trick is to pan out a little to the left and right until the spread sounds good. If there are going to be more double tracks, they can then be panned incrementally further and further out so they have their own space. The kick drum and bass guitar (or any basso instrument) should be in the centre. Bass frequencies are omni-directional, which is to say that human beings are terrible at assigning direction to them. This is because the waves are bigger than the width of the human head and can therefore hit the timpanic membranes in both ears simultaneously. Another thing to consider is that basso sounds have more energy than treble sounds, as is evidenced by the fact that woofers are much bigger, stiffer and more powerful than tweeters. This means that taking a basso sound off centre is going to seriously unbalance a mix. This used to actually wreck cutting needles in the old days of vinyl when mastering actually was as critical and difficult as mastering engineers still pretend it is. Lead vocals should always be in the centre and backing vox double tracks can be panned using the method detailed above of starting near the centre and working to the outside. Always listen to the mono sum of the mix as well to check if there are going to be problems with people playing the track over ghetto blasters or PC speakers or car stereos that are not really capable of generating an accurate stereo field. As Darmin says, EQ is ususally the most effective way of achieving separation in a mix, not wide panning.

it's my bed time, but I'll go into it tomorrow when I get home from work.

It takes a clever man years to do that. You're right, you'll never apply the same settings twice. It's impossible to define a process that you can follow that tells you exactly what compressor settings to use. You have to learn what all the basic controls are about, attack, release, threshold, ratio and compensation, and then you have to practice incessantly until you get results. It shouldn't be done haphazardly. You should always have an idea why you're making a change. Same with EQ. The thing to do with EQ is practice using subtractive EQ. Taking out unwanted frequencies is far more effective and transparent than additive EQ. In answer to your question, it's all of them. Any EQ will subtract or add to certain frequencies. In very simplistic terms, the idea for the spectral domain is to make the mix fairly flat up to about 18KHz. EQ is also essential to achieve clarity by creating separation between mix elements. Contrary to a fairly popular misconception, that is not done by panning. Panning is actually used to widen the stereo field.

You can use plugin compressors. A high end one will be indistinguishable from an outboard one, provided it's used cleverly. Everyone does this in this day and age. Buying sixteen outboard compressors for a thirty two track studio would be a complete waste of money when one plugin compressor can do the same job.

You most definitely can't master a track without a compressor, it would be out of the question. Stone wall compression (i.e. limiting) is one of the maintstays of the mastering process. Multiband Compression is also beneficial sometimes, not to mention de-essing. None of this can be done without compressors. Mastering a track is easy for someone with the right experience and doesn't take long. It shouldn't be hard to find a pro engineer who will master a few tracks for a very reasonable rate in the current climate where pro sound engineers are not having a good time of it. You should never apply any change to a voltage analogue or digital information that your brain hasn't applied five minutes earlier. Rule number one of producing records, never guess and press. If you don't know why you're doing something, you shouldn't be doing it.

That's true in any studio, none of them are flawless. The way a pro engineer gets around that is by A to B analysis. In simple terms, I listen to the song through the Alesis Reference Monitors, then again on my living room stereo through mission speakers and a sub, then I take a jaunt in my car and listen again over car stereo speakers and then one more time on a set of shitty speakers on an old ghetto blaster I keep in the house. Once you get a master that's balanced on all four of these setups, it'll sound reasonable on anything.

I understand... I've taken a job outside the music industry too, and I share your frustration. I want to devote my energy to music and art, but like you, I have to live. I always had to work on the fringes of the industry because I could never keep quiet about what goes on without feeling I was being seen to endorse it in some kind of way.

It's a hard way to make money. Over the last decade I had production credits on a few releases, radio airplay of songs I'd written and produced and was getting plenty of sound engineering work, some of it for local bands and musicians and some of it for corporate entities. One or two of the people I was working with were fairly well known, certainly UK wide. If I was playing the game at that level twenty years ago, I'd have expected to have been making a comfortable living. As it was, between that, repairing PC's and doing odd jobs for my local social club I was living on such a meagre amount of income that I was barely scraping the rent together some weeks... Literally on breadline and less. Society just doesn't value recorded music or songwriters to anything like the extent it used to. People just download songs for nothing, and so the recording industry has become even more insular than it always was and defaulted to reality TV instead of releasing innovative albums.

You have to remember that you're going to be up against fierce competition from pro record producers and established songwriters, and that for the singer it's a buyer's market. If you want to have the vaguest hope of breaking into what is probably the most competative industry on Earth, you have to produce broadcast quality demos. Even when you have done that, you will have to promote yourself tirelessly every waking moment of your life to succeed. Personally I like working alone when it comes to producing my own written material, but from first picking up a guitar to learning how to perform, record, mix and master a record from scratch took me ten years, and I was supposed to be some kind of whizz kid at acoustic engineering. If you're young time is on your side, but their are no shortcuts.

I think it's a good idea in principle if you can find a band who need original material and play the style of music you write.

What is it exactly you wish to do with the demo? If you're creating it for practice or to lay down ideas, then Musescore should be fine. If you want to send it to an industry professional, it will need to be recorded, mixed and mastered to broadcast quality. What you want to do is find some people like me in your local area. Technically knowledgeable people who are not business orientated who'll give you a hand. I don't do much engineering for money at all these days, but I still help local musicians if they want my help because I think you should always send the lift down for the people coming after you. If they do open mic nights around where you live, you could probably get in there, do some networking, buy a few drinks for people and build up a list of contacts who can help you with recording sessions.