RedTapeAudio

Finishing Line / Reverb

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:17:00 +0000

The Land Lovers record wings its way down to WAV Mastering tonight - just a few little bits of tidying up here and there left.
Assuming I can restrain myself from tweak-mania on some frequency in the snare thats annoying me or some similar wild goose chase. Why is it always the snare?

As mentioned last week the Acousticas Bricasti impulse responses...
Are.
A.
Maaay.
Zing.

They really brought life into the mixes over the last week or so - even adding too much reverb sounds good with them.

I was looking around for a convolution reverb for PT M-Powered on Mac last week to give the IRs a try and was surprised how few options there are.
Altiverb don't do demos.
Waves IR-1 is $800 or something stupid.
SIR / Voxengo don't do RTAS.

The two options left were TL Space and MCDSP Revolver.
I'd heard great things about TL Space from Steve Shannon, but I had already demo'ed it about 2 years ago, which ruled that out, so Revolver it was.

Initially I was dissappointed to see Revolver reporting a latency of 1024 samples.
This immediately kills a reverb plugin for me - if I wanted a pre-delay, I'd add it myself :)
Luckily, a bit of digging around turned up a low-latency mode with zero reported latency.
Nice.

So, the Bricasti IRs.
Wow-eee.
Wonderful stuff. Like I said, you can use way too much reverb and it still sounds good.
No, make that great.
The right IR immediately becomes part of the sound - like its always been there.
Most of the time I'd start off by finding one that suited the vocal, then trying to feed various other things in to it to see how well they sat - snare, guitars etc.
Sometimes I set up a seperate verb where I needed a different sound, but for the most part feeding everything into one 'main' reverb worked a treat.

Revolver is cool, with a huge number of tweaky parameters (luckily split across several different pages to keep the interface uncluttered), EQ and two seperate built-in delays.
DSP use is fine, and the included presets are pretty decent.
Combined with the Bricasti responses, it's definitely the most fun I've had with a software reverb.
I'll report with more thoughts on Revolver as I get to know it better.

Anyone got a real Bricast I can 'borrow'? :D

Nearly there..

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:15:00 +0000

Just reaching the finishing line on the mixing of the new Land Lovers record - not much sun for me over the weekend :)
Should have time to share some thoughts and files from my MA-200 vs AK-47 shootout over the next few days.
In the meantime the Hired Hands single I recorded is up on their myspace.. head over for a listen!

Shootout!

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Fri, 29 May 2009 11:27:00 +0000

Telefunken AK-47 vs. Mojave Audio MA200 shootout..
Files and comments to come over the weekend.

Reverb..

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:07:00 +0000

Anyone who has a suitable convolution reverb should check out the free Bricasti M7 impluses that Acousticas.net are giving away.
Sounding super (I've yet to hear the hardware, which I imagine is crazy good).
The Bricasti was reviewed recently in TapeOp.

Here's the download link - http://www.acousticas.net/World/IRs/AcousticasM7.zip

More on convolution reverbs soon.

My demo hell

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:05:00 +0000

Plugin demo, that is.

I tried out the SPL Transient Designer and TwinTube plugins recently.
Anyone who's used a Transient Designer will know what a useful little tool it is - it can really rescue a less than ideal source.
I've had good results with it in killing nasty boingy rings on close mic'ed drums and easing down the attack on a hammered acoustics.
It's also very cool for subtle changes that can bring a track a little more to life - a bit more attack on a bass or guitars, or whatever.

I also figured I'd give TwinTube a whirl.
I think I've mentioned before how much use I get out of the URS Saturation plugin - just the other day I used it to add some grind to a drum bus for the first time in ages.. great sound.
The TwinTube offers a single saturation sound, but luckily its one that compliments the URS plug quite nicely - a somewhat smoother sound overall, but still very much able to provide plenty of dirt.
At the moment it's sitting on a lead vocal for a song I'm mixing and I'm quite happy for it to be right up front.
The harmonics section is one of those features thats just begging to be abused.
While it can be handy for adding some life to dull instruments or synths that roll off everything above 2khz, the way it reacts with the saturation section (read : brings the crazy) is almost certainly going to be roundly abused in the next few days to make some fun sounds.

