Prometheus

Oh yeah, they make excellent diffusers... Personally, I think having a reasonalby anechoic recording space is nine tenths of the battle in getting a clear recording, and nine tenths of the difference between professional recordings and garage ones... I just noticed actually, you can see the very mattress behind me in my avatar... The pop shield I'm holding there is a DIY job... the ones that shipped with my condenser mikes just did not cut the mustard at all, so I got the carousel from 25 CDR spindle, cut the top out of it and stretched a pair of socks all the way round, then fixed them in place with cellotape and staples... It works great because you've got a dual later with two inches of Space in the middle, so any blast of air that gets through layer one is sufficiently scattered to be stopped by layer two. The only problem is that you have to hold it up in your hand... Still, I'm damned if I'm paying twenty five quid for another pop shield that still lets plosives through...

I had a problem with boxy standing waves when I first started doing this but I also have a problem with money, so I nailed a mattress to the rear wall and lined the corners of the walls with pillows and cushions... It actually makes a night and day difference to the clarity of the recordings done in here... I also have cushioning up behind my nearfields to help prevent nodes and antinodes developing in my monitoring area...

Very handy gadgets if you want to move a song up a key or two into your singing range without losing the open chord timbre... Cheating? Utter Bollocks!

I love to use samples too. I've sampled just about everything from the Cassini probe recording Saturn's magnetosphere, to Cicadas, to Aleister Crowley summoning the 2nd Aethyr, but when it comes to creating tracks, I prefer to use real instuments played live if at all possible. Ultimately, I don't think a machine can play music with anything like the kind of feeling that a human can, not yet anyway...

Now that is a bloody good idea... I've always found that foam in the corners where unwanted reverberations seem to accumulate is helpful, even if it's just from pillows... My recording room is slightly rectangular and I stuck a mattress onto the rear wall, which believe it or not make a night and day difference to the sound...

It certainly was a hell of a lot of fun doing it... Chop the last five seconds from it... Seriousy, if you go to Google and open a gmail account, not just for sending me an mp3 but for future reference, you get 2 Gigabytes of storage!

This is true... even in 24 bit, digital clipping is horrendous... It tends to produce dropouts instead of distortion. That said I would never be without my digital equipment now, even though I still think you get a more pleasing mix putting analogue processors in the signal chain than you do with pro tools plugins... Hell, I wouldn't be without the analogue gear either... I was acutally thinking of buying an akai reel to reel from ebay, just to experiment with mastering on to it... I've never had my A - D converters up at the full 192KHz sample rate, the file size would be too drastic, but 24 bit makes a night and day difference in the dynamic range... I don't think you can actually hear any difference when you go above 44.1 anyway... You only need to sample two points on a soundwave to recreate it perfectly since they all follow a precise curve, and I sure as hell can't hear above 22 Khz... Hooray for Harry Nyquist...

Ah yeah, I checked the account and it doesn't seem to have arrived...

Yeah, I like this approach as well. With my spirit desk, you can see the routing in front of you and it is easy to trace any problems that might develope... The Studio I served my time in had a digital Yamaha 02R 96, and the routing in this was almost metaphysical, taking place within switchable digital layers... It was so easy to get lost up your own arse doing mixes with loads of tracks... I prefer analogue to record and digital to edit... http://www.geocities.com/thetrueprometheus/images/Grom.JPG

I still use analogue signal chains, because I think there is something about working with analogue, especially with EQ and compression... My desk is analogue too... I don't know if analogue outboards will be around forever, but I have noticed a lot of companies prefer to sell even their digital algorthims in outboards to avoid the whole intellectual property theft issue... It must be hard going to spend loads of man hours creating a beautiful compression algorithm only to see it appear cracked on a warez site within a week... I do use digital editing to cut out all the unwanted bits of hiss on the unused parts of tracks, because when you have 40 tracks with his on them, it certainly builds up... I suppose at the end of the day, the wise sceptic would never dismiss analogue or digital equipment...

