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The sound of [size=7][b]WIN[/b][/size]

Software wise I'd really recommend Reaper - best bang for the buck DAW out there IMO. It comes with some of the best VSTs I've ever heard and is ultra lightweight and fast. It is truly superb. You wont need a control interface for mixing, although it can be nice, you will need to find a decent soundcard/interface, RME make arguably the best, but you will pay an arm and a leg. As for spec, very few cheaper lappies are really up to it, the harddrives are too slow usually, you cant get enough RAM in them and so on and so forth. Its not impossible though. If you dont want to worry about it get a top flight mac book pro, they can handle recording multitrack and mixing. If you cant afford one of them, then you need to look for at least 4GB of RAM (preferrably at least 8GB), preferrably an i7 processor (Sandybridge currently has issues with audio/drives apparently), although a fast i5 will do. Get one with an eSata port for an external harddrive. This will cost a lot of money, it will however do the job.

[quote name='risingson' post='1251328' date='May 31 2011, 12:26 PM']It was an amazing program. I have never been really huge Queen fan but have always enjoyed reading about their commitment to their music because production wise it really was unparalleled by anyone at the time, and Freddie was just so charismatic that it would be impossible not to love him. No one had done vocals like they did since the Beach Boys really, it was a great watch.[/quote] Agree they were some pretty excellent programs, not sure about the entirely unparalleled production, 10cc's "I'm not in love" could arguably be one of the cleverist bits of production of all time Read up on it [url="http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun05/articles/classictracks.htm"]here[/url]. Very very clever stuff! That apart though Queen did sound damn fine, I dont think they sounded better than Abba did though, as good, but not better (purely talking production here, regardless of whether or not you dig the tracks)

[quote name='Muzz' post='1251353' date='May 31 2011, 12:40 PM']I posted a while back, just after I'd got the first mixes back of the album we were recording in a local studio, and I was a bit sensitive about what I saw as 'my sound' being buggered about with. Incidentally, we were in the studio for 14 or 15 days, and it took me about 3 minutes to get the bass sounding good. More than 5 minutes, and I'd have been getting embarassed... I've just got the final mastered product, and I was completely wrong about my sound. It's been changed from what I was hearing in my cans while tracking, sure, but to the benefit of the band (and album)'s overall sound, and the changes are appropriate to the relevant tracks. Unless you're a professional sound engineer, or your band sound is built on a specific bass sound, or yours is the ego that runs the band, then having faith in the guy responsible for the overall sound is the most sensible option. I realise this isn't always the safest route when playing live, as there are good sound guys out there and bad ones, but as I've said before, live environments are such a crapshoot in what they do to your sound that it'll be a miracle if you get the same sound twice anyway. I'd also agree with the poster who mentioned he has a sound for home/practice/playalong use, and one for the band.[/quote] I remember that thread, really glad it turned out the right way for you!! Its really important to bear in mind how close you are to the music, it takes a person with a completely different 'head' on to think in terms of the way the sounds should all slot together as a whole, and in turn for best results it almost always takes another person to turn a bunch of mixes into a finished album (mastering) from the guy who tracked and mixed it in the first place.

[quote name='4000' post='1251305' date='May 31 2011, 12:02 PM']I think that is probably pretty much the point I've been trying to make, except that I'd describe "Tone" in this context not as "note choice / phrasing", but as "sound produced" (which to me is different). The [i]sound itself[/i] is not the same, however identifiable the playing may be, although Doddy doesn't seem to agree.[/quote] Thats what I said, but for clarification since my inner geek did get the better of me != means Not Equals, so where I said:- tone = timbre tone != note choice or phrasing I was saying that tone does Not Equal note choice or phrasing. It is the timbre or sonic quality of the sound, as measurable in terms of adsr (envelope) and frequency spectrum. Anything BUT the 'artistic nature' of the racket being created. I truly believe that the better a musician you are the harder it is for you to seperate the two (timbre and phrasing) when you hear someone play. Unless you also spend a significant (if not equal) amount of time sound engineering. Just my opinion, but I cant see how someone who can hear a player and get all the info out of their playing in terms of note choice, and phrasing could ever truly divorce that from the timbre. So people with very advanced ears for relative pitch and playing tend to have a harder time with treating timbre as a completely seperate objective aspect to the sound you are hearing. This is not a criticism its just something I have noticed. Fortunately for me (in this case) I am a truly crap musician (certainly by the standards of the really pro players on this site - Doddy, Jakesbass et al), but pretty good at hearing timbres etc etc.... This is not to say they cant hear by any means, timbres, and they are usually well ahead of the game compared to punters, but the fact is that top flight engineers do hear differently from top flight musos. Horses for courses I think. [i]<Runs away to put on his flamesuit with the chamois leather interior>[/i]

