Prometheus

Thank you Layne... It's the stuff I love. I could talk about it all night and all day.

You can, but it takes a lot of time, patience and commitment to a learning curve. The simple answer is that I would find some like minded people to collaborate with on this so you can focus on getting one area of it together.

Sure thing.

I use a PC based drum sequencer called Fruity Loops. The big advantage to it is that you can bounce each track, kick, snare, et cetera separately and treat them separately in the mix as you would with live drums. The best piece of advice I can give you, based on what I was doing wrong at first, is not to over do it. I found myself making drum beats that no human could play in real life, and the situation was instantly improved when I started just making simple, solid, rock drum patterns. The other thing I would say about drum machines, and this is just a personal thing, I used to try to make the drums sound as human as possible and it never worked. I found that the Sisters of Mercy approach of making the mechanical feel of the drums an integral part of the sound is the best way to go.

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.

Cubase Nuendo & Adobe Auditon PC setup Coral Video Pro 2 x Behringer Composer Pro DBX compressor Behringer Ultrafex Harmonic Exciter Behringer MutliGate Boss Reverb 2 x Digitech Mutli Effects Unit Alesis Multi Effects Unit Alesis EQ 2 x Yamaha Mixing Desk Behringer Eurorack Spirit Folio Desk Peavy Unity Desk 2 X Large Diaphragm Condenser Mics Fostex 8 Track Hard Disk Recorder Waves Gold Bundle MAudio Delta 1010 A <> D Converter Precision Bass SG35 Guitar Roland Juno 6 Synth 2 x Patch Bay Alesis Point 7 Reference Monitors Laney Guitar Amp Hohner Bass Amp Marshall Guitar Amp I always A - B on a set of Mission speakers and then again in my car to hear the balance on shit speakers.

Not disagreeing with you, but it's important to remember that equipment and rooms reflections don't make a single decision, digital or voltage analogue. The difference between a good recording and shit one is primarily the man or woman doing it. Take a rookie in Abbey Road against a seasoned acoustic engineer in my bedroom and the experienced guy, in the highly improbable event that the rookie even manages to switch the equipment on in Abbey Road, is going to come off a lot better. That's why I'd be very reluctant to agree to mix someone's creation if I had no input in tracking it. The digital domain, because it is so much more versatile, gives a weak engineer far more scope to make mistakes than when he's working with voltage analogues on limited equipment.

Jim, if you could handle those cantankerous pigs you'd be walking in the park with a modern DAW...

Pen and Paper... And each song ends up filling about half a notepad after all the edits, corrections and rewrites.

I'm not good at that either. I've found getting someone else to sing the track works wonders.

Maybe not... There's never been a recording made in the history of recorded audio that an experienced ear couldn't pick fault with. Even in recordings made at Abbey Road level I've heard artifacts that have made me wince. Part of it is having realistic expecations. Even in the highly testosterone fueled type A personality world of the Sound Engineer, there aren't many of us arrogant enough to think we'll make the first perfect recording ever made. Every fix applied has unwanted side effects, it's always a trade off. Two good examples that always assault my timpanic membranes like a coin scraping on glass are over used de-essers and overgated drums. That said I'm reluctant to criticize the engineer / producer because I don't know what he had to work with before the effects were applied.

I see where you're coming from... I suppose it's down to skilled performers and a clever producer to avoid that happening. The advantage of recording each instrument seperately is that you don't get cross talk between the channels (for example the bass guitar bleeding into the overheads on the drum kit), which with current production trends is thought to outweigh the disadvantage you're talking of, losing some of the spontaneity of the performance. Multitracks that are recorded seperately are easier to mix. The way a modern mix works, it's as if you're hearing the band as an alien with multiple prehensile ears. I actually do think we've become a bit too techno focussed nowadays. I kind of agree with your point.