The 'hell' part of the demo experience is that I initially only bought Transient Designer after the demo period expired, but those clever Germans at SPL promptly dropped an extra 30-day trial of that and their EQ Ranger plugin (haven't tried it, the last thing I need is more EQ).
This fiendish ploy has most likely gotten them an extra sale :/

It Lives!

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:14:00 +0000

I'm back on the Blog Wagon, so to speak.

Just finished up a single/7" for Hired Hands with mastering by Richard down in Wav Mastering.
Had a lot of fun recording them in their rehearsal space (a large church hall), a lovely room with nice ambience. In fact, the room was like an extra member of the band - in a good way, luckily.

I even managed to take a pic during the live tracking part of the session, although most of the juicy stuff is obscured - nice big pic here.. PIC.

Drums are hidden between two down n' dirty gobos (tables covered in blankets) with the guitar amps either side (one, a Vox, is visible to the right).
Bass amp is behind the Mac, facing away from the drums.
Drums were SM7 on kick, U87 snare, Royers overhead all into API.
An ATI 8mx2 took care of the other mics - 441s on guitar, SM57 and some MXL mic on bass.
Clarinet, Sax and fiddle overdubs were Royers with a little bit of U87 here and there.
Vocals were mostly SM7.

The next week or so will be mixing the new Land Lovers record at home, with finishing touches back in Nutshed Studios where the album was tracked in a fun but intense 5 days in March.
12 hour days with recuperation via rum leaves little time for sleep :)

Long time no Update

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:33:00 +0000

A busy weekend coming up though, with gigs by Dreams of Violence and Hounds.

Sandwiched between the two, I'll be out in Beechpark with Yeh Deadlies. It'll be a big 6 piece band bonanza of live recording. Should be fun, although setup's gonna be a pretty big job.
This time there will be session pics.

I've been doing some mix work recently for Dollar Store Toys - excellent indiepop fun.
Hopefully that'll become a release in the next while.

I finally sold off one more principle in exchange for a copy of Melodyne. For emergency purposes only, damnit.

In other new product news, anyone looking to get one good preamp for their home recording needs (or adding a great pre to a collection) should check out the new Daking One Pre :

The Daking is great for Snare, Acoustic and a plenty more besides. It's got enough gain to keep your ribbons very happy, too.
The only thing I'd miss is the output level knob from the Mic Pre/EQ which you can use to get some beautiful saturated sounds with by driving the input hard.
Depending on how the euro price works out (or if you're visiting the US) it looks like being my recommendation for a preamp in the 5/600 price range.

More info here.

Cheap buys for a better tomorrow Pt.2

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:33:00 +0000

Ahh Moongel.
This sticky-icky gel can be your very, very best friend when confronted with a less than perfectly tuned drumkit.
One well-placed chunk of this stuff can banish those nasty rings and overtones that are making the snare sound like a rutting rhinoceros instead of the tremendous thunderclap you're aiming for.
I won't approach a drum kit without some in my back pocket if I can help it. Time is always in short supply on tracking days, so taking care of nasty rings quickly helps keep the session flowing, keeps musicians happy and makes for better takes.
Buy some!

Cheap buys for a better tomorrow Pt.1

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:32:00 +0000

I just noticed that Thomann have started stocking Extreme Isolation Headphones.
These wonderful little fellas (and they're only €66) are fantastic for both tracking and monitoring at a live/location recording.
On plenty of occasions I've used them when other headphones just weren't getting the foldback to the player's ears right - usually when tracking live in one room, or even just when the player is standing in the same room as the drums.
The isolation means that you can use much less level, reducing fatigue over a day of tracking - not to mention helping get a more audible mix to the player.

Elastic Brilliance

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:52:00 +0000

So what's new?

