51m0n

Bizarre, I really thought someone might find this useful....

New Bootsy Variety of Sound free VST compressor with IM saturation:- [url="http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/thrillseekerla-released-today/"]ThrillseekerLA[/url] Try running bass through it and playing with the odd/even saturation alone. Then play with the compression, its a bonza bit of kit chaps!

Anyone saying Reaper is clunky needs to give it a bit more time IMO. Its lightening fast in the right hands, and seeing as it is about the most configurable DAW out there(there are even downloadable sets of ProTools key mappings and look and feel layouts apparently) pretty much how you need to work can be covered. There are a few areas where its no all the way there I know (midi editing isnt it's strongest point for sure), but a little more time with it will reap huge rewards.

Not hanging about are they!

Studio 5, [b]studio 5[/b]! As in 5 whole seperate studio bits to play with - by god man! When this is finished we'll never hear anothing thing from you, you'll be so busy enjoying the palace of recording you have made. I am a little jealous (a lot actually). Keep it up, and keep on with the updates too!

Sound proofing requires mass and isolation. Concrete will provide mass, in abundance, but if its touching the walls it will still transmit vibration. Seperate concrete floor, room within a room, all standard fair for control room /live room type of thing. Checkout the Gearslutz [url="http://www.gearslutz.com/board/studio-building-acoustics/"]forum on studio builds for more info[/url]

You set 'em up....

Said the Actress to the Bishop....

Thing is you cant cut through a hole that isnt there. If there is no hole you wont cut through it, you will compete in that area and thats when things become messy, which defeats the object....

If you get the foundation right then it becomes easier to lay the textures on top. Guitar can lose a lot of low end assumingthe rest of the band are supllying it (ie bass, keys) and in the context of the mix not sound remotely weak. At the end of the day though the vocal is (9 times out of 10) the one thing that gets the least cut from it. It carries the song to the punters, it is the single most important part of the band, it is the mix equivalent of the King and Queen together in chess, the most powerful piece of the show from an emotional point and the most defenseless, without which you have nothing. Simply because the punters are hanging off the melody and lyrics, their entire conscious perception of most songs starts with the melody. If you ask a punter to sing (insert well known song here) they will start with the melody line of the chorus and work out from there, they wont sing any other parts except the hooks that happen inbetween vocal parts. Subconsciously most people actually recognise an awful lot more than the vocal, but consciously its a different story.

[quote name='thisnameistaken' timestamp='1330437663' post='1557437'] Every sound guy I've ever worked with has spent an age EQing the bass drum and then simply checked that the bass guitar signal exists and been happy with that. Although to be fair I suppose there's not a lot to do with a bass signal until everything else is firing. [/quote] Which is of course utter nonsense.

[quote name='WalMan' timestamp='1330433031' post='1557316'] Just back from the lunchtime wander and had to chuckle when I picked up Bass Player mag and was flicking through while waiting for a till to be free, to seethe final article in the mag was The Grooveyard reprinting an article from 1993 called .........."[b]Defend Your Sonic Space[/b]" That was actually more bemoaning live sound engineers for goiung for a monster kick sound at the expense of bass. [/quote] Yeah, I hate that so much - you get a kick threatening the foundations but the bass is just inaudible sub rumblings, wtf? Some venues make controlling bass incredibly difficult simply as a result of the design and structure, but as a very very general rule (and therefore often as not wrong) the larger the space the less this is an issue, and yet the bigger the venue the more this seems beyond the FOH engineer to sort out. Makes my blood boil!

[quote name='Beedster' timestamp='1330433644' post='1557327'] Good stuff, hope I haven't blown my chances of getting you to mix our next album! C [/quote] Not at all mate, not at all!

[quote name='51m0n' timestamp='1330429856' post='1557236'] As a further point wrt to mixing, the result is only ever as good as the song and the arrangement. [/quote] [quote name='thisnameistaken' timestamp='1330432327' post='1557297'] It's interesting that whenever this topic comes up, it's always discussion of frequency ranges and mixing and never anything about how the songs are arranged. If everybody's playing the same note or the same rhythm then nobody is going to 'cut through' - try thinking about harmony and syncopation a bit more. Or *horror* space! [/quote] Could not agree with you more! But great mixing is as much about getting the best oput of the arrangement as fiddling with eqs.

I agree that the idea of 'cutting through' suggests a certain tone and a certain approach that may not really work very well in a lot of circumstances. It does however suggest some concept of finding a space that may not really be the bass region in order to be heard. Where that space is depends on the rest of the band, the style, the arragement and to some extent the room too.