Initially, I found that mastering was the hardest aspect of studio engineering to learn, and the first steps in it I found difficult. I remember pulling my hair out for years actually, trying to figure out what the difference between my mixes and the big studio mixes were... If you plug away at it though, eventually it does become second nature and you reach a point where you feel confident in it... I think it goes in all trades. I was talking to a joiner a couple of months ago who was saying that when he served his time, he thought he would never get the hang of it, and then one day it all just fell into place. I remember in all the early work I did, I would keep going back to it again and again and never quite feel that it was finished...

I reckon you need a high quality compressor / limiter and a high quality EQ device... And you need a package the lets you graphically analyse frequency and phase (although you should always go with what your ears tell you) Parametric Sweeps are great (Cool Edit Pro has one of the best I've seen) for identifying irritating frequencies, and it also has a fantastic Stone Wall limiter... I reckon subtractive EQ is genrally best, instead of boosting Highs dramatically I think it's better to scoop out some of the midrange, this sounds more natural, and maybe just a little boost of a decibel or two at the high end to give your mixdown a bit of sizzle at the high end... What I've found one has to watch is that overdoing the mid cut or high end boost tends to make the sibilants come out a bit too much... My best advice would be to think things out with your instrumentation at the recording and mixing stages to get a good frequency spread, if your recording doesn't have enough high end on it, use a tambourine, or a shaker or some kind of percussion with high harmonics. This tends to sound much more natural than throwing a lot of effects at your mix... the main differences I've noticed between professional products and garage ones is the amount of midrange and Stone wall Limiting... It's important to use a Stone Wall Limiter to boost your mix to match that of industry released CD's... Apart from that, the obvious things of years of practice and being careful not to over use effects like EQ and noise reduction. Alaising errors caused by noise reduction are far more disturbing than hiss actually is, and over EQ'd sounds can be dreadfully off putting too... One more thing, you can't polish a turd. If you have a recording that has been done badly, or a mixdown that has been done badly, you're probably not going to fix it with mastering tricks and achieve an industry product result. Mastering is like putting icing on a cake. It adds something to the cake and makes it taste nicer, but if the cake has been poorly baked in the first place, the best you'll ever achieve is damage limitation... One final thought, advice on mastering onto vinyl... Don't try...

We did a direct to stereo recording too, but much of the problems stemmed from the fact that there was a full house of about a thousand people present, so moving out and setting up distance mikes to pick up the room sound was not a practical possibility since the room was chockablock full. Also, we had to provide reinforcement as well, and they weren't willing to pay enough money to hire a powerful enough PA, so we had to drive the PA to just below the howlround threshold, and we had to set up the control / monitor area in an utterly ridiculous location... The whole thing was crazy, and it's actually that gig which made me decide I was never doing reinforcement again unless I am assured of complete cooperation with all my setup requirements... Roger that, I'm gonna check my email now... Yeah, I concur... I couldn't agree more...

I think successful was a bad choice of word... I don't have much time for the over produced, plastic, pop art chart culture either, and not all of my favourite recordings have particular orthodox production... For what it's worth, I have a lot of respect for your production method, and do work that way quite a lot myslef, but you're right, I do tend to use a lot of what you would call post production techniques right from the recording stage... It just really depends on the nature of what I'm recording... The best (from my point of view) work that I do is in working with maverick songwriters, and doing the Buddy Holly idea of thinking of the craziest thing that you could possibly do, and then thinking of a way to do it... My favourite thing I've done so far is on a recording by a writer called Chris Palazzi, coming up with the idea of putting a recording made on location at another planet on it. As far as I know, this has never been done before. NASA gave us permission to use the recording provided they were given due credit, which is only fair. The recording was done on location by the Cassini probe at Saturn's Magnetosphere, half way across the solar system, and downsampled into the audio range... It sounds kind of like an old analogue eerie synth effect that you might have heard in an old episode of Dr Who...