I finally moved up to Protools 7.4 for one thing.
I'd gotten 7.4 with my new Lightbridge, but as luck would have it, I ended up having to pay for the updgrade anyway because you have to have the same version of LE and M-Powered to run the two on one PC.
Glorious.
So I'm stuck with having to buy upgrades for both until I ditch the 002 altogether.

Although I haven't gotten around to checking out all the new stuff, Elastic Audio is definitely worth a mention.
I had a chance to test it out on two different tunes - one that was pretty tight already but suited the welded to the grid thing, and another than was pretty much the opposite.
In both cases it did a pretty fine job once I'd gotten the hang of it.
It seems to do its best work on drums, and editing them this way is a relatively painless undertaking.
I did run into some trouble where I had guitar tracks that consisted of two microphones on one amp with the diaphragms as close together as possible for phase reasons.
On these tracks the shifting and warping would occasionaly knock the two mics out of phase with each other - I can only assume that this is happening across a group of drum tracks too, but with less readily audible results. Then again, it could be my elastic noobness letting me down (hints and tricks appreciated).

In new plugin news, I've been demoing the Abbey Road Brilliance Pack.
This consists of three plugins, all of which are based on units used in Abbey Road back in the day to brighten up signals in one way or another.
Two of them are functionally identical, providing plus or minus 10db in 2db steps at either 2.7, 3.5 or 10khz. The third has a fixed frequency of 8khz and only offers boost, again in 2db steps.
All of them sound pretty cool. A nice sounding boost in brightness is one of the most satisfying and useful tools to have at hand - in use where I regularly find myself boosting some high end (guitars, vox and particularly ribbon mic drum overheads) the 10khz boost delivered exactly what I wanted almost all the time.
The lower frequency settings seem to grab the midrange by the balls in a very cool way, handy at low boost settings for some things and probably a bit of a life saver with tracks that arrive to mix with no midrange/treble at all (usually those damn synth sounds that seem to fall over a cliff at about 2khz).

They're running an introductory $200 (about €130) offer until the 13th of July.
The bastards.

Pros :

Sounds sweet
Damned useful

Cons :

Now I have to buy it
Will I ever have 'enough' gear?

'Till next time.

String me up

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:43:00 +0000

I had two very different sessions in Beechpark last weekend.
One was a short vocal recording session for a pop/r'nb starlet and the other was assisting on a 12-player string session.
Chalk 'n cheese.

The vocal recording session was good fun.
Whenever I work in a slightly unusual genre for me, I'm always struck by how much fun it is to work on something different, and how one can transfer the same basic techincal and pseudo-psychological skills to a very different kind of song.
I could also rattle off a whole "what's the world coming to" post about singers requesting the use of autotune before they've even sung a note, but where's the sense in that?

The string session was for an entertainer popular with mammies all across the land. 12 players, conductor, producer, ambient micing and a lot of tea and coffee. Hearing a decent amount of players like that live is a lot of fun, and the hourly rate definitely gives extra focus - as if it were needed.

Got two projects back from mastering in the last week - first up was the Land Lovers record from Golden. Good subtle job done with this, he reined in the low end on one or two songs where I'd missed a bit of a build-up there, but overall it seemed that the tasteful application of mastering magic gelled the whole thing together like a good master should. It's nice to have a good reference for the ballpark I should be aiming at for high and low end in future with mixes in my room.
Rifle Fire Rifle just got back their master from Alan Douche's place this morning (I've forgotten the name of the engineer who worked on it.. will update) and again, a nice job, although I've only heard it on shitty PC speakers so far. Good feedback from the mastering guy over there - nice to know I got the mix into the right area.

Finally got the last piece of my new setup on Friday.
M-Audio Lightbridge > Lynx Aurora 16 > Neve 8816
Will report back with impressions as I develop them.

I must say, having finally moved to PT 7.4, I'm seeing much better performance from it.
A session that was starting to tax my system a bit on 7.3 jumped straight back down towards the 50-65% mark on the CPU meter in 7.4 - very cool.

Next up is a group vocal / handclap session for Stoat tomorrow night.
Should be a larf!