[quote name='Beedster' timestamp='1330431939' post='1557290'] Don't take is personally mate, i was only thinking out loud. Generally speaking things done well sound good, but that is not quite what the OP was about! As ever, I bow to your expertise. C [/quote] Not taken personally at all chap! Just trying to come up with something concrete as evidence. This process allows the musicality to shine through. If you want to enhance the chances of this occuring for your band live then a bit of sensible 'preprocessing' of the individual sounds by the band in order to create a cohesive whole will really really help, be you in a tiny venue or the Albert Hall (actually especially in the Albert Hall, terrible issues with excessives reverb in there for years ) The smaller the gig the less the engineer (whoever that is) can do to rememdy the situation (due to stage spill as much as anything else.

As a further point wrt to mixing, the result is only ever as good as the song and the arrangement. A really good (read expensive) mixologist will happily cut swathes of instrumentation out of your tracking in order to deliver a better mix. The recordist will record everything the musicians come up with (the tracking process), the mixologist turns that into a brilliant cohesive mix that is catchy, driving, emotionally enthralling, and moves from section to section pulling the listener along whether they like it or not, (the mixing process). It is an absolute art and science at the same time. The mastering engineer turns the recorded songs into an album by balancing them as a whole together (and adding the correct codes, printing the CD, working out the gaps between tracks etc etc) and brings the whole up to an acceptable level (without damaging the music hopefully).

[quote name='Beedster' timestamp='1330420076' post='1556975'] Mmmm, I wonder if we as bass players are a little self-congratulatory and naive? If I had a pound for every band I've seen in which the bass player is either booming ominously and thereby turning everything into mud, or cutting through like a razor and thereby destroying the musicality of the performance (assuming there was some there to start with), I'd have a new rig. OK, if these are deliberate stylistic decisions, no problem (and there are of course probably an equal number of examples of bass that can't be heard). I guess what I'm saying is that I think 'sitting in' and 'cutting through' are different things. OK, the musicians, especially the bassist, need to hear the bass, but the audience don't, they just need to hear the whole thing, and I'm not sure that, for live music anyway, and even for recorded music, the idea of partitioning instruments into discrete audio ranges in which each can be clearly identified and heard is necessarily musical, in fact it strikes me as all too often being an exercise in science as opposed to an exercise in aesthetics (despite the fact that as an audience we are increasingly being lured into thinking that what is 'well recorded' is also musical)? For sure, JJB's bass sitting in the mix would have lessened the impact significantly, likewise Macca's mid-era baselines cutting through would have messed up some good songs, so it's horses for courses, but I do wonder when i hear bassists talking of 'not cutting through' - and all too often blaming other band members for this - whether in attempting to cut through, we're trying to do something that isn't musical? [/quote] Please use the carriage return key and the occasional paragraph! The audience certainly do need to hear the bass. It is the root note of the harmony after all, and the gel between the rhythm section and the harmony as well. It is fundamental. Take it away and the music loses a huge amount, make it too loud and the music loses a huge amount too. It is a very significant part of the whole. The whole is, and should remain, greater than the sum of its parts though. The idea of partitioning instruments by frequency is not new, its been around since mixing became a real option (ie since eq's were available and multitracking and overdubbing became the norm), it is utterly vital to creating a well balanced mix. The human brain is incredibly adept at 'filling in the blanks' with acoustic information. It is called frequency misxing, and virtually every single record you have listened to made since the early 1960's has used this technique to some degree in order to let you hear the [b]music [/b]better. Since the early 70's it has been used extensively in all genres. In order to hear the complexities of all the different instruments it is necesary to play with their frequency spectrum. So where you have two instruments hot in a specific area the mixer makes a choice based upon stylistic and musical knowledge as to which should be the prominent instrument in that area. They cut the other instrument there to allow the one they want to have less to compete with. Otherwise we get frequency build up and a confusing mess instead of a nice blended whole. The art is in the choice of instrument in any place and the nature of the eq cut (how many dB, how steep the cut, how wide the cut) and so on. This is further enhanced by the ability of the mixer to change things in the time domain, the proper use of compression to tame peaks on some instruments and not on others , the use of compression as a tool to duck instruments out of the way - most commonly used to drop the bass by 3 or 4 dB when the kick strikes, to give better headroom and tighten the band up, but certainly not limited to that. The thing is bass guitar isnt just a sound between 50Hz and 120Hz, the harmonics of the bass can be as high as 4KHz (higher with piezo pups in there), if you choose carefully you can retain all the info the human brain needs to build the entire tone of the bass in the listeners head, without stepping on the other instruments toes at all. Similarly for guitars, keys, drums and vox. It is a seriously complex task to do really well, I think many people dont understand this or appreciate it very much at all. However if everyone just ignores each other and takes their 'bedroom tone' to the gig then there will be a large set of frequency build ups that are not condusive to a clear clean and powerful mix and the band as a whole will sound worse for it. Much much worse. And the engineer on the night cant help because there is no sonic boundary between stage and audience, any mud you create on stage will spill into the area the audience are in. Listen to the [url="http://kitrichardson.bandcamp.com/"]music here[/url], I can guarantee you that this was mixed using the principles of frequency mixing, that there was use of ducking, and serious compression tricks to change the transients of certain sounds so that everything could be heard correctly. Is the result musical or not? You tell me, but I know that no one yet has responded with anything other than praise for the musicality of the result. I can also guarantee (and prove) that if those techniques were not used (and used well) the result would have been a lot worse.

