The most challenging tools for newcomers to the recording scene to understand are dynamics processors: compressors, expanders, noise gates and limiters. We are all familiar with tools like EQ, reverbs, choruses, flangers -- even if we don't know exactly how they work exactly we might understand what kinds of sounds they produce. Compressors are completely different animals because they work on the musical dynamics and their effects can range from undectectable to utterly bad.

What, then, are "dynamics" exactly?

Technically, dynamics refers to the variabilities in amplitudes. "Dynamic" material is said to have lots of variability in the amplitude of the audio.

There is a relationship between dynamics and loudness. Loudness (usually) refers to the average amplitude of a track. Green Day is LOUD! Dynamic refers to the variability - the difference between the soft and loud passa ... Read More »

About the reviewer: As many of you know, I'm currently writing the US manual for Samplitude 2496. I work closely with SEK'D as an independent contractor, but I'm not an employee. So… as a professional DAW user with quite a bit of experience with Samplitude Studio 4.0 and Samplitude 2496, I'll do my best to provide facts and opinions that are truthful and accurate. I'm calling this an Overview / Review because I've included a lot of technical information about the program.

Projects - The DNA of an editing session

I admit it. I'm a homereccer.

My wife barely remembers what I look like. My non-musician friends don't remember me at all. Good thing I don't have any kids or they'd be in a one-parent household.

My dog, bless his wagging tail, still loves me. Even when I run him out of the studio.

The studio consists of three adjacent rooms. The first room is the control room. This room houses my computer recorder, mixer, my old metal rack of effect units, speakers, and a few chairs. The control desk faces out over four windows, each of which has a heavy drape that can be drawn.

The second most important room is the bathroom. Besides serving obvious biological functions, the bathroom also doubles as a vocal booth. It has tile walls and a somewhat heavy bathtub curtain. When the curtain is drawn, the vocals recorded in it take on a nice resonant quality from the tile walls (without the curtain, consonants are too harsh). This resonance serves two functions. First, it's a ... Read More »

Which is better, tube or semiconductor circuits? And if differences exist, what are these differences?

The tubes vs. semiconductors issue is both emotional and rational. Many leaders in audio technology continue to hold up the vacuum tube as the state-of-the-art in audio amplification. Others find greater value in modern solid-state devices. Many amateurs and professional alike are left wondering what the reality is. Manufacturers have been likewise polarized: a number of market-driven manufacturers have found that their equipment sells better when it's designed around a tube - regardless of the sound - because of the current "tube hype." Reputable manufacturers of tube equipment - with more esoteric and expensive designs - find it difficult to sell into this market that assumes that "anything with a tube in it is better".

This reminds me of the "Mac vs. PC" debate - unending, unresolvable, polarizing - often vitriolic. Therefore, the aim of this article is not to decide anything, ... Read More »

The Manley VoxBox is Manley Labs' entry into the current vogue: multi-effect voice processors. These devices typically couple a microphone preamp and compressor into a single unit. Other features often include EQ, limiting, de-essing, and A/D conversion.

Voice / multi-processor units are a natural progression of audio's movement to workstation-based recording. They provide a specialized short-path route to get signal from the mic to the media as cleanly and effectively as possible, bypassing the messy preamps. busses and EQs of mixing consoles. Although such units have been around for decades their recent resurgence is almost certainly due to the thrust of the audio industry to supply high-quality tools to the modern small (but very pro) studios.

I received my VoxBox about 10 days ago, and plan on giving it the full review in the July ProRec. However, after just a few days of heavy use, I am so amazed by the quality of this unit ... Read More »

Walter Murch is known as the film editor and sound mixer for some of the best movies of our times - the Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient are just a few. Recently a popular Pro Audio magazine interviewed Mr. Murch in a special audio-for-video section. However, the topics discussed did not really go into technique and technology, but focused more on aesthetics. I wanted to find out more about what technology he uses when mixing for picture.

Walter Murch

Tube simulators, tape simulators, tube warmth? What in the world is this all about anyway?

Our fearless editor has commisioned me to write a report on these plugins, but I don't think it should be done without a little background info.

First of all, I would like to stress that overdriven tubes (and overdriven tape) add distortion! If it's very light, they call it "warmth", if it's really heavy they call it "Marshall stack turned up to 11!" Regardless of what you call it, it is distortion. Maybe it's pleasant distortion, but it's still distortion.

The only reason I mention this at all is because ever since the dawn of digital audio, them good ol' boys and girls in the marketing department of damn near every audio-oriented company on the planet have been throwing tubes into anything they can get their hands on, running up and down the banks of the river and screaming "warmth" to the top of their lungs! What this really amounts to is an attempt to cash in on the fear of the un ... Read More »

"When I'm drivin' in my car,
And the man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination"
.....................(Mick Jagger/Keith Richard)

Where the do I want to go today?

