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.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, February 4, 2011
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.
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.
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