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Recording Tips and Techniques

These Are Audio Myths – Myths, I Tell You (Even Number 1 in My Humble Opinion)

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A List of Audio Myths To Help You Improve the Quality of Your Home Recording Studio.  The author, however, calls a few of them true, so…not myths?  Anyway, my favorite one is.

  • 10. You need better gear to make better recordings.

  • False. You need the correct gear for the recording at hand. You need better ears to make better recordings. Instead of just investing in gear, invest in knowledge, invest in listening, invest in new techniques, invest in improving your ears and understanding. You can also make great sounding recordings and mixes on a budget.

Here is the original and full article from “The Pro Audio Files”: http://theproaudiofiles.com/10-common-audio-myths-debunked/
Find out more about producing pro quality audio on a regular person’s budget here Home Recording

Getting a Good Mix With Cheap Monitor Speakers

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Someone asked the following question on the Home Recording forum yesterday about cheap monitor speakers:
A few days ago I asked a question on different forum about really cheap monitors as I need some.
Well, I don’t have much money to buy myself..let’s say.. krk rp 5.  I just need a cheap pair of monitors.  I was thinking about Alesis m1 320, but then I was told that there’s no sense buying cheap monitors as they sound worse than computer speakers.  What do you guys think?

And here is how I answered the question:

Hi Edward,
I agree with others here that for the most part, cheap studio monitors are usually better than computer speakers, at least they should be more “honest” than computer speakers, which are designed to make things sound good. You don’t want monitor speakers to “make things sound good, you want to hear the truth…or as close to it as possible. But also, consider this. If you’re doing your critical listening and mixing in a room in your house/apartment like most of us, even accurate/flat speakers are going to lie to your ears because boxy bedrooms (some worse than others) are simply going to accentuate certain frequencies (bass almost certainly), and eat others, causing you to add too much of the frequencies you don’t hear, and subtract too much of the frequencies you hear too much of. Then when you listen to the mix somewhere else it’ll suck (not enough bass and way too much in certain mids or highs for example).
So is all lost? Of course not. As with anything else in this biz you need either time or money. If you can’t afford good monitors AND room treatment (which can be expensive and easily done wrong), what you do is the “mix hokey-pokey’ (my made-up term). Mix in your studio first. Then listen to the test mix on as many systems as possible, including the car (very important), ipod, other computers, your “good” stereo/entertainment system, etc. Make lots and lots of notes, come back to the studio and mix again, tweaking according to your notes. Repeat the process until it sounds good on all systems. That’s my advice for getting by with cheap monitors in a home recording studio.
I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Ken

Is EQ Really Necessary?

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graphic eqSomeone asked this question over at the Home Recording Forum:
If you’re getting the right tone from the start when you record, for example using the tone control on the guitar and its amplifier, why is EQ needed in mixing? I’ve read a bunch of articles singing the praises of EQ, but in the mixes I made I didn’t touch it and they worked fine. I think I only used it once, to round off some top end on a guitar that was annoyingly bright.
Why is it considered so important?
I answered the question with the following:
You’re right about EQ’s necessity if you get the tones right at the source.  Ideally it should not be needed, especially if you only have one or two tracks to deal with (say a voice over with some royalty-free music).  Many folks over-use EQ to “fix” bad recording techniques. HOWEVER, in music recording, when you have multiple instruments playing together on multiple tracks, things can get muddied up pretty fast.  Using EQ to assist in the mixing process becomes very important. The best mixes make room for every element to be heard, and without some EQ, certain instruments tend to mask each other by competing for the same frequencies. One common example is bass guitar and kick drum. They share many of the same frequencies and the best way to let them both be heard more clearly, you have to de-conflict key frequencies, reducing bass in one frequency area (letting the kick through), and reducing the kick in a different area (letting the bass through).
Hopefully that made sense. Basically, the more elements you have in a mix, the more likely you are to need EQ on individual tracks. But if you’re just doing, say, a voice over track, you shouldn’t need any EQ at all if you have a good recording space and decent signal chain.
Cheers!
Ken

