The following video is about my recording philosophy and the gear that I use at Indecent Music.  I record, mix, and master out of Indecent Music.  I also provide audio engineering training and private lessons so that song writers can learn to be more effective at making their own demos.

Many potential clients ask me the same questions before they come into the studio to work on their albums or EPs:

What should I do to prepare myself to make a great recording?

Should I record a demo myself first?

I almost always answer the questions with more questions:

1.  Why do you want to make a recording?

Is it to get gigs?  Sell at gigs?  Try to get licensing for TV or movies? Is it to finally hear the music the way that you hear it in your head? Is it to document your songs accurately to the way you play them or is it to fully realize the full arrangements with drum, bass, strings, urdu?

2.  Who is the audience of the recording?

Record label executives  or your friends and fans?  Are you the audience for your own music or are you trying to sell this stuff?  Are you planning on giving it away as a promotional tool to help build your following?

3.  Are you ready to record in a studio now or do you want to demo the songs to figure out how they should be arranged and performed?

Usually demoing the songs yourself will help you figure out what you haven’t practiced enough, and force you to think about the dynamics and the tempos and the form in a way that you haven’t already.  I always want artists to know the tempos of the songs before they come to the studio.  If they can bring lyric sheet with chord changes that also really helpful as well.

If you have a way to record yourself, I would always do at least some recording yourself to help you figure out what you are trying to do.  The recording equipment can be very simple, like GarageBand, a 4-Track or 8-Track cassette or digital recorder, or something a little more sophisticated like a full-blown DAW like Sonar, Logic,  Cubase or ProTools.

After you have had a chance to record simple versions of the tunes with piano or guitar and voice, then you can think about adding other instruments in a much more concrete way.  Some music might start with a drum pattern or loop and build from there.

After you you have done all this pre-production, it will be time to start talking to a good producer or engineer to help really get the recording process planned and started.  As a engineer, it’s much easier for me to do my job when the music is more fully formed before I start my work.  As a producer, I like to be involved in the music process as early as possible so I can help to shape the form, dynamics and feel of the song while the song writing is in process.

Their is difference between someone who makes beats – meaning composing and performing (or programming) original instrumental music, someone who is really a producer, and a recording engineer that specializes in hip hop tracking and production.

The fastest way to learn to beat making is to make beats with whatever you have available. I have worked with a couple of heads who were complete geniuses with the Playstation software from MTV. Their music was simply amazing. Software that is highly under-rated is FL Studio or FruityLoops. The step sequencer is the easiest way to make music quickly. Read the manual! Watch videos online.  Start working with as many other beat makers that you can find on the net, in your home town. For me, competition made me write stuff that was much better than working by myself in a vacuum. The three big instruments to learn would be keys, drums, and bass. You did not need to work in a studio to do this kind of work. You need a computer, a decent audio interface (Not an M-Box), and a couple of nice monitors. If money is a factor, don’t get a Mac. You get a lot more computer in the PC world and there’s tons of software available.

A real producer puts the whole show together. They hire everyone, often write songs with the artists, choose the studio to work in, find live musicians to fill out the sound. Sometimes that means doing everything yourself. A lot of the time the producer FUNDS the project and gets the biggest share of the profit (if any).  A producer is a big picture person usually with an excellent understanding of the psychology of creative people, motivation, fear, competition and excellence. This is something that comes with lots of experience, a strong musical background, charisma and usually fame or money.

An engineer deals with the tiniest details of tracking and mixing. Moving a mic a half inch, rotating a mic off axis, how to attenuate the peaks of the kick to get it to sound bigger, without making it wimpy. Attack and Release time minutia for compressing drums, bass and vocals. How the sound stage can be used to the best advantage, how to either avoid masking or use it to create new timbres. You need to learn this either in a studio as an apprentice, in a good audio school that has great facilities (I teach at New England Institute of Art in Boston and at U. Mass Lowell both have great facilities) and then leverage that into getting good internships.