One Man Band

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:06:00 +0000

So I spent last weekend in Elektra with Gerry - he'd gotten in touch a month or two back saying he wanted to put down a few songs playing everything himself.
"Interesting", I thought.
"God, I hope he can play everything reasonably well", I thought.

Anyway, not too much to worry about on the playing front.
Good songs, in a somewhat mellow Ryan Adams kinda vein, but with more Steve Malkmus style delivery on the vocals.
We had a few false starts on the first song figuring out the best order to lay down the tracks in.
Any typical weekend of recording will pick up pace as it goes along, as everyone gets stuck into the rhythm of laying down tracks. That was a little more pronounced than usual on this session, since Gerry was "It" all the time. Once we figured out that Gerry was most comfortable drumming to an acoustic and bass backing, we got some decent work done.

Elektra has a new studio manager called Anders, who seems to have sorted out some of the maintenance issues that screwed things up for me on previous visits. In fact, I think I got through the whole weekend without being slowed down by technical woes at all. Have I posted about the importance of maintenance in a studio before? I should have.
Anders was kind enough to lend me his own Beta57 for the weekend - I've mentioned before how it's my current favourite on snare. Elektra also have an SM7 now, which got used on all electric guitar and vocal tracks. I had it hanging low over the area between ride, rack tom and floor tom to try and cover any close micing I might need of that area and it actually picked up a really good picture of the whole kit from there.
Definitely might end up using that as a gnarly kit sound mic.
Every time I use an SM7 I wonder why I haven't bought one yet.. must rectify that soon.

Everything was recorded to the Radar (a joy to use as always), and I used my API3124 whereever possible (kick, snare and OH for the drums, with the desk covering the rest). Bringing your own preamps is definitely a good call in Elektra - the Orion's preamps are pretty uninspiring.

So I'll be running off some mixes for Gerry this week, continuing work on the Stoat stuff. I really must get back to work on the Hounds stuff too.
Did I mention that I'm rejigging my whole setup?

That might have to wait until the next post..

The results are in..

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:48:00 +0000

In order of preference :

Neve 8816
Dangerous D-Box
Audient Sumo
Phoenix Nicerizer

The Neve's got it won on features and sound for me.
In terms of sound, it gives the low end a slight, smooth lift to my ears. It also rolls off the high end just slightly in a pretty pleasant way. It's kind of an overall rounding/warming sound I suppose.
Monitor control of two seperate pairs of speakers, talkback, heaphones etc.
With all that and the fact that it's got real knobs for volume and pan on each of the 16 channels (plus solo and mute) it does just about the best job of convincing me that I still have room for a real analog desk.
Unfortunately, because all its useful i/o is on D-sub, that means I'll probably have to put together a mini patchbay to interface my outboard with the 8816 - which is kinda one of the more compelling side effects of getting out of the box, however temporarily.
The 'width' control is like nicotine - just a little bit couldn't hurt, right?
Stuff like that always gives me the creeps.. "it sounds better - there must be something wrong", is all I can think. It's fun though.
Did I mention that this has the loudest headphone amp I've ever heard?
It does.
And the recall is a big plus.
I did try beating the shit out of the output stage (of course I did) by hitting it with a load of level on every channel. That sounded a bit more.. something. It definitely rounded off the transients a bit. Add in your favourite audio review adjective here. It sounded like that.
Although a little too much.
The long and short is that you can take it from clean to spongy depending on your input levels.

The D-Box I like a lot, mostly because it's got pretty much all the features of the 8816, apart from the fact that it only sums 8 channels and doesn't have the volume/pan knobs. It really does squeeze a lot in for your €1300ish. Sound wise, it's pretty clean and gives you back what you put in to it apart from the added depth and width the summing brings. The monitoring section is cool (nice knobs) and the headphone outputs sound good.
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get hold of an AES to optical/spdif cable, so I can't tell you how the D/A sounds, but every report I've heard says that it stands up pretty well.

