51m0n

[quote name='redstriper' post='1349552' date='Aug 23 2011, 09:39 PM']What is wrong with Cubase 1 ? I ask because I use it and I can't imagine what any newer software can do that it can't.[/quote] Oh boy.... Complete grouping freedom for a start Inbuilt time stretching/pitch shifting, that not only works, it sounds excelletn too Extremely wide ranging and efficient and most importantly fantastic sounding built in effects Total customisability to match your workflow No concept of a midi track vs an audio track vs a group, a track is just a track Full 64bit version (for modern machines this allows use of immense amounts of RAM) Written to take advantage of modern multiprocessor machines from the ground up - Cubase 1 cant do this and so only utilises the power of a single core/hyperthread Large choice of real nitty grritty things like pan law on a per track basis Ability to apply different fx to different objects in a track Totally non destructive editing of audio dry/wet mix levels of every vst on any track, even if the vst doesnt have this built in Complete automation of any and all parameters of every channel, and every paramter of every vst on every channel Up to 64 channels of sound per track - allows massively complex routing to be set up that then makes for far easier mixing Active forum where you can find help, tips and tricks, request features, and talk directly to the developers ..... The list goes on and on and on...

The answer is, dont listen to modern pop, do listen in a proper environment, rather than in the car....

[quote name='Wil' post='1349173' date='Aug 23 2011, 04:57 PM']Could it be a result of digital recording - more frequencies from each instrument are present and potentially taking up sonic space in the mix? Plus modern music is more likely to include synths, distorted guitars etc.[/quote] Interesting point, all the older stuff you are talking about was mastered for vinyl, and as we all know on vinyl you cannot have too much deep bass energy as you will literally pop the needle out of the groove. Now we have digital there are no such constraints so bass can (and does) go a lot deeper. The point is that the OP feels that along with the greater energy at deeper frequencies there is a perceived lack of mid range info to give his ears somehting to grab onto and relate to timbre and pitch of the specific bass instrumetn. Again I dont think he is wrong, the loudness wars have also meant a massive reduction in the ratio of RMS to peak in a track, or how much the volume changes when something loud happens (like a kick drum transient), leading to far less punchy sounding CD's. Ironically this is as a result of record execs wanting to have the loudest track on the radio when heard in a car....

[quote name='cheddatom' post='1349116' date='Aug 23 2011, 04:08 PM']yeh when we record properly I double track most guitars. I play in a sort of "jam band" type thing where we just turn up and play, and I record these. There are no vocals so I quite like dominating the centre of the mix with bass, but that requires panning the guitar, and there's only one track. It's not important enough to chop up the guitar track and make it sound like another take (although i'm kind of lost trying to imagine what i'd do - cut it into 5% chunks and stretch some and squash the others time wise?). Is there any way to easily avoid the comb filtering etc? Like pitch shifting one of the tracks or something?[/quote] You are looking to move some of the initial attacks back or forward in time a bit, to loosen up the two tracks. Another way to do it it to reorder the sections, or even swap individual bars around where possible.

Actually I think its the car stereo to blame, and the listening environment in general you live with in a car. For one you have immense noise in that environment, secondly it is highly possible that the bass response is highly tuned to the point of producing 'one note bass' and nothing else on that system. Both of these situations will cause you to only hear a single tone from the bass across a variety of material. You suggest that all bass tones in modern pop are the same, well depends on the modern pop really, but deep pillowy bass is easy to mix the rest of the track to, its underneath everything. One other poitn, the worst palce to hear full deep bass is tinny little laptop speakers, instead more and more amterial is mixed for earbuds, and the car (large contributing factor in the loudness war was geting mixes heard in that environment).

[quote name='cheddatom' post='1349073' date='Aug 23 2011, 03:27 PM']I tend to find phasing issues when doing this, so I play about with the delay between 3 and 20ms until I get a sound I like. If I were to EQ or compress one of the tracks differently would that somehow stop the phasing issues?[/quote] Ideally you wouldnt use a simple delay at all, because it will cause comb filtering and phase issues. The editing the second track will significantly improve the situation. It is time consuming but it can certainly be done and really quickly in today's DAWs. In place of that then anything else you can do to change the nature of that second track a bit (without turning into something pants in the mix of course) will really help. Remember the ideal is a true multitrack. But even then you can treat the two differently to a certain extent.

