Review: Audio Assault Hellbeast

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are review the latest guitar amp simulator from Audio Assault: Hellbeast!

Hellbeast is one of the several amp simulators Audio Assault is putting out in the last months, and it's without any doubt the heaviest so far; even if it's not explicitly cited, it's quite clear that this virtual amp is modeled after the Randall Satan, the Ola Englund signature model (it has the same two "Girth" and "Grind" knobs that controls independently the gain of the low and high frequencies).

The sound as similar to the original head as the look is, and this means a suprisingly versatile gain machine, that lets you shape your distorted sound with a depth that is almost impossible to find in other amplifiers, since all the controls (3 eq knobs, depth, presence, girth and grind) allows a very high freedom to dial in your tone.

The tone is clearly aimed to those who needs a very tight distortion, ideal for thrash and death metal, and the nice thing of this amp sim is that it retains at almost all settings a very defined attack and a fast, not muddy low end.

Audio Assault is surprising us with every release with its great quality to price ratio, these bundles are all sold at a very affordable price and there are often discounts, so if you're looking for extreme chugs check out the Hellbeast at the Audio Assault website.

Thumbs up!


Specs taken from the website:


- Dual Cabinet IR Loader with 62 impulses included

- Tube Screamer Simulation

- Noise Gate

- 10 band graphic Eq

- Delay

- Reverb

- Chorus


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How to record a song part 6/6: Keyboards and extra arrangements!

We are now in the final part of the recording session, and it's the part in which, once the basic elements of a rock band have been recorded, we must focus on all the additional arrangements.
Obviously it's impossible here to cover all the topics, because we are talking about an infinite variety of sounds that can be added, but we can narrow them down in 2 types: the real ones and the Midi ones.

If we are recording a real piano or other acoustic instruments, such a string ensemble, it's all about microphoning: for single instruments it's usually preferrable to do a combination of close miking and room miking, in order to take also the natural reverb of the room and blend the sounds together in the mixing phase.
If we are dealing instead with several acoustic instruments like an orchestra (click here for an article about how to record a string ensemble), we need to plan a bit more strategically: we can record the ensemble with condenser microphones divided left and right or by sections, and one or more room microphones to capture the room reverb and the low end: this way the mix engineer will be able to narrow the low end and open spatially the higher frequencies.

If we are dealing with keyboards/synths with in built sound, we can hook up the stereo outputs of the synth into our interface and record two mono (left and right) audio tracks.

Finally, if we are dealing with Midi controllers, the possibilities are endless: we can use any type of Vst instrument, for example a Virtual Orchestra, and the instruments can be either synths or samplers (click here for an article that explains the difference between them), and once you have done writing the Midi part you can enhance your sound making it more realistic, by adjusting the paramenters as explained Here and Here.

Now that we have also all the extra parts recorded, we should prepare our project for the mixing phase (click here for an article about project preparation): once we have covered all those steps, let's just go through this quick checklist on how to prepare the tracks for mixing, and we are ready to jump in our serie of tutorials about mixing: HOW TO MIX A SONGS WITH FREE PLUGINS!


CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/6: DRUMS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3/6: BASS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!


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How to record a song part 5/6: vocals!

Now that the instrumental part of our song is ready it's time to lay down the thing that most of the times is the center of our mix: the vocal section.

Let's assume we already have a good vocal arrangement, a nice chorus and some meaningful lyrics, the singer is ready and knows exactly how to interpret the song (which is already a lot), what we need now is to choose the microphone.

The choice of the microphone depends on many factors, and obviously the first one is the budeget: if we have a good budget and we can afford a place without too much room reverb we can use a condenser microphone, which will capture much more details, otherwise we can use a good dynamic one, which are usually directionals, so they will focus on the sound source.
A dynamic microphone is also more suggested if we are recording extreme genres, in which the singer screams very loud, as they are not afraid of high sound pressure and usually are less sensitive in the low frequencies.

Once we have the microphone we can place it in the mic stand and add an antipop filter that will catch the little "saliva projectiles" and prevent the singer to touch the microphone.
The singer needs to find a distance from the microphone in which he will not accidentally touch the mic stand with the feet and mantain it for the whole recording session in order to give continuity to the takes.

