What’s Involved In A Recording Session?
If you made it through the post “How Long Does It Take To Record A Song?” you will have found that I prattled on endlessly about the various complications common to recording sessions without actually answering the question. For this I can only apologise, and promise to take a more direct approach here, using a […]
How Long Does It Take To Record A Song?
The most common question I am asked by prospective clients upon enquiring about a session has to be some variation of “How long will it take to record x number of songs?”. Perhaps, “Can we record and mix a song in a day?”, or “Can we get our EP done in a weekend?”. The trouble […]
DI Boxes: A Distinction Without A Difference..?
A good friend of mine recently purchased a new DI box; an Orchid Electronics Direct Inject box – an active DI that retails for about 40 quid. It looks like this: He excitedly proclaimed that for the money the sound was fantastic, enjoying in particular how it interfaced with his bass guitar. I was intrigued. […]
How To Make A Guitar Sound Like… A Guitar!
It may be an unfamiliar premise to some, but I am fervently of the opinion that the goal of recording audio is to accurately capture and faithfully reproduce a particular sound. Not to fuck around with it, contorting it into something that only dimly represents what was originally going on, but to trust in the […]
MOTU??! Urrgh!
*Real* Sound Engineers Only Use Prism Converters, Dontcha Know? Hiffle, piffle, pibble and fwaf. Earlier this year I visited Steve Albini’s Chicago studio, Electrical Audio, with the goal of not only recording some drums with the man himself, but also scrutinising his mic techniques in order to learn more about how such an incredible drum […]
Crushed To Hell: My Thoughts About Mastering
What Is Mastering? Mastering recorded audio became its own discipline after the Second World War, when a “dubbing engineer”, secondary to the recording/mix engineer, was tasked with transferring the recorded audio from tape to a master disc, which served as the template from which all following vinyl discs would be pressed. This was a purely […]
The Bullshittery Of Audio Jargon
The topic of audio recording is vast and open-ended, and discussion about associated equipment in particular often gives rise to much heated debate with respect to perceived differences in the sonic performance between devices. It is not uncommon for hostile discussions to be waged pitting the minutia characteristics of this device against that, with all […]
Stereo Recording Techniques On Test
Often in recording scenarios it is necessary to implement a stereo miking technique. Usually this is employed to capture room ambience at a distance from the originating sound source, by which I mean the reverberant field of an acoustic environment – anywhere where the late reflections are of greater intensity than the direct sound. Whether […]
Comb Filtering In Drum Overhead Microphones
Recording drums in a small room is a problem that any engineer not blessed with an infinite budget must deal with at some point. Among the difficulties inherent in this scenario is the problem of comb filtering in the audio signal due to the microphone’s proximity to a boundary, i.e. the ceiling or a nearby […]
Impulse Responses & Convolution Reverb
How To Sample An Acoustic Space Those familiar with audio production probably know that there are two types of digitally synthesised reverb effect. The first, and generally most popular given its byte-sized (heh) use of computer resources is known as “algorithmic” reverb, where the incoming signal is, sample by sample, multiplied by a factor dictated […]