Sometimes there are people who really are all three. Sometimes you will find yourself in one role or the other depending on who you’re working with.

The best job to get to learn audio engineering is working for live sound companies as a grunt. You will carry the bass bins, mic stands and a 43 foot console. But you will get to watch the FOH and monitor guys throw down. Live is good because it forces you to learn to do things quickly and it puts you around dozens of musicians every weekend. Not wanting to be embarassed is a very powerful way to learn.  You are always on stage being watched from the time you load in, to the time you strike the stage.

(posted to GearSlutz 7-4-09)

One of the hardest audio processors to understand is the compressor.  Even after several years of using compressors many of my students and readers still have lots of questions about how to dial in the sound that they are trying to get.  Compressors are in the Dynamics Processors family which also includes limiters, expanders, gates and noise reduction.  Dynamics processors work in the Amplitude Domain.  Compressors work on the amplitude of an audio signal, which is basically the loudness of the signal.  Look at a waveform view of an audio signal:

Graph of a Sine Wave with Amplitude and Frequency

The vertical axis shows Amplitude, which in analog (electrical)  audio refers to the amount of voltage in an analog signal. When the wave is above the center line, then the voltage is positive and when the wave is below the line the voltage is negative. Audio (in the electrical analog sense)  is AC or Alternating Current which means the voltage goes from positive to negative and then back again. The further away from the center line, the higher the voltage and the louder the wave will sound.

The Dynamics of music is generally thought to be the differences between the loud parts of music and the quiet parts of the music.  The dynamics of audio includes all of the differences in amplitude along the waveform.  In most pop music, for instance, the loudest parts of the music are the snare drum hits, followed by the lead vocal, then the background music. Notice in the following image the red dots above the waveform.  They are marking the locations of the snare and kick drum hits in the music.

The red dots mark the locations of the snare and kick drum hits.

Notice that there is audio in between the loud hits as well, but that it just has a lower amplitude. Compressors and all dynamics-based effects work on the amplitude of the audio, to adjust and change the differences in voltage.  The loudest level in digital audio is 0 dB Full Scale or (0 dB FS) which means that anything above that level will be distorted or simply just an error.  We can’t change the loudest possible level, but we can change everything that is below that level.

What a compressor does:

A compressor attenuates (decreases amplitude) audio that is above a threshold by a ratio.  The attack time is how quickly the compressor starts to attenuate the signal after the threshold is exceeded and the release time is how quickly the compressor stops attenuating the signal when the audio drops below the threshold level.

Probably the most common use of a compressor is to make an audio signal sound louder without peaking out the signal and causing clipping and distortion.  In a nutshell, the loudest parts of the audio signal (the peaks) are made a little bit quieter so that all of the signal can be boosted by the amount that the peaks were attenuated.

I am a PC guy.  I think that it is the best platform that gives the most options for hardware and software.  I think Mac’s a great, but they’re way more expensive and they have always felt like toys to me.  They are the Nerf brand of computer.  Unfortunately most pro studios have Mac’s and I find that I need to use my external disks both in other people’s studios and in my own.  The only decent format that works in both is FAT32, but on both platforms FAT32 is NOT the file system of choice.

Windows machines really prefer NTFS, the NT File System which has many fewer limitations.  Mac has their own file system as well.  An important problem with the FAT32 file system is that the maximum size of a file is 4 GB. Windows won’t let you format a hard drive with FAT32 if the drive is a big modern drive.  In fact Windows XP will not format a drive bigger than 32 GB with FAT32.  This is a good example of a Windows-Style Suck-a-doodle-doo.  You need to format to Fat32 with a Mac, Linux or use a third-party tool to format on a Windows machine.  Windows will read and write to a larger FAT32 drive, but won’t allow you to create one.

