Recording 12-String Electric Guitar

Last time around I wasn’t crazy about the guitar sound we got for Frank’s electric 12-String. On our previous recording it didn’t really sound that different from a regular guitar; you couldn’t really hear the “12-String” quality and the resonance from Frank’s special tuning (A lot of Ds I think). Also, I wanted to record multiple tracks of the same performance to play around with (the primary plan is to have two tracks of the same performance that are tonally different hard panned to each speaker to give the guitar more presence and depth). Frank has also added a second pickup to his guitar with a different output since our last recording, so we also wanted to use both of those too. Here’s what we did:

Waves TrueVerb Great for Vocals

Been playing around with the Waves TrueVerb plug-in while mixing down the Falcon & The Snowman recording we did a few weeks ago. I don’t like the sound of reverb. In the 90s I was totally against using it ever, and pretty much for the past few years I’ve used it a bit, but my philosophy has always been if you can tell that it’s there, then it is too much. But, more and more I’ve been coming back to reverb to breath some life into vocal and snare tracks particularly, and for F&TS I’ve been really happy with the effect of the TrueVerb plug-in by Waves.

Miking the snare vent actually bad idea

Forget what I said about miking the snare vent. There is WAY too much bleed. Even though in the studio the sound of the snare track was closest to what we wanted, it ended up having so much bleed that it was really hard to work with. Tons of hi-hat and kick. On our other recordings I was able to get the snare to sound really snappy by boosting up the treble and then putting a gate on it to cut out the bleed and the snare vibrations that were bothering me. But There’s so much bleed on the snare vent track that I can’t really gate it at all, without a lot of obvious artifacts anyway. I had to mess around for an hour with some multi-band gate/compressors/limiters and I got an ok sound, but no that great.

Finally some audio Samples

So here are the first two songs we recorded in our new studio. They aren’t totally done. I might want to add another guitar track, and maybe tweak the vocals a little bit more, but at least you can hear a bit of what we are getting. The thing in particular that I’m interested in is the drum sound. The snare/kick is pretty consistent between the two tracks (at least to my ears), but the over all kit sound is a bit different.

1. Witches vs. Wolves
2. You Faux Pas

The first track, "Witches vs. Wolves" was recorded with two overhead condenser mics behind our drummer to her left and her right side. The mics were a couple feet above the drum set pointing almost straight down I think (didn’t get a picture of this unfortunately).

The second track, "You Faux Pas" was recorded with the two overheads directly above her head pointing across each other, with the diaphragms close together. We changed the setup because I felt that the toms weren’t loud enough in the first recording (compared to the cymbals). I also read that this setup would cut down on possible phase problems.

During the mix down, I pretty much did the same thing to the overheads in both tracks. I hard-panned them to the left and the right channels, and put the same compression/tape sim on them (I have another post about that so I won’t get into it). And I DO think the toms sound better in the 2nd track. But, I don’t think the cymbals ended up being louder in the first track really, and I love the stereo separation that we got in the first track. Especially listening on headphones, the stereo effect of the toms is great (in my option), and I miss this in the second track. I think when we record again next (probably in a week or two), I think we should go back to our initial setup.

technorati tags: drum, miking, mp3s, audio, recording

Samplitude DirectX Plug-in Problems

Samplitude has been kind of buggy with some of my DirectX plug-ins. It seems to be related to CPU utilization? Some of the DirectX plug-ins seem to eat a lot of CPU, and my Samplitude with start running at 100%+ of CPU capacity and freeze my machine or otherwise behave badly. Then, the next time I open my project, there is a pop up that says something like "plug-in error", and Samplitude removes some of the DirectX plug-ins I have in my mix (not just the one that caused the error). It never tells me which ones, which stinks. The machine having this problem is a P4 2.4 GHz with 512MB Ram, so it is possible that just getting some more processor power will solve this problem, but maybe not. I haven’t had this problem with any VST plug-ins (I don’t have that many of those though). This is very annoying! I didn’t figure out I was missing some plug-ins until I mixed down a track and was listening to it at work the next day. Now I have to redo it….

