51m0n

Record the reheasals andthe gigs - there is really nor reason not to do this these days and its a piece of cake to send the files out to people too via wetransfer.com for instance. When everyone can hear the issue including the person responsible the expectation for them to improve will become far greater IME.

[quote name='72deluxe' timestamp='1392289312' post='2366765'] I use a BBE BMax-T and use the compressor on that, although the expander ("sonic maximizer" in BBE speak) also works wonders, so the compressor is mainly for peak limiting. [b]What do you expect for a one-knob control on a compressor[/b]?! [/quote] Something that is never quite right for any application.....

[quote name='ironside1966' timestamp='1391376733' post='2356542'] This could get quite complicated a boring very quickly. I also use the IK bass rig and the trick is not to overload the input. Do you use 24 or 16 bit?. I use 24 bit has it allows you more headroom I try to hit the meters around - 12db sometimes less. Good gain staging is important it will improve how you mix, when the signal has gone through SXV and all the processors it should it the master buss roughly the same has it went in, look up Fletcher Munson. We preserve louder to be better so to make good judgements you need a similar volume . The recording level of the DAW should not make any difference but how you drive the AD converters will especially on the cheaper soundcards try not to overdrive them. I try to get the sound right has early has possible and only use EQ to help the sound fit in the mix. To recap use 24 bit and try to hit the meters at -12 to -16 db when the signal has gone through SXV and all the processors it should it the master buss roughly the same has it went in. Just to contradict myself all amps preamps and some plug- ins have a sweet spot the trick is to find it if the signal is too hot try to bring it down before it hits the convertors [/quote] This. Always plug an instrument into an instrument in, not a line in, unless you have an RME UCX or equivalent which figures out the best impedance to match against the connected device with the kind of cold efficiency you would expect from a class A German product Recording at a high level is a very bad and unnecessary thing to do in the digital realm, so just dont do it. Record at 24bit, the digital noise floor is then super low and will not adversely affect your recording. Give yourself a good 12dB of headroom above your loudest peak. You can always use the free GGain vst to add some level later if required, you cant capture a transient peak more accurately if it goes too high on the way in. Do pay attention to your analogue gain staging on anything you are runnung into before the interface, get that at its sweet spot, my Audient mic pres like to be driven a touch harder than my RME mic pres, but sound awesome either way in truth. Get the sound as cool as can before you hit tape, however there is nothing wrong with the eq you have there if its like that to fit into a mix, Repaer's EQ is so powerful that you can get far more surgical than that if you need to, it certainly doesnt look overly complex to me. On the other hand if you are doing that to make it sound great to your ears on its own out of a mix then you can probably get closer to your ideal tone out of the box IMO. When making decisions always always match the levels of changed vs original or your perception will be squewed toward the louder signal, every time!

Another possiblity is sheer tiredness. I dont drink and play, but if I'm properly knackered after a day at work then if I'm practicing at home I struggle to remain focused. Same at a rehearsal, althought the combined energy of the band together usually lifts me through anything other than utter exhaustion. Gigs I'm generally running in a fairly heightened state jsut by playing a gig, but even then if I'm very tired it can be a struggle. You cant beat just lots of practice along to rehearsal tapes though (they need to be right though, obviously) and well written crib sheets to glance at before (though not during) every run through of a track at a rehearsal or at home can really help IME.

Voted, excellent track,some very good entries, one particularly so, best balanced, best eq'ed and best panned IMO.

[quote name='KevB' timestamp='1391517192' post='2357954'] I saw them when the [i]real[/i] James Brown was their support act [/quote] Me too

You need to be careful with the RNC on bass, set the attack slower than normal or you will get distortion artifacts....

You are screwed unless its entirely packed with meat acoustic absorbtion (ie an audience) Even then the R60 on that space will be huge, vary massively with different frequencies and there is likely to be unpleasant resonance with any bass from something in the room (sports equiptment, ducting, the ceiling) depending on the construction. Keep as quiet as possible and accept the fact that the audience are going to experience your band down a well..

Is that catching peaks or crushing the utter nuts out of your signal? Hell of a high ratio!

