Logic and Mixing learner Nick Burns (Captain Mermaid) tells us how he put the recording techniques he learnt on the Logic course and even the Mixing course in to practice when he recorded and mixed this collaboration with singer Rebekah Anne Steele.

“I used two SE small capsule condenser microphones  on the guitar and arranged them in a XY pair to get a nice stereo image. I did record a DI signal, but didn’t end up using it in the mix in the end. If you want to know how not to record a guitar, see the video!

I got Rebekah to sing the vocal into her wardrobe so the clothes would absorb most of the sound waves after they pass the microphone diaphram. Most of the rest of the waves would get diffused by the hangers and pole. I chose her wardrobe as she has much more clothes in it than I do in mine! If it was mine, the sound waves would just bounce around the empty wardrobe which would be worse than bouncing around a room! I used an Audio Technica AT4050 large diaphragm condenser mic which I borrowed form a friend with a pop shield. I popped in the high pass filter as I live near a train line so wanted to cut out any rumbles at source. After the mic, I used a Focusrite ISA 430 with a little compression to get as hot level as possible without squashing it too much, she’s quite sibilant, so I used the built in de-esser subtly just to avoid getting any nasty sibilant spikes but still retaining a good level. 

Nick On The Mixing Course

Strangely, apart form the microphone techniques which I learnt on the Logic course, I learnt all the ‘recording’ techniques on the mixing course. The singing into the wardrobe bit on week one in acoustics, and controlling the dynamics on week 2. Next up for me is Ableton, and I want to do an EMP course after that. I wanted to be the first to do every course, but now with the relatively new Songwriting and Pro Tools courses, that may not happen. The Songwriting course looks tempting, but i’m not sure I want to learn Pro Tools just yet. I think I have enough to be getting on with right now!”

Focal invited me to Dean Street Studios for a Focal SM9 and Twin Studio Monitor Speaker Demo ages ago, but I just haven’t had time to write about them until now. 

When I walked into the room, the monitors were set up along with some NS10s like we have here for our mixing course. They looked massive with what I thought was an extra driver in the top of the cabinet! More on that later.

Focal SM9 with the passive radiator in the top

The guys (Focal, Focal’s distributors and Gav at Kazbar Systems) had a selection of CDs and asked me to take my pick. I chose James Blake’s album so I could check out how man these monitors are first with that ridiculous bottom end on that record. We flicked through his album until we found the tune, and on it went. All I can confirm from this test is that the sub bass in that record is just too low. I couldn’t really hear anything but the cones were violently flapping about along with the curious cone in the top. It was this point that I asked what the hell it was. It’s called a passive radiator, and all it is really is a speaker cone without the metal bits and magnet. It concave when idol and flaps in and out to low frequency. As for the rest of the design, the inside isn’t designed like a resonating cabinet, nor it it full up with absorbing material. It’s just a sealed box with crossovers, air and amps. You could say it’s neither ported or infinite baffle design. I do wonder what effect the negative sound waves that come out of the back on the speaker bouncing around a cabinet full of amps and crossovers arranged in no particular way. Also, the frequency range is 30Hz right up to 40kHz. 40 kHz!! When we’re born, we’d be lucky to hear 20kHz, and by the time you get to my age around 18kHz is impressive. Lord knows how I can still hear up to 19kHz with the hammering my ears have had over the years! Anyway, what’s the point in going up to 40kHz? At over £4k, they’re not cheap. Are they that expensive because they go up to frequencies twice what a human can hear? I’ll be interested to see how many they sell.

They sounded good when they played something a bit more normal from what I remember. They had some Focal Twins on the floor of the control room so I asked them to set them up too so I could A/B the pair. I do remember the twin sounding not too hifi which is what I get form my Genelec 1031s which I liked. 

Focal Twin and SM9 side by side

One thing about the Focal SM9s that I liked is that they work in two modes; i’ll call it ‘full fat’ mode which is 3-way and ‘diet’ mode which is 2-way. In a nutshell, ‘full fat’ mode is all the speakers on full steam ahead, and ‘diet’ is a neat cut down version where not only the main driver is turned off, the crossover is altered so it’s practically like having an extra pair of near field monitors. I’m a big fan of that, the only problem with it is that you have to change the monitors individually with a fiddly switch on the side of each cabinet. I know if I had that, I would use it half as much as I would if I could control it easily from my listening position with an ‘alt’ button in the middle of an SSL for example.

To summarise, they sounded okay but they didn’t blow me away, it was difficult to tell and I didn’t instantly try and justify £4k in my head for some studio monitor speakers that I don’t really need. I’m a bit scared of the never-seen-before design with that weird passive radiator because I don’t understand fully how it works as I do infinite baffle and ported designs. There’re faults or at least draw-backs with both the infinite baffle and the ported designs, but I do worry about what happens to those negative sound waves in this design. I guess the jury’s still out. I need to get Gav to get me a pair to borrow for a while and will report back. Watch this space…

Recording vocals: DIY vocal booth and pop shield or pop filter:

This is about how I record vocals at home with a DIY vocal booth. We cover more on this on the Sound Engineering course.

I have a macbook pro plugged up to an apogee duet, pop shield or pop filter, some cables running from my dining room to my bedroom where I have made a DIY vocal booth out of my wardrobe and some dressing gowns.