If the room is not treated it could also be a good idea to use a vocal microphone shield, a small styrofoam barrier that blocks the room reverbs to come back to the microphone.

The microphone should be plugged into the soundcard or mixer, but if the audio interface is cheap (and we have a better preamp at hand) it's a good idea to bypass the in built preamp and sing through the better one, plugging it into the return of the interface.
If we have some other external gear such a good Compressor or an Eq that could make our track sound better we could also use them, although it's risky: using those, once the processed signal is in the Daw, there's no turning back. I suggest if we are using some outboard to dial a very soft compression, just to shave off a couple of db of gain to reduce a little bit the dynamic range, and in case of an eq, to use it just as a de-esser.

To know more now Click here for an in depth article about how to record vocals!

Once our vocal track is ready we can consider making some overdubs to thicken it up, or creating some vocal harmony. We can even completely double the whole vocal track, if we feel it needs more weight.

Once our vocal session is perfectly recorded, it's time for some editing and autotuning (only if needed!), and we're ready for the next step!


CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/6: DRUMS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3/6: BASS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 6/6: KEYBOARDS AND EXTRA ARRANGEMENTS!


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How to record a song part 4/6: guitars!

Now that we have some solid drum track and a nice bass line it's time to tackle one of the elements that in many genres is considered one of the most important elements of our mix: the guitar.

The guitar recording phase has many points in common with the bass one: before recording we need to take care of our instrument by making sure it's in the best status possible;
we need to clean the fretboard if it's dirty and sticky, change the strings and set the correct intonation for the tuning, tune it perfectly (and re-tune it every few takes) and check whether the pickups are at the perfect height.

Once we have chosen the right pick and have written down clearly the order of our effects it's finally time to lay down our action plan:

- Are we recording an acoustic guitar? Click here for a dedicated article.

- Are we writing a Midi track with a virtual guitar? Click here for a dedicated article.

- Are we recording an electric guitar? Here the choices are the following:

1) by recording the D.I. track directly into the audio interface: this way we will be able to choose our sound afterwards, by using a Vst guitar amp simulator (click here for a dedicated article) or by reamping our track in a real amp.

2) by using an hardware preamp with speaker simulation (like a Pod) directly in the audio interface.

3) by microphoning an amp (click here for a dedicated article). Microphoning an amp is an art that takes long time (and a lot of trial and error) to be mastered, and there are many factors to be kept in consideration: how the mic position affects the transient, the fact that we can use multiple microphones to blend the resulting tone together, and the fact that the interaction between those microphones can generate phase issues.
Finally, when microphoning an amp, is very important to consider the cabinet we are using, and inside the cabinet, the speaker.


How many guitar layers should we record?
It depends on the genre: sometimes one track is enough when the guitar is just a background element (for example in some pop song), usually in rock there are two tracks that gets panned left and right, but there are also genres in which a thicker wall of sound is required, so we can also abund and quad track our guitars.



CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/6: DRUMS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3/6: BASS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 6/6: KEYBOARDS AND EXTRA ARRANGEMENTS!


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How to record a song part 3/6: bass!

Once we have all of our drum recordings done it's time to track the instrument that serves as bridge between the rhythmic section of the song and the harmonic one: the bass.

The bass is an instrument that can be recorded in several ways: it can be real, or it can be Midi (click here for an article about virtual bass), it can be played with the fingers, or with a pick.
The first thing to do before recording a real bass is to dedicate some time to its mantainance: it's a good idea to clean the fretboard, and especially to mount new strings (click here for a dedicated article), in order to have all the harmonic richness we can (with time the strings tend to become more dull sounding and lose their brightness).

After we have the new strings mounted it's time to control the intonation (click here for a dedicated article) so that we are sure that the bass is in tune in all the points of the fretboard.