The Sumo is similar to the D-Box in terms of price, and pretty close in terms of sound, too. It had a very slight lift in the high end that some folks might enjoy, but I felt it kinda fell in between two stools a bit. It's not quite clean enough to give you back what you put in, but what little 'colour' it does add wasn't my cup of tea.
Still, it's got plenty of features, although I couldn't see myself using the bus compressor/limiter all that often.
The knobs are kinda mangy too. Am I shallow?

The Nicerizer, funnily enough, does sound pretty nice.
It's got a more overtly coloured sound, I found it lent a kind of tasty midrange crunchiness to some mixes I ran through it, particluarly a drum machine+synth heavy mix. Nice sounding unit, but I discounted it pretty early, because of its lack of monitoring facilities.
It does have a monitoring output, but it's just a straight +4 out, with no level control.
Not terribly useful.
So you'd be using up a stereo pair on your interface for monitoring (and since I'd be sticking to 8/10 channel summing for a while, this is kind of a dealbreaker for me).
Mind you, the unit I had on demo is for sale at a nice price, and it does sound pretty cool.

So yeah, now I've got to figure out where all this fits into my Gear Roadmap™.
And probably find a bunch of cash under a rock to buy the 8816.
Gah.

Titles are boring

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:59:00 +0000

Sooo, I picked up my demo unit Dangerous D-box and Phoenix Audio Nicerizer from Darren in Studio Solutions on Friday. Is there anything better than new toys? I think not.
First impressions are positive, but also somewhat confusing.
I'm sticking to running 8 outputs for the moment, partly because I haven't been able to borrow another interface to run from my adat outs. In comparing the D-Box, Nicer and ITB mixes, I'm preferring the summed mixes every time. In comparing the D-box and Nicer, I'm hearing different results depending on the mixes I run through them, and it's not just related to the level I put into each box. On some mixes, the Nicer is adding some low end and smoothing out the highs a little, while also lending some saturated crunch to the midrange. This is a nice enough sound, but I'd be a little concerned that I wouldn't want it for every mix. Mind you, on some mixes there is little or no difference between the two.
Now, when monitoring through the D-box (that is, monitoring the analog summed signal before it goes back into the box) I'm hearing a lot more low level detail like reverb tails. At least, it's most obvious in that I'm hearing how things like reverb tails are going on for too long at some points in a song, or just are too long or the wrong sound in general. This is GOOD.
Only thing is, I'm not sure if it's the D-Box or summing in general that's getting me there - I think it may be because I'm using my RME ADI-2 to convert the summing box output to digital and running it back in to my interface. But I'm also clocking from the RME.
And I'm thinking it's the clocking that is improving the level of detail I'm hearing.

VERY interesting.
I will investigate further.
I'm also hoping to get my hands on one or two other demo units in the next few days, I'll report back with more observations, and maybe even some files.

In other news, Padraig's freshly analog summed mixes have been ftp'd to Golden, and Rifle Fire Rifle were over again last night. I've given them a few versions of Doppler with some arrangement edits they requested, so once they decide which they prefer, we'll have that baby wrapped up.

Peace.

Tweaks 'n Geeks.

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:31:00 +0000

Had another short session with Padraig to finish up his album. The only problem now is stopping myself from making little tweaks as I'm bouncing the songs down.
I did catch some ess-y vocals that I'd missed previously though, and I got a chance to fool around with using the URS CS Pro's de-esser preset (which is easily recreated with Dynamics III or similar - it's pretty much a compressor with a sidechain HPF set somewhere upwards of 4.5khz).
It does a pretty fine job of taming the esses without sucking the bright outta the vocal too much.
That and the uncontrollable urge to add a feedbacking delay outro spacenoise thing to the final song on the album aside, I battled the tweak-lust as manfully as I could.
The record is off to mastering with Golden in the next few weeks, hopefully.

Did attended mixing of the first Rifle Fire Rifle tune last night - I'd gotten the mix into pretty good shape, so it was mostly a case of tweaking a few bits here and there into place. We'll reconvene to finish it up in the next few days. The guys seem excited to be getting a first 'finished product', which is always a nice feeling.