Drugs.

Uh, oh, here it comes. At some point everybody in the music business comes into contact with them, either by doing them ("Oh, it makes me s-o-o creative!") or by having to work with someone who has done them ("Could somebody please pick Joey up off the floor so we can get started"). The process of making music come to life is such a precarious one that songwriters will do almost anything to help them create. When they get stuck and their brain is devoid of song, the idea of artificially kick starting the cerebrum with a nice fat joint doesn't seem so bad. The only problem is that the "high" is selective - you get blasted but everyone else around you is straight. You think you've just sung the doo doo squat out of a song while everybody in the control room is opening their phone books to try and round up another singer. You stank. But to your ears it was gold. "Oh well, fuck 'em. When I'm famous they'll eat dog food off the floor to get me to sing their piece of shit tune". Not a good sessio ... Read More »

I have an eight-track tape of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. It's in a box, in my attic, nestled among other mementos of my analog life ... a trumpet mouthpiece, a wire recording of Gene Krupa's big band that my uncle made in the early Fifties, a small, leather pouch with three New York subway tokens from when tokens were a quarter, an empty pack of Lucky Strikes ... and a whole lot of other shit rendered useless and obsolete by the passing of time.

Nowhere, of course, in that box of archaic debris ... nowhere in my attic ... or in the state of Oregon ... nowhere in the entire U-S-of-fucking-A ... or the whole goddamned world, for that matter, does there exist an eight-track device into which I can insert this hunk of lifeless, black plastic and call forth the sweet, hard-on evoking sounds of my youth ... that filled my adolescent nights with the magic of ...

Sheh - reeeee
She - eh - eh - er - eee bay - yay - bee
She - ehr - reee
Won't you come out tonight

Read More »

Most songwriters tend to think the world revolves around such global-impacting issues as:

1. Will Ms. Big-Big-Big Star record one of my songs on her next album?

2. Will Mr. Big-Big-Bigger Star record one of my songs on his next album?

These questions are with them, morning, noon and night.

The President resigned. Who cares? "Did you know that my song is on hold over at CBS?"

We had a small atomic war with Lithuania this morning. "So what - I got the next Janet Jackson single".

Not the most caring about everyone else group of people. So, keeping this in mind, a small earthquake should have little impact on songwriters, right? Think again. Scared the piss right out of every writer I know. Come to think of it, not only the piss but just about every thing else they had ingested over the previous 24 hours came out. Kind of like Mother Nature don't care diddly about music. The nerve of her.

The night of the "not quite B ... Read More »

Part Two: Whatchoo Talkin' 'Bout, Lionel?

I remember the first synthesizer I ever played. It was a Roland Juno 106.

Many of you are already guessing my age. You're right.

The Juno 106 was one of the first affordable programmable synthesizers for the masses. With its LFO and resonance filter it had the quintessential "analog synth" sound: big, fat bass, zingy treble, and an unearthly sound.

Several years later and I would have walked up to this thing and embarrased everyone - including my mother - with a hideous interpretation of Van Halen's "Jump". At one point in history "Jump" was the "Stairway to Heaven" of keyboard pikers. However, when the Juno 106 was released, Van Halen was still an all-guitar band. I walked up to it and started playing Jean-Michel Jarre's "Equinoxe Part 4".

Today, this technology is "vintage" to me. Keyboards are almost universally digital, and one of the goals of digital synths is to sound more "analog". Wow... I remember the release of a piece of vintage gear... maybe I'm ... Read More »

I was tired of turning up the inputs on my mixer to record my hiss, um, I mean my Bass guitar and decided it was time to get a direct box. I didn't know what to get, so I asked the folks who made my bass - Warrior Instruments (http://www.warrior-w1.com) what to get - they recommended the Bass Driver DI. I on the other hand didn't want to spend the $250 dollars to buy a little box.

I went out and bought a Rolls Adb 2 for $40, which actually sounds great on my acoustic guitar with a Dean Markly Pro-Mag soundhole pickup, but not really what I wanted for bass guitar. After annoying my favorite salesguy at Banana's At Large, testing various doo-dads and processors, I decided to blow the bucks and get the Bass Driver. (My advice to the cheap and those on tight budgets - give it up, spend the money, do it right, you won't be sorry, and you can always sell it if it's worth anything in the first place)

Read More »

Comments (0)

Joel Braverman

I've been using the Behringer Composer for a few weeks and so far I'm very happy with it. The cost is low ($250) yet the unit is very transparent, with fast gate response.

The Composer is a dual-channel compressor / expander, noise gate, and peak limiter. It has the basic control you would expect on a compressor (threshold, attack, decay, ratio, etc) as well as an Automatic setting. It also includes less-than typical 8-segment LED meters to indicate gain reduction and signal level.