You've been lucky with the people you work with then. Maybe you don't have people to support and flat to run on a very modest income and can work with only chosen people, but unfortunately for me, I need to earn a living and am compelled to record whomsoever will pay me. Unfortunately, sometimes this gets fraught, but I'd been a musician long before I was an engineer and I knew what to expect... I recorded a choir in Scotland at a prestigious event this year, who shall remain nameless. They wouldn't let me place the microphones where I wanted, they ignored my advice about not putting a rotund man with the loudest voice I've ever heard at the front of the choir near the central Blumlein, they actually had all the loud voiced bassos around the central blumlein, they would not let me do any test recordings at their rehearsals to get to grips with any such issues that might arise, and off they all f*cked for their lunch half way through sound checking them and didn't come back... I categorically warned them all the way through this that if they ignored my advice and took shortcuts on procedures, as they did at every turn, they would come across as a rabble in the recording (which incidentally is precisely what they were). They had a stage manager present who knew nothing about acoustics and was only concerned with making sure the choir were arranged in a nice pretty looking manner There was another fully qualified time served engineer with me who has my complete confidence, so even if there was anything I had missed, he would have spotted it. So when the choir were returned a beautiful, pristine recording, with one man singing louder than everyone else and the females completely drowned out, but all the instruments nicely balanced, they did what musicians always do and accused the sound engineer of screwing the pooch on the recording... I'd like to hear your mp3, if you wouldn't mind, and if I can return the favour, let me know... prometheus888@gmail.com The prometheus name acutally dates back to before I was a sound engineer, it was actually (being the modest chap I am ) more to do with the part of the legend where he takes a firebrand back to man from the Sun... For one thing, most people cannot afford a producer, so the engineer has to adopt a de facto producers role, For another, if I was working to a click, and timed a reverb, delay or compressor release that was not perfect right to the millisecond, I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night with the wife trying to calm me down and tell me it was only a dream... Obviously since no human can keep timing to a millisecond over a three or four minute piece of music, correct tempo based time domain FX are impossible, so if a musician really hates clicks, you've just got to get it as good as possible, and if you're using a delay, riding the tap manually might be the best solution. With compression and reverb, it is not quite so critical to be perfect... Joe Public might not hear the difference, but any engineer worth his salt would... And before anyone says it, yes, I know I am the most analy retentive sound recorder on Earth... Again, this is all very well if you're a fabulously wealthy recording industry giant who can tell people to jump, how high to jump and have never heard the word "no" in your life, but some of us mere mortals have to lower our standards a bit and work with the little people... To quite honest, if someone wanted to pay me 30 dollars an hour to record Kermit the frog singing Frank Sinatra, and they turned out to be a complete arse to work with, I guarantee that as long as the payments were prompt I would learn to love it...

I wouldn't say that freyed tempers are conducive to anything, I would just say that they are an obvious possiblilty, and I have seen writer / performer domestics in my studio on many occasions... On only one occasion have I ever actually had to say "here's the tapes of what you've done so far, now get out" which as it happened brought the two space cadets involved spiralling back down to Earth and they settled their differences... Unfortunately, as an engineer trying to make a living, I cannot afford to vet people for social skills before I accept a contract from them... The Bob Dylan reference is to the fact that he never used click tracks, he apparently didn't even use cans half the time when he was recording, he preferred to let the mix back bleed into the microphones... Apparently he didn't care a whit for the polished produced product, he only wanted to get a feeling, something organic down onto tape, to capture an idea... As I said, I would love to only work with seasoned professionals, but I've got rent to pay... On your other point about my approach and yours differing, studio recording and post production is my thing, not getting the best out of performers. As you may have noticed from my posts, diplomacy isn't one of my strongest suits... I record with a view to getting good data onto tape, getting the performance correct is the artists responsibility, or the producer if they can afford one... I am not an artist or producer, but a studio engineer, and a very good one, or so I remind everyone often enough, but that is all I take responsibility for, and I prefer if someone tells me immediately if they don't agree with my methods, and then the matter can be sorted out...