The three Stoat tunes are ready for mix, so as soon as I can make the time, I'll be getting stuck into them too.
It looks like the long-awaited summing mixer shootout will be starting this weekend - a full report will follow!

Finishing touches

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:03:00 +0000

Had a (near) final tidy-up session with Padraig on Monday.
He had a few notes, so we ran through each song making a few tweaks here and there.
Everything seems to be in pretty good shape, so now it's a case of checking out the mixes on a bunch of different speaker systems to see what they can tell me.
Listening to it in the car last night, I was struck by difference in detail between the car stereo (which isn't a bad one) and my Focals. The car stereo kinda smoothed everything out and made things that really jump out of the mix on my monitors receed back quite a bit. Thank God for the Focals - at least they tell me what's actually going on.
Aside from tweaking the vocal up a touch in one or two songs, the 'consumer' stereos are great for getting a handle on what the low end is going to sound like in the real world. Most consumer stereos have a bump in the low end in and around 100hz to add some excitement, and knowing how your bass and kick drum will be affected is really valuable.
That low end is definitely the trickiest part of a mix to really nail, so I'll always try to get plenty of different perspectives on it.

Padraig's talking about mastering with Golden, which is great, home recorded stuff always benefits most from a really good mastering job - it's also a really good incentive for me to try to get things right! A bunch of Irish bands have used Golden recently with great results - Dudley Corporation, Nina Hynes, Jimmy Cake etc.
With the dollar where it is, and the ability to ftp the files back and forth, it makes a huge amount of sense to go to the US for mastering, particularly with the ease of access you get to really experienced professionals.

Update on the analog summing/gear lust situation..
I'm starting to lean towards the RollMusic Folcrom for that analog summing situation.
It's cheaper than the Dangerous D-Box but still has plenty going for it. Golden Age have them for 578 ex vat and shipping. I'm definitely gonna have to see if I can arrange a demo. It doesn't have the monitoring control/switching or built-in conversion of the D-Box, but then again it is half the price and sums 16 instead of 8 channels. Being able to use the mic pre of your choice for make-up gain and 'colour' is definitely a nice option, although my APIs are the only dudes I think I'd trust in that scenario.

I'm also (finally) demoing the URS Saturation plugin. They finally got around to releasing the PC version (although only for vst so far - I'm using the Fxpansion VST wrapper.. recommended, by the way) and so far, it's pretty sweet. Very nice on a parallel drum bus. Pretty good for giving DI bass a little grit and roughing up vocals where necessary.
I think I'm gonna go with their rental option - it's $200 to buy, but you can rent it by the month for $100, and when you've rented the full price worth, you own the plugin. Beautiful!

Mixing Home Recordings

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:35:00 +0000

Now, maybe I'm a lucky guy...(The fact that I haven't caught the sickness my fair lady has been coughing around the house for the last few days may be testimony to that), but I've never had a bad experience mixing tracks that have been home recorded.
Now, you don't have to throw a stone far in your average audio forum to hit a topic bemoaning the state of the tracks that an engineer has been sent to mix, but for me, there's a lot of reasons why I find it a lot of fun.

For starters, you're coming to the songs and arrangements with totally fresh ears.
You get to make decisions that aren't informed by hearing the song a load of times as it was tracked and overdubbed.
Quite often, I'll end up fairly judiciously using the mute button - more often than I would with a song I'd tracked myself.
Partly this is because of the temptation to throw a lot of shit at the wall when you've got the time that home recording affords to try different approaches and parts. Partly it's because I think you naturally get attached to parts as you become used to hearing them. Fresh ears mean you can make quick (and usually pretty good) decisions about what's helping the song - and what isn't.
Just by taking away an instrument that's contributing to overcrowding, or even muting it in verse one so that it brings something new to verse two, you can usually improve the feel of a mix before you even get in to heavy lifting with eq and compression.