34ms is a long time in terms of this kind of processing... Not wrong at all just long. The human brain can detect time alingment differences between left and right ear down to around 3 or 4 ms

[quote name='Skol303' post='1348781' date='Aug 23 2011, 10:41 AM']^ Ha ha! Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at right now. I finish something and it sounds "ok", then I come back to it the next day and it sounds terrible. Practice makes perfect, and all that... so I guess I have a lot of practicing to do. Cheers again for the top notch advice. You've definitely given me some 'clarity' in terms of how I should approach EQ'ing, which has been a great help. Honestly, you and Rimskidog should a write a book on this stuff some day! "Never Mind the ****ocks: Here's the Basschat Guide to Mixing" ^ PS: I'm probably being very thick here... but what do you mean by "multi track" in this instance? I understand this in the context of working with two separate guitar tracks. But if I have only one guitar track, then the only option I can think of is to duplicate it and pan the original track left and the duplicate track right (both in mono). Like I said, please explain further for the sake of my addled brain![/quote] I really do mean multitrack, double the guitars, especially in rockier stuff, and hard pan them. Its so much the sound of modern rock that without it you are almost not in the same genre. If you only have a single guitar source then you can do all sorts nasty tricks like send a slightly delayed signal to the other side, adding a spot of reverb or compression or extra dirt to it, or some kind of chorus/flange/modulation to it or the reverb or the delay, eq it differently over there, anything really just make it slightly different as well as slightly delayed. Or you can put some other instrument over there - Hammond is always a good one - to balance things out. Hell even an automatic double tracker vst is better than nothing! If you get serious about this you can certainly use massive amounts of time copying the original guitar part and then editing it to be out ever so slightly with the original track, cut here, stretch there, chnage the levels here and there so the compression acts differently, make it sound real, and subsequently the two together will sound fatter. In this day and age nothing is unfair. This will work better than the simple delay trick, and give you ultimate control compared to an ADT effect. If you just duplicate ithe two all you are doing is raising the volume of a track panned central. That is exactly what we are trying to avoid at all costs, its far too much competition with the lead vocal. Get it right and you have: Wall of Guitar + Perfect Vocal = Mix WIN! Other possiblities are to take this approach and in the heaviest choruses edit two more tracks up and place them at about 90% L and R and add them to the mix just for the biggest payoff choruses. Doesnt half add to the wall of sound if doen with care.... All from a single guita track. Forget what the band line up is, forget what the band say go mad and produce a mix so devastatingly effective that they realise thats what they actually wanted ion the first place (HINT: this may only work sometimes!)

True Nige. A musical instrument is a tool for making music. There is at least one joke in there I'm sure... In todays world of mass production almost anything is a halfway decent bass, certainly with a proper set up I have seen very few basses that couldnt do the job adequately without a good set of strings put on properly (given the required amp and a decent musician etc etc) Doesnt mean we wouldnt prefer this that or the other in its stead, or that certain instrumetns perform better in certain musical or acoustic environments than others for certain musicians though. Or that the audience will ever be able to tell.....

[quote name='Rimskidog' post='1348434' date='Aug 22 2011, 09:19 PM']Now I just feel old As ever though, great explanations from 51mon. More articulate than I could ever be. [/quote] Me too! I feel better when I remind myself that 16 tracks (not 8) was the defacto standard in a decent small commercial studio when I started. It doesn't help a lot, but it kind of takes the edge off! And thanks