[quote name='flyfisher' timestamp='1390654285' post='2347945'] Sort of. [b]The advent of digital technology means that adding more features usually just means a bit more code rather than more hardware[/b]. Besides, chips are cheap and phenomenally reliable these days (otherwise how would a billion-transistor CPU chip ever manage to work?). The real trick is to make all the user interfaces [s]idiot [/s]user proof so the amp can't be damaged when things are connected wrongly. Sure, user-definable light colours are just a gimmick (and other 'features') but so what if it costs nothing extra? Someone might like them and the wider the appeal, the greater the sales volume and the cheaper the manufacturing costs, though whether that trickles down to a lower price is a different matter. Anyway, the market will soon determine what really matters and I doubt many people would refuse to buy an otherwise good amp just because it had programmable lamp colours as well. [/quote] Speaking as a software engineer, every line of code is a bug waiting to happen..... And as such, every line of code and new feature adds cost as it needs to be properly QA'ed and adds to the resource drain of every subsequent build-test-deploy cycle since it must always be tested from the moment its introduced until the death of the product, releases without true regression tests aren't worth sh*t. So no line of code comes free - ever....

Typical way of getting a similar feel would be settings like this:- Attack: Fast (5ms say) Release: Medium (50ms for instance) Threshold: [i]very [/i]low (this is always on and then some!) Ratio: 1.5:1 Soft knee if possible Aim to get 3 to 6dB of compression happening, 6dB on the loudest parts. To do this you need the very low threshold since the compression ratio is tiny. If you want the feel of hitting a saturation level put another comrpessor in series with the following settings:- Attack: Very short (1ms or less) Release: Short (10ms) Threshold: High (only coming on when you get aggressive) Ratio: Between 4:1 and 6:1 Soft Knee still thoug, this is trying to emulate a tube amp running into distortion territory not a compressor/limiter You shouldnt hear the first compressor at all, although you may feel it when you dig in. You may hear the second compressor when it engages, but but you should really feel it....

No, different makes of SSD in three different computers running 3 different OS's Beggars belief...

A colleague recently had 3 high quality and very expensive SSDs die on him losing all data in a week. In warranty. I don't consider that safe to use for audio....

[quote name='lowlandtrees' timestamp='1390415244' post='2345246'] Hope that you don't mind me jumping in here. I have a Kania contrabass....small bodied acoustic upright. I use a realistic piezo pup but want to record both pizz and slap. Should I use a large or small diaphragm condenser. Have AKG 714BULS and a small AKG pencil (can't remember model...silver colour). Have a few others but these are my most used. Room is bright but I use traps (framed duvet covers). So far been disappointed with the sound of the bass..muddy...tried close and distant miking [/quote] Impossible to answert without being there. You need to follow what I said in the previous post, find a good space, find the best place fo rthe bass in the space, find the best place to hear the sound of your bass when its in that place in that space. Put both mics there. Record. listen back and see which mic floats your boat best [i]in the mix[/i], nothing else counts, the mix is where it really matters....

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1390427348' post='2345445'] The distance makes an awful lot of sense. I was pretty tight in on the mic for the recording which inspired this thread and it was just not a cool sound and certainly not what I am used to hearing when I have done work in "proper" studios. Having said that, the usual venue has a Neumann something or other (U87?) and monitor on 15" ATC monitors, so I am unlikely to achieve that level of lushness [/quote] U87, U47, U67 all superb mics. You dont [i]need[/i] to have that kind of mic to get a great result though, it pretty simple really:- Find a space where your bass sounds ace, find the place in the space where you bass sounds most ace. Put the mic there pointing at your bass. To do this the difficult part is that you need to be in two places at once, playing the bass and wandering around listening to it, Hint get someone who can just bang out a decent enough stream of 8th notes on an A string, not so hard, and use that as a guide for mic placement. A great mic in the wrong place or in a poor space will sound plop as much a a less exclusive mic. Job done.....

One more point that i hope a little thought about the previous post will have already come into your heads. If your room is small or overly live (too much reflected sound) the critical distance is very close to the instrument you are recording. So if you try to record an instrument in a small room (or with a low ceiling) you may find you have to close mic it to stay insode critical distance by a large enough margin to get a good sound. This is why a lot of recordings in small rooms sound distant, its not that the mic is far from the instrument, its that the amount of reflected sound energy compared to direct sound energy hitting the mic is too high, because the room boundaries are close to the source instrument.