A lot of the time, you'll be dealing with one guy or gurl who's getting their first outside perspective on their work. This alone can be very valuable. Mixing is a constant battle to maintain perspective, hence the widespread practice of switching between different speakers and headphones during a mix. Our ears automatically gets used to what they're hearing - good and bad, so the best way to avoid thinking a turd is shiny is to change your listening perspective every once in a while.
It's even trickier to maintain perspective on a song you've written, rewritten and recorded yourself.

Most of all though, I enjoy the big difference you can make to the finished mix.
It's a really good feeling when you can help someone enjoy their own song more because of the bit of mix glue you've applied to it.
And that's what it's all about - making dudes happy, and hopefully helping the songs be better at the same time.

RfR gtr dubz yo

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:06:00 +0000

Yesterday was guitar dub day out at Rifle Fire Rifle headquarters.
It was a bit warmer than last time out, thankfully.

It was pretty much all R121 and SM58 into API in front of my Blues Junior.
We've got each section of the song pretty well covered for different tones now, the only slight concern may be tying them all together in the mix. We got a particularly nice blend between a mild big muff fuzz and a Blues Jr. cranked up distortion for the chorus.

I tried Nick's Sennheiser E902 early on, which sounded pretty nuts. It's got a really pronounced smiley curve frequency response to it, which didn't work for any of the sounds we wanted. I must try it sometime for a hilarious snare sound or something.

In other news..
When will Digi release PTLE for Leopard?
When will my SM7 arrive?
What about new TapeOp?

Hounds like Beechpark

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:17:00 +0000

A long day, but a good day with my band Hounds out at Beechpark yesterday.
A pretty similar setup to the Stoat one from Sunday, and we're pretty pleased with what we got done.
I've got a pretty sizeable to-do list now, though -

Rough mixes for Hounds
Rough mix for Stoat to overdub a vocal on
Keep working on mixes for Padraig (the damn bass just won't sit right!)
Get a rough drum mix out to Nick from Rifle Fire Rifle so that we can overdub to it on Sunday.

We're going to play one of the new songs from yesterday at the Hounds gig on Friday.
It's fantastically relentless.

Meters are Overrated

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:07:00 +0000

Good day out at Beechpark yesterday - Got setup and doing takes by about 2.30
The Stoat boys ended up doing 3 to 5 takes of each of the three songs.
We'd talked about our options for approaching this recording. The boys had used the 'Lego method' on their last album (as in overdubbing things bit by bit), so they wanted to go a different direction this time around. Through recording themselves in their rehearsal room, they've ended up most comfortable with that scenario, so we set them all up in the main room at Beechpark with low gobos between the amps and the kit.
The resulting bleed is grand and manageable, and we got the live takes done pretty quick with that setup - I think we were overdubbing before 5.30.
Pretty decent drum sound, I think. A bit of a ringy snare situation, which we damped right down for one song where it suited. I'd done a snare preamp shootout the day before, which the Daking had come out of quite well. I think the higher apparent loudness I was hearing was from some nice saturation that you can get into with this pre - a little gets you some nice snappy bite , and winding it up some more gets into fun full on distortion.

Drum setup :

Snare - Beta57 >> Daking pre >> Daking compressor
Snare - B&K 4006 >> GML
Kick in - RE20 >> Vintech
Kick Out E49 >> Vintech
OHs - Coles >> Neve 1084 (little bit of high shelf at 10khz)
Room - M160s >> ISA115 >> Chandler limiter
421/441 on toms, 414s on hat/ride (which I still don't think I'll use).

RE20 on bass and a mix or 122s and M88/Beta 57 on guitars.

Moved on then to some guitar dubs, doubling some parts and adding others.
Cormac did some piano, then we did vocals.
Tried them in the control room with John listening back over the monitors. Not bad.
Those were done with an SM7 into an LA2a, which suited his voice pretty well. Compared it to the Elux 251, which was a bit too clean and beefy. Both were into the 1084s.
We got a few takes done of two songs, but around 11.30 John's voice gave up on him, so we're going to finish vocals later on in the week.

Next up is Hounds on Tuesday in Beechpark, which is gonna rock.

