51m0n

Well Plux can't make it, he's got a gig (splitter!) so it'll just be little ole me

[quote name='wateroftyne' timestamp='1347952907' post='1806948'] The word 'Funk' makes me sick up a little in my mouth. It just makes me think of [i]white socks and shiny suits[/i] with pushed-up sleeves. [/quote] Which is the antithesis of funk......

Funk, played really well, like proper grooving ace funky funk? Love it to death. All that 'wanna be funky' missing the point nonsense trotting out the same tired funky drum parts and cookie cutter bass parts (slapped, picked fingerstyle - whatever), with tired horn lines retreading the same old stuff, and over-souling vocals that on their own are enough to make me want to tear my own ears of the side of my head to stop hearing them. Not so much.... The other day I was in a rehearsal studio and everything we played came out all reggae, I mean properly layed back and really sweet reggae grooves. Turned out we were all utterly exhausted before we got there. So reggae is like funk but knackered maybe?? I do like a bit of reggae, when its really great songs, but then I like a lot of really great music that just hits the spot for whatever reason, could be the vocal performance (like the BVs on Sympathy for the Devil) the bassline (Story of American Life), the overall production (all of T-Power's Self Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind) or the Kazoo playing (Crosstown Traffic). Funnily enough I dont really like Nirvana, but the Little Roy album of reggae covers of Nirvana tracks is just brilliant....

A couple of 'cold hard facts in the light of day' type points. It doesnt really matter what mic it is, if she's moving around and not paying attention to her mic technique then the level will be all over the place. Physics is not on her side, volume drops with distance from a source with the inverse square law, so for every doubling of distance she is a quarter as loud. A good engineer can try and help this a bit with a compressor, but as soon as you rely on a compressor you will start to get other artifacts in to at least a small extent (the mic will effectively appear to be more sensitive picking up more ambient noise, she may start to push her voice hard when she thinks about it if she is struggling to hear herself in the monitors). A decent boom stand set up so the boom is parallel to the floor (or close to) and pretty much fully extended so the stand is well away from her body and guitar is a must, put a cross on the floor where she needs to stand if she is singing. The other thing to point out is that with the inverse square law the closer to the mic you start off at, the more a tiny change in distance will change the level, so if you are on top of the mic at the beginning and dip back six inches then the level will fall more than if you are a good foot or two away to begin with and dip back the same six inches. The trouble with being a foot away is that the gain structure on the desk needs to be set to cope with that (ie it will be far hotter into the desk than if she were putting the mic to her lips), and if someone then reaches up and grabs the mic off the stand, or talks into it from an inch away the level is going to be massive. In this case you need a limiter on the mic to catch that kind of issue and save the PA! There may be issues with feedback (depending on the acoustic and the volume required) but I would imagine you guys aren't exactly Lemmy loud.... A decent mic (condensor or dynamic) should be capable of doing the job fine though as long as the guy at the desk knows what he's doing and your wife is aware of where she needs to be (about a foot or a foot and a half max) in relation to the mic. But you cant get away from it, if she loses sight of the goal (projecting well to the audience [i]via the PA[/i]) then you cant win this battle. A final technical point, pretty much all the mics mentioned show more or less from proximity effect - whereby the closer the mic is to the sound the more bass lift they will produce. So if you try the approach of backing her off from the mic and turning the mic up (because she is just going to move about and you want to minimise the effect of this on the performance as a whole) then her voice through any of these mics is going to quite possibly sound a bit thin and need some eq to beef it up again. If you want an example of great mic technique then you would do a lot worse than watching some live K.D.Laing or Tony Bennet, both of whom have impeccable mic technique, no they aren't playing a guitar as well, but thats actually irrelevant...