Once our bass is ready to rock, we need to decide how to record it.
There are several ways:

- To record straight into the audio interface, directly from the bass or through a bass preamp

- To microphone a bass cabinet

- To do both of the above at the same time with a splitter

The purpose, as we will see in the bass mixing part, is to have a clean bass track to use as the low-end part of the tone, and another one (that can be distorted before reaching the audio interface or via plugin) that will provide the upper range with all the effects/coloring we want.

If the bass player wants to use his own gear (amp, stompboxes and so on), remember to put them in the right order, click here for an article about the perfect bass effect chain.


CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/6: DRUMS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 6/6: KEYBOARDS AND EXTRA ARRANGEMENTS!


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How to record a song part 2/6: drums!

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Once our project is ready to record, we need to start from the foundations of our song, which for a rock/metal song is the rhythmic section, and the first instrument to record of the rhythmic section is the drums.

Now we need to setup the tempo track, which will contain the metronome of our song, with all the necessary variations. The click, in case we are recording acoustic drums, will be sent via headphones to the drummer in order to make him follow a reference that will be the same for all the other instruments.

How will we record our drums?
Will we use a Midi virtual drumkit? In this case we will need to write every single midi note in the piano roll and to adjust the velocity and the other parameters in order to make the drum sampler sound as realistic as possible (click here for a dedicated article about velocity and the other midi parameters).
Alternatively to writing manually the Midi notes, they can also be acquired by using an electronic drumkit or by applying triggers to a real drumset (click here for a dedicated article).

Will we use a real drumset?
Then, according to how many microphones we have, we can use different techniques.
If we have only 2 microphones the best method is the one described in this article.

If we have more inputs in our audio interface instead, we can close mike every drum part.
Here is an article about how to microphone all the single parts of a drumset, and here is another one specific on how to microphone the cymbals.

Finally, here is an article with various microphone setups arranged by genre.

It's important to say that a drumkit can be also recorded both with microphones and triggers in order to add sampled drum sounds on top of the acoustic ones later, or to replace entirely some drum part that did not come out well; this gives us also a lot of flexibility in terms of editing.


CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3/6: BASS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 6/6: KEYBOARDS AND EXTRA ARRANGEMENTS!


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How to record a song part 1/6: preparation!

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are starting a new serie, which is a prequel of our super comprehensive How to mix a song one, and it will detail all the steps necessary to record a song or an album from scratch, step by step, presenting all the links to the in depth tutorials.
As per the aforementioned mixing tutorial, also this serie of articles will be FULL of hypertext links: click on them to open dedicated in-depth articles, and expand your knowledge :D

This time will be even more comprehensive, because it's a six part serie that starts with the preparation.
Let's start by saying that this tutorial will not cover the recordings done with just one microphone in the middle of the room, for that there is a dedicated section, we're talking about a full multitrack project this time.

Fist off we need to have some recording equipment, which can be a small home recording studio (click here for an article about how to create a small home recording studio for less than 500$) or a full fledged professional one, the fundamental tools to have are a computer with a DAW, a good audio interface (with as many inputs as possible, 8 can be a good start if we want to record real drums, but we can also use multiple audio interfaces together), some microphone, a decent monitoring system (good monitors or headphones), jacks and mic stands.
About the computer is important to have a fast cpu (for the real time processing and to keep the latency low), a good amount of ram (possibly from 24gb up, in order to handle the virtual instruments with ease) and a big hard disk, capable of storing all the takes needed.

Now we need to set up our Daw and audio interface with the settings that will be the foundations of the whole project: setting the bit depth and sample rate.
Usually the standard for a project is 24 bit and 48khz, but if we want to save some hard disc space is acceptable also to record directly at 44khz without sacrificing excessively the quality.
Now we need to setup our soundcard in order to make it ready to record with the drivers perfectly configurated and at the lowest latency allowed by our computer, click here for a dedicated article about Asio, Buffer size and Latency.

Finally, when our computer and audio interface are perfectly setup, before starting to record the various instruments it's important to focus on the human factor: here is an article about 4 things to do to get a band ready to record.



CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/6: DRUMS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3/6: BASS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 6/6: KEYBOARDS AND EXTRA ARRANGEMENTS!


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