Best (and Worst) Tips I've ever Gotten - #3 Intersample Peaks

This isn't so much a post from me as it is a post from another website. But this gives you an excellent idea about why it's important to do the following:

1. Gain Stage properly throughout your studio's signal chain 
2. Make sure you leave enough headroom for mp3 and downsampling conversion in your final mixes.

Enjoy!

http://www.hometracked.com/2007/11/08/prevent-intersample-peaks/

Automatic Gain Staging/Loudness Compensation with Reaper

 

 Image from TB software

I have been a huge fan of Reaper since version 0.xx came out sometime in the mid-to late 2000s. I even had a short lived stint on the beta testing team until I blew it by getting into philosophy debates on the main channel. What can I say, I love philosophy almost as much as I love music!

For a while now, I've been looking for a way to level match when I'm comparing my music to reference tracks. The only options I've found cost hundreds or more. Plugins like Ian Sheppard's perception and others are great, but too expensive for this recording artist. 

That's why I was SUPER excited to find this little gem! It's called AB Level Match. 

OK so it doesn't have the most creative name, but it does what it claims, and then some!

All you do is install the plugin into the Reaper Resources Folder (found in options --> Show Reaper Resource Folder"), then put the AB Source plugin before all of your other plugins, and put the AB control plugin after. Set the autogain to "ON", and use the Prefilter to get more accurate results. Use SYNC PDC to compensate for latency.

You will get an automatically level matched track so that you can hear precisely what your EQ, compression and other effects are doing without the added loudness.

If you don't use Reaper, they offer a paid version for around $79 CAD which is compatible with any host that can run VST FX, as well as Pro Tools.

Why use this, or something like it? Because one of the golden rules of audio is that louder usually sounds better to our ears. This means that a track will generally sound more lush, full and defined if it's played back louder that it's unprocessed source.  This is especially true during Mastering and other critical listening stages of production.

Loudness Compensation Plugins
http://www.tb-software.com/TBProAudio/ab_lm.html
http://www.meterplugs.com/perception 
http://www.tb-software.com/TBProAudio/download.html (for the free Reaper Version of AB LM)

Best (and worst) Recording Advice I've ever gotten #2 - Digital OVERS

Image courtesy of Reaper Audio

I was at a recording studio this one time watching my Dad record some tracks for a release he and his band were working on.

Dad was playing his beautiful old Yamaha acoustic guitar hard, and it was clipping the digital audio interface. It sounded terrible. The engineer commented that he needed to record as hot as possible, to make sure the signal was healthy enough to mask any background noise (that's bad advice ... more on that later). He also commented that a few digital overs were no big deal, since his interface (an RME something or other) was pretty forgiving.

This is bad advice #1. There is no such thing as a "forgiving" digital over. However, there is such a thing as forgiving clipping within the analog domain. The difference is hard vs soft clipping. With digital audio, you are either clipped or not. You can model pleasing analog clipping and saturation with plugins (Variety of sound makes some really cool free analogue modeled VST plugins),

Perhaps the "forgiving" part of digital clipping is whether you have the ability to actually hear the digital overs - but this is just whether your monitoring system is accurate, because a digital over is a digital over. It exists whether you can hear it or not. The problem areas you don't perceive will need to be fixed during mastering. If your mastering engineer is really good, he or she might be able to use some expensive restoration tools to make the digital overs less nasty sounding. But you honestly NEVER want to have to get to that point in the first place, because there will be unintended trade-offs to repairing your poorly recorded tracks.

Here's a picture to drive this point home. Notice the greyed out parts of the sound file represented below. This information should have been there, as it is the would-be of an audible sound. But, because the audio is digitally clipped, the information is literally sliced off and you are left with a terrible sounding crackle that masks the depth and detail of the sound.

Image courtesy of wikimedia

Here is a 16 minute video that further explains digital clipping vs analogue clipping extremely well, courtesy of Mastering Engineer Ian Sheppard.

Oh, and you might be wondering what happened to my Dad's clipped guitar recording? Since the engineer wouldn't turn down his pre-amps, I told my dad to play quieter, knowing that the engineer would simply raise the volume of the track in the mix. This worked like a charm - he recorded a really nice sounding track to complement the song.

Until Next Time,
Here's to your music,
Ryan

Copyright © 2016 Reinvent Your Studio, All Rights Reserved

Best (and worst) Recording Advice I've ever gotten - #1

Picture courtesty of wikimedia 

I end up talking to quite a few musicians and others who are interested in getting started with home recording. I spent years cruising forums looking for advice, and some of the advice I got was really good. I was lucky enough to get to know people who did this recording thing professionally, and they had some solid tips.

Part of me loves to look through the newbie sections of home recording forums, but I've come to realize that for every good piece of advice, you can have many pieces of terrible or useless advice. And that sums up my struggle with forums. Everyone has an opinion, and forums gives everyone an immediate platform to share theirs opinions and ideas, which makes it nearly impossible to truly tell good from bad advice without a lot of experimenting. And if you're going to experiment, then why go to a forum other than to get a bunch of crazy ideas? 

I'm not completely knocking forums. They ARE fantastic for generating ideas, and forums is how I got connected with many like-minded recording musicians.

But I got a LOT of bad advice on forums - even advice that sounded good, but really wasn't. The bad advice is the main reason it's taken me so long to release my second album.

And the thing with advice is that if it doesn't work in the real world, then it's not good advice.

So, instead of letting all of that bad advice go to waste, I wanted to share some of the best, game changing pieces of advice I've received when it comes to making your own recordings as well as some of the worst advice I've received from the forums.

Here's the first piece of game changing advice I received.

No matter what you are recording, if you are capturing it with a digital recording interface, the first rule of recording is to record it at at around line level (-18dBFS RMS, or 0VU) into your recording interface. Regardless of the digital gear you are using, it is designed to operate it's best at line level. This is a voltage and digital conversion thing, and it just works.

And the second is like it:

Take the time to learn how to properly gain stage. If you have a kick drum blasting a microphone, make sure that you first aren't distorting the microphone with Sound pressure levels (SPL) that are too loud for the microphone to handle. Once you have that under control, turn the gain down (or up) on your pre-amps so that the levels register at around line level. 

The rule of thumb is this: If you slam the inputs of your digital gear, everything will sound flat and dull - if not right away, then it will most definitely show up during mastering where the mastering engineer will crank up everything in the recording.

Until next time,

Here's to your music

Ryan

Copyright © 2016 Reinvent Your Studio, all rights reserved.