When mixing out of the box, your I/O should remain the same, unless a channel is not working or is unavailable. Every time you pull up a file, pull up a protools session with a designated Output that should be used for each mix. You should basically set up a template for the session you are going to have. I am thinking ahead of time for my capstone in this way and imagining what I will need, like how many channels, do I want certain instruments running to aux tracks with an effect on the other end, set up gating systems. When doing a session, you should constantly be thinking about your routing and layering for tracking and mixing. When recording drums, sometimes upwards of 12 microphones are used. The thing is you don’t need to use all of them – all of the time. It will just increase chances of phase issues As far as mixing the album goes, we have decided as a group to edit our own tracks and then bring them all together in the studio to mix down. There seems to be a ton of different opinions on what to mix and leave in the arrangement, and things seem a little sequacious at times.

“Ya know?... Maybe you just don’t have it…”


Fact: Some people have it, some people don’t. I don’t call myself a drummer simply because I have an interest in drums or because own a drum set. There is more to being a drummer than just having the internal drive to want to do so. When my interest first sparked in drums and I got my first drum set, I was playing 4-8 hours a day, at least 5 days a week and the weekends as well. Since I have gotten older, and am going to college, I didn’t lose the time for it, or let “life get in the way”. Despite my busy schedule I still constantly get the itch to play drums everyday, and I still manage to average an hour a day 7 days a week and have maintained that at least that for 8 years now. Ever since I started playing drums and my skills grew, if I heard a drummer do something or I thought of something in my head, I wouldn’t stop until I figured it out. I don’t mean figured it out like “yea, I know what he is doing” - I mean figured it out like “I can play what he is playing and show you what he is doing.” When listening/studying/analyzing music/trying to record music in the studio, I have come across people that seem to mistake “knowing what’s going on” for “they really have no clue what the shit is going on”. I’m sure how this happens. First of all, it may come from simply not practicing your instrument (whatever it may be) on a regular basis. Maybe in the case previously mentioned, it seems to be one of those people that think they have it, when in fact, something is lacking. That something may not just be hearing (or even not hearing) when you are sharp or flat, but rather the lack of confidence you seem to have, because you are obviously making up all this shit on the spot, and singing it 8 different ways on 8 different takes instead of singing it the same way on 8 different takes which is how you should do it (say, how it is written). Then again, if it takes you 8 takes, you probably shouldn't be recording. I can’t present much more than these things before I will just have to sing it for you (which could end up happening): a complete song, with lyrics, and a melody, sectioned out by verse and chorus, charted out, with the lyrics following the pitches along the staff, with a synth guitar in the back of the mix playing exactly what is charted and what you are supposed to be singing. Then, after all that, it should be known that pre-production has been done, probably about 2 months prior, and the songs have been collecting dust for weeks, not being rehearsed when I was told they were. You can lead the horse to the water but you can’t make it drink. Well at this point the horse should just want to drink and move on with its life. Instead, now everyone in the room feels uncomfortable and the vibe sucks because you don’t have your shit down, when you say you do, and time is being wasted because you like to blurt out “I’m sorry” for screwing up in the middle of the take, but then you get all irritated with the engineer when the tape is stopped – claiming you were going to keep going when you clearly fucked up anyways. Well guess what, the take sucked ass, so let’s try it again, and then if we get a good take - or not, we’re moving on.

The Vocoder:

Some of the first usages of the vocoder were for actual voice encoding used by Bell Labs for communications purposes during WWII. Just like all analogue outboard gear started out, the vocoder in the music world (which is shortened to mean voice encoder) is either a piece of analog rack gear, or it is available in most DAW’s and packs as a virtual plug-in. It filters certain frequencies and changes the harmonic content of the signal. There is an input signal and a voltage control signal. The input signal is sent through a multiband filter that is adjustable on the face of the rackmount. When you route from Protools to the Vocoder and back to Protools, keep the harmonic emphasis fully counter clockwise. If you are using an instrument, you can adjust the level -30, -15, -0db. There are 4 levels of gain staging. In terms of creating proper gain staging for the output, you can just it at the line level, mic level, attenuate using the graphic eq, and adjust the output as well. Using a keyboard direct into the vocoder as a control signal with a vocal as the input signal is a good way to get the most emphasis out of the processing because the keyboards output is pretty consistent as compared to a guitar, where there is much dynamic change. It is possible to take 2 previously recorded signals and send them through the vocoder, using one as the control signal and the other as the input signal. All you need to do this is the correct adapters and patch cables and route accordingly. Send the tracks out of ProTools on the patch bay into the vocoder, and come out the output back into protools and record it onto a new track. If you want the effect of the processed sound and no dry signal, the setting should be turned all the way to the vocoder.

