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TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME 25, ISSUE 8
The
HOME RECORDING issue
6. Home Studio Construction Guide 10. Plan A Home Studio Budget 12. Home Studio Acoustics 14. Soundproof Your Studio
24. Bang Gang Walks Us Through His Home Setup
28. Darwin Deez Takes Us On A Tour Of His Home Studio
40. The Myth of Hi-Res Audio 42. Record Killer Vocals at Home 44. The Importance of Springsteen’s Nebraska
16. Home Studio Building Experiences
30. 5 Pro Tools Tips For Better Recordings
46. PreSonus Studio One 3 Review
18. Lessons Learned From Home Studio
32. How To Choose a DAW
48. Flashback: The TASCAM Portastudio
Construction
20. How To Convert A Shed Into A Studio 22. What They Don’t Tell You About Home Studios
34. Do You Need A Control Surface? 36. Incorporate Compressors In Your
Matt Douglas
Recordings
38. Performer’s Guide to Audio Plug-Ins PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 3
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Volume 25, Issue 8 PO BOX 348 Somerville, MA 02143
Howdy, y’all! Breathe it in – do you smell the odoriferous aromas of burning tubes, hot transistors and melted eardrums? Well then, welcome to the wonderful world of home recording!
the right hardware and software, and we’ll even throw in some tips and tricks to get you up and running (and making better sounding recordings than you ever thought possible).
The issue you’re currently fondling in your grubby little paws is all about our favorite pastime: recording music. And what better way to create art than in the comfort of your own home? We know a lot of newcomers to the recording game can be intimidated and scared off by the mountains of gear options and setup issues inherent in designing one’s own home studio, and quite frankly, it can be a bit of a scary proposition.
We’ve got guest articles from some of the top studio pros around (not to mention the folks behind Pro Tools) and there’s even a sneak peek at the new Studio One suite from our friends at PreSonus.
So, where do you start? How about here. We promise to make the prospect of creating your own home studio space not only less scary, but even pretty fun. Trust us. We’ll teach you the basics on planning a budget, constructing your space, soundproofing it properly, choosing
Toss in some home recording history and vintage gear for good measure, and you’ve got one helluva jam-packed issue. What more do you want for free? Benjamin Ricci, editor P.S. – seriously, we should be charging for this.
CONTACT Phone: 617-627-9200 Fax: 617-627-9930 PUBLISHER William House Phone: 617-627-9919 bill@performermag.com EDITOR Benjamin Ricci ben@performermag.com DESIGN & ART DIRECTION Cristian Iancu EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Bob Dobalina editorial@performermag.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Austin Potter, Bardi Johannsson, Chris Devine, Christopher L. Wanta, Darwin Deez, Dash Wilson, Eric Lichter, Jay Frigoletto, Jim Stafford, Jon Lewis, Jordan Tishler, Mark Waldrep, Matt Douglas, Rob Nolfe, Rob Tavaglione, Simon Sherbourne, Steve Vercelloni, Steve Wytas, Torbin Harding, Warren McQuiston, Zac Cataldo CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Chris Saunders, Bardi Johannsson, D. Wilson, Matt Douglas, Torbin Harding, ADVERTISING SALES William House Phone: 617-627-9919 bill@performermag.com
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ABOUT US
CORRECTIONS
Performer Magazine, a nationally distributed musician’s trade publication, focuses on independent musicians, those unsigned and on small labels, and their success in a DIY environment. We’re dedicated to promoting lesser-known talent and being the first to introduce you to artists you should know about.
Did we make a heinous blunder, factual error or just spell your name wrong? Contact editorial@performermag.com and let us know, cuz we’re big enough to say, “Baby, I was wrong.”
MUSIC SUBMISSIONS We listen to everything that comes into the office. We prefer physical CDs, cassettes and vinyl over downloads. If you do not have a physical copy, send download links to editorial@performermag.com.No attachments, please. Send CDs to: Performer Magazine Attn: Reviews PO BOX 348 Somerville, MA 02143
4 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
EDITORIAL SUBMISSIONS In the words of our esteemed forefathers at CREEM: “NOBODY WHO WRITES FOR THIS RAG’S GOT ANYTHING YOU AIN’T GOT, at least in the way of credentials. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be sending us your stuff: reviews, features, photos, recording tips, DIY advice or whatever else you have in mind that might be interesting to our readers: independent and DIY musicians. Who else do ya know who’ll publish you? We really will... ask any of our dozens of satisfied customers. Just bop it along to us to editorial@performermag.com and see what comes back your way. If you have eyes to be in print, this just might be the place. Whaddya got to lose? Whaddya got?”
© 2015 by Performer Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any method whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. The magazine accepts no responsibility for unsolicited recordings, manuscripts, artwork or photographs and will not return such materials unless requested and accompanied by a SASE. Annual Subscription Rate is $30 in the U.S.; $45 outside the U.S.
HOME CONSTRUCTION GUIDE
S
o you want to build a home studio? I own Night Train Studios in Westford, MA, a 1,000 sq. ft recording studio that I built in 2003 (that’s a 12’ x 15’ Control Room, 12’ x 18’ Iso Room A, 12’ x 10’ Iso Room B, 6’ x 10’ Iso Room C, 4’ x 6’ Iso Booth D and a 9’ x 12’ Lounge). It’s in the walkout basement of a 40’ x 25’ addition I built on my home. I’ve had lots of musicians ask me after recording in my studio, “How much would it cost me to build one of these in my basement?” As a licensed building contractor, I’ve learned to never answer that question too quickly, because the first number you give sticks in people’s heads. But here are some ideas to be thinking about as you plan your dream home studio… HEATING & COOLING Just like other rooms in your house, your
6 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
studio will need heat in the winter and probably air conditioning in the summer (an uncomfortable musician is not a happy musician). Your control room, especially, is going to heat up quickly with all the gear and people coming in and out, so you’ll at least want to plan for air conditioning in that room. If you’re building in a garage or detached building, you might get away with air conditioners in the windows in the summer but you will still need to heat the spaces. Can you zone off of your existing HVAC system or will it need its own system? Can you get away with electric baseboard heat? Consulting with licensed plumbers and HVAC experts is a smart idea. In my studio, I was able to create a zone off one of my existing forced air systems so that I could get heat and AC without needing a new furnace/compressor. To reduce airflow noise, I used flexible insulated duct
that runs to each room in the studio (remember: you’ll need a supply and a return duct for each room and that can take up quite a bit of space – so plan accordingly). LIGHTING & ELECTRICAL You will probably want to run a sub-panel off of your existing main electrical panel; in my case I ran a 60amp sub panel off my 200amp main panel. You’ll need at least one 15amp circuit for outlets to power computers, guitar amps, outboard gear, etc. (I suggest 2 – 20 amp circuits for this). Make a list off all the gear you have (and plan on acquiring down the road) and estimate the wattage each one uses. Don’t forget that musicians will be bringing in their own gear (and that sometimes means big amps that draw a lot of power). Each amp in your circuit generally equals 100 watts of available
HOME CONSTRUCTION GUIDE
How To Build A Professional Home Studio Construct a Great Space & Choose The Right Gear
power, so a 15amp circuit can handle about 1500 watts before it becomes overloaded. I also would try to keep your new electrical wiring at least 12” away from audio lines that you may be running in the walls and ceiling. If electrical lines do have to cross audio lines, have them cross at 90-degree angles to reduce interference. Lighting should be on its own circuits. A rule of thumb for old school light bulbs was 3 watts per square foot, but things are changing fast, with new CFL & LED bulbs reducing lighting wattage drastically. Whatever you do, make sure you plan to have plenty of light. I recommend having at least a couple of different lighting options for each space (wall sconces, track, switchable lamps, recessed) each with its own switch. That way you can adjust for different moods easily. In many
states, homeowners can do their own electrical work (which will be inspected by the local electrical inspector – once before you close the walls and then at final inspection). There are many good books available for do-it-yourselfers, and I recommend The Complete Guide to Home Wiring from Black & Decker. Hiring a professional to do the job is always a smart idea if you aren’t sure you’re up to the task. FRAMING & WALL/FLOOR COVERING Whenever possible, you want to minimize parallel walls in your studio. So unlike regular construction where everything is square, you want to try (if possible) to have at least one wall in each room at a slight (7 degrees or more) angle. In my control room, one wall is elliptical, which looks and sounds great (but was very difficult to build,
so I don’t recommend it unless you enjoy wetting sheetrock to get it to bend). You want to separate your control room sonically from the room(s) that will have the musicians tracking in them. To do this you want to create “dead air” cavities. One way to do this is to frame your walls using 2” x 6” floor and ceiling plates and stagger the studs, so that when air pressure moves the sheetrock on one side, it doesn’t directly move the sheetrock on the other. Another way is to build a wall like you normally would and then after you sheetrock, build another wall half an inch away (of course you’ll only be able to get sheetrock on 3 of the 4 sides). In my case, I built double walls and also doubled the sheetrock, so there is 2-1/2” inches of sheetrock and 7-1/2” of dead space between the control room and the PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 7
HOME CONSTRUCTION GUIDE iso booths. The drummer can be rocking out but in the Control Room it sounds like he’s down the block. Of course you will want to use fiberglass insulation in all the walls and ceiling cavities. Will you need to see the talent tracking in the iso rooms? If so, you’ll need windows – two double glazed panels installed out of parallel to each other works well. And if your talent needs to see each other in different iso rooms, you’ll need sliding glass doors. Plan sight lines very carefully. Also, the higher the ceilings, the better – nine feet is nice, try not to go lower than eight if you can; there’s nothing worse than low ceilings. If you are building in a basement, keeping sound from going up and keeping “foot steps” above from echoing down into your studio is hard to avoid. Plan on doubling the ceiling sheetrock with acoustic clips in-between, so that the two sheets are not rigidly attached to one another. Sheetrock walls and ceilings do not generally sound very good, so you’ll want to apply carpeting and other acoustic treatments (hanging tapestries or “acoustic clouds,” for instance) to certain sections. You can build simple acoustic wall and ceiling treatments by making wood frames, filled with fiberglass insulation and wrapped in a nice fabric. Some floor areas can be carpeted, but its nice to have some wood floor to give a room a “live” sound – you can always add throw rugs to adjust the amount of liveliness. Again, if any of this 8 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
sounds out of your league, plan on bringing in a professional to help. PERMITS In most states you’ll need to submit your plans to the local building department for approval for any type of major renovation (read: permit fees and inspections). If your plans involve building walls, hanging doors, running electrical and HVAC and you aren’t a do-it-yourselfer, then I’d recommend bringing in professionals. Work that would take a hobbyist months can be accomplished in just weeks by professional tradesmen. Building my 1,000 sq. ft, six-room recording studio took me about five months, and I’m a licensed builder! CHOOSING GEAR The first question you need to answer before you head off to the store is, “What will my typical tracking arrangement be?” Will you be recording traditional rock bands, string quartets, singer/ songwriters or all of the above? You should determine how many channels you will need to record simultaneously. If it’s a typical rock band, then 16 channels should do. If you’re recording 13 piece funk bands, then you’ll either need more channels or you’ll want to break up the tracking sessions into rhythm sessions, horn overdub sessions and vocal overdub sessions. A digital mixer will be one of your more expensive purchases – I recommend buying one that has built-in compression