[quote name='Skol303' post='1348067' date='Aug 22 2011, 03:18 PM']^ Superb and detailed advice as always, 51m0n - and greatly appreciated! So in essence: there's no point me getting too hung up on frequency ranges, because ultimately I'm going to have to treat each instrument in each mix in a different way... so I might as well start training my ear now, as that's what I'll end up using anyway. I think I get it now, cheers for bearing with me! I actually had some proof of this over the weekend, when I was practicing with EQing. I did start by using some of the frequencies I'd posted in the document, but in the end I ended up resetting all the dials/faders and doing it all over again by ear! I'm reasonably confident using things like stereo width and panning, but compression is another 'dark art' that I'll probably be asking for your advice on in due course... Anyway, thanks again.[/quote] Yeah exactly!!! Every single person on this forum could learn how to do this in a short time, it is not hard, and the best bit, the result is the right one, every time. It is very intuitive. As soon as you start imposing someone elses findings from some other mix you are going to be going wrong. Training your ears to do this is totally and utterly different from the ear training a musician needs. Rather than identifying intervals and chords you need to learn to identify regions of detrimental frequncy build up. Of course you still ge to make all the wrong choices about which of any overlapping instrumetns is the dominant one in that part of the frequency range One 'gotcha' that will get you time and again (still gets me), in learning to concentrate your attention on a very specific part of the mix in terms of frequency I find it becomes increasingly easy to put aside other areas of the mix, and sometimes you come back to your work only to hear all the bits that you never got round to fixing. Suddenly the mix you had a warm glow about has become an absolute mess. Time to get the eqs out and cut some more crud!!! Compression is a similar beast, a lot of people find the concept hard to grasp, and the tools hard to hear, and the available parameters too many and too varied with bizarre names and so decide that comnpression is the work of the devil and the best approach is to use either a cookie cutter set of parameters without really understanding what that should/could/will/did do. Its as bad to do this with compression as it is with eq, both will damage your mix equally! Learn how to use a compressor, and then you dont worry about cookie cutter settings, you just tailor the sound to your needs for the mix. Put it another way mixing is a bespoke activity, like tailoring, if its done right. Off the shelf never fits as well, never looks as good, but it is cheaper....

I think a lot of this way of working eq comes from using real desks to mix back in the day, and on a real desk two things become apparent very soon:- 1) You never ever look at the frequncies when you turn a knob on a parametric eq, cos your hands are in the way 2) the frequencies printed on most desks are laughably innaccurate anyway, so they are only good to document a mix on that particular desk, they are useless for any other instance of that device even. So I would put money that Rimskidog and I , having learnt to mix before the advent of computer DAW mixing are totally at home with the idea of listening to a mix as we mix rather than lloking at the screen - I still always turn the display off very regularly when mixing, I even keep the lights down low as I want as little visual info coming into my bonce as possible.