[quote name='Beedster' timestamp='1390407422' post='2345086'] As I've said before, everything I learned in two years of Electronic Musical Instrument & Recording Technology in the 1980's I could have learned in one weekend round at Si's [/quote] I doubt it, but we'd have a lovely cup of tea, and shoot the breeze for hours. It would be fun!

Or point reaper to that folder in its config as a potential source for VSTPlugins Pretty much any VST runs in Reaper.....

[quote name='owen' timestamp='1390344576' post='2344445'] Ooh! Thanks for that Si. I have the small AT condensor on a gooseneck which has always struck me as underwhelming. Perhaps I should try it further away. [/quote] Mic postion interesting points/rules of thumb/ stuff to know:- The larger the instrument the further away from it your mic needs to be to capture the entire sound of the instrument, rather than an aspect of the total sound that eminates from the part of the instrument your mic is closest to. This distance from an instrument that a mic needs to be from it to capture the entire the soiund of it evenly is the boundary between close micing and distant micing an instrument. In any room as you back off a mic from an instrument the level of the direct sound picked up from the instrument drops at a rate of 1/dxd (so if you move twice as far away the volume drops by a quarter). At some point (unless you're in an anechoic chamber) the level of the reflections from the room boundary become louder than the direct sound from the instrument. This is called critical distance. In order to capture a decent recording the mic needs to be within the critical distance, specifically a cardiod mic needs to be within 2/3 of the critical distance, whilst an omni (or a fig 8 for that matter) should be within half the critical distance, otherwise the recording will sound like its from miles away from the instrument, down a well.

[quote name='Beedster' timestamp='1390309617' post='2343802'] Good info. Do you rate the Samson VR-88 Si? Chris [/quote] Interesting, a lot of people think its scarily similar to the Superlux R102, which again, a lot of people really dig. I've read a few negative reviews on the Superlux though, compared to the 'expensive' ribbons (Coles and Royer), but that could be sour grapes from people who have spent the earth on great mics only to hear almost as good from something far cheaper. The active ribbon idea is unusual, and is there to help if you dont have a enough clean gain on your mic pre - ribbons need a bunch of clean gain, their output is lower than a dynamic or condensor typically, and they can have trouble if the impedance of the pre isnt high enough. Any decent pre should be OK with a decent ribbon. A cheap audio interface may well not cut it. The thing to remember with these ribbon mics (ie most of the non-specialist modded or very expensive ones) is that they are made consumer friendly at the expense of the sound they produce. Ribbons are seriously delicate mics, a strong gust of wind will damage the motor (ie stretch it enough to slaken the corrugations in the ribbon, which is very bad indeed) storing one on its side (esp a long ribbon motor) will damage it over time even! To help deal with this most of the available ribbons on the market go for the cheap and easy option of serious wind shielding in side the headbasket. This makes it safe to move the mic around uncovered, but it really damages the top end that the mic can pick up. Its a tradeoff. Most ribbon mic mods involve removing the headbasket, taking out at least a couple of layers of the protection, and replacing the headbasket, a good service invloves carefully checking the ribbon tension at least, or better yet replacing the usually rather thick ribbon with a far thinner one (we are talking in microns here!). The reason the LRM-1 is so good is it is effectively a hand assembled ribbon mic, put together by a single guy, who is a bona fide expert on mic tech (worked for ADK at some point IIRC). It sounds absolutely gorgeous on voice, very much radio presenter deep and smooth territory even on my voice, which is staggering since I dont have a very deep voice, yet it has plenty of top end for clarity - I cant wait to try it on trumpet! The mic you get is essentially fully modded to extend top end, and has a thinner ribbon out of the box, for less money than any other ribbon on the market - sounds to good to be true, but he is selling direct which saves 30% straight away. The downside is that you cant even move it on a mic stand without covering the mic up first, because you may easily damage the ribbon with the air pressure on it. And you absolutely must use a pop shield if there is any chance that the source is going to be puffing and blowing (singers, horns, vacuum cleaners etc) - with a double bass you should be fine without the pop shield. Also it is a long ribbon mic, and that means it is not a small microphone, looks the business on a stand behind a pop shield! One last point you absolutely must NOT use phantom power with the LRM-1 (and many other ribbon mics), you will release the magic smoke if you do, resulting in one pooped mic, still it'll always look nice on the stand.... For more info on Chinese made ribbon mics generally there is great info here:- [url="http://recordinghacks.com/2008/11/01/chinese-ribbon-microphone-designs/"]http://recordinghack...ophone-designs/[/url]

