One thing unites engineers of all skills and backgrounds: The need to show off our gear. Here are some threads from gearslutz and hr.com with pictures of:

• studios
• drum setups
• miked guitar cabs

It’s pure studioporn, but you’ll probably see some things that make your 2 mics and 4-track look like Abbey Road.

Previously: Home recording pool on Flickr

Tags: pictures, studioporn

From the Muse’s Muse: “Singing and playing a great song is almost as good as getting a lesson from the person who wrote it.”

With recording and mixing, lessons from experts come even easier when the engineers and producers volunteer to share their knowledge.

Michael Tretow, the engineer for all of Abba’s studio albums, offers a wealth of information on his techniques in this 1980 article, Abba In The Studio:

I always try to place the electric guitar amp in a different room, if the studio has access to a storage room or something like that. I believe that to get a really loud sound you must play loud and literally let the sound fill the room. I use one close-up mic in front of the amp and one omni, out in the room, to pick up rattling windows and the like.

In this interview with Michael Fremer, Roy Halee, who engineered for Paul Simon from the 1960’s through Graceland and The Rhythm of The Saints, talks at length about his experiences (particularly some of the tricks used on The Boxer.) See also part II of the interview.

MF: And then there’s that big drum “kishhhhhh.”

RH: Well that was done in the elevator shaft at Columbia! So we go to the church, add their voices with Dolby, and now we’re out of tracks…Then we were going to do strings, so we decide to record it onto a two-track and wild track it into the final mix.

MF: You had to use a variable pitch control to keep it in synch with the rest?

RH: That’s what I did.

Previously: Ryan Hewitt’s hand in Stadium Arcadium

Tags: mixing, production, professional-engineers, tracking

The definitive takes on the loudness war are probably The Death of Dynamic Range, and Rip Rowan’s Over the limit.

Most articles on the subject, though, are addressed to engineers, by other engineers and producers fed up with the hammering their mixes receive at the hands of overzealous mastering engineers. For the average music consumer, the matter remains somewhat esoteric.

In his article Imperfect Sound Forever, Nick Southall addresses this, and more importantly why the steady increase in volume is so bad for consumers, from the perspective of someone who just loves music:

Levels have crept up over the last decade though, and alarmingly so. Nevermind is 6-8dB quieter than, say, Hopes & Fears by Keane—to contextualise this, those 6-8dB will make Nevermind sound approximately half as loud… Keane should NOT be twice as loud as Nirvana.

For those why decry the practice, it’s a good sign when writers outside the field of music production begin to address the issue. And Southall has more great thoughts in his follow-up article:

Compression will continue to be abused in the pursuit of loudness for as long as the recording industry believes that louder shifts units. I don’t think the loudness war is causing tangible increases in sales anymore than I think the actual notes and words and beats of music are getting “worse” though … I think this is because the clamour to make music louder has made it less loveable, and in the long run loveable sells more. Record company people sadly don’t always seem to get this

Tags: loudnesswars, mastering, production

Apple gains control of critical digital download patent
With this patent in hand, Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download of not just music but also movies and videos

‘Before the Music Dies’ Diagnoses an Ailing Industry
In fact, the business model that once used profits from big, popular acts to support the development of new and lesser acts has broken down. In one American industry after another, from radio to records to books to retailing, the financial foundation for developing the next wave of talent has collapsed.

Downloads to lift music industry
A new report from Verdict Research predicts that the download market will grow from £112m to almost £500m by 2011.

Zune, Creative Commons Don’t Mix
An increasing number of musicians are releasing their work into the public domain under an innovative and radical new copyright scheme known as Creative Commons. Some of these people are now questioning whether the Zune’s blanket hardwired sharing limitations — a compromise hammered out to appease the record labels — should be applied to their content.

Zune means zilch for artists
Although this pattern of not paying artists for digital music sales is dreadful, the chances of artists seeing anything from the royalty placed on Zune is even worse. There is nothing in the standard recording agreement that says the labels must share income derived from licensing digital devices.

And the Hyperbole Special:

RIAA wants the Internet shut down
The RIAA argued that by merely making files available on the Internet Barker was making a copyright infringement.