For Windows, the easiest tool to download is Acronis’ True Image Home.  (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/) They offer a free 15 day trial that will allow you to format large disks as FAT32.  Just go through the process for “Adding a drive…”

Acronis is a great back up software tool as well.  It allows you to create images of your system disk and incremental or differential backups as well.  I find that it better than Norton’s Ghost, but have found that it doesn’t handle hard disk failure on the destination drive very well.  Their support offerings are pretty good, but not fast.

Prepare yourself.  This will be a rant.

Several years ago I purchased GigaStudio so that I could use Sonic Implants’ (now SoniVox) amazing sounding orchestral sample library.  The library cost about double what I paid for my first car in Bean-town. It was expensive and it was worth it.  GigaStudio however is a heaping pile of turds. When I installed GigaStudio 3 the first time, it prompted me to restart my computer at which point it destroyed the boot loader for the Windows XP operating system and prevents you from being able to boot using Safe Mode.  The drivers for TASCAM’s software are “special.”  Not WDM, not ASIO, just special.  I had to rip all of the PCI-based sound cards out of the machine, disconnect everything with a USB connector on it just to get it to boot.

Then I downloaded the updated version of their software.  I installed it and rebooted my computer again with a tremendous amount of anxiety. I then tried to start the software only to find that I would have to register it to get it to work for the first time.  I went to their horrid website and registered my software.  I then got a page that said that it would take 48 hours for them to send my registration code, but that GigaStudio would work for 10 days without registration. Not true. (You’re a lying sack of crap, You’re a lying, scheming, stinking, nasty sack of liquid crap! — Stephanie Miller)

So I basically gave up on the software and purchased GVI so that I could run the samples as a plugin.  It still really sucks. You can’t open the .GSP files that you saved your settings in with GVI. So I recently had to load up a bunch of old projects where I was using GigaStudio so I could remix a bunch of old hip-hop instrumentals. Sovivox, bless their hearts, does allow you to crossgrade you samples to Kontact 2 format for $500.  So you can fix the problem by throwing more money at the problem.

TASCAM’s GigaStudio and GVI really,  really suck and their support can bite me in the booty too.

Beware the GigaStudio…

I work with a bunch of hip-hop artists and a few R&B singers. Most of the time they bring their own instrumentals to the studio instead of having me write music for them. I usually charge $300 or so to write and produce instrumentals for artists and there are 3 zillion kids with FL Studio using the title producer that will put something together for free.

The problem with free beats is that most of the time the quality of the audio really sucks.  Most MC’s are downloading instrumentals off of the web or the beats are coming in over email.  These are always compressed files which lack accuracy and sound quality.  OGG Vorbis files, MP3’s, WMA’s and Apple’s M4P’s or AAC’s all can sound pretty bad.  If you are starting a recording project, you want to start with the best quality audio that’s possible.  The following guidelines are intended to help people avoid releasing crappy sounding music.  Mix down your instrumentals using the following suggestions as a guide.