The Composer features -10 / +4 inputs to match to any of your pro audio gear. It also includes a sidechain, which will allow you to compress only certain bands. This is a great feature on such an inexpensive compressor.

Behringer Composer

One of the most exciting products to make headlines recently is the Yamaha DSP Factory DS2416.

The Yamaha DS2416 offers the mixing power of the Yamaha 02R digital mixer, complete with 24 channels of digital mixing, on-board digital effects and dynamics processors -- along with everything else professionals need - plus 16 tracks of hard disk recording with up to 32 bit resolution.

Unlike most other audio cards, the DS2416 relies on its own processing power and not the computer's CPU. This arrangement makes much better use of your existing hardware.

DSP Factory equipped with 2 expansion bays

One of the worst aspects of running a studio on a computer is the lack of a console.

I really miss being able to just reach out and grab a knob and turn. And I'm not alone. The recent drop in DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) prices means that lots of people are taking the home studio plunge. Musicians and engineers alike are investing a few thousand dollars in a home recording studio that runs entirely on their computers.

They are lured by the storage and editing power of the computer. With today's software the potential is incredible: limitless digital editing and effecting can be had for under a thousand dollars.

The announcement ofYamaha's DSP factory drives this point home. When this thing is released it will support up to 16 input channels and 32 output channels using two cards and four expansion units. This combination is up to 32-bits thru and will include 208 ... Read More »

Recording audio on a computer places demands on the computer never anticipated by the computer's creators or operating system manufacturers.

For example, if you record on a large disk formatted with FAT32 in Windows 95, Windows will format the disk with small block sizes. This is an attempt to avoid wasting space, since the entire block is consumed even if it only contains a single byte. With "normal" sized files, small block sizes mean less wasted space. With audio, however, small block sizes mean excessive reads and poor disk throughput.

In a future article I will discuss the proper techniques for setting the right block sizes. For the moment I want to discuss Virtual Memory.

Windows' default Virtual Memory settings are usually not good for audio. First of all, Windows likes to maintain a flexible swapfile size. This is good for typical usage because it allows Windows to increase the size of the swapfile as you load more and more programs into memory.

With a ... Read More »

Part 1: eQs and As

As the competent and conscientious recording engineer that you surely are, you've taken great care to record your (or your client's) latest opus. You've gotten your greasy little fingers on some mics and placed them more or less in the general vicinity of the instruments being played. You've taken care to insure that these instruments were tuned to a scale somewhat resembling those normally heard in modern Western music. You even carefully placed some cool crash cymbals on that dodgy part where the overly-enthusiastic vocalist overloaded your A/D converters.

You've soloed every track and listened. The bass sounds fat. The guitar is punchy and open. The kick is round and snappy. The snare is... well, it's very "snarey" sounding.

So, how come your mix sounds like oatmeal?

I was once asked, "If you could only use a single effect to mix a record, what would it be?" In real life, my first reaction wou ... Read More »

I got into this year's NAMM convention courtesy of Celia Biggs, who works at SONY up here in Eugene. Celia's an attractive, middle-aged woman who lives a couple of houses down from me. She gave me a pass to this NAMM thing, saying how she thought it might help to expand my horizons. In-fucking-deed!! Here's a woman . . . works eight hours a day, stamping out CDs in a sterile environment, telling me that MY horizons needed to expand. I felt like telling her that I had something besides "horizons" that needed expanding . . . but I didn't. I simply accepted her gift with as much graciousness as I could muster, tucked the pass in my pocket and trucked on off, with the intention of tossing it in the trash when I got home.

ED FURILLO! The pass was made out to this guy, Furillo, who was, evidently, going to be too busy getting his "horizons" expanded by the succulent Celia to be representing his Japanese masters in the City of Angels that weekend. Probably told the wife that he was going and, instead, boo ... Read More »

It's Friday afternoon. You're home by yourself . . . as usual. The UPS guy has just dropped off a three by five foot box of God-knows-what. The return address on the shipping label reads "SteinWalk On-Line Entertainment." You scratch your foggy noggin, trying to remember what you might have ordered that could possibly be so big. You drag the box out of the front hall into the middle of the living room and hastily slit the taped parcel open. Voila! IT'S SIX MILLION PLASTIC CHEETOS! You begin to wonder, why on earth SteinWalk would be sending you all these plastic morsels when, deep down in the sub-oceanic trenches of your brain, a little light goes on . . . and, slowly, its message reaches the surface of your consciousness: Ass hole! Look in the Cheetos . . . Ass hole! It's buried under all those Cheetos . . .

And so, you begin doing a tentative breast stroke through a sea of white, plastic bits, being careful not to get them all over the living room, but the little fuckers stick to ... Read More »