Tags: newsdigest

In the age of DAWs and firepods and CD burners, it’s easy to forget how good we have it:

Tags: history, video

Some treatment ideas for a mono overhead drum kit mic:

I drive it hard at the preamp ( I usually use an old Trident Preamp for this) and then Nuke it with a Distressor. It all depends on the feel of each individual song as to how much if any of it gets used in this Mix.

How to record a cymbal basher:

Angle the cymbals more so his hits are more of a glancing strike rather than a direct hit. A cloud suspended over the drums can help to diffuse some of the cymbals but it wont solve all the problems. Moving overhead mics out farther or higher may help a little.

And a related thread on dealing with cymbal bleed in other mics:

1. change the cymbals to lighter ones
2. change his sticks to thinner ones
3. raise/move the cymbals so that he has to reach for them–if he has to reach for them, he won’t be able to bash away comfortably, which typically leads to more controlled cymbal playing.
4. move the overheads so they don’t pick up as much cymbals
5. use mics with better rejection (or better sounding bleed) for your close mics.

Tags: drums

From Gibraltar Hardware, this page on drum maintenance and repair is handy for addressing annoyances that pop up while tracking drums. If nothing else, the page advances the maxim that drummers (and the engineers who record them) should always carry duct tape.

Excessive Footboard Movement
If your bass or hi-hat pedal footboard suddenly begins moving from side-to-side while you’re playing, you should first check to see if the Y-shaped radius rod which is attached to the bottom of the pedal’s heel plate has disconnected itself …
Short-Term Repair: Duct tape the pedal’s heel plate to the floor and continue playing.

Tags: drums

Some failed experiments in audio technology, including the head-mounted turntable and the oxygen-free listening room.

If oxygen-free copper is a good thing, then clearly oxygen is a bad thing for audio. The largest quantity of oxygen the sound is likely to encounter is in its passage through the air from loudspeakers to listeners. The only way to address this is: The Oxygen-Free Listening Room, which is filled with pure nitrogen.

(Joking aside, some of the speakers in project #10 now make up an art exhibit with a message.)

Tags: humour

I’m a member of the band Gert. Until we played together in person this summer, our year-long collaboration was entirely virtual. 6 song writers, a continent apart, connected by musical tastes and the Internet. We’re still a band in the general sense, but in place of schedule conflicts, angry neighbours, and ego clashes, we deal with time zones, bit rates, and ego clashes.

The 6 of us have played in bands for years, but most of our past experience isn’t relevant to creating music virtually. Collaborating with 3000 miles between band mates has little in common with traditional jamming. Though that’s not always a bad thing, as we’ve discovered in the last year. On one hand, music – especially for performers – is interactive. With some limited exceptions, the Internet does not facilitate real-time musical interaction, so musicians who rely on visual or audible cues are at a disadvantage. But on the other hand, creativity is usually a personal and private experience. Many people feel liberated with no band mates or groupies in the room, which in turn opens up creative avenues not possible with the traditional approach.

In Gert, we’ve learned to work around the obstacles to our creativity, and in fact we’ve capitalized on the benefits the Internet affords us to create some fantastic music. Below, I provide insight into what it takes musicians in different cities to write and record a song together. I also describe in detail how we wrote Sweet Lovin’ Woman (I Hate You), with samples of the song as it progressed, and the discussion around the choices we made while writing.

If you’ve considered online collaboration yourself, or are simply curious about how distributed creativity works, read on.

(more…)

Tags: collaboration, songfight

Nashville tuning (or “high stringing”) a guitar involves replacing the heavier strings with a lighter guage, and tuning them an octave higher. Chord shapes stay the same, but the guitar produces some notes an octave higher (somewhat like a 12-string.)

Without the lower strings, the tone lacks body, and as a standalone guitar track a Nashville-tuned guitar would sound thin. But a guitar with this tuning can be used to double a normally-tuned guitar track, and brighten the sound.

Here’s an example:

Now here’s the same riff played with two guitars, one tuned normally and one high strung:

(The riff is from the song Funny Feeling.)

Tags: guitars