technorati tags: audio, software, plug-ins, samplitude, bugs

Snare Drum Track Effects

As I’ve mentioned before, we pretty much use two overhead condenser mics for 90% of our drum sound. We throw in the kick and snare tracks to add color and enhance the sound of those two drums. In the case of the snare, we mostly just use the snare track to bring up the actual ‘snare’ part of the snare (as opposed to the sound of the drum head on the snare, which is captured pretty well by our overheads). For this, I use a Waves plug-in called TransX Wide. It is a kind of compressor, I think. The Waves site says it works on the ‘transients’ in the audio signal. Not sure what that means, but using the "SD-More Snare" preset brings out the snare part of the sound and cuts down any head ringing we happen to have picked up. I also EQ the track to bring the highs up even more. The EQ settings I’m using right now on the track we recording with the mic like this:

10k = +4.9

5k = + 7.2

1k = 0

100 = -20 (down as far as it will go). 

technorati tags: audio, recording, snare, drum, plugins

Kick Drum Mixing Update

Ok, So listen back over my mixes I decided to take the reverb offthe kick drum, and change the compression. Now I am using the PSPVintageWarmer on the track, starting with the “Funky Bass Drum Track”preset. This preset is WAY to booming for our kick track though, itmakes it sound like booty-bass coming off two giant subwoofers in anEscalade. Not the sound we want, so I backed off the Low Adjust so itis just +2, and I changed the compression style from single-band tomulti-band. Then I changed the EQ so everything was flat except the1.0k frequency, which was boosted +7.7. This seemed to help the kickcut through the mix without being too boomy. Works better within thewhole mix than my previous mix-downs with that big reverb on the kicktrack.

technorati tags: audio, recording, software, plugins, kick, drum

I love the PSP VintageWarmer

The PSP VintageWarmer Is a VST/DirectX plug-in that simulates an analog-style single or multi-band compressor/limiter. I’ve been using this plug-in on most of my tracks, plus another pass on the entire mix. I really like the “Guitar” preset in particular. I’ve been using this preset on the guitar track, the bass track, and my vocal track. It makes the bass really growly and tones down any pillowy sounds (don’t really know if pillowy is the right adjective to describe what I am talking about, basically with no effects the bass has a heavy low-end that makes it sound very studio/produced, almost like a jazzy fretless electric bass, which is a sound I really don’t like). It makes the guitar sound great too, and it gives my vocals a much ‘hotter’ sound and accentuates the natural room sound from the recording. It also punches up the “ess” sound on the vocals, but I don’t mind it that much. I still haven’t found a final mix preset/settings that I swear by, but I’ll write more about that later…

Kick Drum Effects: Reverb

So I’ve had some trouble getting the kick drum track to sound good by itself. We’ve moved the mic around and the sound is either too slappy or too boomy, and doesn’t really sound like a drum (more like a synthetic sound). But by adding some reverb on to the kick track (along with some other effects, posting about that to come) I was able to get a more natural kick sound. The plug-in I use for this is Wave Arts MasterVerb DX. It has a pretty wide range of options. For the kick I use the “Studio, bright” Preset. The settings I used this time are:

• Wet/Dry Mix: 100%
• Gain: 0.0 db
• Decay Time 1.0 ms
• Room Size 25%
• Pre-Delay: 0 ms
• Early Damping: 8.07 kHz
• Late Damping: 5.01 kHz
• Low Freq Scale: 75%

Overhead Drum Kit Effects

For the two overhead drum mics (which we use for most of the drums, just adding the kick and the snare tracks in for extra color), I’ve been panning them hard left and right, and using a Plug-in from Samplitude’s Analog Modelling Suite called am|Track. This plugin is a combination compressor and tape simulator. There are two presets I like for the drum kit: “drums: submix,fat” and “drums: submix,retro”. The retro one seems to boost the snare frequencies a little more, whereas the fat one ‘fattens’ as you would expect.