so you don’t need racks of outboard compressors. The mixer will either directly plug into your DAW (Digital Audio) via FireWire/USB or you will need to purchase an audio interface to go between the mixer and the computer. If this is all foreign to you, then talk to a professional; things are changing fast in this area. Working with a pro-audio sales person or a studio owner can save you lots of headaches. MICROPHONES Depending on what kinds of musicians you are planning to record, you will need microphones and lucky you – the days when only super expensive microphones would do are over. Now there are dozens of high quality microphones well within reach, the only problem is that you will need at least as many microphones as the channels on your mixer – and each microphone has its own purpose. Large diaphragm condenser mics (usually some of the most expensive) will handle tasks like vocals, acoustic guitars and horns. Small diaphragm condensers are well suited for drum room overheads, acoustic guitars and strings. Dynamic microphones will be the workhorses for drums and guitar amps. In addition to the mics, you will need to budget for high quality XLR cables (I recommend getting different colors so that mic’ing drums is easier) – 20 feet is a good length. You will also need a plethora of different kinds of mic stands – some for singers, some for mic’ing amps, drums, etc. I recommend getting
HOME CONSTRUCTION GUIDE
specialized clip-on mic holders for drums, otherwise you might have a difficult time with mic placement on the kit. HEADPHONES You’ll need a range of quality headphones and a headphone amp with multiple outputs and inputs so that each musician can hear while tracking and overdubbing. Drummers tend to do well with closed cup phones, while many singers prefer open ones. Budget at least $100 per pair and try to mix it up so that you don’t have six pairs all the same. I use aux sends from the mixer to give each musician his/her own headphone mix. I can’t stress this enough – all the gear in the world is useless if the musicians aren’t getting really good headphone mixes, so don’t skimp on this step. WIRING, MONITORS, SOFTWARE All the wiring for the microphone inputs and headphones should be wired in the wall with jacks in each room to make connections. The cost of these specialized XLR and1/4” TRS outlets, as well as the shielded audio cable, can add up quickly and take some fine wiring and soldering skills. You’ll need a good set of monitor speakers that you’ll want to mount with adjustable mounting brackets to the walls near where you’ll be mixing. The type of audio software for your DAW first depends on whether you are going to be MAC or PC based and then on preference and budget. You can spend as little as a few hundred bucks on professional DAW, but don’t forget about additional plug-ins for reverb, compression, soft synths, etc. Even if your software comes with most of what you need to get started right out of the box, it won’t be long before you’ll want drum loops, better sounding strings and other plug-ins. Budget accordingly. WHERE TO SHOP I love shopping online at stores like Musician’s Friend and Sweetwater. There you can read reviews and compare prices while wearing your pajamas. Ebay and Craigslist are great resources for cheap gear, especially if you know what you’re looking for. Used gear is a great way to get more bang for your buck, and well-maintained microphones or monitor speakers can be found at a fraction of the cost of new gear. Realize that you will be learning what works best for your studio as you begin working in it. Often what seems like a necessity at first turns out to be something that sits unused in the mic closet. Start as small as you can and expand as you learn what works best for you. Don’t believe all the hype you read about every product – some gear has earned its reputation in the industry but much is marketing glitz. Read recording forums and reviews and talk to other professionals whenever possible to glean gear tips and recommendations. FURNITURE Make sure you budget for at least one comfy
couch and some durable desk chairs. As engineer/ producer, you will be spending a lot of time on your butt. The band will also be spending much of their time bothering you in the control room. It’s best if you keep them as far back from your workspace as possible, preferably nodding off in comfy couches rather than leaning over your shoulder, secondguessing your every mouse click. Just kidding, guys. INSURANCE Will you need insurance? Yes – bad things happen and you’ll sleep much better knowing that if something goes wrong (like a break-in or a flood), you’re covered. Usually you can add the studio equipment as a rider on your existing homeowner policy. Remember, you are going to have expensive equipment in your home studio. Depending on where you live, a security system and additional locks could prevent a thief from taking off with all your hard-earned gear. FINAL THOUGHTS I worked for many years in studios in Boston and L.A. and I made note of the things I liked and the things I didn’t. We’d all like huge rooms to work with, but few of us have the luxury of huge Abbey Road style halls to work with. Set up a
drum set in a small office and see what makes it too tight. Is it better in the bedroom where there are two more feet on one side? I have four iso rooms in my studio, but we generally only use two rooms for 90% of the work we do (and my tiny iso booth hardly gets used at all). Could you live with two bigger iso rooms instead of three small ones? Could you have one big iso room and use gobos to divide the drums from the guitars? My biggest advice would be to visit some studios first and pick their owners’ brains to help you figure out what you need and what you don’t in your dream home studio. And as you finalize your studio, keep in mind that you and your artists should be as comfortable and relaxed as possible. The studio space should incorporate colors, artwork, lighting and design to maximize creativity and reduce stress. Recording is a science, but it’s also an art and should be fun. Good luck on your quest for a dream studio! ABOUT THE AUTHOR Zac Cataldo is a licensed contractor. He is also a musician and owner of Night Train Studios in Westford, MA and Black Cloud Productions, a music publishing company that licenses music for film, TV, software & commercials. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 9
THE BUDGET
How to Plan A Hom I
’ve been involved in the music industry for ten years, and it all started with the dangerous combination of being in an indie band AND going to a recording school at the same time. I knew just enough to get my band famously terrible independent recordings that eventually led to BETTER recordings that led to INCREDIBLE recordings once we finally got a proper record contract and budget. I’ve learned a lot along that journey, and producing out of the comfort of a spare bedroom has never been more enjoyable and creative for me.
BE MOBILE I’ve recorded so many bits and pieces on-site, while traveling, and winging it. Half of these sessions make it on the final recording. With a budget. Why? The TAKE beats the SPACE. The first lesson is that being 10 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
mobile is more important than that trickedout Trash Can Mac Tower. I know multiple Grammy award-winning producers who are tracking in the back of tour busses with killer bands because that’s the availability of the working musician today. I know multiple guys who have a travel kit that contains an API Lunchbox and a MacBook. My 3-year-old MacBook has upgraded everything and I am nowhere near running out of DSP. Being portable creates more possibilities. And who doesn’t like multiple revenue streams? FUNCTION OVER FORM Do NOT spend money on looks to make your space better until you have all the gear to sound incredible. I’ve tracked vocals in functional closets that ended up charting on the radio. It’s NOT about aesthetics; it’s about how good it sounds when you push PLAY. The chain in that particular closet was a Reflexion filter to kill the closet, a tube condenser, a BAE 1073 clone and UAD plug-ins. The closet was the least
LESS IS MORE In terms of inputs. I don’t know a single producer in Nashville who tracks
can? I know it’s all related to budget, but you aren’t getting better gigs because your beauty reel sounds one-dimensional. Suck it up and make pennies on a few projects to be able to afford proper mix/master. The quality will start to show up, and the quality of clients will start to show up! And who
Being portable creates more possibilities.” their drums in-house. They might track some auxilia r y percussion or use a couple ex tra inputs here a nd there, but I don’t know a nyone who rea lly uses much more tha n two killer inputs at a time. Put your money where you track most a nd focus on one (maybe two, tops) great musica l mic cha ins. Rent a space for your drums; the reason you ca n’t get killer drum tones is because you’re competing with studios that have invested $500k+ into their gea r a nd space a nd work in that environment
here wants a better vocalist to track on their next project?? THIS GUY. FINAL HOME-STUDIO PURCHASE HIERARCHY Here’s the order in which I’ve purchased my gear over the years. It’s not perfect, it certainly had humble beginnings, and please don’t do it all the same way, but it’ll give you an idea of where to start/where the priorities should go. Keep in mind I had NO money; I was in an indie band! And I’m a producer so I lean more towards having toys vs. having mics.
Latest Pro Tools Native Instruments (not ultimate!) 3rd party unique instrument packs Upgrade RAM Nicer Mics - ribbon, tube condenser vocal mic Acoustic paneling - bought most of these 3rd party 3rd party plug-ins - UAD plugs (Unison NEVE!), Plugin Alliance, Addictive Drums
THE BUDGET
important piece of that chain. The song was #1, the producer #2, the singer #3, the gear #4, the SPACE dead last.
NEXT ON THE WISH LIST Upgrade Native Instruments Solid state hard drive More 3rd party plug-ins Possibly an analog mic pre, but I do love the UAD Unison. Just want something crazy warm… There it is. If I had to do it all over, I’d start with the UAD Apollo, MacBook, and Sony Pros. Then again, UAD didn’t exist when I started… Some trial and error here but I’m getting to a good place creatively. I have a couple great inputs, a bunch of toys and candy that keep me fresh and musical, and definitely last, a fairly dead space that is appealing and inviting to clients. Happy creating!
ome Studio Budget And Learn The Hierarchy to Your New Purchases
EV ERY DAY twea king their tones. W hy in the world would you wa nt to tr y a nd replicate that? Rent the space. A nd f ind a killer studio drummer to have on-ca ll if the one in the ba nd sucks.
PC laptop Pro Tools LE and Mbox Focusrite pres! Woo! Sony-Pro headphones Cheap condenser mic (mine was an AT4040)
DON’T DO TOO MUCH The best recordings you’re trying to compete with are done by MULTIPLE people who are ALL better than you, so why are you trying to be a Swiss Army Knife? As a guy that is a natural control freak, I have to limit myself on each project. If I’m producing, I will NOT mix/master. If I’m the mix guy, I will NOT do any production work until my mix is money and only if the song REALLY needs it. I will not be involved in mastering unless I’m getting a two-mix, etc. If the best guys in the industry won’t touch multiple parts of the process, why do you think you
Waves Diamond Bundle Melodyne - critical for any serious pop production External hard drive for backup
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jon Lewis is the lead singer/songwriter for the Minneapolis band Hyland and now produces projects out of his home in Nashville. Follow him on Twitter at @HylandJon.
More cheap mics - small diaphragm condenser, dynamic, FET Reflexion Filter - my space sucks, this helps. Waves CLA Vocal Plug-In THIS IS WHERE I ESSENTIALLY STARTED OVER UAD Apollo MacBook Pro Studio Speakers (Tannoy Reveals) PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 11
ACOUSTICS
Tiago Cassol Schvarstzhaupt
How To Set Up Your Studio For Sound Success
S
Performer’s Primer on Home Studio Acoustics
etting up a home studio holds the promise of creating your own great-sounding music any time the inspiration moves you. It’s exciting to buy new gear, claim a spare bedroom or basement, and embark on the production of your next masterpiece. If you’re like many home recordists, in your excitement to get started, you may not have paid as careful attention to the acoustics as you did to the rest of the recording chain. If the sound of your room is lying to you, there’s no way to make good choices for processing and balancing your music. If you can’t hear it, you can’t fix it. SOUND ACCURACY & ISOLATION The two issues to consider in the control room are the accuracy of sound reaching your ears, and prevention of noise from leaking into or out of your room. Similarly, in the recording space you want a true sound 12 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
to reach the microphone, and isolation from adjacent spaces to prevent external sounds from polluting the recording, or your sound from interfering with the activities of others. Isolation can be achieved in two ways: mass and de-coupling. The more mass a wall has, the less sound is transmitted. Mass Law is a rule of thumb that for every doubling of mass, transmission loss (TL) increases by 6dB. If a wall with one layer per side of drywall (GWB) stops 33 dB (TL33), increasing the mass to two layers per side would yield TL39, and doubling again to four layers per side should achieve TL45. It becomes evident that using mass alone can quickly get big, heavy, and expensive. The best solution is to use mass in conjunction with de-coupling, which eliminates the physical connection between rooms.
