You may remember a few articles and videos I posted last summer on parallel processing — Parallel Processing: Bass, Parallel Processing: Drums.

To review, parallel processing is simply processing two copies of the same signal in different ways in order to produce tonal results that would be otherwise impossible with only one copy of the signal.

In other words, parallel processing allows you to utilize the benefits of a certain effect without overdoing it. Let me explain.

Here’s a screenshot of how I have the drums set up (click to enlarge):

I have the regular processing on the individual pieces of the kit: EQ, compression, gating. then I run them all through a Submix Aux track.

If you’re wanting to compress the drums, you can certainly do it on one aux track. However, sometimes compression can kill the attack and transients of your drum track. That’s where parallel compression can really help.

With parallel compression, you create two aux tracks. In this session I have one aux with no processing at all. On the second one, I put the SSL bus compressor plug-in, and set it to do some EXTREME compression (See pic at the beginning of this post). Then I blended the two together.

The first clip from yesterday was the kit by itself (the first aux track):

[See post to listen to audio]

For the second clip, I blended in the over-the-top compression of the second aux track.

[See post to listen to audio]

Wanna hear just the compressed drums? Here it is:

[See post to listen to audio]

With Clip #1, the drum kit sounds fine. With Clip #3, it’s pumping and breathing like crazy. The transients of the kit are muffled, but the body and ring of the drums and the sound of the room are all brought out.

By blending them together (Clip #2), you get the nice body and beefiness of Clip #2 without losing the transients of Clip #1.

Pretty cool, huh?

Straight from the HSC Production Club

This is an example of the kinds of things we cover in depth in the HSC Production Club. These are actually clips from the song I use for the Production Club material called “Treading Water.”

I’ve still got a few spots available if you want to join us. Over the next 12 weeks I will be unloading all sorts of info on my Club members.

Go ahead and sign up. You will love it. If you don’t, I’ll give you a refund faster than you can say “parallel compression.”

Click here to find out more. The doors close Saturday night, February 6th, at midnight. You won’t be able to join after that, and I probably won’t be accepting new members for several months.

Got an opinion? Questions? Leave a comment.

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I remember my Theory II class with Dr. Linton. He would sit at the piano and play an interval, and we would have to accurately guess. He started slow, but that didn’t last long.

Bum…BUM. “Major fourth!!” BUM…bum. “Minor third!!”

He would also play chord progressions, and we had to guess the chord AND the inversion. Pling…pling. “Four. First inversion!” Pling… “Five. Second inversion!”

A lot of folks hated it. I loved it. (Don’t even get me started on fixed-do solfege exams. Whew.)

Ear Training for Engineers

So if music majors in college are so focused on ear training, shouldn’t we as audio engineers focus on ear training just as much…if not more?

Probably so.

I can’t tell you how many time I’ll adjust an EQ because the settings look right on the screen. That’s so lame. I might as well turn off the studio monitors and take off the headphones. What good does it do to make audio decisions with anything other than your ears?

So I’ve got some ear training for you today. I may post more stuff like this down the road. We’ll see.

Listen Up

I’ve got two clips of a full drum kit. It’s the same exact performance; it’s just been mixed differently.

Rather than tell you what to listen for (which inevitably manipulates your mind into hearing things that may or may not be there), I’m simply posting these files for you to listen to.

Listen to them first, then make your guesses in the comments section as to what you think is different between the two.

The only rule I have is that you don’t read the comments below until you’ve listened and made your guess.

Here are the files. They’re 320 kbps mp3’s, so they sound pretty good.

• [See post to listen to audio]
• [See post to listen to audio]

I’ll post the answer tomorrow.

[Photo by fauxto_digit]

No related posts.

So, to both save some time and also answer all of these questions, I sat down this morning recorded my response to each of them…all thirty of ‘em.

