MIXING WITH HEADPHONES vs MIXING WITH MONITORS

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article! This time I wanted to share my thoughts about the output devices that we use when recording, mixing and mastering.

Ideally we should use the right tool for the job: isolating headphones when the drummer records the acoustic drums, so that there is no metronome spill on the drum microphones, a good set of monitors when mixing to assure a neutral response, and in the mastering phase a long testing and debugging session with the car stereo, ipod headphones, laptop speakers, and any other device we think that our audience will use.

Since this is a blog about home recording, we assume that not everyone has a full featured studio, so usually bedroom producers choose one device and stick with that: a decent pair of headphones if he/she lives in a flat and cannot produce excessive noise, or a decent pair of monitors if noise it's not a problem.
First off let's define what DECENT means: it means that both headphones and monitors should be meant to be used for mixing, so they should tend to have a "realistic response", which means that the sound should tend to be not too different when translated to a car stereo or into a pair of cheap headphones.
The more this sound gets translated without being totally modified in terms of equalization etc, the more our device is liable, and the more it will cost.

If we want to start mixing or mastering we should choose a device that assures at least a minimum of realism, otherwise our work will be totally useless, we will be like a blind man that tries to paint a picture.
About mixing headphones, I'd suggest only devices from a certain quality level up, for example Akg, Sennheiser or Beyerdynamic (being these last ones probably the best, and most expensive, for mixing purposes).
Speaking of studio monitors, instead, my advice is to avoid the 200€ / $ per pair, since probably the cheapest ones that has some utility in a mixing environment are probably the Yamaha, in their 350/400€ / $ per pair range; going up with the price the quality gets even better, and a very good quality - to price ratio is represented by Genelec, and Adam brand.
Avoid the cheap ones and the small speaker ones (anything smaller than 5"), since if you mix with them, the song that will sound well with them will sound awful and unbalanced with any other device, and you will have wasted your time.

PROS and CONS of using headphones:

+ you will not bother the ones around you
+ you will have a clearer idea of the stereo field disposition of the instruments
+ you will notice more details when tracking or editing
+ on an average, they are cheaper than a pair of monitors

- they don't represent well the low range, and sometimes they just hide it
- they don't represent well the frequency masking
- working with them is more ear-fatiguing
- in the mastering phase they are really close to being useless

PROS and CONS of using monitors:

+ the sound will be usually more realistic and the spectrum will be represented better
+ it's clearer to find the single frequences where to intervene surgically
+ it's clearer to point out phase cancelling and frequency masking
+ they are good also for mastering, to check out the overall loudness

- they are usually more expensive
- to be used at their best they need a certain placement in the room
- they can bother those around you :)
- the room may need some acoustic treatment


Click here for an article with the differences between open back and closed back headphones!!


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HOW TUBES AFFECT SOUND.

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're starting from where we left in our How To Choose Guitar Amp Tubes article, and will take a look to how tubes affects the sound of our instruments.
Tubes have been used for audio equipment in the last century almost anywhere, first by necessity, then to give the sound an extra coloring, and still today there are some tube equipment made to be as clean as possible and some other one in which tubes plays a strong role in modifying the output.


Why does people often prefer a tube driven amplifier or other piece of gear instead of a non-tube one?
Because tubes usually adds something to the tone that still today hasn't been recreated otherwise with the same identical results: a bit of compression, a bit of saturation, and a harmonic enhancement that makes the final sound a bit smoother and more ear-pleasant.

When mixing, the main uses for tube gear are:

- to smooth over harsh signals, such as vocals, guitars, cymbals and other instruments that stands out too much (in this case producers tends to use tube compressors and preamps).

- to add some harmonic enhancement to an instrument that sounds a bit too dull, without the need to over-equalizing, which will unavoidably modify the nature of our sound, for example a snare drum, or a kick, or toms, or even a bass guitar (the tools for this job are the tube saturation-harmonic enhancers and tube equalizers).

A last advice is about how to use tube gear.
Tubes needs some time to warm up, usually for 15 minutes, and in this time they can have irregular output peaks, before they get stable to the right level of warmth.
You will surely notice (and this is particularly clear when using a tube guitar amplifier) how different the sound is with the tubes fully warmed up, compared to how thin it sounded immediately after the switch on.
So our last advice is to warm the tubes up before starting playing/recording/mixing, and when you don't need them, turn the device off, since they tend to wear down with the use!|

The video on the top of this page is from my band, I have used a tube preamplifier in order to smooth out a bit of the harshness of the vocals and the cymbals.


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HOW TO USE MULTIBAND COMPRESSION WHEN MASTERING! (a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
This time we're going to expand our article about Mixing with Multiband Compression talking about the main purpose of this tool: Mastering.
When the track is ready for the mastering phase, we all know that it should pass though the last processing steps before reaching a volume comparable to the commercial tracks, adding if needed the last "icings on the cake", but it is actually very important to take care of the balancing and the other aesthetic aspects of the song in the mixing phase, resolving the issues before arriving to this last step:
the track should already sound at its best, leaving to the mastering phase only the final push.