closing the pan width would solve that issue, but it was mixed on monitors, and in that case pan is going to necessarily wider to achieve the desired result in a room.

Line Audio CM3 (sdc) (~ £125 new) ADK S51 MK5.2 (ldc) (~£165) Heil PR-40 (ldd) (~£200 second hand if you look hard) NoHype Audio LRM-1 (ribbon) (~£105 new) That would be a flat small diaphragm condensor, a large diaphragm condensor, a lovely large diaphragm dynamic, and a hand assembled long ribbon, depending on the sound you want they could all sound great on a bass in the right room, in the right position. The ribbon would possibly be abit too boomy on a lot of db's, and is a figure of 8 pattern mic, so you need a nice souinding room for it, it will sound killer on the right bass though, especially if you are looking for a vintage sound, amazingly smooth sounding mic for vocal too. The ADK is a cheaper LDC that definitely punches above its weight The Heil PR-40 is out of your price band, so you could pick one up second hand, and if its not be mistreated they are fantastic mics, really exceptional at the low end. The CM3 is a seriously well kept secret, extremely flat, and a rather wide cardioid mic, its tiny, yet brilliant at capturing the real sound of a source in a room. I've had tremendous success recording all sorts of things with these, if you could fashion a gooseneck to attach to your bass the CM-3 is so small you could put it anywhere (not that I would advise recording DB from that close with any mic if at all avoidable).

Yep, its par for the course if you have an X-Y pair dead centre of the kit pointing down on the snare and then pan them full width. You can get a wider image with a spaced pair, but you tend to lose the middle of the kit then, which sounds far worse IMO

ANother thought, are you compressing the bass in the mix? Compression will bring up the quieter aspects of the sound (ie the spill). Its possible to use an expander to combat spill if its very carefully set up to some degree at least. Of course the best remedy is to have good spill, then it not only doesnt matter, it can make a recording far more awesome than not having any... I would recommend studying this short series of videos from George MAssenburg on micing up a band in a single room, he's a bona fide legend and this may give you some ideas:- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZOVZQgXl9k http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZQwlZgV6pI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLMjesvL9uE

Bleed is always there, in every mic, given the same polar pattern, condensor vs dynamic vs ribbon is irrelevant on bleed, omni, cardioid, hyper-cardioid, figure of eight is what counts. The DPA4099b is a supre-cardioid mic, which is tighter than most live mics (ie an sm58), its polar patten across frequencies is like this (courttesy of the DPA site):- You have to study this diagram a bit, its giving a lot of info about what frequencies are loud where. With careful mic position you can try and ensure as much as possible that the direct line from other loud sources hits the mic in its quietest areas. However you state that you were cordoned off with some gobbos and yet the worst spill was from high frequency instruments (trumpet and cymbals) - which the gobos should certainly soak up if they are in the right place. And that this signal was very distant. To me that really suggests that the signal from these instruments was hitting your mic after bouncing off a room boundary or two. In other words the room was too 'live' to get a controlled recording of the bass (with any microphone that can pick up frequencies over 1KHz, that is all of them) without too much room spill into the mic (note not direct spill since your gobos probably dealt with the worst of that) without more careful gobo, mic and player placement within the room. Most telling for me is that you say the cymbals and trumpet sound like they are miles away. You could attempt to roll off the top end eq in the mix on your bass mic, but its probably going to make you upset about some aspect of the bass sound (transient and string noises mainly I would think). The real solution is to acoustically treat the room (more/better), more diffusion and absorption would help tame that reverb, how big is the room?? Has it been treated? By whom (ie an expert or not).