There are all sorts of questions, and it was actually pretty fun answering them all. You can listen here:

Right-click here to download the mp3. [34 minutes, 46.9 MB]

Other Fun News

I’ve put together a free webinar for my newsletter subscribers. It’s this coming Tuesday, January 19th, from 7-8pm CST. Acoustic treatment expert Gavin Haverstick will be joining me to help explain acoustic treatment and answer your questions.

To access the webinar, you need to sign up for my mailing list. You’ll get a free copy of my new eBook Roadmap to Finishing Your Album, AND you’ll get all the information you need to sign up for the webinar.

Click here to sign up.

No related posts.

Last night I did a radio interview with Tim Hill, a buddy of mine from college. Tim hosts a political radio show on WEBR Fairfax in Washington, D.C. In addition to discussing all things political, Tim’s been focusing on topics of interest outside the political arena.

He’s been intrigued by Home Studio Corner for a while and thought it would be interesting to have me phone in as a guest.

Here’s a recording of the show. Keep in mind, the show was streaming on the internet, so the sound quality isn’t all that great.

Can’t see the player? Download the mp3 here. [21:35 - 9.9 MB] (Right-click and choose “Save as.”)

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Ever since then, I’ve wanted to compare the 58 to a microphone I use quite a bit both in my studio and when I play out live – the AKG D5.

I’ve loved the sounds I’ve been able to get out of the D5, but I’ve never compared it directly to the SM58, which dominates the live sound market.

The D5 is a pretty stylish mic, with its black grill and body and nice big AKG logo. It’s also a super-cardioid microphone, as opposed to the standard cardioid pattern on the SM58.

Aside from these differences, the microphones are fairly similar. They’re both dynamic mics, and they both sell for right at $100.

So…does one sound better than the other? Let’s hear.

Shure SM58

[See post to listen to audio]

AKG D5

[See post to listen to audio]

If you’re having trouble playing these, you can download them here: SM58 and D5. (Right-click and save.)

How It Was Recorded

Here’s a quick run-down of how I recorded these. I left the grill on both, and simply stood about four inches from the front of the grill. I recorded directly through a Focusrite preamp into my 003, and I didn’t use any processing on either take.

My Thoughts

Both mics sound good, but I think the D5 has a good bit more high-end content to it. It doesn’t seem hyped to me necessarily. It just seems like the highs aren’t as rolled off as with the SM58.

Also, the bass of the D5 seems to reach a little bit lower. Sadly, this is only really heard when the mic “pops” from my breath, but still, it was something I noticed. This may make the D5 a better choice for bass amps, for example.

All in all, while it definitely depends on how well each microphone sits in the mix, I’m pretty impressed with my D5. It gives some of the benefits of a dynamic microphone, in that it doesn’t pick up as much room noise and is a bit “aggressive,” but it doesn’t sound as much like a dynamic as the Shure SM58 did, particularly in the high frequencies.

What do you think? Which do you like better?

You May Also Like:

• 10 Ways To Promote Your Home Studio
• Shure SM7B vs SM58
• Free 12 Home Studio Necessities eBook

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Whenever I think about recording in my home studio, I tend to tell myself that I need to set aside at least two hours if I really want to accomplish anything of worth. As you can imagine, this is stupid.

I had a suspicion that this was stupid, hence the challenge. If I only have one hour to record, can I get anything done? Or would it be better that I just watch TV or surf the internet? After all, an hour isn’t very long.

So, in an attempt to prove myself wrong, I set the timer on my iPhone for one hour, hit start, and opened up Pro Tools.

When the alarm went off one hour later, I bounced the mix of what I had done. And? The result? I was rather surprised. With a little focus (and a little sweat…hey, I was a little stressed), I was able to put together a decent little song. Here it is. The song is called “So Close.”