Looking things under this point of view it appears crucial to work in the most transparent and essential way, because the risk of compromising the complex castle of cards that is a perfectly balanced mix is very high, and this is the reason why some mastering engineer prefers putting in the mastering chain a Multiband Compressor instead of a Broadband One: to assign a particular setting to each part of the spectrum, instead of using one processor that affects with the same intensity the whole mix.

Let's make an example of how to use a multiband compressor on our master track, and for this example we're going to use the Waves Linear Phase MB, as in the picture above, but basically the same mechanics applies to any other multiband comp.

Let's open the Waves Linear Mb and play the whole song, adjusting the input looking at the top right corner meter in the UI, so that it doesn't clip (we can also click on the "Trim" button to lower the gain right below the clip level).
When the whole song will be played, we'll check out the number on the right of the "Solo" and "Bypass" buttons on each band. These numbers are the peaks on each band, so we will need to dial these same numbers in the "threshold" section of that same band (for example -10, -5,5, -12 and so on).
Once we have done this task, we will notice that the sound should be more "stable", since only the infrequent highest peaks that reach that level will be tamed, and only in their most relevant frequency area. This operation will give us some extra headroom to raise the overall level, and ultimately, will let us obtain a more powerful and transparent master, if we don't love the slighly more invasive feel of a broadband compressor.

Now it's time for the final adjustments: we can add or lower some db of gain on the single bands if we need (this will combine the compressor function of this tool with the tasks of an equalizer), and we can fiddle around with the Attack and Release functions, remembering that usually you have set them properly if you see the compressor kicking in and out in time with the song.
It is also possible to turn on or off the "Makeup" function, which raises the gain according to the gain reduction produced, and to set the "Adaptive" level, which helps avoiding one frequency area to mask another one through the song.


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RECORDING IN MULTITRACK, CHANNEL ROUTING ETC (a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to talk about Multitrack, recording, and this article links to our Drum Recording article, which I invite you to check out because it's quite complete.

The topic of the day is "how do we get the sound of multiple microphones into our Digital audio workstation, in an ordinate way?".
First off we're going to need a multichannel audio interface or a mixer that brings the individual tracks into separeted tracks to the Daw; usually audio interfaces features 2 to 8 ins, but they can be expanded via ADAT devices, for example we could use a Behringer Ada 8000, which is a  8 channel interface that does not connect directly into the computer via usb, but it's used to expand the inputs of another interface, so that for example we could obtain the 8 channels of our interface + the 8 of the adat, for a total of 16 preamplified mic inputs.

Now it's important to mark all jacks with a number, in order to find them more easily once we are creating our project: Jack 1 into channel 1, Jack 2 into channel 2 and so on, and if we have configurated the interface drivers properly, we should find the right channel already routed to the corresponding track of the Daw.

Once everything is set it's important to rename each track in the Daw project to make order: every channel must have the name of the instrument that is tracking (eg. Snare, Kick, Tom...) then we can proceed to the project preparation phase. 

One last thought: avoid to have the jacks tangled together as in the picture above, the studio must be as clean and ordered as possible to be efficient, and if we have the mixing room separated from the tracking room (something that not happens often when home recording, but that usually small studios have), all jacks should be brought from one room to the other though a channel box, which is a box with a serie of microphone inputs that takes them and unites them all into one single cord that ends with all separated connectors (for example, 24 inputs and 24 outputs), and it is used to tidy up and help bringing the jacks from one room to another, instead of sending for example 24 separated cannon - cannon jacks.

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REVIEW: DRAGOON GUITAR CAB 2X12 with CELESTION V30 SPEAKERS

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to talk about another Italian excellence, exported worldwide: the Dragoon guitar Cabinets.
Those guitar cabinets are made by a manufacturer located in Florence, Italy, and have the particularity of being the lightest in the market: 41lbs (approx. 18 kg), it's the lowest weight available for a 2x12 cabinet.
The cabinet features 2 removable back panels, to make it closed back, half open back and open back, and has both mono and stereo inputs, 4, 8 and 16 ohm.

The Cabinet comes with a wide range of speakers to choose from:

250c8g - celestion alnico gold
260c8v - celestion vintage 30
230c8h - celestion g12h
225c8m - celestion g12m greenback
260c8cl - celestion classic lead 80
260c8cv - celestion century vintage
2100c8k - celestion g12k-100
230c8h - celestion g12h heritage
265c865 - celestion g12-65 heritage

Dragoon cabinets are available in 1x12 and 2x12 version, for guitar and bass, and are designed by a famous Florence luthier, called Giniski, which is also an amp tech, and his cabinets are endorsed by many musicians worldwide, for example Giacomo Castellano (session man for Vasco Rossi, among the others) and Nicola Oliva (session man for Laura Pausini).


