What is “harmonic balancing” and why should I care? (Or more appropriately, why should I ignore the hype?):
Peaks and valleys in your spectrum don’t determine what’s “good” or “bad,” your ears do… And what causes records to sound different in different listening environments is a poorly balanced mix, again something you fix with your ears, not your eyes.
This conversation about ultrasonic frequencies (those above the range of human hearing) is technical, and does nothing to settle the debate about whether recording at 192KHz really yields improved transparency. But it’s interesting nonetheless:
if you do record all the way up to, say, 100 kHz, you will be capturing signal that can foldback and alias into the sub-20 kHz regions. If you take care of these things prior to the decimation, there will be less energy to foldback.
How do I get a big thick guitar sound? (The best advice is on page 2)
Drop any distortion simulation like a hot potato. Forget about it….you will thank me later. I tried to do “professional” recordings with it, and it just doesn’t work….though I do actually rely on sims for pristine cleans. The whole thing is that emulation hasn’t got to the authentic stage, because it doesn’t sound like it’s pushing air, and it’s using transistors, which add a 3rd harmonic in the distortion, which is not pleasant to the ears. For single notes it’s okay, but transistor distortion just sounds unpleasant when you have multiple strings playing, especially on an open d or g chord….it’s a whole bunch of these harsh overtones. I just don’t think that transistor power amps can process all the information in a way that it’s pleasing to the ears….it’s trying to process numbers, where the ears are processing overtones.
Joey Moi, who co-produced and engineered Nickelback’s The Long Road shows up on this thread at Gearslutz to offer his thoughts on recording the band.
whats noted is pretty close to the set up we used on “The Long Road” give or take a mic or 2…or 4. Its alot different now that we have moved to the barn and our Live room is smaller. For the record…the SSL we have is great, it is the old board from the A room in Little Mountain, we have a lot of fun using it and it has never let us down. (We thinks it has magic)
Tags: guitars, professional-engineers
2 comments
I’d differ with that bloke about digital amp-sims.
My first example is the Simulanalog Guitar Suite. They’ve got their tone down to less than -40dB of difference to the classic original stompboxes and amps (mathematically provable). And that’s on test tones, which as we all know always accentuate any audible problems tenfold – after all, that’s the point of them.
My other case in point is Guitar Rig 2, and this is where I insult all the ‘golden ears’ bearded fellows. I would say any lack of realism that can be found using GR2 is down to a bad patch programmer. The tones found in GR2s devices are audibly very close to DIed real-world equipment – most of the problems arrive at the cabinets-and-mics stage, that is, the very beginning and end. People choose inappropriate mics, cabinets, and cabinet sizes, and stack them up when they don’t need to. Suddenly they’ve made a mess of a serviceable chain.
Of course it pays to know exactly what you’re doing with the sound from the start, and experience with the devices help too. Ultimately it’s the entire rig that processes the sound so if you chain the devices badly, or worse use the wrong devices altogether, you’re going to get ugly guitars. Crap in, crap out.
As a little test, I’d like to do a double-blind test with some people that say they can hear the difference between a well-written GR2 patch (with a DIed guitar) and an identical hardware chain.
Wow, Simulanalog Guitar Suite is cool, poorsod. Thanks for the pointer.