[See post to listen to audio]

While You Listen…

Here’s the list of what I did over the course of the hour:

• Opened new session in Pro Tools (via one of my session templates).
• Inserted EZDrummer on an instrument track, and used tap tempo in the Transport Window to determine the tempo of the song.
• Opened up the groove window in EZDrummer and found a simple groove. Copied and pasted this MIDI groove onto the track in Pro Tools and duplicated it until it was five or six minutes long.
• Recorded a scratch vocal and guitar tracks (listening to the drum groove) – I used a pair condenser mics on acoustic guitar. (These were still set up from when I did my review of the stereo mic bar.) I sang through an AKG D5 dynamic microphone. (I used a dynamic with a supercardioid pickup pattern, so it wouldn’t pick up much guitar.)
• After recording the scratch parts, I listened quickly in Pro Tools to make sure the arrangement was how I want it.
• Moving forward, I muted the scratch guitar track and recorded acoustic guitar while listening to the drums and scratch vocal.
• Then I recorded bass direct.
• Then I went back to acoustic and recorded a higher part, with a capo on the 7th fret.
• Then I recorded the lead vocal (singing into one of the condenser mics in the stereo mic bar.)
• At this point, I had about 10-15 minutes left. I quickly threw up some EQ on everything, rolling off a lot of bottom end off the guitars and vocals, cutting some low-midrange from the drums and bass. I added a limiter to the bass to keep the levels somewhat consistent.
• Then I added a compressor and limiter on the master bus and tweaked these a bit to “glue” things together.
• Then the alarm went off.
• At this point, I had routed all my tracks through the master aux and out to a stereo audio track. I hit record and mixed the song in real time, adjusting levels as needed. (This is rather obvious, especially at the beginning, when I needed to turn up the vocals.) Since I was mixing via record-to-disk rather than bounce-to-disk, I was able to make these adjustments during the final mixdown.

Obviously, it’s not the most exciting or polished recording in the world, but I think it gets the point across. You can accomplish quite a bit over the course of one hour. Try it sometime, maybe this weekend? I think you’ll find that with a little focus, you can get that album done a lot sooner than you expected.

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It was a beautiful Langejans guitar. I had never heard of the brand, but this was a gorgeous guitar with rosewood back and sides. The guitar had a huge bottom end, but was also surprisingly bright as well. I loved the sound of it.

I decided to stereo-mic the guitar. However, rather than use a spaced pair of microphones – one up by the neck, one down around the bridge – I decided to place the mics closer together.

Then I remembered getting a stereo mic bar months ago. I had actually never used it. After some digging around, I finally found it and put it to work.

What is a stereo mic bar?

A stereo mic bar is a simple device designed to allow two microphones to be mounted to a single mic stand. It has various threaded points along the onto which you can mount the microphones’ threaded shockmounts or mic clips.

To be completely honest, one of the main reasons I chose the stereo mic bar is that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time setting up two microphones with separate mic stands. Adjusting each stand, picking the right height for the microphone, determining the best position for each microphone, all these things take time.

Secondly, because the stereo mic bar keeps the microphones fairly close to each other (as opposed to a spaced pair of mics), I didn’t have to worry as much about phase issues.

As you can see from the picture, the microphones are roughly 3-4 inches away from each other, each angled outward. When recording the guitar, I pointed the center of the stereo mic bar at the guitar’s sound hole, aiming each mic to the left and right of it.

In addition to avoiding some of the phase issues of a spaced pair, I found that the sound of the recording seemed a bit more balanced. Rather than one microphone picking up primarily low frequency material and the other picking up mostly the high frequency information, each mic in the stereo mic bar configuration captured a more balanced recording.

This allows me to pan the mics fairly wide to the left and right in the mix without one side becoming bass-heavy.

I’m pretty impressed.

I have to say I was very pleased with how the recording turned out. Not only that, my lazy side is pretty happy to have a new technique in my arsenal that requires very little effort to set up!

Here are a few audio examples for you to check out. I’m posting them as-is, with no EQ or processing of any kind. Typically I would roll off some of the lows and do a cut around 250 Hz to smooth out the boominess.