Since sound transmits more efficiently in solids (e.g. wall studs) than in air, building a double wall with independent, parallel rows of studs will increase TL without extra mass. Adding insulation to the cavity in-between further increases TL, as does spacing the
Monitor triangle
ACOUSTICS Double Wall Construction walls farther apart. That TL39 wall with two layers of sheetrock per side can improve to TL57 when you put those layers on their own studs spaced an inch apart with insulation inside. Double walls should have sheetrock outside only. Adding a layer to an interior side, even though increasing mass, creates a triple-leaf system that actually degrades performance, especially at resonant frequencies. If you’re curious why this happens, look up mass-air resonance and coincidence dip in your favorite search engine. Double wall construction is often impractical for home studios. A simpler alternative is to use resilient sound isolation clips. RSIC-2 clips are a great option with hat channel (furring strips resembling the shape of a hat when viewed from the end) holding the drywall. DON’T BE AN ISO FOAM DUMMY Hanging foam on a wall for “soundproofing” is a fool’s errand. This will not increase transmission loss. Soft materials, like foam, fiberglass insulation, rockwool etc. serve only to absorb sound within a room, preventing ref lections and reducing ambient sound. While ineffective for isolation, carefully placed absorption is essential for a controlled and accurate listening environment. SPEAKER SETUP IS KEY Before addressing room treatments, let’s go over some general guidelines for setting up speakers. A common technique is to arrange monitoring on an equilateral triangle with one point being the listening position and the other two points being speakers aimed at the listener at 60º angles. Symmetry is important. You don’t want to be twice as far from the left wall as the right, or rotated with one speaker farther from the front wall than the other. Try to keep some space between speakers and walls. Direct sound, following a straight
path from speaker to ear, mixes in undesirable ways with ref lections from nearby surfaces such as walls, tables, and mixing consoles. The ref lected path, from speaker to wall to ear, is longer than the direct path, resulting in a copy of the sound arriving just after the original. Sound is comprised of alternating higher and lower pressure, or in electronic transmission, positive and negative voltage. When a delayed signal combines with the original, one may be cycling positive, and the other, negative. These energies work against each other, reducing level at certain frequencies (destructive interference). Both signals being in a positive cycle results in reinforcement at some frequencies (constructive interference). Neither case is welcome because it changes the frequency response of the sound from your speakers. The easiest way to determine placement of treatments to absorb early ref lections is to grab a mirror and enlist the help of a friend. While you sit at the listening position, your friend places the mirror f lat on the wall, moving it until you can see a speaker. Center your treatments there. Sound and light travel in waves and ref lect in similar ways (angle of incidence equals angle of ref lection), so the mirror shows the first ref lection paths from your speakers to your listening position. Ceilings, f loors, and consoles also can be a source of unwanted ref lections. TRAP THAT BASS Low-frequency absorption, or bass trapping, is essential in small rooms, and acoustically speaking, any room in a house is a small room. Standing waves are a particular case of constructive and destructive interference between parallel walls causing certain frequencies to either ring or all but disappear at specific locations (anti-nodes and nodes). One node will exist exactly half-way between the front and back walls, so it’s best to have
your listening position in front or behind the half-way point. The poor bass response in un-trapped rooms contributes to many home studio mixes having problems in the low end. If you are missing bass at your listening position, you’re probably in a node. It may seem counter-intuitive to trap bass when you don’t have enough, but that’s exactly what to do. The missing bass is caused by sound bouncing between two walls, with the low pressure in one direction combining with the high pressure in the other, thereby cancelling each other out. If you trap the bass, it won’t bounce back, eliminating the cancellation and restoring an even bass response. The simplest bass trapping is a thick porous absorber in the corners or on the back wall, often called a “super-chunk.” The classic material for these and many other absorptive treatments is Owens Corning 703 semi-rigid fiberglass boards in a frame covered with Guilford FR-701 fabric. The thicker the panel, the better the lowfrequency absorption. Leaving a small space between panel and wall also improves low frequency performance. Four-inch panel depth gets you into the lower mid-range, but for real bass trapping, you’ll need it to be several times thicker. These techniques won’t turn your home into Abbey Road, but they’ll help you get the most out of your gear and ears, presenting your music in the best possible light. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jay Frigoletto is a recording columnist for Performer who’s covered such topics as Com pression, Limiting, Equalization, Reverbera tion, Digital vs. Tape Delay, Active vs. Passive Electronics, Speakers & Crossovers, Tubes vs. Solid State, Microphones, Mic-Pres and Phantom Power, Phase and Polarity, and finally, All About Decibels. For more info please visit www.promastering.com. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 13
SOUNDPROOFING
Eileen Kane
SOUNDPROOFING 101 This brief article is designed to give some basic ideas about soundproofing your home studio. I personally have built three studios from the ground up and learned a lot as I have done so. There is a wealth of information including Sound Control Tables (STC) and a great variety of sound control products available online and I encourage you to check further, after reading this, to find the best combination for you. Soundproofing is a term most often used to refer to the reduction of sound pressure 14 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
(sound level). Controlling sound levels is essential to the operation of a studio. It may be that you need to control the volume of the sources that you are recording with respect to your neighbors or it may be that you are trying to reduce the sound levels from outside of your studio so as to not interfere with your recordings or, more likely, both. There is nothing worse than tracking that perfect vocal only to have a motorcycle roar by and ruin it. The key is to eliminate sound transmission as much as possible through your walls, f loor and ceiling.
So, where to start? WALLS & FLOORING Ideally you are building your studio as new construction. Doing that, you can design your walls from the outset for soundproofing. But, if you are converting existing space, there still are steps you can take to control sound levels. Let’s first look at new construction. If you are on a slab, your finished f looring
SOUNDPROOFING
needs to be de-coupled from the slab. You can do this by f loating the f loor. To do this, you build a false f loor that rests on rubber pads spaced evenly throughout the design. That way the concrete won’t transmit the sound because the f loor is decoupled from the slab. If a f loating f loor isn’t practical then isolate the finished f loor from your slab with a rubber or rubber cork membrane. Definitely not as good as the f loating f loor, but you will benefit over no isolation at all. It is very important to also isolate or decouple your f loor from your walls. This can be accomplished by attaching rubber under the bottom plate of your walls. There are products specifically designed for this or you can go to a f looring supplier and buy a roll of the rubber/cork material used under carpets to control noise in apartments and cut that into strips. That same material is great under the finished f looring in your recording room and control room, too. Next, let’s look at the design of your walls; that’s where your biggest challenge is. Here is what I did in my current studio and it has served me well. There are two walls separated by 1” of airspace. Each wall is insulated with rock wool (you can get this from an insulation supplier). Each wall also has a double layer of 5/8” drywall with the inside double layer (facing the recording room) separated (de-coupled) by Resilient Channel. Additionally, between the wall studs and the first layer of drywall is a 1/8” rubber membrane. Pictured is a borrowed diagram showing most of these ideas using their 440 Sound Barrier product instead of the double 5/8’ drywall I used.
CEILINGS For your ceilings, I suggest a double layer of 5/8” drywall attached to your rafters or trusses and insulate it. I used blown insulation with a factor of R-36. Finally, use an acoustic sound barrier sealant. This applies like caulking and helps seal the gaps at the bottom of your walls and other places you may have gaps. Note: Here is an important tip unrelated to soundproofing but an important element of studio design: make sure no two walls are parallel. This helps eliminate standing waves in your recording room. CONVERTING EXISTING SPACES If you are converting an existing space, you should try to incorporate as many of the
steps above that you can. Building a second wall, inside of your existing wall, will serve you very well. If you can’t do that, attach resilient channel to your existing wall and then add your double layer of drywall. Glue them together with Green Glue (acts as a de-coupler) and attach with screws. Adding additional drywall to your ceiling will be necessary also. Green Glue that as well to decouple the new layer from the existing one. ACOUSTICAL TREATMENT Now that you’ve done your soundproofing, it is equally important to do some acoustical treatment. This is for another article but here are the basics. Leaving your walls with the smooth painted drywall will result in a space that won’t sound very good; sound waves will bounce all over the place. There are a number of methods to use, from sound control blankets to attaching carpet to installing curtains or using acoustical treatment products like those from Auralex. Typical treatments include installing absorbing bass traps in your corners and adding absorptive panels spaced as needed to dampen the live-ness of the room, but not remove desired ambience. In many cases, you can send your room specs to acoustical treatment manufacturers and they will suggest designs incorporating their products. Good luck and happy recording! ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jim Stafford is the owner of Eclipse Recording Co. in St Augustine, FL. For more info please visit Eclipserecording.com. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 15
EXPERIENCES
Don’t Let Gear Overwhelm Your Home Studio How To Make Meaningful Music On Your Own
I
’ve spent the greater part of a decade putting together a home studio. It’s been a labor of love and a test of sheer will. I’ve thought of giving up entirely - and just letting the “pros” do it. However, I’m finally getting to the point where I’m making recordings that I can be proud of. The most important thing that I’ve learned is that gear really isn’t important.
Don’t get me wrong - obviously you need a microphone, a DAW or a tape machine and few other things to actually make records - but there’s a fine line between what you need and what you want. Don’t ever trust that feeling of want; it’s deceiving and gets in the way of writing music and making recordings. If you start thinking things like, “If I could just get that Neumann microphone my voice will sound so much better!” Or, “If only I had a Neve console my mixes will sound like the big studios and then people will buy my music!” STOP. 16 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
I was fortunate to attend a college that had an excellent recording program. I was able to experiment with different pieces of classic recording gear including API consoles, AMPEX tape machines, EMT plate reverbs, Buchla synthesizers and lots of vintage microphones. It was overwhelming to say the least. But thinking back on those years in college, I learned the most from the people that I had met - especially my fellow students. Collaboration can be an invaluable source of learning. Sharing mixes with other people and having it critiqued can provide you with a wealth of new perspectives and lead you to better hone your craft. Listen to the recordings that inspire you and think about what qualities are meaningful to you. Is it the tone of the mix? Is it the timbre of the vocals, the guitars or the drums? Is it the simply just a good song? Find what’s meaningful
to you and emulate it in your own music. Try and find interviews with the producer(s)/ engineer(s)/artist(s) that made that recording and learn from them. Often times you’ll find out that it’s creative microphone placement - not the microphone itself -that’s responsible for “that sound.” One of my favorite recordings, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska was recorded using only a 4-track cassette recorder, two Shure SM57 microphones and an Echoplex. With a modest amount of recording equipment, input from others and a lot of feeling, you can make brilliant records that are meaningful to both you and your listeners. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Austin Potter is a Philadelphia transplant from Olympia, WA. He’s a huge analog recording fanatic, and as such produces all his music in his home studio. For more info please visit tapesandtubes.com.
LESSONS
Lessons Learned & Advice From A Home Recording Veteran FIND A MENTOR (WHETHER THEY KNOW IT OR NOT) The Internet is so rich with archival footage and interviews that researching an artist that appeals to you has never been easier. I have always been a huge fan of Brian Eno (pictured) as both an artist and producer. The lesson that I got from listening to Eno’s work in combination with reading about him was that experimentation was key.
you to bounce around to multiple projects at once. MOVE OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE I am a musician who has taught myself to play multiple instruments by ear so that I would simply have something to record, so I don’t really have a comfort zone. I do not read music but I have mastered the basic language of the notes on the neck of a guitar and that has allowed me admission into a world of collaboration and artistic freedom that I never would have imagined 10 years ago.
I have developed a work process based on the concept of ambient loops. I use my homemade loops to trigger a rhythm base upon which I write original compositions featuring guitars. The loops can be preserved or discarded depending on how the overall writing process goes. Sometimes the loops stand alone independent of anything else.
I made the leap to a DAW running Propellerhead’s Reason through the Balance audio interface two years ago out of necessity. My Zoom 1608 was fritzing out and my old laptop lost its battle against time, so I took that as a sign that is was time to move on. It took a while for me to find the sweet spot with the new technology but once I did, it has been an amazing experience. I don’t regret waiting, but now that I’m here I feel like I’m home. My entire catalogue has benefitted from the transition.
IT MAY SUCK AT FIRST BUT IT WILL GET BETTER I have always been an advocate of recording everything. I rarely pick up a guitar unless I am in a position to record and capture what happens next, because it won’t be there the next time I plug in. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. Record everything and revisit. Be in a constant state of editing. An idea will find a home somewhere down the line and the presence of what can be perceived as work product will promote progress. Have choices. Quantity will get you to the quality. DO NOT BE INTIMIDATED Once you become familiar with the technology, it will be there to work for you. Your goals should be both vast and selective at the same time. Mastering the basics of clipping, panning, and levels will inf luence everything that you do. So figure out how to get a basic sound recorded, and don’t look back. Lasso the technology and make it work for you. GIVE IT A DAY One of the most important lessons that I have learned over the years, especially now that I am getting older, is to let a new recording/idea sit once you have captured the essence of it and saved it. My artistic mood varies dramatically from one week to the next, and I have had some great success in 18 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SOUND GENERATORS My iPhone has been the single most important artistic tool available to me. No boundaries as to what can be done when sounds generated from Bebot or ThumbJam are looped, enhanced, and manipulated.
variety of not only compositional content, but more importantly, mixes. I’m constantly surprised by my prior decision-making process and I rarely if ever can remember the idea I recorded the week before, so it’s a constant process of rediscovery for me. DO NOT DWELL Always move onto something else once you have achieved a certainly level of satisfaction/quality with an idea that you are working on. Approaching it from a different angle upon return can only benefit the experience. Establish a work process that allows
TAKE FULL ADVANTAGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA I have posted over 100 original compositions to SoundCloud over the past few years and enjoyed the music of my peers immensely. It is a wonderful outlet for home recorders and for listeners. I have also participated in many wonderful collaborative projects that have added a voice to my extensive instrumental archive and given me courage to go out and explore my voice. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steve Vercelloni is an artist and avid audio recorder living in Long Beach, CA. His most recent work is featured at soundcloud.com/ steve-vercelloni.