Making Your Audio Loud – The Use and Abuse of Compression

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Compress AudioMaking sure your audio can be heard easily and clearly is important.  One of the best audio editing tools available to us is called compression. With a compressor, we can even out the volume of certain tracks in our recordings, or even the entire mix.  One primary reason for this is to prevent the listener from having to turn up the volume to hear the soft parts, but then also having to turn the volume down to keep from getting their ears blasted out during the loudest bits.
This loudness leveling has another…ahem…benefit.  Since it turns down the loudest bits without turning down the perceived average loudness of the entire song (or any audio content, like voice-overs, podcasts, etc.), some blank space is left between the former loudest bit and 0dB, the loudest possible level, before distorting.  “Well…” say the producers, “we can’t have any blank space on the final track.  That would mean the song isn’t as loud as it could be.”  So now the entire song’s average loudness can be increased by raising ALL the levels until the loudest one is just barely below 0 dB.
Here is an interesting article about “the loudness wars,” as they are sometimes called, and how the search for ever-louder mixes can crush the life out of the music.
The original article is here: http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/the_loudness_wars_a_graphic_look_at_hypercompression/
Cheers,
Ken

Audio Quality for Videos

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Why does it seem like the audio quality for videos, especially internet video, is crappy even when the audio looks great?  Every day video capability is improving, pictures are getting sharper, technology is getting faster and almost everything is high definition or three dimensional. When recording your own videos, it turns out that it is pretty hard to get your audio recording to the same quality as your video.  What is up with that?  To achieve fantastic audio to accompany your fantastic video, you may well need to follow a few more instructions and go through a few more stages.  It isn’t hard, but it seems like a whole lot of folks are just living with crappy audio even when the video looks great.audio for videos

Canon Vixia HD Camcorder
Canon Vixia HD Camcorder

Your camcorder may have cost you a fortune and be top of the range but its built-in microphone probably isn’t. These microphones are generally very cheap, and the distance from the speaker or sound emitter (unless the camera is 6 inches from the narrator’s face!) means too much echo and reverberation are mixed in with the desired sound by the time it reaches the camera’s audio recorder. To achieve on-the-spot quality audio, invest in an external microphone. To achieve quality audio the microphone needs to be near to the speaker or sound emitter. The optimum distance for recording great audio is around 12-18 inches, and this can really only be achieved by using an external mic jack. This option is great for video where it is OK for the microphone to be seen or you will be recording up close.  If you don’t want the mic to be seen in the video, you can use a kind of mic called a shotgun mic, which is capable of picking up good, noise-free audio from a few feet away, usually just outside the picture. This is what they do in the movies. Or you can actually use a small-diaphragm condenser mic or even a USB mic (if you have a computer). I explain how to do this – and you can hear an audio comparison of audio from the camera and from the external mic – in a video I put on the post How To Get Good Audio On Your Videos.
Picking the right camera up-front is the best solution here. It is a good idea to contact your camera supplier to make sure you get one with an external mic jack, especially if you are serious about your film making. It actually isn’t as common as it should be. I had to investigate about 10 different camcorders before I came up with one that met both my video needs AND had an external mic input. that camcorder was a Canon Vixia HF M500 Full HD Camcorder.
If you are recording a theatrical or cinematic video, you could use a small lapel-based microphone which would be barely visible to the viewer or you could use a completely different method. The other potential method involves using state of the art video editing software. Reputable programs include Sony Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro.  With these programs you can record your audio and video files separately. This is especially handy if you don’t have a shotgun mic, or your camera does not have an external mic jack.  You can record the dialogue along with the video, then align the audio track to the video track in the software.  That allows you to cut, splice, move, etc. the audio and video together simultaneously.  Then you can add background music, sound effects, etc. to the edited video as additional audio tracks to really make things sound professional.
Technology is developing at an alarming speed. Every day there is a better camcorder or more advanced program on the market and to keep up with the trends in video and audio technology, you need to be aiming for the top in BOTH instances. Putting cheap-sounding audio onto a slick looking video pretty much tanks your goal of trying to create a professional end-product.