It's meant to come out flat, that's what mutlitrack mixing is all about. If you want a song to be broadcastable, you use compressors and fader adjustments to make the loud bits quiet and the quiet bits loud. An excellent example of this is the Green Day song "When September Ends". When the song suddenly steps up in power, the peak volume level doesn't change. What happens is that the vocals and drums become somewhat submerged in the Overdriven Guitar and Bass. The reason flat mixes are needed for radio play is because people would not be happy if they had to constantly keep readjusting the volume on their radio sets between each song, so broadcasted signals are heavily companded, so the loud parts would be made quiet and the quiet parts loud by the companding process anyway, and in a far less transparent way than a competent mixing engineer could do it. Because of this, mixing and mastering engineers have gotten into a "loudness war" over the last few decades.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopmusic/9346706/The-Producers-give-their-production-tips.html Cool article in the telegraph for any budding producers.

Yeah it varies dramatically... You can find your video blocked in some countries but not in others, you find that it varies dramatically depending on who owns the copyright. One thing I will say for them, they have recently drastically changed the appeal process and made it much easier.

On youtube you can often get away with it because google have agreements with many royalty collection agencies. Releasing something commercially would be another matter of course.

My Bass Guitar is called Agatha.

^^ And before anyone says anything, it takes a clever woman years as well...

The question that springs to my mind, are you sure any of you have the knowledge to produce a record? Getting an e.p. produced in a studio would be a lot cheaper and more efficient than building a studio and training yourselves to produce records, an endevour for which it takes a clever man years to develope the skill sets.

I have gripes, legitimate or otherwise, against the whole industry and would love to see it completely deconstructed and rebuilt from scratch. It's one of the few industries I've ever heard of where you can't tick a single box for it. I work for an armament manufacturer at the moment and the people who run that industry are lap cats compared to the ones I met in the music industry. It has no sensible regulation at all. The people who work in the front line of it have no legal protections at all. The people who run it are rapacious, malevolent psychopaths who generally know nothing, in technical terms, about music and have no appreciation of art whatsoever. I love music theory, practice and production. I despise the industry, passionately.

I'm sure. I, however, have had dealings with mastering engineers where I felt they were trying to pull a fast one on their clients and mistakenly thought that I as a fellow engineer would find it amusing. I have also had a short thesis that I wrote stolen by a fellow mastering engineer whom I regarded as a man I could trust, and used commercially. In short, mastering engineers are not all sweetness and sunshine. If you re-read, you'll notice that I was never calling their competence into question. The music business is a very competative and testosterone driven industry and it is not at all uncommon for people in it to be very unkind to each other and / or to use each other to terrible advantage. Some engineers are better than others. Some are more honest than others. They are not all the same and working with one mastering engineer can work out well for you while working with another might not. It's all about building up a network of contacts you can trust, work well with and rely on. I see absolutely no harm though in pointing out a few of the things worth watching out for. Like car mechanics, it is not unknown for mastering engineers to make work for themselves that is, shall we say, superfluous and reductive. Do you mean that I'm a mixdown engineer and should shut up? If so, then with respect you do not know what kind of engineer I am. As it happens I am a good mastering engineer with some production credits to his name among other accolades, and I am fully aware of what happened to the completed masters. Some of them actually got pretty respectable reviews in mainstream newspapers. I also know that a few of my fellow engineers are more interested in feathering their own nest than sending the lift back down for the people coming after them. Since at the moment I am in the happy position of not having to rely on sound engineering to make my living and have little intention of doing so again, I don't see much harm in being the prestidigitator who reveals the tricks.

I'm sure that'll be fine.

One more point I would make on this subject for people who do go to a mastering engineer. A lot of people seem to be comforted by the idea of a mastering engineer inventing massively complex and convoluted signal chains bringing all manner of expensive and esoteric equipment to bear. The better a sound engineer is, the less of that kind of shit he'll do. When people don't know how to do something simply, it's because they don't know how to do it.

You're very welcome... It is a pet bug bear of mine, the mystique surrounding mastering, and now that I no longer rely on the music industry for money and never will do again, I no longer have to maintain the imposture...

There are still plenty of people writing great music out there... It's the overweening, vainglorious, prancing loons running the music industry who are the problem. The industry is falling at the speed of gravity at the moment. They're selling album length CD's in Morrison's for £2.00 (about $3.00) because rather than releasing new and innovative stuff that people would want to buy to support bands they believe in, they focus on X-factor.