In first sample, the microphones are about a foot away from the guitar. In the second sample, the microphones are roughly six inches from the guitar.

• [See post to listen to audio]
• [See post to listen to audio]

You can download the mp3 files here and here.

As you can hear, there is a bit of bottom end, but with a little EQ these tracks sound great! Here’s an example of a stereo mic bar, if you’re still unsure as to what they look like. What do you think? Leave a comment!

Other posts you should read:

• 12 Home Studio Necessities #4 – Microphones
• 3 Reasons to Stereo-Mic Acoustic Guitar
• 3 Reasons NOT to Stereo-Mic Acoustic Guitar

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Photo by lrargerich

In the recent shoot-out I did between the Shure SM7B and SM58, I discussed some of the reasons why you would use a dynamic microphone for lead vocals as opposed to a condenser.

One of the main reasons is that dynamics tend to pick up less of your room, so if you have a noisy room or just an acoustically bad-sounding room, a dynamic microphone might allow you to still record a decent vocal.

That said, sometimes a condenser microphone simply sounds better.

The next obvious step would be to do everything you can to minimize the amount of room the microphone picks up. The first thing people usually try is to throw the vocalist and microphone into a nearby closet. Problem solved, right? No more room!

Eh…this will usually introduce more problems than solutions. One of the main problems with most home studio rooms is that they are rectangular, chock full of right angles, corners, and parallel surfaces, which cause all sorts of room nodes, standing waves, bass build-up, etc.

Putting the microphone into a smaller rectangle (i.e. a closet) only really brings the microphone closer to all those parallel surfaces and corners. You may think that all your flannel shirts and fur coats will absorb all of those issues, but just like acoustic foam, these materials won’t touch any of the low frequency problems.

While being in a closet MAY drown out some of the computer/hard drive noise, you’ll most likely end up with a boomy, lifeless vocal.

As always, give it a shot and hear for yourself. You may get the perfect vocal sound in your closet…but I doubt it.

Some Options

When it comes to do-it-yourself acoustic treatment, there is a wealth of information on the internet. I was recently perusing the studio construction and acoustics section of the Gearslutz forums, and it’s all pretty fascinating (and inexpensive, too).

In case you’re wondering, I certainly don’t have a perfect room. It’s a spare bedroom, and I tend to pick up a lot of computer, hard drive, traffic, A/C, and neighbor noise when I record.

A few weeks ago, I thought I’d try something. I’m rather familiar with Auralex’s Aural Xpanders, which are little pieces of foam designed to block out unwanted bleed from the microphone. And I’m also familiar with the SE Electronics Reflexion Filter, which is a beast of a contraption that surrounds the microphone, providing some good isolation. I’ve actually heard A/B samples of the Reflexion Filter in action, and it’s quite impressive.

However, I’d rather not spend $300 on the Reflexion Filter, at least not without attempting to remedy the situation myself first.

I turned to some leftover Auralex foam I had lying around. Last year I bought a box of the DST-114 panels to treat the area around the mix position in my studio, and I had a few pieces leftover, so I decided to make my own little reflection filter.

As you can see from the picture, the two foam pieces placed together make a “V” shape, which surrounds a microphone rather well. I just grabbed a few pull-ties and jammed ‘em through the grooves and tied the foam together.

From here I just feed the foam over the mic and let it “hang” behind the microphone.

So…how well does it work?

I’ve been using these filters for several weeks, but I’ve been looking forward to actually testing them to see if they’re actually doing anything.

I recorded some samples with and without the makeshift filter. I’ll be honest, there’s not a life-changing difference between the two. However, there is a small difference.

The first two samples are of me singing a few lines. Here they are: (Right-click to download)

• Vocal WITHOUT Filter
• Vocal WITH Filter

Obviously, neither vocal sound is all that bad. In fact, I would argue that on the quieter parts there’s pretty much no difference. However, the vocal recorded with the filter sounds a bit tighter to me on the louder parts. On the words “like” and “colors” you can definitely hear the sound my voice bouncing around the room.