[quote name='silverfoxnik' timestamp='1347879053' post='1805959'] Hear one of his talks a few years ago at the Portland Pub in Brighton & Hove and he was fabulously entertaining.. Told me off for chewing gum when I walked in the room IIRC! By the end of his talk he had everyone singing and playing along to 'Walk on the Wild Side'.. He started off as a tuba player in the army he said and has just gone on from there. Sort of bloke that should be Basschat's Patron or something.. [/quote] Was that the Brighton Bass day thing? Was a great day that, and Herb really ought to be the Patron Saint of Bass

Clever stuff, very free compositionally (ie you just dont know where they will go next). Dont really like his voice though, which is a shame - not his fault, other than the upper range he keeps hanging around in, which just isnt floating my boat at all - might grow on me though. Cheers Nige!

Another plus one for the Sennheiser e845, or depending on her voice the e835 is a great (and incredibly cheap fo rthe quality) mic, slightly less hyped, so it gets the mids out a bit better (less emphasis on the 4-5KHz region), which can be excellent for a lot if uses (speech being one of them).

Nice one cheers!

Yup, in fact some might say its his best work, certainly the track with the coolest front man and lyrics that he has played on to date...

She's writtern some fine music and is very much into her music as performance art sort of stance. Done very well for herself as AFP and before that one of The Dresden Dolls. I think she's been clever in the past at trying to try new ideas all the time to avoid the issue of record company control, not sure how great this one is though. By the by she's married to Neil Gaimon, which is weird somehow.....

Plux played bass, he didnt sing lead just lots of the BVs Release Easy is his favourite too! Like the guitar clean(ish) beautiful guitar tone, custom tele -> Cornford (just breaking up on the chords) ->sm57 -> API channel strip + Cascade Fathead II (Lundahl) -> Joe Meek 6Q Guitarist specifically wanted clean rather than dirty, went as far as I could toward dirty whilst remaining clean...

Better than through anything else

Its Berg, baby, do you really need to ask if its going to sound incredible???

Whenever I need to play along with stuff its laptop running Reaper with rips loaded into it (that way I can set up sections, loop whatever I need to, slow playback down at the same pitch, tune the pitch of the recording to A440 without changing the speed, etc etc etc) into aux in of Digitech BP8 (which I have to borrow off Plux, note to self invest in my own dedicated headphone amp!), Roscoe in BP8, BP8 to Sennheiser HD595 cans (which are rapidly wearing out). If I dont need to play along to stuff I practice acoustically, always. If I need to work on sounds from the pedal board then its full rig; fx like touch wahs (envelope filters) and distortions sound and behave differently when I'm playing through the big rig to when they are just coming out of speakers, because my touch is definitely different, whether I like it or not. Either way I get better (though not perfect) translation to playing with a band if I use the full rig than if I use anything else. Conversely when recording with a touch wah I like to hear the sound from the control room monitors, weird!

Do not have all the dimensions of the room equal! That way a truly awful acoustic lies with terribly strong peaks and nulls in standing waves at various frequencies (dependant on the actual dimensions)... This getting a decent sounding room is a tad tricky, but not by any means impossible. Aim for something vaguely like this:-

One point that no one has raised yet, that totally change the way you can rehearse is the room acoustic. If you want to be known as a truly great place to rehearse, rather than a room with a kit and a couple of amps (however nicely turned out) you can relatively easily score a huge win over all the other rehearsal studios by building your rehearsal spaces with the acoustic in mind, and the adding some suitable acoustic material (ie some DIY basstraps and absorbers/diffusers and a cloud) to make the room easier for the musicians to hear themselves in. Remember the better the acoustic the quietter the bands will tend to rehearse since they wont start a war to be able to hear themselves, the volume arms race just wont be as much of an issue. The smaller the room (and the lower the ceiling) the harder it is to get the acoustic to work well (especially the bass end). You dont need to go mental but non-parallel walls, decent bass traps a couple of broadband absorbers per wall and a couple of clouds off the ceiling will make a huge difference to the acoustic (honestly, completely immense difference), and also make your rehearsal space look like a full on studio ( = worth more in the eyes of the customer). It will also mean that any two track recording taken in there will sound immensely better! (cheaper recording facilities required then) Should have added that to the things I dont like about Monster, the rooms are a tad small and they arent acoustically sorted. Still the nicest place to rehearse in Brighton, but could be amazing with those changes IMO... As for how to get the best sound insulation you can out of partition walls, the BBC have done the research for you:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/rdreport_1995_06.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications/rdreport_1995_07.shtml Not to be confused with sorting out the acoustic in the space, this is about seperation between rooms, and short of seperate concrete slabs (see Trevor's Circle Studios build topic) walls built like this, on simple floating floors (hint - tennis balls are great at seperation) with a high mass ceiling will give you the best possible seperation for your money. You need seperate rooms within rooms and high mass for acoustic seperation.

