Recording Tips and Techniques

Ready Your Mixes For The Mastering Engineer

October 18, 2012 by Ken Leave a Comment

I have mentioned in the past – see our post Recording Engineer, Mix Engineer and Mastering Engineer – Oh My – that there are really 3 distinct jobs when recording, especially for music:

Recording (sometimes called “tracking”)
Mixing
Mastering

When we record from our home studios, we often do all three things, but there is a lot of benefit to drawing at least a mental line between all 3 jobs. It helps us to refocus and think a bit differently about what we’re doing.
But if you are going to send your music project to a mastering engineer – which is a really good idea, BTW – then there are some things you can do not only to make life easier for the mastering folks, but to get your project produced faster and sounding better.
In this article, Bobby Owsisnksi outlines 8 tips for making your mixes more master-friendly. I would add one tip to the list though, and that would be to leave some headroom in the final mix-down (rendered stereo file of the mix). This gives the mastering engineer room to work with and optimize the final level of the song. If you send in a compressed and normalized audio file, the mastering engineer doesn’t really have breathing room to allow space and “air” to come through in the final version.
But without further ado, here is the original article to which I refer:
http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/in_the_studio_eight_tips_for_mixing_for_mastering/

Using A Dynamic Mic To Record Vocals?

October 17, 2012 by Ken Leave a Comment

I have to admit that when I saw the title of an article by Joe Gilder called “3 Reasons to Use a Dynamic Mic on Vocals,” my hackles went up a little. He was referring not to live performance, but to studio recording of vocals. There is a rule-of-thumb that you should always use a condenser mic, preferably a large diaphragm condenser mic, when recording vocals in the studio. LDCs are more sensitive and so pick up a lot of the subltle details of the complex human voice.
But when I saw the 3 reasons why you might consider using a dynamic mic to record vocals instead of an LDC, I found myself nodding my head. They were all very good reasons.
1. Less trouble with plosives – I do spend a LOT of time and effort to rid my condenser-recorded vocals of p-pops.
2. Less room noise – Since dynamics are less sensitive, they pick up less ambient noise.
3. Less de-essing needed – Again, since LDCs are more sensitive across the board, if a particular vocalist has hot “esses” (Ss?), they will be accentuated in the recording and likely require de-essing in editing.
All good points. We should remind ourselves, in all facets of life, not to doggedly stick to rules-of-thumb. A better solution can often be found by breaking the rules. Though if I had to use a dynamic mic on vocals, I’d rather use something like an Electro-Voice RE20 over a Shure SM58.
Read Joe’s full article here:
http://www.homestudiocorner.com/3-reasons-to-use-a-dynamic-mic-on-vocals/

Bad Voice-Overs Ruin Great Looking Videos

October 16, 2012 by Ken Leave a Comment

If I had to estimate what percentage of very professional-looking sales videos on the web were accompanied by crappy audio due to poor voice-over quality, I’d have to say at least 50 percent. That’s a lot folks! And there is no reason for it – none at all. Audio for video is not hard. If your videos are just for fun, the narration quality may not be that important. But videos for your business affect the bottom line, and amateur-sounding audio might well be limiting how successful you are.
When someone goes through the trouble of creating a sales video they usually have a goal of – oh I don’t know – selling something. With that in mind, the wise salesperson will want to put forward as professional an image as possible within their budget. One of the ways they do this is to produce a very nice-looking video with professional graphical design, and carefully crafted copy to tell the right story. Then, for the final touch, they decide to record the narration for this video in such a way that it sounds like they’re in a shower. At least that’s my experience as a consumer of these videos (I watch a lot of them so I can learn what to do and, apparently, what not to do:P). I’m not certain what these folks are thinking, but a lot of them must feel like as long as it is intelligible and gets the message across, it’s fine. Uh, no. When I see a great video with crappy voice over quality due to poor audio recording choices, in my mind the presentation can literally be down-graded from “pro” to “amateur.” Don’t you don’t think THAT affects sales?
The odd thing about this is the reason, typically, for the poor audio. It’s usually something silly like being too far away from the mic in a less-than-ideal acoustic space (which includes just about every room in most houses, by the way). The fix is so easy. GET CLOSER TO THE MIC. The closer your mouth is to the mic, the more of you is recorded, and the less the room figures into the equation. I recommend 3-4 inches if possible. You can go the extra mile and hang a moving blanket behind the microphone, but for the most part just getting closer to the mic will make a huge difference.