While the first set of samples is a bit subtle, the next two were a bit more revealing for me. All I did was crank up the gain on the preamp and simply recorded the mic for around 15 seconds — once with the filter, once without. Here they are:

• Silence WITH Filter
• Silence WITHOUT Filter

The best way to listen to these is to open them up and switch back and forth between the two while they are playing. You can do this in QuickTime by just selecting back and forth between the windows. Or you can just import them into a DAW and solo each one.

As you can hear, the filter does nothing for the low frequency noise in the room. However, it does roll off quite a bit of the high frequency noise. I measured the two waveforms and found that the recording with the filter is 0.6 dB quieter than the other.

That’s certainly not a huge difference, but once you add compression to the vocal and the entire mix, this noise will be made louder. Cutting out the high frequency “hiss” could really make a difference in the sound of a final mix.

Conclusion

As I recorded these samples, I was a little disappointed that the differences weren’t more obvious. But as I thought about it, it makes perfect sense. Foam doesn’t do anything to stop low frequencies. It’s a high frequency absorber.

Even though the results won’t take your breath away, I decided it would still be good to post them. After all, this is real life. Sometimes you make changes to your studio that don’t improve things all that much. Or maybe the improvement is a subtle one. Either way, until I build some really nice gobos for myself, these little foam filters will get a lot of use.

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Typically, when you think about recording vocals in a studio, you picture the singer in front of a nice large-diaphragm condenser microphone. Condenser mics are great, but is it ever appropriate to use a dynamic mic to record vocals?

Condenser mics are typically very sensitive. They pick up all the detail and nuance of a voice. They also pick up a lot of things that you may NOT want to hear in your recording. For example, if you have a noisy room, or if your room isn’t acoustically treated, a condenser mic will likely capture all of these along with the singer’s voice. 

A dynamic mic, on the other hand, doesn’t pick up nearly the amount of detail as a condenser, and its frequency response doesn’t go nearly as high, but it has this raw, organic quality to it. It doesn’t sound “pristine” per se, but it can still sound amazing.

Also, since a dynamic microphone isn’t as sensitive as a condenser, it tends to pick up less of your room, which is great for us home studio folks. We don’t have perfect rooms. (Come on, just admit it.)

If you spend much time on forums such as Gearslutz or Harmony Central, it won’t have to look hard to find someone talking about the Shure SM7B. When anyone asks a question about a good mic for recording vocals in a home studio, almost inevitably someone will suggest the SM7B.

I’ve had the privilege of using the SM7B in my home studio for the last few weeks. The other day I thought to myself, “I do like the sound of the SM7B, but I wonder how it compares to the SM58?” I’d never thought to use the SM58 for recording vocals. That would be “amateur,” I thought. 

So I broke out both mics and set them up tonight to do a mini shootout. As you can see from the picture above, I placed the SM58 just above the SM7B, and I removed the windscreens from both mics. After that I set up a pop filter approximately four inches in front of the microphones’ capsules. Then I sang into both mics (at the same time), and recorded them directly into Pro Tools through the preamps on my 003.

The more scientific types will argue that the capsules aren’t close enough, and that the difference in position is going to prevent a true A/B comparison. That may be true, but the whole point of this little experiment was to simply see if the SM58 (at $100) could hold its own alongside the SM7B (at $350), and I thought it would be more interesting to hear how both microphones sound recording the exact same performance, rather than singing in one then going back and singing in the other.

It took a minute to get good levels, as the SM7B’s output is a few dB lower than the SM58. Once I recorded the audio, I used the Gain AudioSuite plug-in in Pro Tools to measure the RMS level of each track, and I adjusted the level of the tracks accordingly to get them to roughly the same volume.