Routing live kick and snare tracks
Send the dry tracks to aux tracks and set the sends PRE fader
On the aux tracks, insert from the TDM plug-ins, a signal generator followed by a gate. You can choose between a few different waves – sine, saw, triangle, square, and white or pink noise. Attempt to get the bass drum to trigger the kick with the sine wave via the gate. Try pitching the sine wave to the correct frequency to fit the program material.
Activate the key input and input to the correct bus on the gate, otherwise you won’t hear the trigger.

Try this same technique with white noise to get and electronic sounding snare drum. If this effect is tweaked right, you can make it sound like just the snares of a snare drum. IF a beat that you are working with has a lot of ghost notes, find a sweet-spot for the threshold that allows it to sound like someone is playing with brushes.

Decca Records Andrew Bailey
(Universal Music Group)

Decca Dulcephone
Patented by Barnett Samuel & Sons in 1914

Genres & Artists
• CLASSICAL - Leroy Anderson, The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, The London Philharmonic Orchestra.
• COUNTRY - Roy Rogers, Kitty Wells, Patsy Kline, The Wilburn Brothers
• POP - Bing Crosby (White Christmas), Al Jolson, Bill Haley & His Comets, The Moody Blues, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday.
• R & B - Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Louis Jordan

Early Recordings

• Cast recordings: Oklahoma! Carousel Annie Get Your Gun
-Columbia Records took over the cast recording industry by the 1950’s.

• MCA bought US Decca in 1962 - Decca Broadway Label formed with the fusion of MCA and Polygram with Universal Music Group.


DECCA Innovations
• FFRR (full frequency range recording) - first used in WWII for the detection of submarine types via sound waves.
• LP production - EMI suffered as a result in that they wanted to continue to manufacture on 78 rpms.
• FFSS - The DECCA Tree
• Recording and Mastering in the 70’s -Digital Recorders and time code.
• John Culshaw – biggest asset to Decca and the classical genre. He recorded the first LP versions of the Savoy Operas and many popular opera artists.


Tough times lead to success…

A historical mistake:

Dick Rowe, representative of the pop genre - turned down the opportunity to record the Beatles, but eventually ended up signing The Rolling Stones.

The Decca Audition
• Did not sign the Yardbirds or Manfred Mann.

• “Rockin’ Round The Clock” - original wasn’t very popular until it was used a few years later as the theme song for the film “Blackboard Jungle”. It then became the first American Pop tune to hit #1 on the American Charts.

DECCA TODAY -UMG

A few artists: Paula Cole, Bryan Adams, Sting, John Scofield, Elton John, Renee Fleming, Boyz II Men.



Universal Music Group (UMG)

• Bravado (merchandising), Vivendi (Activision/Blizzard), VEVO (online video resource)
• Twenty-First Artists, Trinifold, 5B (live music, event)

• Musicals: Wicked, Mamma Mia!, Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard

• Soundtracks: Braveheart, Schindler’s List, Slumdog Millionaire



UMG - a small handful of major artists

• Eric Clapton, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra, Jay-Z, John Coltrane, Buddy Holly, The Jackson Five, Nirvana, The Police, Sublime, Waters, The Who, Bo Diddley, Bob Marley, Nelly, Rihanna.

• Record Labels:

Island/ Def Jam, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Universal Motown Republic Group, The Verve Music Group, Universal Music Group Nashville, Decca, ECM, Emarcy.



Works cited:

Universal Music. Web. 28 Mar. 2011. http://www.universalmusic.com/.

Decca Records - A Universal Music Company. Web. 28 Mar. 2011. .

Parrallel compression, 2-way compression

These are compression techniques used to get a fatter sound. Combining an uncompressed sound with a compressed sound in parallel and one on top of the other.
One way is to clone all the drum tracks and put them through a compressor. There is a much more elegant way to do that using AUX SENDS. Create a new stereo AUX track (DRUM BUS). Set the original tracks output to the drum bus channel. This AUX channel now acts as a drum stem. This will be a dry bus. Create another drum bus that will be “squashed” drums. Throw a compressor on the aux track. There is a 3ms delay because of the plug-in. To prevent phasing, add the same plug-in to the dry track but BYPASS it.

Let’s work with some audio:

Kick, snare, and room mic, through the board! (parallel compression)

For the MTA980, use a stereo monitor group, and the group sends/returns on the patchbay for the compressor of your choice, the Millenias or the Distressors. Control the level of the group with the monitor level pot, and leave the fader at unity gain.