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THE SHED
How To Shed In Genera
I
’m a jazz saxophone player that doesn’t really like to play jazz all that much. I like singer-songwriters, soul music, rock bands, weird string bands, folk music, and electro pop. Cannonball Adderley, Jan Garbarek, and Ornette Coleman got me into the saxophone. Singers and songwriters got me into songs and records. But I never wanted to be a Clarence Clemons. I like being a part of a section. Most bands can’t afford to tour with a horn section, so I got into making sections happen in the studio. Enough people in my widening circle of musical colleagues (most recently The Mountain Goats, Hiss Golden Messenger, Bhi Bhiman) wanted me to put together woodwind parts for their records that I thought it would be worth the investment to build a studio where I focused on just that. So that’s what I did. My wife and I bought a house in downtown Raleigh, NC two years ago that had a detached workshop in the backyard, and I renovated the crap out of it. I ran super clean power to it, installed a powerful mini-split heat pump/AC system, insulated it with dense rockwool, replaced the window and door, installed tongue and groove flooring on the vaulted ceiling, created a slatted wall to give the room some acoustical dimension, and finished the existing yellow pine floors. To give it a more cabin-like vibe, I built a small front porch with an overhang. The total project took about six months, though it probably could have gone faster if we hadn’t had a baby in the middle of that, and we didn’t exceed our budget of $10,000 by all that much. Why is this an economically viable route to take, you ask? Normally, if a woodwinds player gets called to do a session in a studio they would get paid a rate either based on the amount of time spent or by the song. If I’m in a professional studio for a full day, I usually get between $200-300. A totally fair rate. The idea behind my studio is that I could charge similar rates for my services as an instrumentalist, but the artist/producer wouldn’t have to be spending their valuable studio time for my portion of the project. I don’t feel like I’m pulling money away from established studios because,
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THE SHED
To Convert Your Into A Revenuerating Home Studio in a lot of cases, an artist would either farm it out to someone like me or just not have horns/ woodwinds at all. With my arrangement, people can still have affordable, orchestrated instruments without impacting their budget too much. Are you wondering about quality, now? Are you skeptical as to whether or not I can produce studio quality recordings in my shed? Well, I was worried about that too. Obviously, the quality of the recordings matters a lot. I didn’t want people to be able to tell that I wasn’t in a million dollar studio. My approach to achieving this was simple: after playing in some amazing studios I figured out which sound I liked the best, made a note of what the signal chain was (mic, preamp, converter), and then bought that stuff. Now, this equipment gets expensive. I figured I’d start out with a few choice things and go from there. I like ribbon mics on my saxes, so I have a decent AEA ribbon mic, paired up with a Great River preamp, and sent into an Apogee interface with decent converters. Those items cost me roughly $3,800. I steer the ship with Pro Tools and a souped-up Mac Mini. And it all works great. I recommend also having a good dynamic mic, like an SM7 or an RE20, and a midrange largediaphragm condenser mic like a Mojave MA-300. As far as preamps, start a 500 series rack. Great quality stuff that you can add on to later at a reasonable cost. Not everyone is willing to invest in quality home studio gear, so if you do, you might even be able to make some money renting it out. I buy pretty much everything on an online store’s credit card, and keep an eye out for zero interest specials. The minimum payments will have the balance paid off in the zero- interest time frame. Financing $5,000 over 24 months is only around 200 bucks a month, which can be covered with just one session. That’s how I deal with equipment expenses. The renovation expenses were a combination of gifted money, savings, and credit cards. All of which are paid off now. Other than my monthly credit card bill for equipment and maybe a
slightly inflated electric bill, the studio doesn’t really have any overhead. Though there’s an economic reason for having this studio, my priority is having a space where I can be creative on my own terms. This is not a luxury item for a full-time musician. It is a necessity. When I’m not working on a woodwind part for someone, I can write, practice, and experiment. The more I’m able to do those things for myself, the better I’ll be at producing great work for other people. Creativity and consistency are the greatest assets for an instrumentalist and session musician. But if you can also have a kickass little studio in your backyard, all the better. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Matt Douglas is a trained jazz saxophone and woodwinds player who floats between the jazz world and the world of singer/songwriters. He continues to live and work in Raleigh, North Carolina as a multi-instrumentalist, teacher, and songwriter. For more info visit www.mattdouglasmusic.com. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 21
WHAT THEY DON'T TELL YOU
WHAT THEY DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT HAVING A HOME STUDIO “If only we could record whenever we wanted, didn’t have to pay outrageous studio fees and we could try all our ideas without someone holding us back, then we’d have it made.” After all, it is most every musician’s dream to own a studio and achieve a creative complete-ness isn’t it? As a musician who became a studio owner and is now no longer a performing musician, I know these ropes and let me tell you - they can tangle and pull you off course. Conventional wisdom: Recording in our own studio will bring us closer together. Reality: It’s more likely to cause stress and arguments. Whether your band is a straightdemocracy, democracy with a “veto power” leader or a “front-centric titular leader,” you may find that achieving group-think isn’t made any easier…in fact, it’s often harder without the leadership (and tie-breaking) of a hired producer/engineer. Conventional wisdom: We’ll save money. Reality: If you record very frequently, you’ll end up saving significant cash. But, quality gear is expensive, whether hardware or virtual, and studios are notorious for nickeland-dime’ing you to death. You’ll likely spend 22 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
way more than you would in a studio for your first full-length, break even on the second and start “saving” on your third. Conventional wisdom: Then we’ll record a lot, to save lots of money. Reality: Recording is a big pain in the ass and there’s plenty of obstacles in-between your vision and prolific productivity. You’ll only seldom record due to health issues, computer issues, plug-in nightmares, neighbor complaints, “waiting on more crucial piece of gear” and the big one…the lack of urgency created by always having a studio available. Conventional wisdom: We will reach new heights of creativity. Reality: Yes, you’ll get plenty of opportunity to fix mistakes and enjoy endless do-overs, but more creativity…no. Your left brain and your right brain will likely feud enough to prevent that (if your unruly band mates don’t), assuming you’ve got the deep chops often needed to achieve creativity in a technical world where freshness is elusive. Conventional wisdom: We’ll record everything from free jams, to rehearsals, to demos… we’ll never lose another good idea again!
Reality: Its hard enough to be on-time, intune and always “ret to go” without having to babysit the laptop…and set-up mics, make rough mixes, distribute files to the gang, do DAW/OS updates, etc. You’ll record everything for a month and then that routine gets old surprisingly quickly. Don’t get me wrong; a little personal discipline goes a long way towards beating the “distracted artist” syndromes described above. It is possible to have fun and save money if you have an extremely stable line-up, tightly aligned artistic goals and employ realistic expectations. If that’s a bit too much to chew, try starting slowly with a simple rehearsal recording set-up and then graduate to the demo recording level. You may find that provides the requisite artistic freedom, without the lifeconsuming hassles of being a computer-tech/ musician/engineer/producer/entrepreneur/ coach/marriage counselor… ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rob Tavaglione owns Catalyst Recording in Charlotte, NC (www.catalystrecording. com) and is a freelance writer/reviewer/ columnist/blogger for the pro audio industry.
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HOME STUDIO TOUR
HomeStu 24 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
HOME STUDIO TOUR
udioTour Bardi Johannsson of Bang Gang Takes us Behind The Scenes of his Icelandic Getaway
PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 25
HOME STUDIO TOUR
Essential Yamaha SK 50D and amps
W
hen I was in college I only had a guitar, a Kurzweil keyboard, an ATARI 1040ST, headphones and Cubase. I wrote most of my first Bang Gang album on that setup. I did scratch vocals by singing in the headphones as they could somehow sense noise as a microphone. I then went to a studio and synced the computer with tape, and recorded everything from the sequencer on the tape and did vocals on top of all that. Now 20 years later, I have my own studio with a lot of more stuff in it. During my first record
nature and tweaked them, made beats with my feet, hands and mouth and made them unrecognizable with an effects chain. Now my studio is built around instruments and gear that are essential for me. I have little by little been cutting out things I don’t use. Also, I have been using fewer and fewer plug-ins. It is so nice to have a clean track with all EQ and fx recorded - making decisions before, rather then trying to figure out afterwards in a plugin mess. I have Pro Tools HD X that is the core of my recordings. Two sets of speakers, ADAM
“I keep my studio quite dark, so it always feels like evening...” Kiss doll and my first EP and two of my best friends: Keren Ann and Henrik Singapore Sling
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deal I got screwed by an Icelandic record company so I set my goal that in my late 30s I could record what I wanted, when I wanted, in the best quality available and would not have to rely on anyone. I have always been into experimenting with sounds and liked working with all kinds of instruments and sources. I recorded sounds in
S3XH and Mackie HR 824. When I write music, produce and start mixing I use the ADAM as they have a soft and fat sound. Then I end in the Mackies. Basically what you hear in the Mackie speakers, you will hear anywhere else. I think I would choose them if I could only have one pair of speakers. Maybe with a sub added.
The songwriting process varies for me. Sometimes the song’s base is written on a guitar or piano with vocals, and sometimes I start making a sound universe and then work on vocals afterwards. Recently, I started using only outboard echoes when mixing and producing. I plug each instrument either through the Chorus Echo or a Korg Sampling Delay. I think 75% of the delays on the new Bang Gang album are the Chorus Echo. When I record guitars, I always try a few different guitars and sounds for each part. Then afterwards I do freestyle sessions where I play around with noise. After that I choose which sounds fit best and go through all the freestyle sessions to pick out weird sounds or clusters that can bring the right ambience to the song. Most of the time I record more than less; sometimes I record an instrument even if I am 90% sure it won’t work, but since there is the 10% chance it might work, I have to try it so I won’t have any regrets. It is better to regret what you have done rather than what you haven’t done. My guitars are mostly Fender, but then I have a Les Paul for sustain reasons. Also an old Rickenbacker that I use for most of the solos. The synths are a combination of essential synths, SH 101, Yamaha SK-50D that I have used as a organ sound on the last three albums. My song “Inside” from the album Something Wrong is mostly an SK-50D and a Fender Rhodes. Then I have two Roland vocoders that I mostly use for high range string sounds and sound effects. Then I make strange sounds with my mouth through the vocoder and it brings something special. I also have a POG2 that I used on some of the guitars in the song “Sabazios O.” It makes the guitar sound synthesized and strange. In the guitar solo on “My Special One” you can hear distorted guitars double-layered in two octaves, with double layered harmonies. On top of that I put the
HOME STUDIO TOUR
I can record everything except live drum kit and strings (if they are more then one at a time). Normally I use my Neumann M149 plugged in an Avalon vacuum tube, so it goes through two amps. In an addition, I have a Shure SM57 through an EMI pre-amp. My guitar pedals are combined with a chain of distortion and effects. Normally I just use two distortion pedals and the reverb of the amp when I play guitar. Sometimes the Boss Slow Gear pedal gets on there and some others, as well. It is when it comes to keyboard recordings when I start to put the whole effect chain together. Recording keyboards through guitar pedals in a guitar amp is a lot of fun and weird things start to happen, sonically. I did a lot of that on the new Bang Gang album The Wolves are Whispering. Also most of the drum machine in the track “The Sin is Near” is recorded through a guitar amp.
guitars through a vocoder and there is one layer of that also. For bass recordings I usually plug directly into a Focusrite Trakmaster Platinum. I have three different basses that cover all spectrums. A Hofner if I want a retro sound where the bass stands out, a Rickenbacker for fat low frequencies and a Fender Jazz Bass for melodic lines. Sometimes I add a delay on the bass to get a more ambient feeling, if that fits. I feel like today’s engineers are often in a hurry and think that they can fix the sound afterwards. Little-by-little, I was going in this direction too, but then I noticed that most often it takes more time and effort to fix something that doesn’t sound right, than to actually rerecord it properly with the right sound. Now I try to get good takes with all the effects from the beginning. Also, I have been fortunate to have drummers that sound good on takes, so I don’t have to treat the sound so much to make it large and fat. It seems like some musicians think that if you play loud in a studio, it will sound loud on a record. But that is not always the case. The softer you play drums, the larger they sound on a record.
Guitar pedals
In the past I have used a lot of reversing and pitch-shifting afterwards. For example, in the song “A Lonely Bird” I am using both normal and reversed guitars in the beginning. Sometimes I also use a trick I learned in my film work, and that is to pitch-shift a sound and play it with the original to make it more fat. I always keep my studio quite dark, so it always feels like evening. In the winter we actually have 16 hours of darkness here, but in the summer it is reversed. If I don’t feel the difference between day and night, time becomes abstract and therefore it is easier to get lost in a timeless space. Also it gets more moody when it is dark and it fits my music very well. If I am recording more ambient tracks, I like to play on them late evenings or night as my mind gets more “floating” at that time and I feel that the space in music becomes more [pronounced].