[quote name='Skol303' post='1347215' date='Aug 21 2011, 03:38 PM']^ Gotcha, and I couldn't agree more with either you or S1m0n. More than happy to bow to your superior know-how Like I said, I wasn't suggesting that a list of frequencies should ever replace using your ears - otherwise the best studios would be run be deaf mathematicians... all I'm saying is that for me personally, it's certainly helped to know, for instance, that I can lose some of the 'boominess' from a typical kick drum by starting to tweak its frequency somewhere around [i]here[/i]; or I can usually make a snare sound more crisp by boosting it somewhere around [i]there[/i], so that's where I'll start twiddling. Of course, it depends on the song in question and the context of everything else in the mix. But for me, it has helped to have a rough idea of where each instrument [i]usually[/i] lies in the frequency spectrum. Not as a replacement for using my ears, but just as a starting point to help me understand where different sounds might be sitting in the mix. [b]You guys can probably reel off the typical frequency bands of instruments in your sleep, so for me it's just been a basic exercise of getting at least some of this understanding for myself. The rest, as you say, is going to be all about listening, listening and then listening some more![/b] Anyway, you can count on me pestering you guys for advice when I get stuck! [/quote] This is the crux of it, not really, well, kinda, maybe. I could list a load of frequencies where stuff can happen, but I cant tell you where it really will happen on a given source. I dont need to, neither do you. You have to learn to use your tools to work it out. Mixing is a jigsaw, you have a load of sounds and you want to ge tthem to sit together such that you can hear them all and there are no areas where one piece obscures another. You have three ways to do it (off the top of my head). 1) Cut holes in the frequency spectrum to allow them to slot together 2) Change the envelope of the sound so you effectively move the energy in the time domain to a differnt point 3) Use the wonder that is stereo to make things sit alongside each other. You are concentrating on 1. In order to do this you need to compare two sounds and figure out a couple of things:- 1) where are the 'nasty' parts of the sound that [i]you[/i] dont want in this mix - use a paramteric eq, boost a band by 6 to 12 dB and then slide the frequency up and down until you hear something about the sound you dont like, then set the gain to 0dB, we will adjust the gain at this frequency later if necessary.... 2) when they are both playing, does one overlaps the other in a detrimental way, if so choose which sound you want to hear in that area then go to the other sound and repeat 1 but listen for more build up in that area that is overcrowded, then cut the gain until the two sounds are no longer a mess there, and you can hear the one you want to. 3) when you have got riod of the build up then listen again in context and see if you can still hear that nasty part of the sound, if you can grab that gain control on the frequency in 1) and pull it down, dont bin it (the nature and timbre of a sound is so often actually a result of the nasty part of it - more than you will ever believe!) The point of this is simple it doesnt matter what the freuquncies are! Put this another way, you need know the following:- 20-40 Extreme sub bass, rarely actually detectable on hifis, so you can bin anything below 35Hz almost always and it will just make things sound better 40-80Hz Deep bass, that biiigg warm pillowy bass area, too much and things become undefined, too little and things will sound empty 80Hz Lowest area of a normal male voice 80-130Hz Bass, like old school bass, not super deep but you know, punchy and full of energy - too much will sound thuddy 130Hz to 500Hz Low mid, this is the killer, somewhere in here is all the mud and crud, somewhere in here is the warm and round, too much of this on a non-bass instrument (ie guitar) is going to cause you a world of hurt on the bass, too little and hese instrumetns will have no impact. B ottom end of the snare, and female vocals are in here somewhere. 500-1KHHz - there is presence in here, but too much is nasal 1KHz -3KHz Again presence, can sound scratchy and very very tiring, but is also where your ear is most effective (Fletcher Munsen old boy!) 3KHz-6KHz Lots of toppy sibilant presence on vocals is somewhere in here 6-10KHz de-essing territory (can go as low as 4KHz as it happens) 10-20KHz can we say bats? This is air, too much is tiring and distracting and will show up on hard tweeters as painful, too little and whaqtever else you do will sound muddy. Right now you could have written out something along thiose lines with a little thought, play with some sound sources (say a drum kit recording on 5 or 6 tracks to start with) and play the game (my bro Rimskidog and I) have suggested with eq, see how these areas of the frequncies interact and how they sound when you boost and cut them. Now forget it (its like jazz in this regard!!!!) because you can intuitively understand this stuff within a very very short time, it is not necessary or even helpful, to put numbers to frequencies to mix, it is only useful when talking about mixing, and that is the rub, you are talking about how to actually do it, and Rimskidog and I are telling the truth. If I said to you, what kind of frequency range is upper mid, you could hazard a guess, so listen to the sounds and think "is the upper mid ok?" and then go there (mentally) and concentrate on it. It is that simple, you dont need to get tied up in the numbers for this. Use the other tool (eq) to make changes and really get to grips with the specifics of the area. Same with compression! As for stereo there needs to be the following in the center of 99.99% of mixes:- Kick Snare Bass Lead Vocal Everything ( I mean EVERYTHING) else needs to get out of the way, nothing else matters. By out of the way I really mean at least 70% panned, on a rock track 100% is fine. Double up guitars to pann them left anf right (do multi track them, do not just duplicate the same track and pan it) - if that doesnt fit the situation then send a delay or reverb to the other side to widen the guitar. I could bang on for hours about reverb vs delay for ambience, and other special effects, but the core skills to mix are really, frequencies (eq), envelopes (compression) and stereo space (panning). Get those right and you are 90% of the way there. One last point, dont change it unless its a problem. Hardest thing in the world is knowing when a sound is right....