[quote name='Doddy' post='1250694' date='May 30 2011, 07:44 PM']No it's not 100% of the sound,but I think it's the biggest variable. While I agreed with you on the two sounds having differences,it is still very recognisable as being a certain player by the sounds that are produced-in that case it is unmistakably Claypool. I think that the differences between two players (regardless of instrument) is more obvious than the differences between two Rickenbackers....again I'm talking about sound,not style.[/quote] I'm going stick my big oar in here. Sorry, can't help myself! So I see it like this, tone = timbre. They are the same thing. This means tone != note choice or phrasing. To me at least. So removing the note choice and phrasing from the equation then the same player has the same hands and may or may not play two different instruments in the same way, I know I have played different basses that have made me approach the instrument at a very low level differently, in other words the way I pluck the strings themselves and the way I hold the instrument is definitely different. In the case of the two Claypool tracks the timbre is hugely different. One is mildly overdriven and quite wide, the other is cleaner and very nasal/midly. Thats before the rampant fx use. If you think about it, Les has a 'target tone' he is aiming for, like you and I, for any particular project, and he has within his available arsenal for achieving that tone, a spectacular array of fx, amps, preamps, cabs etc etc. So regardless of the bass in his hands he can go a huge way toward processing the output of two or more different instruments towards the same final goal. A common part of the Claypool sound is the compression he uses, there's almost always plenty, and you can really really hear it. It almost defines his timbre more than any other effect to me. The possible exception is the mild overdrive he likes on the low end. Could I make any instrument sound like that? Not quite, but given the right rig and time I could get so close that not one of you could tell the difference. Certainly not from a youtube clip of the output of the PA. Except for the note choice and phrasing of course, I cant play like Les (believe me I tried for long enough in my yoof). What I am saying I think, is that the note choice and phrasing makes two players sound different far more than the attack on individual notes. And that the plethora of tone and transient shaping tools out there can make two players timbres sound incredibly similar timbrally, what you cannot do is make the players play music the same way. So any time a player picks up a different instrument he is likely (though not always guaranteed) to try and play the instrument the same as any other, but his phrasing and note choice will be the same almost always, which makes us say "He sounds the same on any instrument". We should add the caveat that he sounds the same, DESPITE the obvious timbral/tonal change. All IMO, IME etc etc....

Cheers!

Once you've got your technique down unamplified to the point where you arent creating so much gank that no one can make out what you're playing you would be well advised to help yourself keep that tapped sound as loud as your fingerstyle. Decent quality compressor or a nice overdriving front end preamp (be it pedal, rack or amp itself) will really help here. Billy Sheehan makes a big point of the two fingers overlapped thin g, but also uses seriously overdriven parallel signal and compreesion by the bucket to get his chainsaw through mud tone. Which ugely helps both tapping and harmonics. I used to spend a lot of time in chopons switching between fingerstyle, slapping and tapping and the only way to remain heard is a decent compressor IMO (assuming you like cleaner tones).

Sledgehammer, fretless played with a pick, an octaver and huge (really HUGE) amounts of compression....