Speakers, Gainsbourg and a whip Synths and Keren Ann
Then I have three guardian angels in my studio. It is a whip I got from my friends for my 30th birthday, a Kiss doll that sings “Crazy Nights” and an ABBA jacket I got when I was young. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bardi Johannsson is an Icelandic musician, composer, writer, TV show host (of the surrealist Icelandic TV show Konfekt), clothing designer and film director. He is mostly known for his work with the groups Bang Gang, Lady & Bird (a side project with Keren Ann) and Starwalker, a collaboration with Jean-Benoît Dunckel. For more, follow him on Twitter @ banggangband. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 27
WHY I RECORD AT HOME
8.5 Reasons Why I Record at Home and You Should Too
M
y first home studio consisted of a tower PC running a MIDI sequencer, a Korg DW-8000 synthesizer, and an Akai S-2000 rack mount sampler. I made drum ’n bass with that setup in my teens. I used to download breakbeats off the Internet using the family computer, cut them up in Cool Edit, and transfered them via floppy disk to the sampler. I saved my allowance for months to buy that sampler. It could do anything the beloved MPC2000 could do, but it looked like a VCR rather than a spaceship’s control console. I got the S-2000 to save money, and saving money is high on the list of reasons to record at home. These days, the price of studio time is always relative to the price of a new laptop in my mind. And these days, a laptop running Logic comprises the sampler, the synth, the sequencer, the fourtrack, and a boatload of effects and digital sound processing. So there’s another reason to record at home: the tools for composition come in the same box as the recording gear. Now let’s say you’re a strong-headed Aries who likes to be in charge and not have to compromise with anyone else. You’ve just accessed the third reason to record from home: complete autonomy. Oh yes, and no hourly rate to worry about. Infinite time. I spent two-and-a-half years writing and recording my debut album at home in my Lower East Side apartment. That’s kind of a long time. My heroes at the time were Animal Collective and Ariel Pink, lo-fi DIY masters whose homemade sounds created an emotional
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intimacy in the music. I’m talking about the debut albums of both artists. That first Animal Collective album is mixed with so much treble, you can almost hear their hearing damage. But the compositions and the performances are so full of magic and integrity that the lack of audio fidelity just adds to the story and to the uniqueness. The lo-fi quality makes it sound authentic. I personally try (within reason) to capture sounds with fidelity. But I always know that any failing in that area only serves to increase the authenticity of the artifact, to the right ears. There’s a lot to be said for Quincy Jones’ amazing productions, but there’s also
around the time I quit school. I sat with my guitar and honed my ability to identify each chord’s harmonic function within a song. With a simple guess-and-check method, I began to collect and recognize the sound of IV chords, as opposed to the sound of V chords. It was hugely satisfying to listen to Fine Young Cannibals “She Drives Me Crazy,” and be able to correctly guess that the chorus progression is I-IV-vi-V. To this day I use my hard-won familiarity with chord sounds to diversify my compositions on each album and ensure that I am not accidentally traversing the same harmonic pathways over and over because I-IV-V in C sounds the same as I-IV-V in F. I
“My favorite approach is to learn while doing, and it’s the most intrinsically rewarding part of recording at home.” something magical about Michael’s home demos. That’s another great thing about home studios: the opportunity to learn by doing. I dropped out of college after my sophomore year for two main reasons: a) you don’t need a degree to be a musician, and 2) the way I learn things is by diving into them headfirst. One of my favorite experiences as an autodidact was the ear training I did right
couldn’t tell you what key the FYC song is in. I don’t think it’s relevant! Right, so how is all this chord stuff relevant to recording at home, then? There is so much to learn about engineering, mixing, mastering, etc. There is always more to learn. And there is always more music making to do. And life is not just about one or the other—just learning or just doing. Just learning—that’s like a technician who reads every manual,
WHY I RECORD AT HOME Chris Saunders
but never even turns the power on. Just doing—that’s like a carpenter hammering away, oblivious to blueprints and how to read them. My favorite approach is to learn while doing, and it’s the most intrinsically rewarding part of recording at home. At a professional studio, it’s polite to let the engineers handle the engineering. You might walk away with a nice recording, but you won’t learn anything about engineering if you’re being professional in there. I make records at home and maybe they’re good and maybe they’re liked by some people. But even if they aren’t liked by anyone, I still gain experience and knowledge along the way. And that makes it easier to devote myself to such an unpredictable career path. It makes it easier to accept my life. It gives me skills for when my 15 minutes are over.
So what if I’m preaching to the converted? In that case you just wanna know what gear I use. So I’ll tell you. For my debut record released in 2010, rhythm guitars were played through a Crate G10 practice amp, eBay value about $20. Vocals, guitars and percussion were miked with an AT-3035, which I bought used for about $200. The preamp for everything was a Behringer Eurorack 802 mixer. I tracked the record on an old tower PC, pictured in the liner notes, using Acid 4.0. Mix bus processing involved a lot of Waves L-series Limiters. On my second album, I used a Shure SM-7B, “the Michael Jackson mic,” for all the lead vocals. The preamp for everything on album number two was an Apogee Duet 2. I tracked everything that wasn’t sampled at home in Logic and sent the songs off to be mixed professionally (also in Logic/Pro Tools). This record featured a mix of my Hiwatt Custom 50 amp miked with an
AT-4047 condenser mic and amp simulators from the AdrenaLinn III. On my new album I’ve used the AT-4047 for all but two of the lead vocal tracks, again using the Duet 2 for the preamp. For the other two lead vocals I used the holy grail of vocal mics, a U47, during one day at a real studio. The AT-4047 cost me about $600. The U47s cost around $10,000. Maybe check out my new record and see if you can guess which songs feature the fancy mic. It’s surprisingly hard to tell! I always would have wondered about that U47 though. I’m glad I got to try it out. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Darwin Deez is a New York-based independent musician. His third album Double Down is due out this September on Lucky Number Records. Follow him on Twitter @darwindeez.
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AVID PRO TOOLS
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1) Manage your working space with Memory Locations You probably already use Memory Locations as markers, but did you know you can also use them to create custom views in your session? Memory Locations can remember which tracks are shown, track heights, zoom settings, and also the layout of Pro Tools’ windows 1 . For example, you can store focus views of different instrument groups. 2 shows a memory location that recalls FX return tracks and uses a Window Configuration to open the reverb and delay plugins. Shortcut tip: To recall a memory location from the keyboard, press period on the keypad, then the location number, followed by period again. 2) Save Time with Templates Pro Tools professionals live by their template sessions. A template saves a bunch of timeconsuming setup work by starting a project with all your tracks, plug-ins, routing, groups and view options in place. Any session can be used as a template by choosing File>Save As Template… 3 is a template for tracking a small band. There
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are tracks ready for drum mics, a bass DI and Mic, a vocal mic, and some guitars. Each group has been color-coded and routed to a submix (see tip 3). Shortcut tip: To change to several tracks at once (e.g. set output, add plug-in, etc.) select the tracks, then hold Shift+Alt while making the change. 3) Route to Track There are often occasions when you want to route a track to another track. A common example is routing the outputs of several tracks to an Aux Track to create a submix with processing on it. Other examples include creating Sends on many tracks to a reverb return, or to a headphone mix master. Recent versions of Pro Tools make this an easy task, with no need to make buses or tracks manually. 4 shows this trick being used to create a drum master bus. The drum tracks are selected, and the “do to selected” shortcut is being held. In the Output Selector menu there are options for Track and New Track, as well as the Output and Bus menus. Choosing Track will let you route to an existing track in the mixer, while New Track
TOP 5 PRO TO FOR HOME R
Get Pro Tools for FREE – Pro Tools | First
AVID PRO TOOLS
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If you’ve never used Pro Tools before, or if it’s been a few years since you tried it, you should check out Pro Tools | First. It’s free and includes most of the features found in the full version. It’s also a great way to learn this industry-standard software – for writing, recording, editing and mixing music and audio – used by the top pros to produce music tracks and soundtracks for movies.
7
will bring up 5 , asking you to choose a track type and name for the submix. Everything else will be taken care of for you.
absolute time. Now any changes you make to the overall session tempo or the tempo ruler will affect the whole song.
4) Elastic Time Tricks Elastic Time and Pitch are technologies in Pro Tools that you may have used to warp and time-correct your recordings. Here are a couple of other uses: Audition in context: The Pro Tools Workspace can audition loops in time with your session. Right click the audition button to see all the options 6 . Now if your session is playing, loops will be previewed in time! Change tempo of whole session: If you want to change the tempo of the whole song and have all tracks follow the grid, do the following: First enable Elastic Audio on every audio track 7 . You can do this by holding Alt while changing any track’s mode, or you can select between polyphonic or rhythmic on a track-by-track basis. Next switch every track into “Ticks” timebase mode 8 . This means the tracks follow the bars/beats grid instead of
5) Latency-free overdubbing The audio engine in Pro Tools 11 and 12 lets you set a very small hardware buffer and enjoy low latency when recording and monitoring through Pro Tools. Sometimes, though, you get to work on the mix, then try recording an overdub and hear a delay in the input signal. This is usually because you’ve added plug-ins with inherent processing latency, such as bus compressors/limiters. No problem - simply make sure that the output of the record track is routed directly to the output you are monitoring through, instead of to an internal bus. Pro Tools will work behind the scenes to make sure what you play is bang in time with the rest of the mix. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Simon Sherbourne is a Pro Tools specialist at Avid and was previously a columnist for Sound on Sound. For more info, follow him on Twitter @simonsherbourne.
TOOLS TIPS RECORDERS
The idea of a free version of Pro Tools isn’t new. Avid released Pro Tools Free in 2000 with eight audio tracks to allow users unfamiliar with Pro Tools to check out a reduced feature set version of the software. The current version of Pro Tools software is available for a free 30-day trial, but requires an iLok to run. So what’s different about Pro Tools | First? Pro Tools | First has most of the same features as Pro Tools. The notable differences are the track counts, with Pro Tools | First having up to 16 mono/ stereo audio tracks, 16 MIDI tracks and 16 Instruments tracks for a maximum of 48 tracks, compared with hundreds of tracks for Pro Tools. You can save three projects to the cloud but you can also work offline. Pro Tools | First comes with more than 20 Avid plug-ins including the virtual instrument Xpand!2, with thousands of instrument presets. You can also purchase low-cost plug-in bundles specifically designed for Pro Tools | First from the in-app Avid store. Avid has also published a six-part video series, Get Started Fast with Pro Tools | First, to help you learn the basics of creating great music tracks. Give it a try and download it now from the Avid website. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Andrew Wild is the Segment Marketing Manager - Music & Education at Avid. For more information, please visit www.Avid.com/ptfirst.
PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 31
CHOOSE A DAW
How To Choo DAW For Your
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WHAT IS A DAW? A fancy haircut, 23,000 Twitter followers and national television exposure are less crucial to an artist’s success than customizing an original sound design by choosing the proper DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). I am a professional music producer called Anything But Broke with over ten years of music business experience. I work with top-tier artists like Stacy Jones, Nappy Roots and Soopa Groop. Many producers lack a comprehensive definition of what DAW means because the term DAW encompasses a majority of the recording studio’s components. The computer, digital software and audio interface are all vital parts of the digital audio workstation (DAW). Exploring the basic ways to determine which DAWs are right for individual projects will best benefit the recording process of any producer or DIY musician. THE RIGHT HARDWARE Picking the correct laptop or desktop computer to produce music is a starting point for any aspiring producer. Specs to consider include the sound card quality, amount of RAM and core processing units that will determine the quality of sound when it comes time to record and master a hit song. Macintosh and PC platforms are both capable of making great music. Mac users tend to want to work within parameters while PC users want to customize all aspects of the computer. Laptops are best for DJs, solomusicians and producers looking to make beats for vocal performers. Being able to make music anywhere you go has its advantages. DJs might want to tweak a song before a big performance, solo musicians can record new songs while on tour and beat makers can adapt their beats on–the-f ly to complement vocal performances instantly. Desktops are better at capturing sound than creating it artificially through electronic signals. Therefore, desktops are best for analog producers, sound
engineers and film recorders looking for a more realistic feel to their music or sound. THE RIGHT SOFTWARE Having a limitless number of programs and plug-ins to create music can become problematic for producers. While amateur producers might swear by the legitimacy of free programs including Audacity and GarageBand, they will not produce industry quality sound. Professional producers including Skrillex use programs such as Ableton Live Suite 9, Logic Pro X and Pro Tools 12 to create their records. Don’t be fooled! These programs are not equal. Pro Tools has been the industry standard for a long time and has no intention of being dismissed simply due to the fact that Ableton Live Suite and Logic Pro are not standalone programs capable of creating industry quality songs with out help from plug-ins such as virtual instrument programs like Massive from Native Instruments or Sylenth1. Often professional producers use iZotope 6 or Ohmicide to create specific sound designs that can create an artist’s signature sound. THE RIGHT STUDIO GEAR The last pieces of essential equipment will be a mixing board, studio monitors and studio headphones. While many people get lost in the glitz and glamour of these final pieces of hardware it’s important to snap back to reality when making purchases for your home recording studio. When it comes to recording studio mixing boards for the highest-quality masters, Solid State Logic creates great analog soundboards that come with warranties ( just be prepared to drop considerable amounts of cash). Digital boards can be just as good or better than analog ones depending on the person using it’s experience and utilization. If these mixers are too expensive at around $20,000 for a home budget, producers must come to
CHOOSE A DAW
ose The Right ur Home Studio terms with the fact that they might not need a pro studio mixing board to create their music. In fact, the producer might be better off with a simple control surface or more affordable compact mixer, or renting a commercial recording studio to record live instruments and vocal performances. You can even outsource mastering services at affordable rates while keeping your DAW small at home for basic songwriting sessions. Most importantly, studio headphones should never change the EQ of the song playing through them before they get to the producer’s eardrums. Brands such as Beats By Dre and Skull Candy only bass-boost songs and can throw off the entire mix of a track that is already bass heavy, drowning out the treble and middle frequencies before they reach the producer’s ears. This results in a bad mix - period. Audio-Technica makes great studio headphones at an affordable price that won’t change the EQ of the audio being processed. You want your studio cans to be as f lat as possible without any sound coloration – the same goes for studio monitors. After understanding that a producer can be infinitely creative when choosing the right DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), it’s time to get down to the hard facts. “DAW” encompasses a full spectrum of hardware and software for the producer to create a masterpiece. After all, you never heard people say van Gogh had a superior paintbrush to all of the other painters in the world. At the end of the day a bad song is a result of a bad artist, bad producer or bad songwriter. Only in perfect harmony can a great song be written, produced and performed to create something lasting that resonates with listeners. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christopher L. Wanta is the C.E.O. of Sacred Ghost Records LLC. For more info please visit www.sacredghostrecords.com.
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CONTROL SURFACE
Do You Need a C for Your Hom I
n the good old days of analog recording, when something needed adjustment on the mix you reached out for a fader or knob and not the mouse. Somewhere along the way someone decided that doing all the work in one box work was the way to go. If you are limited on space or are using a laptop for portability, then you most likely do not need a control surface for that rig. However, if you have a stationary system, you should read on. A control surface is the digital version of the old analog mixer in many ways. Instead of grabbing the mouse to tweak this or change that you reach up and move a sliding fader, push a button or twist a knob. Most control surfaces on the market allow the use of the HUI mode (that is short for Human User Interface). It is a standard protocol much like MIDI in that allows different programs and hardware to talk to one another. Most DAWs use this protocol. These control surfaces allow you to adjust data and not the actual sound. That being said, the majority of them have absolutely no audio capabilities at all. Just think of them as another piece of outboard gear. Most control surfaces today use standard MIDI connections and some use the faster USB connections. Speed is the main difference but the functionality is very similar. So we are going to focus on functionality and not the connectors. Some keyboards out there allow you to do some limited work to your music via MIDI. These are not in-depth enough to be considered serious for this purpose, so let’s look at a real control surface. I’ll start by discussing the Mackie Control Universal (often referred to as the MCU), which is pretty much considered a standard for recording, from home rigs up through pro level studios. Most functions will translate into other control surfaces like the Behringer BCF-2000. 34 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
A quick first look at the MCU leaves the novice scratching his or her head. It looks like a plain 8 or 9 channel mixer with a bunch of knobs and buttons on it. To most, this first look is way too confusing and they move on. But you need to dig a little deeper, especially with the amount of money you can spend on them. Those sliders actually can access as many tracks as you have. You can slide electronically either a channel or a bank of 8 at a time left or right. So whether your mix has 8 channels or 48 channels or more, you can use this board on them all. Does that make it more useful sounding now? At the top, above the channel strips, are LCDs that tell you which channel you are on as well as other important track information. You can set the record state, mute and solo for each channel as well as pan and volume with the slider. The master section had dedicated areas and buttons that allow you to do automation, change parameters on your plug-in, set in and out points, and adjust loops. You can even scrub back and forth to find an exact location. Yes, just like an old analog tape machine where
you could free spool the reels to get where you wanted to be and you could hear what you were doing, as well. You can swap between the edit window and the mixer window with the click of a button. You can pop from one marker in the timeline to the next quickly and easily even if you are not on the edit window. Another huge plus of a control window is the transport. Just like old tape decks, you have buttons for rewind, fast forward, stop, play and record. There is even a feature that gets you to the start or the exact end of the tracks. This is a huge time saver to any of us doing recording. Trust us, physical transports are great. Yes most of these things can be done with a mouse click and drag or by remembering shortcut keystrokes that allow you to do it. But when you stop and try to remember that information you lose your creative flow and often interrupt what you are doing enough to have a negative impact on the session. And this is all about the music, right? And not memorizing hot-key-combos?
CONTROL SURFACE
Control Surface ome Studio?
Another great plus for the control surface over most keyboards is that you can plug in a peda l and set it to start, stop or punch in. So you have your hands free to play. Yes, that is another one of those things that you can set an auto punch in/out for. If you do, though, you will again be taking your eyes off the prize and possibly turning a stellar take into a so-so take because you had to take off the musician’s hat and put on the engineer’s hat. So stop being afraid of this strange looking piece of gear and embrace it. There is really nothing like pushing a button or twisting a knob and watching your computer (and tracks) respond instantly. A control surface puts the fun back into digital recording and you will find that your sessions will improve and your production will be less stressful. Enjoy! ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dash Wilson is an avid home recorder, currently using the Mackie MCU control surface for his own projects. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 35
COMPRESSORS
Ignore The Big Kno to Know About Com H
ere’s the thing about compressors: they’re not used for what you think they’re for! And, how you think about using them fully determines the results you’ll get from them. Most people are taught, or assume, that compressors are for controlling the level of a sound. In fact, that is why they were invented, as “auto-leveling amplifiers,” but we’ve gone way past that application now, and frankly, track automation is probably better for that anyway. Compressors are really used to change the tone, or the waveform of the signal. So, you see that this is not about level but rather about the way in instrument sounds in the track. The quintessential compressor has 4 knobs: Threshold, Ratio, Attack and Release. There are many variations on this, but they’re essentially the same. In fact, there are so many variations that I had trouble finding a good example. However, the stereotypical version, like the revered Avalon pictured below, has 2 large knobs, Threshold and Ratio, and two smaller knobs, Attack and Release. See Figure 1 A classic plug-in like the Waves Renaissance Compressor, while using sliders, essentially draws your eye to the two big sliders in the center, Threshold and Ratio, while the Attack and Release are on smaller sliders at the top. See Figure 2
to the shell of the drum and the shell vibrating in a damped fashion. The interesting thing is that the very fast transient is so fast that our ear doesn’t really hear it. However when our playback system is set to play such a large burst of energy without distorting, the tail or body of the drum hit seems very quiet by comparison. To make the drum seem louder, or more importantly, more present, we need to change the relationship between the height of that transient and the body. We do this by adjusting the attack and release. By adjusting the attack to a very fast setting we are able to apply the compression to that early large transient. Then by adjusting the release to something that is also very quick we prevent the compression from being applied to the body. Now we’ve changed the relationship between the transient and the body of the hit, functionally making the body louder and changing the tone to emphasize the body characteristics of that drum. See Figure 3 , 4 & 5 . Showing drum hit before, after, and the settings of the compressor. We could, of course, apply the same scenario in reverse. If we have a dull and lifeless snare because it has no pop, we could apply the same compression but with a slow attack and the slow release to emphasize that initial transient. The fun, or the art, is in finding that sweet spot for both attack and release that balances the crack of the stick hit with the tone of the body.
Notice that the layout tends to reinforce that the key controls are the Threshold and Ratio. In fact, those may well be the first controls that you need, but are not the ones that require your greatest attention. Once you have the Threshold and Ratio set you can practically forget about them. Where the magic really happens is when you start to adjust the Attack and Release.
Bass guitar is another instrument where this trick is handy. Most often the bass feels a bit choppy if the bassist isn’t really attuned to his or her dynamics. By applying compression with a medium attack to just let the finger or pick attack through, and then a medium release to contain some of the growl, but allow the distant tail to remain uncompressed, we can even out the note and give the track a fuller, more consistent feel.
The tonal shaping abilities of your compressor are best understood using an example. Let us consider snare drum: any drum hit consists of a very rapid transient, that is made by the stick hitting the drumhead, followed by a decaying tail that is the energy being transferred
Vocals often need compression, and often fairly complex compression. Remember that different compressors will differ in how well they handle certain sounds, and that compressing really hard with one compressor is usually not as effective as two machines working less hard.
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1 In pop music, often the vocal is compressed to hell. Typically, this means one compressor to shape the tone as we’ve discussed, for example an Avalon 737 could be used with light compression, medium attack and medium release to even out and thicken the performance, followed by a more brutal assault, say with an LA-2A, to gel the track and get that “in your face” sound we’ve become so used to. (Notice that the LA-2A doesn’t have Attack and Release settings at all, but uses the input knob to drive the circuit, creating the reduction, and the attack and release vary with the level of input and the amount of reduction). Now that you know, forget about those Threshold and Ratio knobs: set them to get the machine working, but then dial in the tone with your Attack and Release. This is the stuff that makes tracks go from demo to hit! ABOUT THE AUTHOR Award winning mix engineer and producer Jordan Tishler runs Digital Bear Entertainment in Boston. With a large Augsburger designed mix/overdub room with SSL console and racks upon racks of analogue outboard gear, tape machine, and gazillions of instruments, Tishler has credits including B Spears, JLo, Iggy A, MOTi, Justin Prime, SIA, and London Grammar. Contact me about producing your next record, or mixing the one you’re working on now! Fore more visit www.digitalbear.com.
COMPRESSORS
nobs: All You Need ompressors
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PLUG- INS
A Complete Guide to Plug-Ins For Your Home Studio
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n the May issue of Performer, I wrote about analog tape machine plug-ins. This month we’re going to focus on plug ins for home studio owners. A home studio can be a million dollar facility owned by a rock star, trust fund kid, etc, or a laptop-based system in a spare room owned by the average musician with a dream. If you have a million dollar studio, you probably have a million plug-ins! If you own a home studio using a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) or are ready to upgrade from GarageBand, you’ll want to know about plug-ins – specifically, which ones will help you the most when getting started. 38 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
WHAT ARE PLUG-INS? Plug-ins are software additions for your DAW to enhance the sound of your recorded audio tracks and are “inserted” on a channel in the mix window of your DAW program. This is similar to an outboard rack mounted compressor or EQ that is inserted on an analog mixing console channel, bus, or master output. W hen you purchase DAW sof twa re for your home studio, the developer usua lly includes a few basic plug-ins. Ty pica lly these a re compressors, equa lizers, reverbs, delays, vir tua l synths, etc. These a re usua lly ver y basic, but they ’re still powerful.
FORMATS & COMPATIBILITY Most DAWs and associated plug-ins run on a Mac or PC and are cross platform compatible these days. Your DAW software will require your third party plug-ins to be in a certain format, usually AAX, VST, RTAS, or AU. If you are using onboard R AM for Digital Signal Processing (DSP), plug-ins are limited by your computer’s processing power. If you are using an outboard DSP processor (PCI card, Firewire or Thunderbolt unit), you can scale your system to do much more processing. Be careful that you don’t get carried away by going plug-in crazy!
When I started working in my home studio over 30 years ago, I was “plugging in” guitar pedal compressors, overdriven cassette tape machines, and wah wah pedals into my 4-track TASCAM cassette deck! Today, at the studio where I work in Connecticut, Dirt Floor, we are running a 32-channel Pro Tools HD System and have over 300+ different plug-ins by many different manufacturers. With so many choices, it’s easy to get lost in all of the different options, but really we only use about 10% of them on a daily basis. RECOMMENDATIONS A tried-and-true piece of equipment (microphone, outboard rack gear, or plug-in) shows up in every recording studio in the world and has become industry standard for a reason. As a home studio owner, you need to watch your budget on plug-ins, and just about everything else for that matter! I tend to use plug-ins that are modeled after hardware units, because I know the settings on the plug in will give me about a 99% accurate representation of the hardware counterpart that it’s emulating.