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DUAL MIC GUITAR RECORDING TECHNIQUES! (The Fredman Technique and More)

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to expand our "microphoning a guitar amp" article, talking about some advanced technique, that involves two microphones.

Using more than one microphone on the same cabinet means getting the sound from different points and reproducing it in a more accurate way, since every microphone just takes a snapshot of the spectrum tracked from there, and there will be unavoidably some predominant frequency area, and some other that will go lost.

We could add as many microphones as we want, keeping in mind that the more mikes we use, the harder will get to make them all glue together, but it's pretty common to say that using just one microphone is usually not enough to track the body and at the same time the crispness of a guitar tone.

Today we're going to focus on the three most common dual-microphone techniques:

1) the Fredman Technique: used by Van Halen and the producer Frederick Nordstrom, this technique was used on many albums, for example the In Flames' masterpiece "Clayman":

As you can see it's a "Close Miking" technique, which means that the michrophones should be 1-2 inches (3 to 5cm) from the grill, and it's usually done with 2 shure sm57, but nothing forbids to try different combinations.

One microphone should be set straight towards the dustcap or its edge, taking the full body of the sound and many low frequences due to the proximity effect, while the 45° offset one should take the higher frequences, adding some grit to the tone.

2) the fizz-killing technique: this technique takes advantage of the phase alignment (click on the link for a dedicated article about the phase). It consists in using 2 Shure Sm57, one straight to the edge of the dustcap, the other near. The core of the technique is to back off the second microphone until the phase cancellation doesn't take away only the "fizz", the annoying high frequences that make our tone sound like a mosquito. Once we get rid of them this way, only the "beef" of our tone will remain, and the sound will be tight and punchy.

3) The Condenser technique: this technique is used mainly with clean and overdriven guitars, and it consists in setting a dynamic microphone near the edge of the cone, to capture only the mids and the lows, and putting a large diaphragm condenser half a meter away, to catch some room, the higher frequences and the low-roar of the tubes. These two microphones combined will give a very warm and rich clean tone, especially with tube amps.

I hope this was helpful! Comment if you have some other interesting technique to share!


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Compression as a gain reduction tool vs Compression as a tone shaping tool

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
This time I would like to share with you my thoughts about compression, and its dual role in the mixing phase.
So far in our many mixing tutorials we have seen compression for its main purpose: to lower the volume of the loudest parts of a sound, thus creating room to rise the quieter parts; this is the concept of Compression used as a gain reduction tool, the way it was created in the first place, and it is explained in the compression tutorials.

The other role of this tool is to shape the tone, that's why they say that equalizaton and compression are the two main tone shaping tools, because just with them we can create modify the source sound in the 90% of what we have in mind, the rest that cannot be done with them is to be considered just the icing on the cake.
With "tone shaping tool" I mean that we can use the compressor not only to intervene with the gain but also to modify the structure of a sound and make it better, in a way similar to the equalization.
This concept applies especially with drums and vocals: there are times in which we would like to give fatness to a sound and to make it more similar to what the radiophonic rock songs sounds like, and we use the equalizer trying to pump up the lower mids, with the results that our tone loses clarity and becomes boomy, while we could just use compression in an intelligent way, and we would get much closer to our target even without touching the eq.
Drums and vocals are instruments with a very high dynamic range, and if we don't compress the sound wisely we will end up hearing just the loudest frequences and lose all the rest of the content, which is what gives "the body" to a sound: think about the snare sound, its original tone is usually snappy and ringy, but we need it to make it sit in the mix in a stable way, and at the same time to make it sound fuller, and with some tail similar to a gunshot: if we start compressing it, beside the evident gain reduction that must be compensated, we will notice that the sound will gradually lose its snap, and will become more and more explosive until, if we keep turning the knob, the sound will become an almost inaudible "oomph".
Our target would ideally be somewhere in between, with the snare stable (which means that it doesn't disappear nor covers the other instruments), and with the right amount of snap and explosiveness.
Radiophonic rock producers tends to compress drums very much to leave the sound full and to make it always audible, even if the radio signal is low, and to obtain this they often kill most of the dynamics, but it's a trade that's worthy, speaking about music that will often be heard in the car stereo, with sub-par signal-to noise conditions.
Compression can be used as a tone shaping tool also for bass, giving it attack, roar in the lower mids and clarity, and to vocals, fattening the sound without intervening with the additive eq, that most of the times can damage the sound, somehow.
In order to use Compression as a tone shaping tool, the producers have also created Multiband Compression, which is a step in between a comp and an eq, and it's aimed mainly to compress some areas avoiding damaging other parts of the spectrum, and to modify only the tone of some parts of the mix/master.

I hope this helped you understanding some of the collateral functions of this powerful tool!


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