[quote name='urb' timestamp='1347184676' post='1797682'] All workshops sound great - I'd quite like to bring my laptop/Ableton set up but it does involve quite a bit of gubbins (leads/boxes etc) and I won't be able to bring an amp - but if I could borrow an amp would I be able to use the house PA in the theatre bit? I'm not sure exactly how instructive I can be but Ableton is such a great tool for composing, jamming and performing I'd be quite up for plugging in and showing what it can do - not sure how much people already know or if they're interested but I've only taken this stuff out a couple of times so far so it'd be fun to get all set up - others could plug in too... let me know what you think Otherwise I'll just loiter about Cheers Mike [/quote] MIke, you're welcome to use my rig again if you'd like mate. I like hearing you play through it a lot, so it really wont be an issue for me

Oh, and if anyone is interested, those three tracks [i]are[/i] [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/182273-whats-the-sound-of-a-musicman/page__fromsearch__1"]the sound of a Musicman[/url]

Right, anyone interested in hearing the final mixes (as yet unmastered) can feel free to go and have a listen here:- [url="http://soundcloud.com/51m0n-1/sets/slow-motion-sickness-e-p-1/s-u42Wa"]Slow Motion Sickness E.P[/url] Hope you enjoy it. A brief word of warning, these young scallywags do like the use of lyrical profanity so the lyrics are possibly NSFW, and almost certainly not safe for little ones....

[quote name='Mikey R' timestamp='1347299842' post='1799053'] Last year we covered recording drums, maybe this year we could do something on recording a room full of acoustic instruments, such as a bunch of acoustic guitarists, with close and ambient mic'ing? [/quote] OK, not a problem, I will get some thoughts in order for that area. Excellent!

Let us know how the approach works out for you!

[quote name='barneyg42' timestamp='1347282255' post='1798766'] How about a lecture on one knob compressors! That should eat up about 30 seconds [/quote] IIRC my unprovoked rant lasted several minutes, not 30 seconds!

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1347289269' post='1798865'] Superglue melts polystyrene down to nothing [/quote] I would imagine it produces some very unpleasant gasses while that happens though!

[quote name='Hamster' timestamp='1347290965' post='1798896'] How about something about IEM's, the kit that's needed and practical considerations etc? [/quote] Not really a field of expertise of mine, since IEMs arent something normally associated with the whole recording process IME....

[url="http://www.monsterstudios.co.uk/"]This [/url]is the very best rehearsal studio I have ever used. They have very very clean and tidy air conditioned spaces to use. The guitar amps and drum kits are OK, the bass amps are a massive let down for me however (but I am a total snob) so I take my rig. They sell cold drinks, strings/sticks/fast fret whatever you damn well need to keep going. They are very friendly, but take the money up front (and why not, seems reasonable to me) with a very strict cancellation poilcy (again so they should!). They have a bright white light in each room which they turn on from the counter 10 minutes before the session ends to let you know its time to wind it up and get out for the next band, asystem that workds very very well indeed! If I could change anything it would be to improve the bass amps and cabs - but then I would say that!