Three words:- [size=7][b]Use Your Ears!![/b][/size] Nothing else matters, no guide lines, however well written, apply to mixes in the general sense all that well. Some idea of where you may find various parts of the sound are useful, but using a sweep eq properly to find them [i]in the context of the mix[/i] is the real truth. Any other approach will not work nearly as well. Some of those eq points I would take with a [b]huge[/b] pinch of salt, kind of like the size of Jupiter, but heavier.... The idea that you can compress something with various settings as a starting point is pretty bogus too to be honest. Instead learn how to set one up to do various things to a sound, practice on various sounds to change the transient in some way you predetermine (soften the attack, thicken the punch, add sustain, cause pumping or release artifacts) try and achieve these results deliberately, a couple of days of playing around with a decent comrpessor vst and you will been way way better off than if you try and apply the same cookie cutter approach to various source signals.

[quote name='4000' post='1345337' date='Aug 19 2011, 12:28 PM']Personally I think the Wal on BSSM is is his best sound.[/quote] + several million.....

The main melody vocal and backingvocals/chord changes reminds me of Zepplin a bit - may be going mad though ) Thats a compliment!

I wonder whether that grind on the full bass is actually the stingray preamp breaking up a bit due to the level its trying to produce. If the MB blue clip light is staying off then I would hazard a guess that that is the case. Could well be wrong though Either way its no bad thing if its a sound that works right for you in any given situation, in this one I preferred the tone with the bass on the preamp dialled down. Either way its lovely material, I'm sure it sounds fantastic live!

2nd track is a lot better for me, I'm surprised by how much actually, I listened through the first one and really enjoyed it, lovely song, beautifully performed in both cases. Back to the bass, the 2nd track is warmer and sits in the mix better, its lovely and strong, but round and plummy at the same time, really really dig it, very old school. I would say I can hear the odd clack of the strings against frets in both, thats just how you play, its cool though, kind of reminiscent of someone digging in a bit on a db. Its not that toppy nasty metallic click (at least not on my cans), so much as a nice rhythmic chacchtk (?) sound. Personally IMO you can not beat a little Tascam or Zoom type device in the room for this kind of attempt at objective analysis of a set up, if that means the bass is on the rhs of the recording, that fine, because, guess what, thats where the bnass was from the perspective of the device/someone standing where the dcevice was. Frighteningly honest those tools are, every band should have on and use it for this kind of documentation I think....

Thats excellent Dave!

[quote name='Linus27' post='1344285' date='Aug 18 2011, 12:49 PM']Do you think that a Gramma Pad plus an extra strip of Platfoam under the front to add as a tilt would work? I only use a MarkBass combo and have been looking at a tilt. I like the idea of this Gramma pad but it does not raise the combo up much. Adding another strip of Platfoam under the front to tilt it would be ideal but would it take away some of the effect the gramma pad does?[/quote] Yes, and I think it would add to the effect as it goes, more foam = even less vibration based coupling. Should be a very cheap way to get your tilt on and improve on the already excellent GP.

[quote name='cytania' post='1343666' date='Aug 17 2011, 08:58 PM']Anyone remember the Real Audio format? Sounds like this forum is ready to throw MP3 in the same dumpster. The only real argument is between wav/aiff and flac. Nobody has really tried to convince me to stop spinning CDs but most are drawn to computerizing their music. Back in the 70s/80s people got turned on to Hi-Fi by hearing some else's system or hearing one in a specialist shop. No one mentioned backup or convenience. The sound was an instant seller. By the way, if the Sonos goes up in smoke does home insurance cover the downloads in it? More to the point has anyone here lost a physical record collection and got the cost back on their insurance?[/quote] Ogg can sound pretty darned good too (although it is largely a lossy format it does have a lossless wrapper around FLAC for storing the metadata we are so used to now). You couldnt back stuff up in the 70s/80s so it wasnt relevant (except by copying to a crudy cassette). The sound of high quality (88.2 and above 24bit) source is significantly better than mp3 or CD on a decent system. Like it or not convenience seems to be the largest factor governing how we buy and listen to our music. High quality be damned if it isnt convenient. For the record I spend more time listening to CD or CD quality rips (of my own CDs) than anything else on my stereo, and it does sound good, but I also check mixes on that stereo, sometimes at significantly higher than CD quality, and it does sound better, particularly wiht the top end and the sense of the space the recording is perceived to be in. I have also listened to plenty of higher quality mixes both commercial and not and there is a very real difference.