[quote name='JellyKnees' post='1243377' date='May 24 2011, 08:10 PM']Like i said, 'buy'??? The 'version' I had of cubase at the time was a bit unstable, the version of nuendo wasn't...I know they are basically the same thing, although I still think nuendo looks more business like, even though I now have a working version of cubase 5 too... [/quote] Nice admission of guilt there. There is no reason to be using pirate software for music produciton these days as there are so many cheap or free programs available that do the job as well as or better thna the expensive stuff.

Bootsy's VSTs are all superb, but NastyDLA is without doubt the best charcterful delay I've heard in a computer. Some other good free VSTs are (in no particular order):- TAL series: great plate reverbs, nice distortion fx, some cool dub style delays too. G series: I use GMax a lot as a quick brick wall limiter Jerome series: Some really nice 'quick and dirty' limiters/maximisers, PC2 a superb no colour compressor TLS series: Excellent bunch of coloured compressors/limiters FlangerHand: weird flanger thing, nice to automate PushTec: clone of a Pulltech eq, kinda... NU-tron: wannabe mutron Voxengo: Some really useful free mastering tools (beeper, M/S, span) Ambience: another very nice free reverb bluenoise mydrumset: nice free vsti drumkit....

I am pretty hard to please when it comes to a DAW, mainly because I was used to working on a desk with patchbays, and basically that lets you plug pretty much anything into anything - you may release the magic, or just the magic smoke, but you can do it. The only DAW I have found that lets me do this is Reaper. Some of the grouping arrangements I come up with to help make a mix I am pretty sure you cant do in any other DAW at all. For instance I can make a group at anytime, put in a track with a reverb fx vst, put in a another couple of groups of tracks then change the number of audio channels in each of those groups , then arrange the sends from the tracks in those groups to go through the different channels, and send all of theose channels to the reverb. Why would I want to do this? It solves one of the biggest headaches in using aux fx off groups, that when you change the level of the group fader it doesn't change the level of the track sends to the aux. This may not sound like much, but it is very very significant to me as it means I cna reuse a single instance of a VST for multiple groups, which in turn saves huge amounts of processing cycles :0) For £25 that is simply staggering. Add in the superb fx it comes with, one of the best gates and certainly one of the best compressors (and multiband compressors) and an EQ that is sublime and you can not beat that particular package IMO. The rest of the time I use almost entirely free VSTs, the Bootsy stuff is amazing (not that Bootsy!), Molot is a phenominal drum buss compressor, FishFillets are fantastic, SIR reverb is mind boggling especially since you can now get Eventide H3000 and Acoustica M7 pulses free to run in it!

[quote name='Rimskidog' post='1241010' date='May 22 2011, 11:25 PM']So I was bored: [/quote] LOL! Yeah, that sounds about right, you got dem Teleeefun-kennn mics innit. Heehee!

Oh and one last thing about those levels, this looks to have been run into a brickwall limiter (Waves Ultramaximiser or similar), if you cant hear any distortion I wouldn't worry too much, he's using it to get a higher RMS to peak level, or in ocmmon parlance, he's making the mix louder. If you can hear it at all in terms of artiofacts then get him to back it off. Also make sure he sets the output level at about -0.4dB, some CD players cannot cope with higher output than that, and it is utterly irrelevant extra level.