Now when you are recording video, especially if you’re doing a “talking head” type of video, logistics dictate that your mouth (or that of the person talking) will be a few feet away from the camera. You have a couple of choices. If your camera has an external mic jack, use it! That way you put a mic close to the narrator’s mouth. You can also use a lavalier type mic like the Azden WMS-Pro for this. (The Azden also comes with a hand-held mic).
I did a review video of the Azden, comparing the sound of just the camera’s mic with that of the lav, in this post: https://www.homebrewaudio.com/audio-quality-for-videos/

If your camera does not have an external mic connector, the other alternative is to record the voice totally separate from the camera. The will be recorded either into a computer or a mobile recorder like the Zoom H4 Handy 4-Track Recorder (which can double as a computer audio interface – very cool!). Then just load up the video in your editor (I’m a fan of Sony Vegas), which will also load the audio recorded on the camera’s built-in mic. That’s fine. Simply import the voice audio you recorded separately and place it on a new audio track underneath the one you loaded from the camera. Now you can just line up the two audio tracks by nudging the audio-only track, delete the audio track that got recorded from the camera, and presto! Pro audio instead of the cruddy camera-recorded sound.
Several of the above tips won’t require you to buy anything! A common misconception is that pro audio can only come from great big microphones costing hundreds (or thousands) of dollars. That is not true. It’s more about the knowledge of acoustics and microphones and recording than it is about the gear. For video narration purposes you can get perfectly professional quality audio with a USB mic (like the Samson Q1U) costing around $49, as long as you have just the barest bit of audio knowledge, which you can get from many a tutorial and article at Home Brew Audio.

Felix Broke The Sound Barrier In His Sky Dive – But What Does That Mean?

October 15, 2012 by Ken 2 Comments

Felix Baumgartner broke a bunch of records in his historic sky dive from the edge of space, including becoming the first person ever to break the sound barrier, reaching a speed of about 834 miles per hour, without the aid of a craft of some kind. But what does it mean to “break the sound barrier?” And how can I use that knowledge in the audio recording and live sound worlds?

How Does The Speed Of Sound Relate To Audio Recording?

Well, basically breaking the sound barrier means that you move from a speed that is less than the speed of sound to a speed that is faster than the speed of sound. Since there are lots of variables involved that are ever-changing and rarely the same from one place to another (things like temperature, air pressure and density, etc.), it is generally accepted as a good approximation that the speed of sound is 1,125 feet per second at room temperature. That’s the same as 768 miles per hour, 1,235 kilometers per hour, 1 mile every 5 seconds, or 1 millisecond (ms) per foot.
But as people who are concerned about recording audio in our home studios, or doing live sound work, it’s the 1 millisecond per foot number that is most useful to us. How is it useful? Well, when we know that 1 foot = 1 millisecond, we can apply delays on certain sounds in our recording projects to correct for timing issues, especially when using multiple microphones on a single source.

An Example of The Speed of Sound In The Studio

For example, a lead guitar in a rock song needs to be very clear and “up-front,” but it also needs to sound huge. You can get the clarity and up-front part simply by placing a microphone very close to the amplifier grill – like just an inch or two. Over the years it has become pretty standard to use a dynamic mic like the Shure SM57 for this. But that won’t give you the large/huge sound that you want. For that you need a far-away mic, something placed about 10-15 feet away. At that distance a large diaphragm condenser mic would work well. An AKG C214 would work well for this due to its ability to withstand loud sound signals.
So now you have 2 microphones recording a single sound, the electric guitar. But one of the 2 mics is 10 or 15 feet further away, and the sound will reach them at different times. Blending the sound from both mics will reduce or eliminate the clarity and attack of the guitar that we need because of the delay of the sound going into the far-away mic. But armed with our new-found knowledge about the speed of sound, we can compensate for the delay by simply adding some delay to the close mic. In the studio you can use a delay effect in your recording software/DAW (such as Reaper or Pro Tools). If recording live, or otherwise using outboard gear, you can use a hardware delay unit such as the TC Electronic D-Two.
How much delay do we need? Let’s go back to our speed-of-sound number – 1 millisecond = 1 foot. So if the far-away mic was 10 feet away, we add 10 milliseconds to the close-up mic to compensate for the distance difference in the mics. Now we have both a clear AND a large-sounding lead guitar sound!
See? Now you know how Felix Baumgartner breaking the sound barrier relates to recording audio. You’ll find other uses for this knowledge as you do more and more recording or live sound.

Using Subgroups or Busses To Mix Music

October 15, 2012 by Ken Leave a Comment

Once you have a bunch of different instrument tracks in a music project, one really cool thing you can do is create sub-mixes to help simplify and improve the mix. In the old days, you had to have a mixer with more than just the master buss (left and right channel outputs) or at least have the ability to send the outputs of tracks to other tracks. For example, if you had 4 guitars on tracks 1, 2, 3, and 4, you could route them to stereo track 12 (or a pair of mono tracks, say 11 and 12). Then you could control volume and effects for all the guitars with 1 (or 2) slider.
This is soooo much easier with computers and multi-track software. Below is a video from WinkSound demonstrating how to do this in Pro Tools. You can do the same thing very easily in Reaper, where you can use auxiliary sends like in this video, or use track folders.
See the Pro Tools video below: