“Levels in Digital Audio” deals with overall theory in digital audio, which applies whether you’re in Logic, Cubase, ProTools, Ableton, or any other DAW.

It’s a very quick read and covers questions about bit depth, the various triggers and stages for clipping (and how to avoid them), whether or not to normalize, and he also debunks several myths about what can help or hurt your audio fidelity.

You can also find a great thread on GS about “Loudness when Producing and Mixing.” Very helpful.

About the author:
Holger Lagerfeldt is a Danish composer and record producer known for numerous pop and dance hit songs. Lagerfeldt received a Danish Grammy nomination as Producer of the Year 1999 and has so far received 50 gold and platinum records during his career. (wikipedia)

Levels in Digital Audio is a post from: wax&wires

In this episode:
- Performance Rights Organizations (BMI vs. ASCAP vs…)
- Aqualung
- Parallel and Two-Stage Compression

Read up on PROs: ASCAP, BMI and SESAC.
You can check out the third-party companies like Taxi and CD Baby too, which can help you distribute your music, or land it in TV, film and radio.

I couldn’t find a place to download Aqualung’s album, Memory Man, legally online. Here’s a link to buy it on Amazon for just a couple bucks; you can also check out sound clips on there to scope it out:

Aqualung – Memory Man

I would love your feedback (good or bad!), just shoot me an email: tim@waxandwires.com.

wax&wires tv – Episode 004 is a post from: wax&wires

As you heard me address in the video, the tempo manipulation seemed to be the feature that had the most excitement around it. How frequently it will be used, I’m not sure. Gerry and Peff gave a quick demo of the software, and drew in a tempo automation for a false ritard at the end of a song. It did sound quite authentic, baiting the applause of all in attendance. There have been a few instances where I’ve completed a song, thinking it sounded great, only to have it drag a bit when played in the context of the album as a whole. How many times in my life has that happened? Not really enough to justify changing my entire work flow, but I could see the program assisting for scratch tracks and pre-production from that end.

Also mentioned in the video, the SSL 9000K emulation, acting as the primary mixer within record. The jury’s out on the accuracy of the modeling. I’ll play with the beta a bit this week and give a more in depth review next week via video.

The interface is clean and intuitive, much like Reason. It operates in three views, Arrange View (standard waveform edits, etc), Rack View (effects rack, just like Reason), and Mixer View (where the much hailed SSL 9000K model is featured).

Record can rewire into any rewire supported DAW (ProTools, Ableton, Logic, etc.), but Reason does not need to be rewired into Record, as the new software opens Reason sessions natively within it. The plus in that is that all tracks are handled the same; you heard Gerry alluding to that in the video, wanting to see tracks as music, not audio. That’s a bit semantic, but the point is that there aren’t “MIDI” tracks and “Audio” tracks per say, as all effects work on any of the channels, and all tracks feed to the SSL.

The next feature that seemed to get a decent amount of attention was the Line 6 amp modeling. The same modeling available in guitar and bass PODs is included with record. The program also can sync up with your hardware POD to exchange presets between Record and your POD. The whole system is designed for quick, intuitive and simple music making.

Propellerhead has been touting Record’s low latency. The months to come with dictate the depth of that claim. After I mess with it a bit, I’ll relay any thoughts I have to you.

Another key feature is Record’s comping. Most of us who are accustomed to vocal comping and the like have grown use to having multiple stacked takes on a single track in ProTools, then copying and pasting the good chunks into a new “comp” take. Record has a much more easy to use GUI for comping, where you can simply drag around the pieces you want from each take to a top “play” take to create your final comp. Nothing too mind-blowing, but the new comping system in Record should help speed up your workflow a bit.

One thing that I forgot to ask Gerry on camera, but did catch up with him about was the fact that Record does NOT support third party plug-ins. All effects, just like in Reason, are hosted within the program itself; everything is entirely self contained. While most would see this as a huge set back, it doesn’t come without reason (pardon the pun). With the incorporation of external plug-ins, you introduce the potential for a plug-in crashing your application. Reason is known for its stability, and the folks at Propellerhead wanted the same reputation to follow Record. Gerry said something to the effect of, “If we let you use whatever plug-ins you want, we’re not really going to be any more stable than any other recording program out there.” Sounds logical enough, though I do think this will impact their market share. For users, like myself, who have spent thousands on quality plug-ins, I want to be able to take those presets and plug-ins with me, to whatever audio program I end up in. I don’t know that Record’s target market is comprised of such musicians though.

On a similar note, all associated files are held within one Record session file. That means, no folders of MIDI data, audio files, and fade files. Everything is self contained. The good in that is the ease of use. The down side is having to bounce stems for use in any other audio environment. Record does take as much of the pain out of that as possible by offering a quick “bounce stems” option to export each track as a separate audio file.

Think of it as more of a sketch pad for your work. It will be the fastest and easiest way for Reason users to lay down song ideas from start to finish, with decent enough audio. If you’re thinking about a major label release, this isn’t really going to be your end all be all solution. For $249, you can’t really expect much more than that though. If you’ve already got Reason, Record is only $149. I’ve spent more than that on a single compression plug that I hardly ever use. Record would likely do more for my workflow than said plug-in, so to me, it’s a worthwhile buy. If you’re new to the computer recording game, this could be an incredible first program for you, a huge step up from garage band, and a bit sideways from apps like Logic Express and the like.

You can get more info about Record at Prophead’s site, and supposedly at RecordYou.com, though the latter wasn’t up last time I checked.

More thoughts to come as I experiment a bit more with the beta, but those are my initial reactions to the features presented. What do you think? Will you be looking for a new workflow when Record comes out this September?

Propellerhead Announces New Software – “Record” is a post from: wax&wires

On 2nd April 2009 Keane will make history with the world’s first ever live webcast in 3D. The band will record the live session at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios, the home of The Beatles’ historic first ever satellite broadcast, and will feature live mixed graphics from world-renowned digital artists D-Fuse.

“We believe that the tradition of rock’n'roll is to always innovate, to bring new ideas and concepts into music. We are therefore incredibly excited about the prospect of being the first band to beam our music live in 3D over the internet. Over the last couple of years, our website has become a hive of artistic creativity for us and our fans. On April 2nd at 8pm (UK time), hundreds of thousands of those fans will be able don their 3D glasses and watch us play some songs from our new record, Perfect Symmetry. We will be broadcasting from Abbey Road, scene of the first ever live satellite broadcast – The Beatles ‘All You Need Is Love’ – and we hope that this will become a similarly powerful new way for music to connect people all over the world.” (Tom, Tim and Richard)

3D glasses are available from the brand new keanemusic.com shop with the 7-inch of the new single Better Than This, which is out on 16th March. (We’re also hoping to show you how to make your own 3D glasses.)

The audio from the gig will also be simultaneously broadcast live on-air on newly launched national station Absolute Radio. The show will then be available to watch on-demand via km.com afterward.

While a great idea to try and drum up some incentive to buy their new 7″, if it’s anything like the whole Chuck-in-3D thing after the SuperBowl this year, I’ll likely end up ditching my glasses to save myself a headache. That episode was terrible, and the colors were all distorted, with the glasses on. I would rather see something shot well, with vibrant colors in HD, than something that looks terrible, but pops out at me (which actually kind of makes it worse…)! The problem there is that if it’s not 3D, they can’t market it like they’re currently doing, so I guess kudos to Keane for taking advantage of the new technology to support their album sales. The bands that do the best are the ones that jump on new tech first, be it MySpace, Twitter, Facebook… or 3D live streaming.

Keane Live 3D Webcast Should Help Album Sales is a post from: wax&wires

Would you prefer a controller with knobs for quick and easy control, or just a big empty screen that could become anything?

The Dragon Midi Controller is a post from: wax&wires

1) Set time limits on sessions.
I know this seems counter-intuitive, but force breaks upon yourself. If you’re trying to nail a particular part, or find some new creative mojo, working yourself until you’re exhausted is only going to belabor the process and get you nice and frustrated in the process. Take an hour break, come back fresh and ready to kill it. Your brain will inevitably continue working on the song while you’re away from your desk, and that’s great. Some of my best creative ideas have come when I left the studio to go wash dishes or water the lawn for an hour. Some part will pop in my head that completely transforms the vibe of the song.

You could put a quick bounce of your song on your iPod and go for a drive too, though I usually find it best to avoid hearing anything during that time. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you listen to a song too much, everything starts to sound right. That’s bad. Get out of the studio. Don’t get stuck in tunnel vision.

2) Recycle your old stuff.
There’s nothing wrong, or creatively taboo, about using your old stuff again. This goes two ways.

Sigur Ros used to reverse vocal tracks and such from older albums and put them on their newer albums with tons of reverb to help create a nice ambience behind the newer tracks. So the first way is to actually use things you’ve released before, modify them beyond recognition, and reinsert them into your new material.

The second way is to create a folder on your computer for sounds and ideas you like, that might not sit well with the particular song you’re working on at the time.

A few months ago, I was working on a track in Ableton, and for some reason, when I went to export it, the computer glitched and gave me this really funky, bit-crushed, slowed down digital pattern. I loved it, so I dropped it in a folder. By the same token, I’ve stumbled on sounds I liked before that didn’t fit the key, mood, or timbre of a particular song, so I saved the clip to a bin on my computer. Every few months, or if I feel like I’ve hit a wall with a song I’m working on, I’ll dig through that bin of sound clips and get a nice creative shot in the arm.

3) Organize your files.
Develop a naming convention that works for you so that you can find songs and samples quickly.

Several years ago, when I was working in a pretty big studio down here, we used to have to label our DAT tapes and files with the format “yyyymmdd-sessionName”. I ended up adopting that format in my personal projects as well, because it makes so much sense. It takes up just 8 characters to name your files in such a way that the computer will always have them in chronological order. If you name them with the day or month first, the computer would sort them by the day or month, and files become harder to find. I’m not saying that’s hands down the best way to do it. I am saying that you should find something that works for you and stick with it.

Along with that, keep tabs on your favorite samples and patches (as mentioned above). That way, when you need a particular sound that you’ve used before, you can recall it quickly, rather than digging through thousands of samples and patches to find it again.

4) Keep your tracking materials handy.
If you don’t have a dedicated space in your house for your studio stuff, do your best to compromise. It makes such a difference when all I have to do is open up a program and hit record to lay down a new idea, rather than digging mics, cables, instruments, interfaces, etc out of the closet. By the time you get all that gear set up, you’ll have lost your train of thought, inspiration, and the energy to perform well. This includes keeping 9V batteries on hand for guitar pedals and tuners, strings on hand etc. When creativity strikes, you need to be ready to lock it down.

5) Use Templates.
This is an extension of the previous step. Just as you need to have your hardware ready to go in a moment’s notice, do the same with your software. If you have a great idea in your head, the last thing you want to do is spend 10 minutes adding tracks, arming them to record, adding the appropriate virtual instruments and plug-ins before you can even record. Figure out what you use on a regular basis, and have those tracks and plug-ins preloaded in your template session.

I noticed a few years ago that just about every song I make in Reason has piano, a big fat bass, some form of Dr. Rex and tight acoustic drums. I set up a template so that every time I open Reason, my favorite piano, drum kit, and synth bass get loaded up automatically, so I can jump right into making the music. Don’t give yourself enough time to forget your idea!

6) Use Multiple Monitors or Spaces.
You need enough space in the physical world to make your music, the same is true of your computer screen real estate. I used to use a 20″ and 24″ monitor. I could keep my soft-synths and mixer open on one side, and then have my audio editor open in the other. That helps you work quickly between programs that might be rewired into each other, as well as helping you see the big picture of your song and what all you’re using. I recently moved to a laptop as my main computer, and my production slowed down a lot since I have to use spaces to jump between windows and such rather than seeing everything in front of me.

7) Collaborate.
Work with artists that you know and trust. Trade sessions with each other to bring new ideas and views of your songs to light. The drummer in my old band and I used to work really well together. I would come up with some melodic idea on guitar or piano and bring it to him. I would be completely stalled out, and he would start laying down drum parts. A lot of times he would lay down a part in double-time, or half-time from what I was hearing in my head. That was exactly what I needed to find the heart and life of the song though. That simple spark would let the rest of the song simply fall in place.

Not only does this off load some of the creative work to give you a break, but it gives you a great opportunity to network and get some time in on other people’s tracks for new inspiration too.

7 Quick Tips To Speed Up Your Workflow is a post from: wax&wires

The ERGO unit connects to your computer via Firewire to analyze room nodes, but operates as a stand alone box after analysis is complete (obviously given that you keep it in the same room with the same speakers). In its stand alone mode, ERGO operates as a speaker selector and volume knob, in addition to the room correction DSP it applies to the signal.

The ERGO system retails for $799, MAP is expected to be down around $599.

I’ve always been plagued by bad sound in my random makeshift bedroom studios. Being that I’m a renter, I never really wanted to invest in treating the room as properly as it should be with RealTraps and things of the like. After all, who’s to say how long I might be at any given house, or that the landlord would even let me “redecorate” with tacky fiberglass panels and bass traps in the corners? That situation has left me in an awkward place of only seriously using my bedroom studio for editing and scratch tracks, while leaving the real tracking and mixing to be done in more costly studios around town. I’m pretty anxious to see what a system like this might do in my room at home. Hideous and cumbersome acoustic treatment will always go a long way toward helping your room out, but some new tech can’t hurt either.

You can find out more about the ERGO system here. There are some good videos on that page, but they’re a bit long and in depth for me to want to just embed them here.

KRK ERGO Room Correction System Shipping Soon is a post from: wax&wires

A week ago, in Fix It Before You Mix It, I wrote about 8 simple things you can do to set yourself up for success leading up to the mix stage of your project. In this article, I’ll try to take you through a few things that can help you during that mix stage.

The mixing stage, including editing, can often be the most daunting task of a recording project. It’s here that you have to make the final decisions on which guitar solo to use, how much you want the bass to punch, how saturated you want that reverb, etc. All of those choices will undoubtedly shape the sound and in extreme instances, even the genre of the album.

1) Choose your sound. Identify some albums that you really like, that sit in the same genre of music you’re aiming to create. If you’re having trouble finding an artist that relates, pick some albums that have influenced you and listen for what you like about those albums. Maybe it’s Coldplay Parachutes, and you like the intimacy of Chris Martin’s vocal on the album. Maybe you like the drums on John Mayer’s Room For Squares. If so, refer to those albums during your mix to see if you’re achieving the same result that makes those albums so alluring to you. How compressed do they sound? How much reverb is on them? How loud are the overheads compared to the rest of the kit? Can you hear the room in the tracks, if so, how much?

2) Know your room. Are you mixing in your bedroom or on headphones? How much commercial music have you listened to through the same system? How many mixes of your own have you heard on that system, and how have they translated to the rest of the world? This is one of the most critical and toughest things to hammer out because it takes time. Spend some time with music on while you’re just hanging out or working in the room, but also dedicate an hour a day to some critical listening in your mixing room. These steps will familiarize your ears with what a good mix sounds like on your system, so that you can replicate it with your mixes. Good ears and a good knowledge of your room will go farther than the best gear and plug-ins you can buy.

3) What’s the driving force behind the album? At the first big studio I worked at, my boss used to reiterate that there were two main schools of mixing in pop music (and I use the term “pop music” in the looser sense, describing all radio-playable music including rock, country, hip hop, etc):

Nashville and LA.

With Nashville mixing, the lead vocal is the driving force behind every song. When you get to the mix stage of a project in which the lead vocal is the focus, start your mix with the lead vocal. Mute all of the other tracks and only listen to the vocal track. If you’re going to be comping a good take together, do it here. If you’re taking a straight take, identify you’re winning take and start to work on any sibilance and honkiness with EQ, dial in your compression, and find a tasteful reverb for the vocal. After you’ve nailed the vocal down to exactly what you want it to be, start pulling in the other instruments and mix them so that they sit well and complement the vocal, not vice versa. Be sure that after each track you un-mute, you can still hear the vocals shining through the whole mix.

With LA mixing, the rhythm section and guitars drive the song. This was hugely popular with rock in the 80s. Check the mix on your favorite Poison or Motley Crue album; the vox are totally reverb saturated, drums kick hard and at times you can hardly hear the vox when the guitars are kicking in. That creates a louder, in your face hard rock mix. In LA mixing, you’re conceding that the instruments are driving the song. Start with the rhythm section. Mix the drums to kick your teeth in, be sure the bass is locked in with the kick to maximize impact. From there, add in your face-melting guitars and be sure they’re EQ’d to cut through really well. Lastly, drop your vocals on top. If the vox get buried at times, you’re cutting your losses since you’ve already yielded with the vision of the song that the vocals are not what’s driving it forward.

It’s mostly a question of priorities and identifying the style of your mix. At any given moment, what is it that you want your listeners hearing and focusing on? Are you guiding their ears to that part with your mix?

4) Don’t make too many rough mixes. You can call me a hypocrite on this one, as I’m still sitting on some mixes of my own from 2004 that I have yet to release. If you start making rough mixes and listening to them over and over, you’re sabotaging the process. The faults in that mix will start to sound right since that’s the way your ears will learn to hear the song. It also has huge potential of zapping your creativity since it will be tough to add something to a song on a production level when you’ve heard it so many times that it sounds finished to your brain. At that point, anything you add starts to feel like you’re corrupting the song, and you’ve got to bring a new set of ears to help you finish.

5) Impose a Deadline. This stems directly out of number 4. Give yourself one afternoon to mix the song. If you notice glaring mistakes, clicks and pops, things like that later, of course you can go back and fix them. However, do not go into your mix under the impression that you’ll just work on it a little bit, listen to it for a few days, then work on it some more. You will never finish. We can make small tweaks into eternity; we can wait for better plug-ins and outboard gear for years. If you don’t finish your mix with some sense of immediacy, the song will be irrelevant and the genre will be dead by the time you get it out. It’s happened to me before, and I still kick myself over things like that.

I’ll crank out another article soon with more practical how-to’s on getting a cleaner mix. These 5 steps will help you gain a clear vision for your project though, and help your workflow so that you can get more music out there.

The Chronology of a Good Mix is a post from: wax&wires

1) Good recordings start at the source. Before we get into more step-by-step practical things to do, you have to really buy-in and believe that statement. If you don’t internalize the fact that you MUST take your time when setting up the source of sound, you’re already limiting the quality of your recordings. Spending the extra time to acquire good tones and good takes will pay dividends when you get to the mixing stage of your project. You could have an arsenal of the greatest plug-ins, outboard gear, and even ears, known to man; but if you’ve got fret buzz on an out-of-tune guitar clipping through the 8″ speaker of a 15W solid state crate amp, it won’t matter (unless that was the sound you were going for… but I doubt it).

2) Practice man, we talkin’ about practice. Get your arrangements tight. Every performer needs to know what songs you’re recording and the right arrangement of each one. Be sure that parts aren’t stepping on each other (no drum solos while the singer’s singing, etc). When we mix, we make sure that every instrument has it’s own room in the frequency spectrum through the use of EQ, and it’s own space through the use of panning. The same principle should be applied on a compositional level. If the vocal is the main feature for a few beats, don’t have complex guitar lines and bass runs that confuse the ear as to what it should be listening to.

3) Buy, rent, borrow, do whatever you can to get the best gear for your project that you can find. We already mentioned the guitar and amp above, I think a big area where I’ve noticed a difference here has been with cymbals on a drum kit. If I get a drum track where the skins sound bad, we can dynamically trigger the snare, toms, and kick using SoundReplacer or Drumagog (both great plug-ins); but cymbals are pretty much impossible to replicate in post. There’s far too much variety in timbre and velocity to be able to copy it using any number of samples. Spend a few hours in music shops or backline companies trying out cymbals to save yourself a few days worth of EQ or failed attempts at authentic sample replacement. The end mix will thank you for it. An extension of this goes without saying to have fresh strings and drum heads on and ready to go for your session. There’s no plug-in that can magically bring your dead strings’ punch back.

4) Place your mic with your ears, not your eyes. I know we have all these techniques on where mics should be placed, and there’s solid theory behind those methods, but you shouldn’t be relying on pictures of other peoples’ set ups, or your eyes, to tell you how something sounds. I don’t listen to my food to see how it tastes, or feel a flower to see how it smells, so why would I look at where a mic is to hear how it sounds? If you’re micing a cello for example, get down on your knees, close your eyes and move your head around in front of the soundhole. You may even want to try moving the instrument to different locations in the room. If you find a spot that it sounds good, put your mic where your ear just was. After that, at least if you hear something about the tone that you don’t like back in the control room, you know it’s the mic or your preamp and you can try a different mic or preamp, but you know that you heard the sound you wanted in front of that cello; now it’s just a matter of capturing it. DON’T OVERLOOK NOISE EITHER!!! A big part of using your ears to place your mic is identifying noise. If you’re listening for a good spot to place your mic and you notice that you can hear the air conditioner on, or train tracks outside, you need to solve those noise problems first. If your ears can hear it, your mic can too. As a disclaimer, with crazy loud sources like drums or rock guitar amps, I wouldn’t recommend putting your ear against the source to place your mic (so let’s have a bit of common sense here). Instead, get a studio hand to go into the live room with closed headphones on. Patch a talk-back mic to his headphones and have him move the mics around while you listen in the control room and instruct him through the talk-back mic on where to move each mic. The biggest argument here is essentially, don’t just put an SM57 an inch off of the edge of your guitar amp’s speaker because that’s what you’re supposed to do and it looks right. Use your ears to find the sound you’re looking for.

5) Tune, Tune, Tune. Get a few tuners to be sure they all agree. I use a little Korg cheapo $20 tuner, and then a Peterson Strobe tuner to be sure guitars are in line. Have them set up and intonated before your session too. You could be perfectly in tune on your open strings, but if your intonation is out, as soon as you have to use your fretboard (so… as soon as you have to play…) you’re out of tune. Next, tune after EVERY take. Nothing is more frustrating than packing up your gear and striking your mics, and THEN finding out that your B string was out when it gets to mixing time. If you don’t intonate your guitar and bass first, the smallest infraction can really hurt your vocal take, as your vocalist won’t be able to find center as easily.

6) Use a pop filter on vocals. If you get a lot of boominess and plosives on your track, the main feature of your song (the vocal) is going to be lackluster and unprofessional. Spend the money on a good pop filter (or use a coat hanger and pantyhose to make one if you’re hard pressed, it’s better than nothing). EQ and compression can only go so far, and they won’t be able to satisfactorily repair any abuse of hard plosive consonants. Don’t eat your mic either. Besides hygenic infractions, this could cause an overload of proximity effect and mouth noise. Get at least a few inches of space between your mouth and the mic to allow for a good amount of presence without sacrificing body. Sing right into the mic and don’t turn your head around or jump up and down. Contrary to popular belief, the mic doesn’t know where your mouth is, and can’t move with you. Focus on producing a good vocal tone and solid placement to give you a strong and consistent take.

7) Warm Up. This is especially true with vocals. Spend 10-20 minutes warming up so that your takes are cleaner. Don’t kill yourself singing Kelly Clarkson, but run simple, low scales to shake the rust off of your vocal chords. The same is true with guitar. Spend some time playing some scales and helping your brain reload the song and your fingers’ muscle memory to recall how far apart the frets are, etc.

8) Keep the monitors in check. As a rule of thumb, only put into the artists’ headphones what they need to get the track right, and at just enough volume for them to get a good feel going. You don’t want click bleeding through every sustained chord on a song, or snare drum blasting through and getting re-tracked via vocal mic on your singer’s take. You need to give a solid enough mix and a reasonable enough volume for the vibe of the song to come across, otherwise you might get a passionless take, but don’t let the volume of the headphones get out of hand. Mix the headphones via subtraction not addition. You might also want to kill the click send right when the last chord rings out to avoid any bleed as the instruments fade out. Some people like tracking a clean and click-less take of the final chord witht the whole band to avoid click bleed; I usually just sit in the control room and mute it right as they strike the chord though. Wait for the chord to ring out fully, and THEN cut. You can always fade out later, but you can’t generate the sound that would have been.

That’s all I’ve got for you in this post. I’ll continue to write as I get more ideas on helpful topics. Feel free to comment and add any tips or tricks you might have, or refute any of mine. I’d love any input you have.

Fix it Before You Mix it is a post from: wax&wires