Send all drum tracks to a stereo AUX channel drum bus. Put a compressor on the AUX channel. Create kick and snare sub mixes to be individually compressed and combined with overheads or other material.

Compressors enhance natural dynamic sounds with the drum mix, and fatter kick and snare sounds.

Parallel compression: one stereo dry signal, one stereo compressed signal simulaneously

2 stage compression:
set up 4 channels and send to groups 1-2, 3-4
Compressor on group 1-2, compressor on group 3-4.
How do you get compressor 1-2 into group 3-4?
Output of compressor 1-2 into line1 inputs (stereo channel) and send those channels back to the monitor group.

2 stage compression: Dry/compressed signal are being compressed by an additional stereo aux track.
The most energy is in the bass frequencys, and the compressor latches on in the middle of the transient, possibly creating a pop or click that you will have to digitally edit out.

Decca Records

For my presentation, I am choosing to discuss the history and fame of the mighty

Decca Records. It was a British record label that is now owned by the Universal Music

Group, the largest division of the major record labels in the music industry. Decca

records started way back in 1929, founded by a man named Edward Lewis. He was a

businessman that put a huge investment into this company or label, a couple of times.

Eventually Decca took over Brunswick Records, which but artists like Bing Crosby.

The label started out producing recordings for large or orchestras and cast recordings. I

will talk about what is considered to be one of Decca’s largest historical mistake in the

music industry. In the earlier years, they had been manufacturing gramophones, and had

eventually revolutionized quality sound recordings on disc. Decca was battling it out

with EMI records in a business race. There are many major artists that will be talked

about, like But Decca prevailed, inventing many things that boosted the advancement

and technicality of the audio market. Innovations such as ffrr, the LP, and ffss are among

just a few. The Beatles played a big part in this record label as well. Dick Rowe, John

Culshaw, and Hugh Mendl are among some of the more important figures/producers of

Playlisting

Playlists are found under the input audio path selector where the different options to view a track are. Go to ProTOols preferences –operation- automatically create new playlists when loop recording.
Playlists are great for loop recording and saving time in the studio. When you are recording, do a few consecutive takes and gather some material to make a composite (if you can’t just play it right one time through. Playlists can get dangerous because the more you create, the more space you will take up on the hard drive. This also means you have not practiced your part enough to be able to lay it down it a couple of takes. This could be great for engineers trying to make money, but if the project is needing to get donw, then there is no time or money to waste and people should be well-rehearsed.

A few tips and key commands:

Command+Alphanumeric 1 = transport
Alphanumeric 5 = loop record
Pre-roll / post-roll – have a successful starting and ending point to capture solid takes.
Select the portion you want to loop record

Playlist composite: a composition based on the audition of various takes.
Select the desired region and press up the up arrow in the track area to add it to the current playlist.

The songs are seeming to come together for the album. Practices have been longer and more productive, and people seem to be waking up after last Mondays performance and realizing that they need to get their shit together. Chris brought 2 songs, I have put in 3, and Will has come to the table with 3-4 tunes. We are still looking at Taylor’s chart and trying to rework it to make some sort of sense. It has been hard work, and I have been forced to learn voicings and chords that I am not familiar with, and it is both exciting and stressful. It’d be nice to play an instrument that I am fairly familiar with such as drums, and be able to the listen to the music and play appropriate grooves while just using the chart as a guide. Taking the role of the piano is teaching me a lot about getting in and out of certain keys and modes, and is pushing my limits as a piano player.

Reverse Reverb, and more!

Before getting into the technique itself, let’s talk about how we get to it in the first place, and vent a little while we’re at it…

If you are looking for these things:
-lab to be boring
-do the same shit, every day
-do an exercise one way, and be done with it
-who’s going next?
- so now what do we do?… blah blah blah,

Then you should do this:
Bring up an old session from last semester, use the same bass drum sound you always use, and try the same technique the same way as last time, so as to not learn anything new or get new experiences in the studio. Great Idea...

The Problem is that this attitude/vibe/lack of intuition or motivation/whatever you want to call it, does not seem to create an exciting, creative, innovative group. Sounds like a group of people that sit around with their thumbs up their asses until somebody (almost, just about always, pretty much, usually, myself...) quickly says “Hey let’s try this” or I’ll just start doing something until somebody in the group asks what's going on when they can’t figure it out.