Desks and Routing Devices Spirit Studio 24:8:1 (Direct Feeds From all Channels) Yamaha MD8 Spirit Folio 8 Track Peavy Unity 8 Track Behringer Ultra Patch 48 point Patchbay G & T 48 point Patchbay M Audio Delta 10 10 Analogue Digital Converters 24 Bit 96 Khz Tascam 4 Track Outboards: Behringer Composer Pro Behringer Composer Pro XL Alesis 64 Channel GEQ Yamaha Reverb unit Boss Reverb Unit Boss Compressor Behringer Multigate Behringer UltrafexII Digitech Time Domain Effects Unit Recorders and Editors: Tascam DA 30 Mark II Sony Stereo MD Recorder Cubase V5.0 on AMD Athlon PC Cool Edit Pro v2.0 Miscellaneous: MIDI Plus 61 Controller Keyboard Roland Juno 6 Synths Stagg Condenser Mic Behringer B1 Condneser Mic AKG Dynamic Mike (Very old) Park Guitar Amp 1 x Boom Stand 1 x Straight Stand Alesis Point 7 Monitors Ariston Micro Monitors Hohner Bass Guitar (Precision Copy) Stagg Les Paul Copy 1 x Violin 1x Tambourine 1 x Shaker 1 x Epiphone SG35 Probably a few more bits and pieces I've forgotten...

That looks like quite a setup!!

Ah! Well, re-reading the previous posts it seems to have went well, so all the best with the demo, wherever you plan to go with it...

I think that's a little bit harsh... If recording broadcast quality music in a studio environment was easy, then surely everyone would be doing it... You're never going to find an engineer whose opinions do not differ from yours in any way shape or form, unless of course he is a yes man who is too scared or inexperienced to speak up... Quite honestly, I feel far more worried working with people who don't question me and don't get frayed nerves, since this points out they either have no self belief, no passion for what they are doing or they are yes men... In this day and age of over produced multitrack recordings, you are not going to hear succesful recordings that are not done to click tracks, basically ever, unless you are a big Bob Dylan fan... One more thing... A lot of people will tell you that you can't Groove to a click track... Bollocks! Listen to Groove Armada - At The River English Riviera Remix... That Grooves and it was sure as hell created to a click track... With respect, riddle me this... How are you going to time the release on a delay, compressor or reverb to a reasonable degree of accuracy on a recording not done to a click? Unless you use a metronome, it can't be done... There's nothing digital or tempo based about the brain of your average (or even genius) musician, and even using tap delays, the feat of riding the timing is going to be prodigious, and your recording is going to be imperfect...

I'm not far away... I'm in sunny Troon... I've gotta kind of DIY studio rigged up here... I got into all this stuff a few years ago, and went and did an HND Mutec course... I've been having some fun with it and been lucky enough to get the chance to do a few cool recordings... Speaking of Glasgow, I've got a friend who lives up in Maryhill Road...

In a word, always... The only way I don't use a metronome is if the artist I'm recording point blank refuses one and will not budge... A lot of people say you can't groove to a click track... That is bollocks! A lot of artists find them tricky at first, but once you get used to them, you'll never want to lay down a track without one... There are many benifits to tracking to a click and absolutely no downsides once you get used to it... It becomes a lot more problematic to try and use tempo based compression, reverb or delay without a click, and these are all part of the black art of getting a good pumping mix...

Use a couple of decent quality condensers (if you have them) as overheads suspended a few feet above the kit and pointing down at the cymbals to get a bit of top end sizzle on the drum mix. Other than that, my advice would be to make sure that you know the cardioid pattern of each mike and make sure it is pointing directly at the drum you want to record to try and rejecting as much bleed as possible, that way you can usually gate (being careful not to do it too savagely) a lot of the unwanted noise out... Recording drums is a whole black art in itself... I was extremely fortunate that I had a lot of drum recording work to do when I was serving my time at college, because it's something you don't come up against every day... I've found that there is no prefect way to record drums, and that getting a produced sound on them is all in the gating and EQ... I tend to roll a lot of bass off the overheads, and I mean a lot, so the cymbals are almost splashing... Like anything else, you have to be careful not to overdo things...

Serious Studio Tip, if you're not used to playing with click tracks, practice it a bit with the PC, because most studio engineers (myself included) will try to push you into using one since it makes the product feel more professional and makes the editing and setting up of compressor releases and time domain effects much easier... Apart from that, just remember that it's a fraught environment and that tempers get frayed, so just try to hang loose and stay as relaxed as possible... If you've taken a few takes on something and you're starting to feel uptight and that you're losing focus, take 5 minutes to go outside and breathe some air that hasn't been completely exorcised of oxygen...