If you have a home studio, focus on making music and keeping things simple. You don’t always need the latest greatest Plutonium Bundle with a zillion plug-ins!
My favorite “go-to” plug-ins are the Focusrite ISA 110/130 (EQ/Compressor), the Waves Puigchild (Fairchild Compressor - PICTURED), Sound Toys “EchoBoy”
(delay/echo), and the Universal Audio Studer A-800 (analog tape emulation). These show up in all of my sessions. When you find a plug-in that works for you, start building presets to save time and speed up your workf low. You’ll eventually end up with a handful of useful plug-ins that will become your “go-to” ones as well.
PLUG -INS
imagine the cost (and electric bill) of owning even one, or try 24 of those compressors! It would be impractical, even for the largest world-class professional studio!
There are a lot of plug-ins that are available for free. Just Google “free audio plug-ins” and see what you can find. Make sure they are compatible with your DAW before you download them. Some plug-ins require an iLok USB hardware dongle or require a challengeresponse code via an Internet connection. Most manufacturers give you a two week trial period to test drive their plug-ins or allow you to use the plug-in for a certain amount of time in your session before it goes into bypass mode. Having a home studio allows you more time to be creative and try things out without having to watch the clock. So, put an amplifier plug-in on a vocal or a radical EQ or compressor on the drums. Get creative, dig in, and try something different because you can always “undo” it if you don’t like it! ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steve Wytas is the Chief Engineer at Dirt Floor in Haddam, CT and owner of Audio 911, LLC. He has been involved in recording since he received a Radio Shack cassette recorder at the age of 10. Visit www. dirtf loor.com or www.audio911.com
PRACTICAL USES Think of plug-ins as virtual outboard rack gear. They can also be virtual synthesizers, guitar amps, or guitar pedals. If you have a MIDI/USB keyboard controller, you can use a virtual synthesizer plug-in on the track that you are recording to and change the sounds at any time. If you have an electric guitar or bass, you can record it cleanly (dry) through a direct box and add a virtual amplifier and stomp boxes when you mix. This leaves your options open during mixdown. COSTS The cost of plug-ins versus owning the real thing is substantial. Imagine using a plug-in that emulates the sound of a $5,000 vintage compressor. The plug-in version may only cost you around $100. You can use that compressor on multiple channels as a plug-in. Now, PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 39
HI-RES AUDIO
The Myth of HIGHRESOLUTION AUDIO H
ave you seen the new gold and brown “Hi-Res Audio” logo on a website or a new piece of high-end audio hardware? Maybe you learned about “highresolution audio” from Neil Young and his Pono initiative, the one that resulted in the 3rd largest Kickstarter campaign in history. JayZ’s purchase of TIDAL attracted mainstream press because his site offers “high-resolution” streaming of over 20 million albums. It would seem that “high-resolution audio” has arrived. Unfortunately, it’s all a myth…a mix of opportunism, greed, spin, ignorance and arrogance. Basically, the push for “high-resolution audio” is a clever marketing campaign cooked up by a few self-appointed experts supported by the major labels and music organizations to get you to repurchase “high-resolution” versions of the older standard resolution catalog at premium prices.
And Why It Matters For YOUR Recordings
than traditional stereo. Unfortunately, all the releases in both SACD and DVD-Audio were sourced from existing catalog masters…meaning the fidelity of the sourced analog tapes was already “locked” in at the time of the original sessions. The potential of the new formats was lost by focusing on older “classic” albums from The Doors, Queen, and Fleetwood Mac rather than making new high-resolution recording using 96 kHz/24-bit PCM or DSD. It may be hard for some to accept but a recording made on a 2” 24-track analog tape machine, mixed to another analog tape and
Music consumers were pitched a new “advanced resolution” audio experience. Higher fidelity was promised because of the new higher specifications and in the case of DSD, a whole new method of encoding audio that was “closer to analog.” It’s true that these new formats offered the potential for greater audio fidelity than what we were used to and that 5.1 surround mixes were more involving 40 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
Of the 2 million tracks available on PonoMusic, only about 15,000 are new analog conversions to 192 kHz/24-bit PCM from the analog master tapes. The rest are ripped from CDs, which is a format that Neil railed against as having killed music for decades. Now 44.1 kHz/16-bits (which can sound amazing when done right) is “the highest resolution available” and dominates his catalog. That may be a true statement but it strikes me as deliberately deceptive and vague. The 192 kHz 24-bit FLAC downloads of analog masters should be called “master quality sources” instead of “high-resolution audio.” The fidelity is as good as we’re ever likely to get. It’s the sound that the artist approved at the mastering studio but it’s not the same fidelity as new high-resolution formats are capable of. It’s only new recordings that are specifically produced to maximize fidelity that will benefit from 96 or 192 kHz sample rates.
High-resolution audio does exist but it’s not the content that available on Neil Young’s PonoMusic website. Do you really think that playing lossless CD quality audio files on a very expensive portable device will magically transform the 44.1 kHz/16-bit PCM files into audio nirvana? Even the portion of the PonoMusic catalog that sport 192 kHz/24-bit specifications aren’t any better than the analog versions that we had 40 years ago. I’ve been recording and producing real high-resolution audio since 2000, when two competing optical disc formats intended to replace the compact disc. Sony and Phillips developed the Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD), a 2.8224 MHz 1-bit DSD-based scheme while the DVD Forum and the rest of the audio industry moved forward with highresolution PCM digital audio. Both formats offered 5.1 surround and stereo music mixes.
above 20 kHz and the dynamic range doesn’t require anywhere near 24-bits. Neil’s selling very large bit buckets that aren’t even half full. And he’s not alone.
finally mastered to yet a third analog tape master doesn’t begin to compare to the dynamic range available on a 16-bit PCM system…if it matters at all to the producers and engineers. And it gets even better when recording engineers are given additional headroom with 24-bits during sessions. The point is that the “high-resolution audio” albums that are derived from analog tape recordings can only achieve the fidelity of analog tape. I would think this notion would be obvious, but that not what Neil Young, Jay-Z, Sony, and a host of other high-res advocates are saying. Neil Young has rediscovered the “soul” of music with his PonoPlayer and the music files that he sells at PonoMusic. If you purchase Harvest at 192 kHz/24-bits, are you likely to hear the “soul” of the music over the original vinyl LP? No. There is no sonic information
Are their artists, engineers, producers, and labels interested in using all of the potential fidelity of the new formats? Yes, but they don’t work with Dave Grohl or Taylor Swift or Georgia County Line. Labels like Norway’s 2L, Channel Classics, Linn Records, Sound Liaison, MA Records, and my own AIX Records achieve amazing results by minimizing dynamic processing and exotic plug-ins. If you haven’t taken the time to hear a real highresolution audio track, you might want to stop by my daily blog site (realHD-Audio.com) and click on the FREE HD-Audio tracks banner. The music may not be to your taste, but I guarantee you’ll never hear fidelity like this. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Waldrep, Ph.D., is founder, president and chief engineer of the specialty audiophile label AIX Records and iTrax.com. These two companies produce and distribute award-winning, high definition audio/ video music recordings on DVD-Audio/ Video discs and through the Internet.
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RECORD VOCALS
10 TIPS FOR RECORDING GREAT VOCALS IN YOUR HOME STUDIO Invest in a decent mic Each voice has its own tonality and texture and no one microphone is a perfect solution for all voices. Big studios will often line up a bunch of pricey mics at the start of a vocal session to see which one works best for that particular vocalist. That being said, the mic on your mobile phone is not likely to give you that spark you are looking for in making your record. I recently bought a decent mic for under $100 used from an online classified site. You can find something in the hundreds range that will be sufficient, but you may end up finding it isn’t the best for your voice and swapping it out until you find a good fit. If you have a budget to make a record, while you don’t have to spend thousands 42 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
on a Neumann, don’t skip holding a few hundred aside thinking the cheap mic from an old DJ mixer is going to do the trick. Acoustically treat your mic room In my last setup I was lucky to have a walk in closet (never happens in NYC!) which I painted and treated with some acoustical foam bought cheaply online. The foam did not “soundproof” the room so a loud singer could be heard outside of the booth, but it did kill most of the reverberations so the mic did not pick up so much sound bouncing around. You want a dry, clean signal going into the mic and not a built-in reverb, which you cannot later remove. Foam can also get pricey, but you don’t have to cover every inch
of a space to kill a lot of the reflections. Another trick is using mic stands and draping moving blankets over them, or even bedspreads. There is a level of air (the hissing sound of too much space) which records on a mic if it is in a large, open, untreated space. Follow signal path & balance levels When first hooking things up if you methodically walk through the steps of your audio chain, you will save time figuring out where your signal is in the chain and properly manage your levels all the way from the mic to mic switch (if it has one) to the mic cable, to the snake, to preamp and so on. I have been in major studios when much time was wasted by not following
Learn to wear different hats It is very important that you see yourself in a different light as recording artist, engineer, computer guy, etc. There is nothing that wrecks the vibe of an otherwise great session than having something go wrong and suddenly you go from having that perfect inspiration to being zapped of all creative energy, faced with a dead signal or nothing in the headphones. First of all if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! Beware the lure of updating to the newest version of the free plug-in you hold so dear to your heart. Updates to anything on your workstation can cause your whole system to go down if you are not careful. You will regret it when you lose two days reinstalling the whole shebang because one little update caused an instable system. Secondly, get used to sliding under the different hats. When you sit down to record the perfect guitar take only to find out you hear nothing, put on your tech hat and root out the problem. Following the signal path of course! Then, after you resolve the issue and everything is a go, take a break and reset your brain to the creative guru you long to be before stepping back in to lay down guitar perfection.
David Martyn Hunt this simple rule in the face of any problems like noise, lack of signal to your DAW, etc. only to find out after an hour that it was the mic cable. Most gear (such as your audio interface and DAW) has meters so you can also check your audio level at different points in your path. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the recorded level should be maximized, but rather keep your peaks in the middle or just about it, making sure not to hit the roof (thus causing distortion/clipping). Don’t overuse compression If you squash everything in compressors it may be easy to hear your favorite parts, but with nothing jumping out at you in a mix there is no element of surprise or dynamics for the listener.
Learn basic editing in your audio software Basic editing, where you can take multiple passes on the mic then cherry pick a grand vocal take from several snippets, will usually yield some great results. Look for the interesting, unique moments and string them together and you are likely to have an interesting vocal track with character. Beware the different vibes that can show themselves on different passes. Your masterful edit can sometimes sound funny on playback when you realize the headspace you were in when you recorded each take may have been different. The better and faster you get at editing takes, the more you will understand when to re-record and when to edit so that a perfect vocal track can be forged. Get easy-targeted help by searching for online videos I have picked up many a tip for my recording software by searching the specific thing I am trying to do on the Internet. So many folks have uploaded how-to videos and I have solved a problem which I spent two days trying to figure out in only five minutes watching a hip-hop producer take me to school on YouTube! You will be surprised how many tricks you can pick up: from modern production techniques to the science of microphones. Properly warm up your voice A quick search on Google could easily
find you some vocal exercises you can use to properly warm up your voice before recording. Your vocal session will go much better if you open your voice gently for a period of 12-15 minutes. You will be in better shape from the first take, but you are more likely to stay relaxed and last longer in the vocal booth if you oil the machine a bit first. Try playing one note on the piano five times in a row and cycling through the vowel sounds “A - E - I - O - U” and then moving up to the note, and so on.
RECORD VOCALS
I love it when an unexpected vocal chop almost takes my head off like a low-flying plane! Do leave some life in your takes.
