For critical listening, like mixing and mastering, your speakers are obviously important. Often overlooked, however, is the importance of the stands on which the speakers sit. For best performance, monitor and hifi speakers should be level with the listener’s ears. Good speaker stands improve the bass response of just about every speaker, and a good stand provides isolation from vibration, further cleaning up the sound.

Of course, like most products marketed to audiophiles, quality speaker stands are expensive to buy. But a few industrious folk on the web have drawn up plans for good, cheap DIY monitor speaker stands:

The TNT Stubby: This is the most popular design for DIY’ers. Its simple wooden base and sand-filled PVC design is sturdy, yet easy to construct.

Lots of people have their own take on the TNT Stubby design. Here’s one with great pictures, and another all-black design that might suit some decors better than unfinished wood and PVC pipe.

Rob’s Speaker Stands: Made with steel, lots of steel. These might be trickier to build than the above designs, but they’re dead sexy.

3-spike Maple Stand: These all-wood frames look great, though solid maple may colour the speaker’s sound. (Though that could be desirable.)

Simple MDF Stands: All-MDF construction, so these stands are probably the cheapest of the group.

PVC and Concrete Stands: Art deco!

Generic Wooden Speaker Stands: This one-picture plan is straightforward, but the spikes on the stands’ bases (overlooked on a few of the other designs) would greatly enhance isolation. If you have hardwood floors, stands with a flat base may transmit too many vibrations.

Tags: diy, monitors

Royalty checks not in the mail for artists
In September, SoundExchange announced a Dec. 15 deadline for collection of fees generated by Internet plays between Feb. 1, 1996, and March 31, 2000. The company made public a list of the artists with unclaimed funds.

Digital music market to reach nearly $14.9 Billion by 2010
The global market for digital recorded music, delivered both via broadband and over mobile-phone networks, is expected to grow by nearly six-fold during the period from 2005 to 2010.

EMusic nears 100 million downloads
eMusic reported Monday that it is nearing its 100 millionth MP3 download.

Musician Plucks Sound From Lasers
Miya Masaoka is a composer, koto player and inventor of the Laser Koto — a tripod-mounted laser array that she plays by passing her hands through the beams…

Tags: newsdigest

There’s lots of chatter in this discussion about whether or not matched mic pairs are worthwhile, but lots of great information too.

Keep in mind that, if the mic’s specifications are +/- 2dB, that means that there’s a possibility you will find two mics that are 4dB apart at some point in their frequency response. If that doesn’t worry you, or you can’t hear that big a difference, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong line of work…

A practical concern for anyone looking to make some money with their recording talent: How much do you charge for an ad jingle?

Go for $3000 min. for the creative fee and then you have to figure out what is required for players & union-non buy-out, non, etc…Sometimes, it’s a lot easier, especially for a local ad, to just say $5000 all-in. But, again, it depends.

More on the never-ending quest for the perfect snare drum sound.

pull the mic back away from the rim 2-3″ and point it so that it is looking at the “impact zone”. Orient your snare wires so that they are all in line with the way the mic is pointing. The angle of the mic will be about 10 degrees with respect to the head of the drum when it’s in this position. This position, while it doesn’t isolate as much hi-hat, ends up sounding more like a snare drum and less like a timbale.

And some insight on capturing a more open sound

Can’t repeat this enough, there are 4 critical aspects for music like this; vocal sound, snare tone and the bass/kick relationship. The 4th element is the snare to kick relationship, the “pump”. If these 4 are done well it “sells the ear” that the mix is pro sounding and the listener will move on to things like the lyrics or maybe head bobbing to the music.

Tags: drums, microphones, snare-drum

Sigur Ros discuss their studio in this Sound on Sound article.

The Mosfellsbær building is comprised of two levels, the lower of which once housed a public swimming pool and later, an art gallery. “It’s a really peaceful place…” Jonsi recounts. “We had to tear the roof off the house to get the mixer in. We brought it in with a really big crane — that was quite a lot of work.”

They’ve put together a web site for the studio, since the band rents it out while they’re on tour. Studio porn at its finest

Tags: studioporn, studios

Practical Mixing – from sound On Sound magazine.
This article focuses on tracking and mixing via console (with an aside to address the importance of checking a reference CD while mixing.) But Sound On Sound caters to the masses, so the information in this article is broad and still generally useful.