Semantics really. Cutting through/sitting well/balanced/blending in Same concept, maybe referring to different parts of the frequency spectrum being chosen as the dominant part of the bass sound to be heard (other than the 40-100Hz region which is, well bass). Its all frequency mixing with the band, finding that 'hole' in the rest of the band (or more likely holes) that the bass can poke through at and thus be heard whilst staying out of the way in other areas for other instruments. And vice versa, ideally!

Nice one, interested to see what you think

Damn I just saw this too, you beat me to it! Looks very interesting doesnt it, and a cracking price....

I've thoroughly enjoyed this thread, thanks one and all. Thoughts:- The thumpinator is tidying up the unnessecary stuff that you cant hear and just uses up headroom, a 4 string version clearly isnt really necessaqry unless you are trying to absolutely maximise that (cant see why anyone would need to - but someone might) Berg cabs in the ae series definitely seem ridiculously 'flap-free'. I get no large scale movement in my cones at volume, Plux's HT series cones move more (not enough to be worrying, but enough to really see), so in the event that you have an ae series cab (at least a 210 or 410) you are probably not getting anough extreme LF hitting your cones to make the thumpinator necessary (JB's crossivers are legendary, I wonder if they include something along these lines, and coupled with the HPF in the markbass it solves the issue). However its still going through the preamp up until the point where the MB head has its LPF in so some headroom is wasted for sure. I would think anyone running a small cab (ie midget or any 112 etc) would get advantages from one of these, and I imagine it could be helpful on db too, if nothing else it would lessen the chances of sub feedback considerably. The RH450 certainly has an HPF in it, anything to get more useable volume was certainly employed as a part of the preamp cleverness to maximise the apparent output of the amp. That wasn't where the critique came from, so much as the brickwall limiting of the signal to gain apparent volume, trading off punch and transient peak volume for average output - and more importantly claiming a wattage based upon the apparent volume rather than the actual wattage.

I dig Lamb a lot. This sounds pretty darned good to me, nice one!

Musicians arent sound engineers, guitarists, vocalists, keyboard players and drummers can all over play and consume too much of the frequency spectrum with their eq settings. Both issues make it very hard for punters as well as the band to hear the music at any volume, at a gig its a disaster. The advice above is all excellent, the band need to think as a whole not as a bunch of seperate parts. Take the time at a rehearsal to record the band with a Zoom H1 or equivalent as they currently are, then go around an dial out the excessive eq on the guitars (the mids are so much better sounding on a guitar in a mix anyway). Do the same to yourself - you dont need to be boosting mids so much as not cuttting them to the point where the bass disappears in the mix. This is the balance that we all should be striving for, no one wants an imasculated sound, but then no one wants to be unheard - or perceived merely as a rumble of worse a hum - mids are the answer, but like all eqing what you should be aiming for is balancing the mix with the eq. A great big sad face may work for you but a lot of people complain of it sounding all nasal and horrid (often as a result of boosting the upper mids a little too much) even in a mix. You also need to be careful with low mids as they are full of mud that can make your bass sound like undiluted porridge (yes really - exactly like porridge;)). As for levels, as a starter the bass should be set to the level of the kick, or just between the kick and the snare. No louder than that. This ususally means turning down, often by as much as a third with an acoustic kit - you will feel fear at this point! Bring the guiatristas down so they blend with you (rhythm) and sit just above you (lead). The guitarists will complain that they can hear nothing at this point - get their amps up high and pointing at their heads, then double check the effect this has on the level. Get the vocal over everything (which again can be a case of turning down) and use the graphic on the pa to dial out feedback. If the pa doesnt have a graphic, get one, and make it a 31 band graphic at that - they take 5 minutes to set up and more than double the available vocal volume before feedback. Run the song through once then record it. At home compare the mixes on a stereo - be sure to listen at the same level - the entire band will prefer the sound of the second mix, every time - or they are such prima donnas that you should consider getting out of the band.

Watch out fella, looks like a couple of the lines they are using are wonky, theres all sorts of funny gaps inbetween them walls there.... Looking great!