Tips and suggestions for faking the sound of an upright bass with an electric bass:

You’re probably not going to fool anyone but it might be enough to imply the sound of an upright by having (or exaggerating) a few of its distinguishing traits. I think the decay is important. Uprights seem to have less sustain than electric bass. Try the Carol Kaye trick of putting some fabric near the end of the strings (near the bridge is best bet, but you could shove it between the strings and the fretboard at the nut) to dampen them.

Why do CDs use a sample rate of 44.1 KHz?

44.1 kHz came about because digital audio was encoded and then stored as video on video tape as white and black bits.

Since there are a number of video standards a sampling rate had to be chosen that would be divide up well on to video formats having different frame rates and scanned lines per frame.

And more, on the technical details:

Video recorders… were adapted to store audio samples by creating a pseudo-video waveform which would convey binary as black and white levels. The sampling rate of such a system is constrained to relate simply to the field rate and field structure of the television standard used, so that an integer number of samples can be stored on each usable TV line in the field.

What recording chain did John Mayer use on his album Continuum:

Vocals were Mic -> 1073s -> 1176 (or two chs with one into a Fairchild 670)
Neumann U47 (most), Neumann M269c & RCA 77 (“I’m Gonna Find Another You”)

How do you place your monitor speakers? Even if you’re mixing with computer speakers, there’s lots of useful advice here:

In a two way box design with a tiny horn like that, the woofer is actually handling AT LEAST 1khz on down. Sometimes, the crossover point is even higher. This is another reason that tweeter over woofer is the proper way to display the speakers, because the imaging will be more consistent.

Tags: ,