I was quite intrigued by the results, and I’d like to get your thoughts. You can download the files here: [Right click to download]

• Mic #1
• Mic #2

What do you think? Leave a comment with your guess as to which is which, and I’ll post the answer in a few days.

* If you’re familiar with the SM7B, you know that it has a high-pass filter and a presence switch on the back. Both were set to flat.

UPDATE – Here are the results: SM7B vs SM58 Shoot-out Results

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This guest post is brought to you by my brother-in-law Joel. Joel’s a great bass player/producer, and he’s been building up his home studio over the last year. His Crummy Church Signs blog, while unrelated to the topic of home studios, is hilarious. You can also follow him on Twitter here.

I’ve always been nervous about having my own home studio. You see, I wasn’t reared on the low-key singer/songwriter scene that seems to be the forte of many home studio owners. Nor was I content to totally lean on MIDI for all of my sounds. I wanted to make loud music, and I wanted it to sound authentic. I always just assumed that there was no way to do that on a low budget (or with neighbors on every side of me who would strongly disapprove if I miked an 8×10 Ampeg bass cabinet at full volume).

TECH-21 somehow heard my unspoken requests and developed their fairly new Character series pedals. TECH-21 markets these bad boys as equal parts stomp box and preamp, but they are really worth their weight in gold in a small home studio. Large studios that can afford to mic a wall of amps have little need for these. But are you looking for that perfect guitar or bass tone without blowing the neighbors away or spending a fortune? Then these pedals are exactly what you’re looking for.

Each pedal models a different brand of amplifier; I have the “California” pedal, which mimics Mesa Boogie cabinets (including a clean setting, dirtier Mark II, and blazing Rectifier), and the VT Bass pedal, which mimics the aforementioned Ampeg bass monstrosities (SVT and Flip-top, plus a setting with tons of churn and grind built in). The other pedals (“Blonde”, “Liverpool”, and “British”) mimic tones and styles popular in different time periods, from the British invasion to 70s classic rock. (They are modeled after Fender, Vox, and Marshall amps respectively.)

The sounds these things generate are no joke. Playing with a simple Epiphone Les Paul Studio plugged directly into the California plugged directly into my Mbox 2, I was able to generate all kinds of chaos including effortless feedback, crunchy driving chords and soaring leads. A single character pedal offers a ton of variety in its settings. The aptly named “Character” dial on the pedal is extremely sensitive, providing a wide sweep of unique variations within its basic focus area.

Combined with a basic distortion plug-in in Pro Tools (Izotope Trash), there hasn’t been a distortion sound that I haven’t been able to recreate with my California pedal. I have a hard time imagining the possibilities if I bought a second one. The pedal’s built in speaker emulation completes the sound; with a creative use of reverb in Pro Tools, I can make it sound like I’m recording in pretty much any live setting.

I’m the first to admit that I know almost nothing about home recording. I’ve had my “studio” (Pro Tools on my home computer with a 2-channel Mbox) for a grand total of three months. However, with my long history as a musician I do know what sounds good, and I’m picky about tone. Maybe there are other options that do something similar, but I can’t believe how well these things deliver. For less than $200 a pop, I can’t imagine that the TECH-21 character pedals won’t become a staple in many small home studios across the country.

Joel was kind enough to record a few quick samples from his VT Bass pedal. You can listen to them below. Here are a few of his notes:

• First Section: bass directly into my MBox – (The next four sections use the four recommended settings on the VT Bass pedal)
• Second Section: SVT amp modeler
• Third Section: Fat Tube
• Fourth Section: Flip-Top Amp Modeler
• Fifth Section: “Rage”

It should be noted that on their recommendations the “Drive” dial never gets above 12:00. There are much better “Rage” sounding tones than the one they recommend. Also, my bass is a 4-string Ernie Ball Music Man Sterling.

[See post to listen to audio]

[Having trouble listening? Download the mp3 here.]

What do you think? Leave a comment! You can also check out the Character Series pedals in their entirety here.

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