I can hear what he's trying to do with the slap back, its not a bad plan IMO, it's fairly authentic, but its too pristine, the echo needs to have degraded and been filtered to sound more authentic. Backing it off by a couple of dB and taking off some top and bottom, even running it through a bit of dirt (just the echo this!) would all help it out a lot. It really needs to sound more like an old knackered tape delay IMO. To be honest for a demo the mix sounds fine, the playing is fine, the sound is pretty natural (other than the nifty slapback). So for that purpose its pretty much good to go IMO. However, if I were looking for a release off this, and my mantra is always treat every tracking session, mix session and mastering session like it'll be your last (its definitely the last one anyone will remember) I'd be wanting a bit more energy off the drums, maybe some parallel compression on the tubs to get a bit more oomph, I'd work on the snare to get it sounding fatter (eq) and bit crackier (compression) at the same time, the kick is a bit tubby (for my liking), I'd treat it differently eq-wise. The bass is good, a bit quiet, I'd give it a bit more punch, but I'd do some wee tricks to keep the kick really clear when it plays alongside the bass, nothing you'd know on hearing it, but it would still be there. I'd look to making the guitar a bit wider, send a reverb or subtle delay to the other side of the stereo field to get it wider, leaving a big whole in the middle for vocals. I'd also do some magicy stuff to the vocal, its fine as it is, but it could be a bit more 'wow', so I'd spend a lot of time on getting it to sound a bit swisher, taking the reverb and sending it super wide, very very careful choice of up to three reverbs to make the final sound is my normal modus operandi on a lead vocal (1 ambience, 1 plate, 1 room/hall). Not that you'd hear it very much, but it all helps make a vocal sound like its in a believable space. Careful compression, and more often than not some sidechain compression on the extreme top end, not to mention de-essing so that all that added clarity is not overpowering. Usually some careful automation is required to dip the breath noise after that compression but thats not hard these days, although it takes a while. The backing vox get similar attention, plus a darker (or less hyped) eq, no sidechain compression, and longer predelays on the reverb to help sit them in the background. Everything is grouped up, all the different groups are glued together with just a bit of the right buss compression, end result is you get a mix with plenty of dynamics and very high RMS levels compared to the peaks, which is very good for mastering. In fact it ends up sounding pretty much mastered out of the box. Of course all of that would make this sound less of a demo and more of a release (without it sounding over produced) which may seem counter productive, but people, whether they like it or even realise it or not, are bombarded with music with exaclty this sort of attention to detail in the mix literally every day, and if they get a band turn up with a similarly pro sounding demo they are far more likely to book you for a better fee. You simply sound better. After all this stuff is always just an illusion anyway. Unfortunately this kind of treatment takes time, and that costs money, you would be looking at something like 12 to 15 hours work per song to mix to that level. On the plus side I would try and get the project off of the engineer, it may cost a bit to get him to run off the stems, but at a later date you could take those to any decent mix engineer and have them turned into a release, the tracking certainly sounds good enough to me.

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' post='1234716' date='May 17 2011, 06:53 PM']Mine are whatever sounds best in the room I'm in. Since every room is different acoustically my settings are different in every room .[/quote] +1 right answer...

When did you last change the battery?

ANother +1 to ER-20s, they do get a little uncomfortable after half an hour or so, but the woinder of pulling them out after a gig (playing or watching) and being able to hear a pin drop makes it all worth while!

Wow! Surprised by that disparity a lot. I have an sa450, and have used several different MB combos in reheasal studios, and have always had similar gain settings before clipping....

Excellent!

Zooms are superb. Any half decent PZM is going to be pretty stella too if set up right. Its what they are for....

Have a top gig mate!

[quote name='Geddys nose' post='1230077' date='May 13 2011, 04:00 PM']This is a cheap and easy way to insulate and soundproof- [url="http://www.planetinsulation.co.uk/ZGA3050.php"]http://www.planetinsulation.co.uk/ZGA3050.php[/url] We use it at work quite a lot for lofts/Studding ect.[/quote] That is completely unsuitable as sound insulation. No mass = no meaningful sound insulation below 1KHz

[quote name='Happy Jack' post='1229988' date='May 13 2011, 02:47 PM']But are you looking for sound-[b][i]proofing [/i][/b]or sound [b][i]reduction[/i][/b]? Using double-layered PB will be an absolute pain in the arse, and will only apply to the walls anyway - the ceiling/roof will be no better sound-proofed than was originally planned. If I need to use double-layered PB to reduce the volume, then I'll do it. But if I don't need that level of aggravation to achieve my target, then I'll give it a miss thanks. [/quote] Its the same thing. You can only attenuate, you cannot entirely remove. Of course the level of attenuation is what matters, and whilst I understand you want to take off 10dB, realistically you are going to need to do the best job possible to achieve that. The roof is an issue, you will need to prevent spillage through that as drastically as everywhere else or your efforts are wasted. Sound is like water, if there is a gap it will find its way through.