2/15/14
Our friend Mic.
Hello dear reader, how are things? Today
I would like to take some time out and talk about one of my personal favorite
things, microphone placement! To me, microphone placement is where it’s at, I
would rather spend an entire day working on microphone choice and placement
than spend an entire day mixing things that could have already been resolved.
Most if not all engineers will tell you that capturing a good sound at the
source is one if not the most important thing when tracking live
instrumentation. And I couldn’t agree more, and I find that being very meticulous
and detailed during this process actually makes mixing more enjoyable as you
have more material to deal with, and I don’t know about all of you but for me,
more material actually equals less work. But right now I want to get specific.
Lets talk room mics… Room mics are
something that I’ve had great success with, but never really fully understood.
Providing you have a great room, room mics are fantastic… But often don’t achieve
exactly what we intend them to. For me when I use a room mic I want it to act
as a real time reverb component in my overall sound. The job of the room mic is
to capture reflections within the room and give you a greater sense of space,
but often times room mics tend to pick up to much of the direct sound source
and really don’t add much to the sound. So to remedy this here’s a great tip I
recently picked up. Place two small capsule omnidirectional mics at two
different points in the room on the
floor. Yep. That’s right I said it, on the floor. By doing so the
microphones will be at low enough point in the room to capture ONLY the
reflections and natural reflections/vibrations in the room. Give this a shot
and let me know what you think by commenting with any questions and concerns!
Thanks guys!
2/8/14
New Track Demo
Hey guys! Check out this video demo
of a new track I’m working on!
*I apologize for the audio quality
of the clip, I don’t have nearly enough ram to run all the software instruments
I’m trying to run at the same time.
Synthy: Party Lord Tutorial
Hey guys! Here’s a quick demo of how
I made the sounds of my “Party Lord” clip.
2/6/14
2/5/14
Surgeon General or: How I Record Nonsense in My Aparment.
Sometimes,
in music as well as all other forms of art, its important to throw things like
logic, conformity, and quality out the fucking window, and just sit down and
sound like shit. When this song was
recorded that was the goal, whether or not we knew it at the time is
irrelevant.
This is a song I wrote entitled “Surgeon
General” it’s a happy little tune about nothing with all but no substance, but
you know what? It’s still not that bad. Anyway, enough with my sentimental ramblings
about the very hazy history of this song and lets talk about some recording.
For this song we started with the
basic acoustic track to lay the foundation. We recorded the acoustic guitar
using a KSM32 and an SM57. After which we laid the bass track down going
straight in to the Mbox. If at this point you are thinking to yourself “Man….
He’s sure dumbing this down” I assure you, it really was this slapped together and
no… This song isn’t exactly rocket science.
Now comes the interesting part… What
would you say if I told you that all those little kids banging on pots and pans
were actually on to something? All the percussion sounds in this song in the
exception two beat to shit drums was comprised of storage tubs, pots, pans, and
an empty bottle of booze filled with popcorn seeds. And believe it or not with
just a handful of mics (and lots of processing after the fact) you can make one
of the most convincing low-fi silliness sounds in the world! All you have do is
stick an SM57 inside one of the storage tubs and turn it upside down, now you
got your kick. From there you take the other SM57 and throw it on your snare
(at this stage of the game there is no wrong way to do it) now all that’s left
is to set up the KSM32 as an overhead hovering roughly 3ft above the left side
of the kit and then set the TM180 about 5ft away from the center of the kit as
a room mic (it doesn’t do much but it makes you feel good).
Everything else we did on this track
is pretty standard… Your average throw an SM57 on the guitar amp turn it up
until it feeds back and then start playing. As I’ve implied, this isn’t meant
to be taken very seriously and believe it or not I actually can engineer a quality track, sometimes
I just choose not to, I suggest you try it sometime.
Equipment
List
·
Microphones
o
Shure
SM57 x2
o
Shure
KSM32
o
TASCAM
TM180
·
Hardware
o
Avid
Mbox Pro Interface
o
Apple
IMac
o
JBL
2325P Monitors
·
Software
o
Avid
Pro Tools 10
o
Waves
Komplete 8
·
Instruments/Amplifiers
o
Fender
American Deluxe Stratocaster
o
Ibanez
AW50 Acoustic Guitar
o
Marshall
AVT20
o
Warwick
Corvette Standard 4-string bass
o
Drum kit (storage tubs, pots and pans, an old
snare drum, an old floor tom, and an empty bottle of Mickey’s Malt Liquor
filled with popcorn seeds)
Synthy
Hey
guys! Just thought you'd all like to hear a Synth piece that I put together a
couple months back! Please feel free to check out the rest of my SoundCloud and
let me know what you think!
2/1/14
Help Me, Help You. (Blog Edition)
Alright
dear reader, I’m three posts deep and I’ve only discussed about ¼ of what spins
through my demented circus of a brain. But now what I want to know is what do
you want to see? I can make videos of whatever I want as the day is long, but
what do you think I should talk about? Now, should no one respond I am
completely fine with going about my merry way and posting content about
whatever in the hell I find interesting at that particular moment, or you guys
can contribute and I can give you my opinion on things that have been driving
you crazy. Feel free to inquire about anything audio related… Be it equalizers,
compressors, limiters, expanders, gates, FX, WHATEVER you want and I will do my
best to give you my two cents and as many educated guesses as I can muster.
You know what…. I’m feeling particularly
saucy. Whoever comes up with the best topic to cover gets a free plug-in from
yours truly. You guys have one week to post your most interesting idea and I
will select a winner on Saturday February 8th and from there that
winner can contact me and we’ll make arrangements to receive set plug-in out of
a pre-determined list that will appear later this week!
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