It is important to keep checking the balance in mono as well as stereo (or surround) — particularly if your material may end up on the radio. Inevitably the mono mix will sound different to the stereo (and the stereo to the surround), so a degree of compromise will be required to achieve the most acceptable results in each format. Pay particular attention to reverbs, which have a habit of drying up when you listen in mono.

Previously: The Big Page of Mix Tutorials

Tags: mix-tutorials, mixing, reference-cd, tracking

RIAA president speaks out on Fair Use
Sherman took an accusatory stab at the CEA and Digital freedom stating that their campaign is not only based on false and incendiary rhetoric, but tries to sully their name saying that the CEA is not concerned at all with consumer rights.

The Beatles will go online ‘soon’ – EMI chief
Munns didn’t eleborate on timing, but the band’s new album Love, a George Martin collection of remixes, goes on sale in December.

Leading the battle for independent music labels
… the independent labels have become a bigger economic force because internet sites such as News Corp’s MySpace allow them to market directly to consumers, reducing their dependence on the majors.

Tags: newsdigest

Ryan Hewitt contributed to the tracking and mixing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Stadium Arcadium, and is happy to share his engineering experiences:

In an interview with EQ Magazine:

“What makes mixing this band so hard is that you have three musicians who are all laying down serious stuff, and the balance between them will change from part to part of the song … and to balance those things together, and always make sure that the appropriate person is stepping forward, that’s the hardest part. But everyone’s always doing something cool all the time.”

In a Mix Magazine article:

“They didn’t have a firm idea of who they wanted to mix the record, so they had me and four other guys do a test mix,” says Hewitt. “We all mixed the same three songs, and then Rick and the band listened to them blindly without knowing who was who and picked the mixer. It was nerve wracking. When I did the test mixes, I just went for broke and did what I like to do, which is make things big, exciting, live and just rock! If you had told me five years ago I’d be mixing a Chili Peppers record, I’d have told you you’re crazy. It’s an amazing opportunity.”

And at length, in great detail, on the ProSoundWeb forum (where Ryan’s user name is allaccess):

For example, “Strip My Mind” didn’t have drum sounds that were satisfactory to Chad; he wanted a big Bonham kind of sound. I got the kit sounding like he wanted, with the help of transient designers and some other wacky compressors and then reamped them through his home stereo into his huge living room… That sounded pretty sweet!

Ryan is a professional (you can hear samples of his work on his page at JDMI,) with access to equipment that most amateurs dream, or scratch their heads, about. But Ryan also describes his mixing and tracking techniques, including microphone placement and compressor settings. Even without his equipment locker, this perspective is a gold mine for home recordists.

Tags: mixing, professional-engineers, tracking

This graph, developed by Dan Richards of the Listening Sessions, plots the brightness and color characteristics of more than 50 microphones. As noted in the Studio Forums discussion it spawned, the graph says nothing about each microphone’s relative quality (note the proximity of the MXL 603 to the Neumann U87.) However, it’s a useful tool for choosing a microphone based on the sound you want to capture.

Tags: microphones

In this clip from the Nevermind edition of the Classic Albums DVD series, Butch Vig discusses the track Drain You, which had more guitar overdubs than any other track on NeverMind:

… a clean sound on the intro with Kurt’s vocal, as well as 1-2-3-4-5 guitars, 2 tracks of the Mesa Boogie, 2 tracks of the Fender bassman, and one track that we call the “super grunge”.

The video is a great little tutorial on thickening your guitar sound with multiple overdubs.

Tags: guitars, mixing, production

Need a good reason to justify not accessing the Internet with your DAW?

What Slows Windows Down and the follwup article What Really Slows Windows Down? come to an important conclusion:

Antivirus programs tether the performance of your computer [to] that of one three years its elder.

In other words, anti-virus software will kill the performance of your finely tuned digital music workstation.

(It should go without saying, but this is also a good reason not to fill your computer with audio applications of unknown provenance. For example, that $3000 plugin package you found on PirateBay.)

Previously: Tuning Windows XP

Tags: performance, windows