1. Use full-quality uncompressed digital audio like WAV or AIFF files.  At the very least, these files should be 16 bit 44.1Khz stereo files.  I prefer to work with 24 bit files at either 44.1 Khz or 88.2 Khz.  The quality of the audio is much better and is easier to manipulate.  Using uncompressed files is the best way of ensuring that your engineer will be able to make a great mix of your songs.
2. If you must use a compressed file-format, use FLAC (the Free Lossless Audio Codec) <http://flac.sourceforge.net/>
   FLAC is great because it is lossless, which means that even though the files are smaller than uncompressed files, they sound just as good as uncompressed files.  By using additional processor power you can make FLAC files even smaller.  In a series of tests that I did with my colleague Connor Smith, we discovered that FLAC was capable of shrinking our test file of uncompressed audio at 5.3 MB down to 1.6 MB without loosing any audio quality at all. FLAC files are sometimes small enough for people to email if they are short.
3. Give the engineer stems. Stems are separate stereo tracks for each of the instruments in the instrumental.  For instance, you would have separate files for the drums, the bass, the rhythm instruments, the keyboards, the samples.  When you give the engineer stems they are able to mix the different instruments with the vocals.  A lot of the time the instruments block out the vocals in a mix.  If you send stems, the engineer can lower the instruments without lowered the drums and the bass. If you don’t bring stems, the engineer can’t leave the drums loud if the instruments are getting in the way of the vocals.
4. If you have to use compressed lossy files, use the best possible quality that you can get.  OGG Vorbis, MP3, WMA, and AAC/M4P all offer the option of making higher quality files that are larger in size or smaller files that sound bad.  Here’s the audio choices going from best sounding to worst sounding:Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) is Open Source, Free and Awesome <http://www.vorbis.com/>
   Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (.wma) <http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/codecs/audio.aspx>
   Apple’s Advanced Audio Codec (.aac or .m4p) <http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/aac/>
   Mp3 (.mp3) MPEG layer 3 (Motion Picture Engineering Group) <http://lame.sourceforge.net/>
5. Use the highest bit rate that you can use with all of the above audio formats.  I recommend a minimum bit rate of 256 Kbps for Ogg, WMA and AAC, but a minimum of 320 Kbps for MP3 audio.  VBR or Variable Bit Rate can be a little squirrelly, so to be safe always choose the highest quality option available.
6. Find out if the engineer has the same software that the beat was created in.  I have FL Studio XXL so I can get FruityLoops files with the loop bundle and mix the  instrumental with the vocals directly.  It’s very likely that your engineer has software that can work with your format.
7. If the file was ever a compressed file, you can never make the quality better.  For instance, if a beat-maker emails you a beat as an MP3 and you then convert it to a 16bit 44.1 Khz WAV file, it will never sound better than the MP3 file.  Never try to burn a CD with MP3 versions of the music.  You are just making the problem worse.

Please don’t hesitate to ask questions about file formats.  I can also help you to get great mixes either with advice or you can send me your projects to work some magic.

I have recently started building 5 more baritone guitars under the Indecent brand. All the bodies will be constructed from white ash, but the necks will be laminated from many different woods. I found a great piece of sap-wood walnut which is very strong, but also light-weight. The walnut will be laminated with purple heart like the original prototype neck. I will also be making maple/purple heart and mahogany/purpleheart laminates as well.

Jim Mouradian of Mouradian Guitars has agreed to hang one of the new guitars in his Winchester guitar store. Jim and his son own the business together and manufacturer their own line of gorgeous and innovative guitars and basses. Eddie from Carlino Guitars has also been quite helpful in the process and we probably be selling the instruments as well.

Please let me know if anyone has suggestions for new neck materials!

Alesis HD24 Hard Drive Caddy

Most of my audio students at the NEIA (the New England Institute of Art) want to know the cheapest way to get an Alesis HD24 caddy for their Recording 1 and Recording 2 classes. Unfortunately you pay for convenience when you shop at the school store, but you can get it cheaper off the web. As per usual you can find the best deal at Amazon right here. At the time of this post, Amazon has it listed at $22.95 via Musician’s Friend. After you order this, you will also need a IDE/PATA drive to stick in it. You won’t need a very big disk for your classes at the Art Institute. Anything more than 80 GB will be fine.

Current Great Deal on Amazon:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 – Hard drive – 160 GB – internal – 3.5 (currently $47.41)

Make sure to NOT buy anything that says SATA on it, or anything that says 2.5″.  What you want is a 3.5″ 7200 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) (IDE or PATA or Ultra ATA) Hard Drive.  You can get one that is boxed or OEM, which is cheaper. Here’s a few inexpensive options:

If you are mobile or adventurous you can always go to Microcenter in Cambridge on Memorial Drive to buy your hard drive.  They have great deals and a convenient order-on-the-web and then pick-up at store feature. I really hope that this helps!

HDG XIX