Use dynamics in your vocal tracks The best vocal producers know that building dynamics is key to making a great record. The singer must keep this in mind at all stages of the track. At the start, you may sing more breathy and soft, as there could be only one instrument in the track during the intro or first verse. Once the chorus comes, there are normally more instruments coming in, the drummer kicks it up a notch and the vocalist must follow suit. If the music gets louder, the vocals should become more intense. Singing with dynamics will keep you from sounding boring. Shift gears with different parts of the song but also keep some contour along the way by emphasizing certain phrases or syllables over others. Inf lection, diction and pronunciation go a long way and dynamics are tied to your emotion. Learn how to connect with your emotion in the vocal booth You put your tech hat down, the headphone mix is perfect and you consumed your favorite legal substance or studio snack: now it’s time to make magic! One trick for getting in the right vocal headspace is to turn the lights low and imagine you are on stage and the drummer, bassist and guitarist are all standing next to you. If you close your eyes and imagine the music is also being recorded live, it can get you to that blissful place called emotion. First you should have methodically gone through the lyrics, really thinking about how to tell the story emotionally and how you would sing different parts of the song. Often you then try the opposite of an approach and it works better than expected; so do remain open to experimentation. In the end, you must overcome the clinical nature of headphones and the vocal booth and feeling like you are under a microscope. Don’t fall in the trap of self-doubt just because 10 takes in a row are lame. It could be that next one that has the special sauce on it. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Rob Nolfe is a producer, songwriter and voice instructor at Voice Academy NYC. Kat Nolfe is a professional vocalist, songwriter and founder of Voice Academy NYC. For more, visit www.voiceacademynyc.com. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 43
NEBRASKA
Independence Day: Bruce Springteen’s Nebraska Opens Up A World Of Home Recording Warren McQuiston
I
n January of 1982, Bruce Springsteen recorded a group of fifteen demos in the bedroom of his house in Colts Neck, New Jersey. The last three albums he had recorded with the E Street Band had each taken an extraordinary amount of time to reach completion. Frustrated, Springsteen decided to come up with a new strategy for the recording process. Instead of recording demos straight onto a boombox, now the songs he was recording would be high quality, professional grade demos with overdubs and effects, maybe a little percussion added to show the band just what he wanted. A month earlier he had sent his guitar tech Mike Batlan to buy an easy-to-use cassette recorder that he could record overdubs on. Batlan came back with a Teac/Tascam Portastudio 144 4-track and two Shure SM57 microphones. After doing some additional acoustics work on the bedroom, The Boss got started. Towards the end of the River tour, after the election of Ronald Reagan, Springsteen began talking about Woody Guthrie and what he stood for. He talked about reading Joe Klien’s biography Woody Guthrie: A Life and what it taught him about his country. He said his next song wasn’t a song for schoolchildren to sing. “This song is a fight song,” he said. Then he proceeded to go into “This Land Is Your Land.” At home after the tour, he watched Terrence Malik’s movie Badlands, about Charlie Starkweather, who had gone on a two-month long killing spree through Nebraska and Wyoming, killing eleven people and two dogs. Guthrie and Starkweather were two men who had done a lot of thinking about what America actually was and what it meant. The two men would have a profound effect on the songs Springsteen was writing. These songs had the dark insides of Guthrie’s most harrowing material, like “1913 Massacre” and “Pastures of Plenty,” songs about children killed by union-busters and hunger and desperation. Like Guthrie, Springsteen wrote an outlaw ballad. He called his “Starkweather.” It took images directly from Badlands. He later changed the name to Nebraska. In 2015, as nineties revivalism is coming 44 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
around, it’s hard to appreciate how dark the 1980s were in America. But it’s when everyone realized cocaine was addictive. Home recording hadn’t progressed much beyond recording one performance at a time. Alan Lomax thought modern home recording equipment was primitive (unsubstantiated). Jack White thought it was perfect (possibly). There were various ways to record yourself, but everything had to happen at one time in one take. Musicians recording demos at home was not standard practice. They went into the studio and showed everyone else how the song went. In 1979, TASCAM came out with the Portastudio 144. It was affordable and you could multi-track. And you had four tracks, just like the Beatles had for Sgt. Pepper! Processes like
mixing had been simplified. The damn thing was easy and almost foolproof. It was perfect for Springsteen and Batlan. So, Springsteen and Batlan set up the new, cutting edge, thoroughly modern home studio to record demos for what would be Springsteen’s oldest sounding songs yet (ever). These demos, of course, became the album Nebraska. Most of the songs on the album were recorded on January 3, 1982. The demos were mixed through a Gibson Echoplex onto the aforementioned boombox, only now it had fallen into a river, died and came back to life after getting hosed off. That cassette is what Springsteen played for his manager and the E Street Band. All hands gathered at the Power Station
NEBRASKA recording studio in New York City to record the songs Springsteen brought in. As he later said, the more he tried to add to them, the more he made them worse. According to Springsteen’s long-time engineer Toby Scott, Springsteen would pull the cassette out of his coat pocket and say, “I want it to sound more like this.” Eventually, he asked Scott if they could get a master off of the cassette. And eventually, three mastering studios would be listed in Nebraska’s credits. Nebraska was promoted as “Basic. Brilliant. Solo Springsteen.” The album’s liner notes notify the world at large that this Bruce Springsteen album was “(r)ecorded in New Jersey by Mike Batlan on a Teac Tascam Series 144 4-track cassette recorder.” Cleary, the story being sold was that Springsteen recorded the album all by himself at home, like Paul McCartney had with McCartney (McCartney, however, was using very different and much more sophisticated equipment). Imagine being one of those musicians starting out in the early 1980s and you’ve just spent a small fortune on recording equipment. You and your buddies have been playing around with this Portastudio, recording some stuff to try to hustle gigs or impress the guy/girl/ guygirl you’ve been trying to talk to for weeks. And then the biggest fucking rock star on Earth releases an album that was made on the same
beginner-level contraption with the red, white and green knobs you’ve got in your bedroom. You’d look at it a little differently, right? The success of Nebraska strictly as a recording project was the “emperor has no clothes” moment. You could make a record at home, a real one that, and if done right could be good enough to be released on Colombia Records. Marginalized musicians went from metaphorical finger paint (boombox) to brushes, canvas and a pallet. The freaks had the keys! Underground music exploded; from Daniel Johnson to Ween to Neutral Milk Hotel to Iron & Wine to Bon Ivor and on and on. It became the de facto home studio device in early hip-hop circles. Vermont guitarist and proud independent musician Scott Tournet is an artist who recorded several great and criminally underappreciated albums of material on Portastudios, parallel to his career with Hollywood Records recording artists Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, who did not record on Portastudios. “Using the Portastudio was great for me because it gave me as much time as I wanted for experimenting. Experimenting on my own, free time and not on studio time. It also helped me spend necessary time working on my vocals. It’s really helpful if you’re shy about singing or playing in front of
other people.” In hindsight, it seems fitting that it was Bruce Springsteen who expanded the possibilities and reach of the Portastudio. Think of your image of Springsteen and what he stands for. Shouldn’t that be the guy to popularize a device that took the need for expensive studios away? He opened up the Myers Park Country Club for everybody. Including me. Like many musicians who had been frustrated by an inchoate creative vision, when you read “Neil Young records everything at once and he never edits. Genius!” or ‘Bruce Springsteen wrote some songs and recorded them in one night on the beginner recording deck. People love it!” I turned my ear to the siren’s calls of Neil Young and David Briggs and Bruce Springsteen. I tried many times to get one Nebraska quality song. That didn’t end well. There were no survivors. My point is that the Portastudio is the tool, not the talent. Even Neil Young (now more than ever) needs an editor. Find the way that works best for you. Let that become the new story. Author’s post-script: Seriously, check out Scott Tournet’s Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle. Then buy it. I’ll autograph it. PERFORMER MAGAZINE AUGUST 2015 45
GEAR REVIEWS
PROS
Affordable. Easy transition from other DAWs. No subscription needed. Mac & PC compatible.
CONS
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PRESONUS Studio One 3
H
ome recording with Pro Tools certainly leveled the playing field; any user who laid down their hard earned money could use the same recording platform as professional recording artists and engineers. Like all software companies these days, the licensing method is changing: charging a monthly fee, while giving free updates. Some users don’t like this method, and PreSonus has stepped up to fill in the void of offering a professional-grade recording suite without the subscription pricing model. The package we received for the new version of Studio One was the professional version and contains, well everything. Plugins, 5 Virtual instruments, and over 2,000 audio loops. The download of all the extras clocked in at 29GB! The software is available for either Mac and Windows systems, and the minimum 4GB of RAM (8GB is suggested) means not having to make a major hardware upgrade to run it. Our install was seamless and easy. For this release there are a few new features: Scratch pad enables the user to organize a song’s development, without the need to save multiple versions. In short, it helps develop “demos” into “songs” without getting lost along the way. Keeping things 46 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
organized is key and the Arranger function allows easy mapping out of arrangements and navigation to certain parts of a project without a lot of hunting. Extended FX chains allow the routing of any of the effects (Native plug-ins, VST or AU). It works like a f low chart, and can make complicated effects routing super easy. One of the other new features is Mai Tai, which has pretty much every vintage poly synth inside this function! The interface isn’t all that different from other DAWs you may have used in the past, as far as look and feel are concerned. The settings and control functions lie under similar menus and headings, so transitioning from any other system shouldn’t be a real big issue (Pro Tools users in particular who are nervous about switching should rest easy). Even Quick Key Commands from other programs such as Pro Tools, Logic, and GarageBand, can be imported to ease any transitions. And like most software these days, everything is drag and drop. There are unlimited Audio, MIDI, Virtual instruments, effects buses and the like, so you’re never gonna be cramped for track space. And audio quality can go up to 64-bit and 384kHZ. For beat-makers and loop junkies, Studio One 3 has an interface that makes finding a loop easy, especially one that will
actually work for what kind of track may be needed - no searching through useless presets that may not apply. It’s not just limited to audio, either; with a video importing function it can easily work as a platform for film scoring or audio/dialog replacement in your next video project. With Studio One 3, there’s no need for any specialized hardware connection, just connect your interface, it recognizes the hardware and it’s ready to go. It’s also meant to work with PreSonus’ fantastic AI mixers (which we reviewed last year), along with their specific settings and inputs. There is also a remote function, making an iPad the control surface over Wi-Fi, enabling the producer to not be stuck behind a glass window. From demo to final mastering, it has everything that could be needed for any recording project. Overall it’s a lot to take in (we tacked for about two weeks and still didn’t use every function or option), but the learning curve for a new user shouldn’t be that tough (and trust us, that was one of our biggest concerns). Whether it’s an upgrade to an existing Studio One release, transitioning from another DAW platform, or even if you’re a home recording newbie, it’s worth checking out. Chris Devine
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FLASHBACK
1987 Tascam Porta Two Cassette Four-Track Tape Recorder BACKGROUND The Porta Two is a portable cassette four-track tape recorder manufactured by Tascam in 1987. Teac/Tascam are a huge influence in home recording. The Teac 144, the first cassette fourtrack recorder, was released in 1979. The 144 kicked off the cassette recording revolution. The Tascam Porta One was released in 1984 offering battery power. In 1987, The Tascam Porta Two offered a six-channel mixer, an fx loop, and battery power. HOW IT WAS USED The cassette four-track allowed any musician to make quality home recordings at an affordable price. The media, cassettes, is cheap, so you could record lots of music. You had four mono tracks to work with. A typical format was to record drums or drum machine on track one, bass on track two, guitar on track three, and vocals on track four. If you needed more than four tracks you could record tracks one, two, and 48 AUGUST 2015 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
three with music and bounce/mix them onto track four. Now committing to your mix on track four, you record over tracks one, two, and three for a total of six tracks. Recording with four tracks forces you to commit to performances and mixes early on in the creative process. LESSONS LEARNED Today’s engineers and artists can learn the fundamentals of music production with a fourtrack cassette recorder. The transport controls on the Porta Two are laid out just like a modern DAW. Recording with a four-track, you learn about microphone placement, how to achieve optimum recording levels and decision making. The Porta Two also allows you to learn about fx loops, graphic EQ, preamps, signal flow, problem solving, bouncing tracks, and mixing music. Lastly, a cassette four-track teaches you about analog recording and sound, tape machine maintenance, and how to have fun with a pencil and a cassette tape.
HISTORICAL NOTES Bruce Springsteen recorded Nebraska on a Teac 144. Cassette four-track recording is often referred to as the “lo-fi” movement. Other notable artists who recorded with cassette fourtrack machines include Guided By Voices and Ween. CAN BE HEARD ON I recorded Roland drum machine and synth bass parts onto my Tascam Porta Two for the song “BP Oil Rap (How Can You)” from For Real by Aslan King. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Torbin Harding is a graduate of Berklee College of Music, B.A. in Music Synthesis Production 1995, and founded Lo-ZRecords in 1997. He currently works in both the analog tape and digital recording mediums. For more info visit www.Lo-ZRecords.com.
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