I love rehearsal tapes

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:34:00 +0000

I moved 'Modern Romance' on a good bit for Padraig.
Should get that finished tonight.
I'm really enjoying the Sonnox EQ so far, it's very easy to sweep around and find problem frequencies with.
I especially like the way it defaults to hiding the figure each knob is set to - way too often I find myself deciding eq based on the numbers on the screen and not my ears.. in fact, the whole time I'm mixing 'in the box' I'm battling against the natural tendency to read rather than listen to a mix.

The best trick I've come up with so far is to set the readout below each pro tools fader to read the sample delay on each channel rather than the fader's db value.
That way, I can move faders without getting the urge to round them up or down to the nearest db.
I've thought about getting a hold of a control surface for a good while now - the Command 8, CM Motormix and those new Euphonix controllers all look pretty good.
Unfortunately, the Euphonix are Mac only. And they're all pretty pricey for a way to kid yourself that you're using an analog desk again.

Speaking of which, analog summing is another dark chapter in my wishlist. Financially, that is.
Those evil bastards at Dangerous keep coming out with tempting ways to lassoo my cash.. The Dangerous D-Box being the latest.
Summing, nice converters, two seperate headphone outs and being able to hang two sets of speakers off the one box. Damn you!

Spoke with Cormac from Stoat on the phone about Sunday's session in Beechpark. He sent me over a recording of their rehearsals at the weekend - I LOVE it when bands do this. It gives you such a headstart in terms of planning the kind of sounds you want for each song.
Already I've learned a couple of things that'll help me out down the line..

I'm gonna mic the hihat and ride on this sucka. I should mention that this is something I never do. I find there's very rarely any need. The hihat in particularhas no trouble making itself known in every other mic on the kit. One or two of the tunes have quite prominent hat/ride parts though, so I'm going to cover my ass by micing them up. Probably with ribbons, if I can spare them.
Song A is gonna sound great with big, roomy drums. Song B on the other hand is dying for some really close, dry drum sounds. I'm thinking it'll be wallet/tshirt on the snare time. Thank fuck for rehearsal tapes - it's pretty hard to recreate that sound in mix.
I'm really looking forward to recording the piano in Beechpark (on Song C). It sounds so good, it even makes you feel like you're a piano player.

Wednesday, Wednesday

noreply@blogger.com (RedTapeAudio) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:52:00 +0000

So, tonight will be moving on two mixes for Padraig (myspace and band name undefined at this point) from last night. Both are at about the halfway stage, just in time to start throwing some tracks into my new reverb..
I spent the last few weeks demoing a few reverb plugins - Breverb, IK Classic Studio Reverb and Sonnox Reverb. I was looking for a solid plate verb, mostly. It came down to CSR vs. the Sonnox - comparing the CSR Plate to the Sonnox's plate preset gave pretty much the same results, so the Sonnox won out on being a lot more versatile. Their spring verb preset was pretty handy on a guitar track too, funnily enough.
Thanks to the 20% discount for buying a pair, I gave High Profile Audio a shout.. and grabbed the Sonnox EQ too, which is a lovelynice EQ if you're looking.
I've gotten a couple of plugins off these guys recently, and their prices are always good.

Padraig had noticed a change in the vocal sound when I was demoing the Sonnox verb - on a lot of his stuff (kinda 80's tinged) I was using Echoboy on short, reverby settings and that worked great (for drums too), but for some of the tunes a longer plate sound sat the vocal into the mix much better.
I'm hoping to get at least one of the tunes to the show-and-tell stage of mix (as in, the point where I give Padraig a shout for input) before the Milan-Arsenal game tonight.

I'll also be checking the files Nick from Rifle Fire Rifle sent over.. we recorded a bunch of guitars, melodica and vocals on Sunday, but his hard drive had a shit fit, so it remains to be seen wether the files retained their timestamps or track names.
If they didn't, it'll be a long process of trying to find the right takes and manually slipping them in to the right spot on the timeline. Argh. Pass the beer.

Speaking of which, it'll be Flensburger Gold tonight for the match..