So lab became under my direction, and I made the decision for the second week in a row that instead of doing the above list of things, we try RECORDING our OWN stuff with MICROPHONES and XLR CABLES. Anyone in 408 can open up a fucking ProTools session with tracks all set up and ready to go. Instead: How about we try new ways of refreshing old techniques, try new/different/old miking techniques, all while practicing the new techniques we are being taught AND get studio/session experience as a performer. Multitasking eh?? If we have the ability to be the producer, mix engineer, session engineer, artist, and we have 4 hours a week to do it in an environment free of financial burden and restriction, then I would hope people want to learn the most they can in the time they are here. Nobody in the group would dream of it, so I figured that in addition to practicing gating, sidechaining, and reverse reverb, we record a insanely basic drum groove using the mid-side technique with the Royer122, and an AKG414 as the mid with a hypercardioid pattern. Say what? A hypercardi... what the f#@! is that, Jack?! - I don’t know… you tell me! The mics were set back about 18-20 feet from the kit in the middle of the room. Why? Because! Seemed like a good day to not do the spaced pair technique. There was a D112 on the kick and an SM57 on the snare. For the purposes of simply stepping out side the box (pun intended –use the MTA!!!), let’s slow the tempo down to 110 from the default 120 BPM. Send click to headphones, but remember create the click track first. Talkback? No, with 3 engineers and one artist, I think a messenger will do just fine for capturing 1 minute or less of audio, there are only 2 hours today. Don't waste precious time setting up shit that should only be set up in a real session on the clock. I had this idea to record a simple beat, increasing note value every 8 bars, from whole notes up to 16th notes. I did this so we could get some cool groove effects with a gated piano. What? Yeap a gated piano, controlled by the kick drum. Grab that AKG 414, and let’s record the fucking Steinway! Sure, I’ll play it. Now let’s try ALL 3 techniques: Gated Snare, Piano Sidechain, and Reverse reverb. Hell, throw a stereo delay on the ‘control kick’ track when you’re done. Sounds pretty cool huh?


Writing songs for the class should be fun, and it seems as though some people have different opinions of what it means to “write a song”. Writing one four-chord progression for a song and adding a few different chords to change it up doesn’t really seem very tasteful -to me, anyways. At one point I had mentioned that a chart that was handed to me was just about 99% the same as a song I had for the same group two semesters ago. The response was “really? well it’s not that hard of a chord progression”. Well sure it isn’t, but guess what - it takes a little more than just a chord progression to make a fucking SONG, you know, with actual parts and voicings, not just letter names/chord symbols above an empty staff. I appreciate that people are comfortable with handing me a chord progression for an album and asking me to voice it however I want, but I’d rather a song with melody and form came into the picture. In the real world, I’ll take it and make it my song. I’m in school though, taking 23 units, and this time around I would- but there’s no time to pick up anyone else’s slack.

After working in a group with other musicians, I have grown even more appreciation for the group of people I’ve played music with every weekend in San Jose for close to 9 years now, or appreciation for anyone who has been in serious bands for many years. My reason for bringing this up is because I have noticed some people have a hard time not talking (bullshitting) in between songs, or just as a song ends - playing random dogshit on your instrument that has nothing to do with the songs at hand (OVER people that are trying to discuss song form, arrangement, and parts). After being a part of/knowing what a professional practice etiquette entails, I’ve noticed these types of things that I’ve overcome and don’t regularly have to deal with drive me up the wall.

Sound has 3 states of existence:

1. Acoustic energy – vibrations in the air
2. Human Perception – sound waves enter our ears and are transmitted to the neurons of our brains.
3. Meaning – We perceive these sounds and apply meaning to them, so that they make sense. We can now call these sounds a piece of music, a song.

There are 5 physical dimensions of sound:

1. Frequency – the rate or number of displacements in the air caused by a sound is measured in Hz (frequency). Compression and rarefraction result in a complete cycle of the waveform.
2. Amplitude – the degree of air displacement, referred to as volume, is measured in decibels (dB).
3. Time – These actions of sound occur over time, and is represented on a medium such as tape, CD, Mp3, or linearly in a DAW.
4. Timbre – The quality/characteristics of sound. Each sound has a different timbre, and with that comes a different shaped envelope (ADSR), and spectral envelope. When the sound spectrum –the range of audible frequencies (20Hz-20KHz) humans can hear is taken into consideration, this affects the timbre of a sound as well. Sounds can be shaped using EQ’s, or frequency filters.
5. Space – Where ever a sound occurs, the environment that the sound is in generates a tonal and spatial atmosphere.

The physical dimensions of sound may not be so important to the listener. However, they are very important to the recordist, the audio-engineering world, and anything that includes the audio-recording process.

The sine wave is the only sound that does not have an overtone series. These are harmonics, or tones that resonate with the fundamental pitch. The fundamental pitch is the note that is sounding. There are other, present but hard to hear colors, or tones that reinforce the fundamental tone.