Oh, and Bob Katz knows his *&^@!!!!

[quote name='BigRedX' post='1343488' date='Aug 17 2011, 06:29 PM']I don't agree. Lossless audio codec of all kinds will soon be a thing of the past.[b] The space savings that they give you are entirely dependent upon the dynamic range of music, the less dynamic range the less the compression possible[/b]. Also every extra bit of encoding and decoding that an audio file undergoes increase the chances of errors in the audio stream which decreases audio fidelity. These days hard disk storage is ridiculously inexpensive and solid state storage is getting cheaper all the time. When most people's audio storage is measure in Terabytes, what's the point in increasing the possibility of errors to save a few megabytes?[/quote] Errr I dont think that is actually very accurate. Data compression has nothing to do with dynamic range at all, it works on an entirely different principle. FLAC is a form of data compression. The more repetition in the file you are compressing (of any part of the data) the more compression it will give you. FLAC is a data compression system optimised for a specific form of data (audio in this case). ZIP is optimised for text pretty much, JPEG is optimised for photo style images, GIF for simple diagrams. It has nothing to do with dynamic range, that is a different kind of compression. Even by todays standards of cheap storage, very high quality wav files (192KHz by 24bit) are big, too big to be happy backing up several hundred albums when each one is roughly 10x the size of the CD. Its not just storing them you see, its being able to back them up, each album weighs in close to a DVD in size, how many of you feel like uploading 150 DVD on to a cloud storage solution with your crappy ADSL upload speeds (note, upload, not download, very very very different!!!), not many I think, so what about backing each one up to a DVD? No takers??? I am not surprised. Yet 192 24 sounds sublime, and FLAC does make it significantly lighter weight. And FLAC is LOSSLESS, that is the point, the result of unpacking a FLAC file is the exact same wav as you had before you packed it up as a WAV, it is a perfect replica, every single bit is the same, there is NO change. Same as with any other lossless compression format. The files are identical (this is trivial to prove, and FLAC has a complete test suite for you to do your own research with if you doubt the validity of these claims). Some interesting reading about [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_audio"]lossless audio[/url] and some [url="http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation_format_overview.html"]geeksville about FLAC[/url] in particular

[quote name='gapiro' post='1341386' date='Aug 16 2011, 12:33 AM']Slightly intrigued by this, but would be coming from cambridge, and am complete noob. Whats the low down on what happens etc? S[/quote] Bunch of bassists and kit in a big room. Lots of chat, rather informative or not, lots of drooling at expensive kit. Several cups of tea later you go home after a very pleasant time. If you're very lucky you dont find yourself selling a kidney to buy something new and shiny the following week.....

[quote name='Sonic_Groove' post='1342967' date='Aug 17 2011, 12:13 PM']+ 1000 Until streaming formats become ubiquitous you are in Phillips 2000 (not even Beatmax territory) and could be investing in something that will be useless very quickly. Brendan[/quote] I dont understand what you mean by this. FLAC is a Free (open source) Lossless Audio Codec It is not going away anytime soon, it is supported by a large number of software players, it is not going to disappear in the way of Betamax, since it is not any more dependant on specific hardware than your average PC. It is available on Mac, Linux (more correctly POSIX like systems generally), and Windows, on hardware systems and so on - for free.... Any file server can have a FLAC read from it with the right software (given its open source nature that will not change), its merely data after all, the interpretation of the data by a software decoder into a standard WAV (albeit of very high quality) is assured as a long life solution. A high quality DAC turns that into something your amp can use. What is to