A sounds timbre greatly depends on the initial attack. A hard of soft attack with any different type of instrument will bring out specific tonal characteristics. This is how we differentiate a violin from the piano, or a tuba from a bass.

Reverberation – a combination of many reflections of sound that gets to the listeners ears around half a second after the actual sound. This is the persistence of sound over time, after the initial envelope has been completed. There are early reflections that are present before the release of the initial sound, arriving closer to 50ms.

Along with the range of hearing, we can also begin to generalize instruments into specified range categories. Each instrument as an appropriate range that is a make-up of a series of pitches. A pitch range is an area in instruments that when EQ’d, their unique timbre is emphasized or de-emphasized.

Gated snare and Sidechaining technique

The Harmonic Series:

A1, A2, E3, A3, C#4, E4, G4, A4, B4, C#5
(Octave, P5th, P4th, M3, m3, M2, M2, M2)

Formants are bands of those parts of the harmonic series that are emphasized or de-emphasized. There are many variables that can change the timbre of an instrument, but the formants stay the same. Formants are a sort of template for a voice, or any instrument. The proximity effect is something that can attenuate or enhance certain frequencies, wanted or unwanted, along with the various frequency curves for each type of microphone. Our physical make up as humans differentiate us from one another, and gives us our own unique timbre, and unique set of formants. The different wood, screws, glue, neck, and the way the whole instrument was put together gives different instruments their unique set of formants. Rather than timbre changing, the tone varies by the emphasis and de-emphasis of different formants.

GATED SNARE techniques

We will use a room mic (Royer 122) recording the whole kit in mono. After tracking, align the the closed mic’ed snare with the snare hit in the room mic. Send a bus to the mono mic from the close mic’ed snare. The gate on the mono mic will open up the room mic for a huge drum sound.
Send the top snare on bus17 to an aux with its input bus17. Put on an EQ, reverb, compressor, and gate in that order.
Use the EQ to shape the sound of the snare that is going into the reverb using a high pass filter. The reverb creates an artificial room sound you didn’t get when you recorded mono with the snare. In terms of gain staging, the reverbs input should be less than 0db to avoid distortion. The decay on the reverb controls how long the sound will persist, while the gate’s hold function determines the amount of time the gate will be open.
Create a new audio track or duplicate the track. Copy the snare and label “fake snare”. Strip silence the region and add fades. This track will be used as a tool to open/close the gate and compressor by acting as a trigger for the processors. Bus this track to the same bus that the sidechaining region in the gate is being sent on. Make sure you have a gate on the correct track that you want the gate to trigger when the snare drum sounds. If you use EQ as a sidechain, it tells the compressor a certain range of frequencies to compress. Just about all gates have sidechain filters, and some engineers use this and bypass the gate, using it as an EQ. When using a gated snare technique, make sure that the hold is set to the right amount of time so that the snare doesn’t sound for too short or too long. It really depends on the tempo of the song.

Split Drum Recording Technique

One of many ways to record drums and cymbals separately: this technique used for minimizing mic bleed, and getting more isolated drum sounds, to be able to further sculpt the sound of each instrument on the drum kit.

Let’s use a simple mic set up for shits and giggles. Start out with 4 XLR cables, 4 mic stands; for kick/snare/overhead (toms) R L. Set up stereo overheads, and mic the kick and snare, using the D112 into Ch 1, SM57 into Ch 2. Overheads are using AKG 414’s on Ch.3 and 4. Set up Headphones with a box and XLR coming out of channel A for monitoring purposes. In the control room set up the patchbay, and set all channels strips. In Protools, set up a session with 4 mono audio channels, 4 stereo aux channels, and a click track. The 4 audio channels correspond to the kick, snare and overheads and their inputs are : A1 A2 A3 and A4. Label the tracks. Label an aux track as headphones and set the input as bus 1-2 and the output as 5-6, patch out of 5 into the headphones, out, and then into room 100 A. Send all the audio tracks on bus 1-2 so the drummer has a monitor level. Now check all of your faders, analog and digital and make sure they are at unity gain ☺. Talkback will use another aux channel. Patch aux send 7/8 into protools and set the input on the channel strip accordingly. Record enable, check levels, make sure the gain stages are set, and record the drum groove with only the kick, snare and toms. All mics should be recording this. After that is successfully tracked, take the kick and snare off of record. Set up two more mono audio tracks and label them as oh L and R cymbals. Record the cymbals now with only the overheads. Hope the drummer in the session knows what he is doing and can keep good time, otherwise this process can be a mess to edit! Use the last aux channel for Compression on the cymbals. You can now squash the hell out of the cymbals with affecting the tone of the drums in your overall mix.