You can see that  I have the mic pretty close to the clothes in the wardrobe to ensure as many as the sound waves from the voice are captured and absorbed before they get a chance to bounce back/reflect and end up back down the capsule of the mic again. The microphone’s polar pattern is set to cardioid so if anything did get a first reflection back out, the mic is optimised for one side. oooo, I love talking about microphones – I’ll try and do a whole post about them soon. I have two towel dressing gowns hanging up on each of the inside of the wardrobes. The idea is to create as much of a dead controllable environment as possible which then can be treated with exactly the amount and type of reverb you wish. There’s NOTHING worse than the sound of a vocal where someone’s just chucked a mic up in the middle of a room with stone walls – you get reflections bouncing all over the place. It’s a very thin horrible echoey sound which you can’t do anything about.

Pop shields are important and pretty cheap too – they capture the compressed air you give out when you make a ‘p’ or ‘b’ sound which ends up as really low frequency on your recording and can even cause digital glitching if it’s fierce enough. Once a hypnotist friend of mine popped over to record some vocals for an online hypnotising project she was involved with, I set the mic up as it but couldn’t find my pop shield, so I broke down a metal coat hanger, made it the shape of a pop shield (or pop filter) frame. The next thing was to find some tights to wrap around it, but I couldn’t find any of my girlfriend’s  so I dug a pair of her nickers out of the laundry basket! It did the trick with some gaffer tape and headphone wire.

Acoustic Treatment and Positioning of Studio Monitor Speakers:

Okay so now it’s time to choose and position your studio monitor speakers and just dip your toe into the wonderful world of studio acoustic treatment. More on this on the Mixing and Mastering course

Most people listen to music in their cars or on a cheap home stereo sometimes even in mono. If your mix doesn’t sound good on a pair of small speakers, there’s not much point. A pair of ridiculously expensive active monitors may sound amazing, but no one else has them, so your mix will be lost in translation. In an ideal world you would like a pair of studio monitor speakers which are easy on the ear and capture an element of the ‘biggies’ you’d fine in big commercial studios, so perhaps a ported design like the Genelec 1031‘s I use here and a sealed box type like Yamaha NS10′s for more of a ‘truer’ sound. Truer is all to do with their skewed frequency response, lack of low frequency resonances, low distortion and remarkably accurate transient response behaviour, all of which are qualities of infinite baffle designs using small, responsive drivers. Ported designs are popular in programming rooms and projects studios because you get more low frequency output which we all know and love – especially if we’re woking on dance records!

Genelec 8040a studio monitor speakers

If like me you don’t have space for two pairs of studio monitor speakers and like me given the choice of a ‘truer’ sealed box infinite baffle design or a more pleasing ported design, you’re going for the ported design you need to decide which ported studio monitor speakers you want. I’ve had my old Genelec 1031′s for donkeys years now and couldn’t recommend them enough! The new version of the old 10 series are the 80 series. I’ve heard that they aren’t as good as the older 10 series which personally makes me happy. If you have space, the 1032′s are a bigger and louder version of the 1031′s. In fact the whole Genelec 10 series always sounded the same right from the 1029′s right up to the 1032′s. Just the higher the number, the louder they got!

Focal SM-6. They do look nice don't they?!

I had a chat with Gav at Kazbar to get some info on popular choices these days and he recommended the Tannoy Reveal range starting at around £250 a pair if you’re on a budget which sounds really cheap to me, and Focal, a brand I hadn’t heard of before.

If you choose any of the common active brands on Gav’s or any good pro audio dealers website, I’m sure that you’ll get used to the curve, the room and as long as you check the mix in as many different environments as possible, I don’t see why you wouldn’t get the best results for your mixing ability.

I always recommend active speakers these days because the pain of even more studio cables, more hassle transporting, finding the right amp, messing about with crossovers if needed, and generally the greater margin for error is taken away by the guys in white coats at the testing centres of these popular brands. Let them do all the work so you can get on and enjoy mixing your record. Now there’s just the small matter of getting good at mixing!

Positioning:

I wouldn’t worry too much about exact angles when you decide where you are going to be sitting and where you are going to be placing your monitor speakers because you’re going to be moving around, which in itself is healthy for your mix because you’ll be getting a different perspective the more moving you do. For your main seating position, your head should be roughly one point of an equilateral triangle with each of the pair of your monitor speakers the other points of the triangle. So roughly an equal amount of distance between your head, each monitor speaker and distance between the speakers themselves.

Studio acoustic treatment:

As for studio acoustic treatment, and think next on the agenda is to write a whole piece on it, but very quickly, and you may need to do some Googling – you may want to start with some treatment behind your monitor speakers, consider a bass trap above your head and if you’re in a square room particularly, try some absorbing treatment to your left and right on the the wall.

Choosing Powered and Active Studio Monitor Speakers:

The positioning, orientation and mounting of studio monitors can have a huge influence on the final sound of a room and of course your mix. I wouldn’t go out and buy hi-fi speakers and a massive sub woofer if you have a room with parallel walls the size of a match box and don’t intend to apply much acoustic treatment.

We should be looking for a happy medium, neither too bright nor too much bass. If the aspirations we have for our work are that it should sound as good as it can on the widest range of systems out there; from top of the range hi-fi systems, portable mono radios to ipod players, then the perceived tonal balance of our monitors should be as close to the peoples average as possible. I encourage students to check their mixes in as many different environments as possible before putting their mix down; from studio monitors, built in computer speaker to simulate a poor quality mono radio (we use an Auratone speaker in professional studios for this), the car stereo (a favourite of mine), and even standing in a different room to hear only the reflections of your mix from a number of ‘natural’ diffusers and part absorbers which make up the hallway, curtains, plant in the corner and chest of draws under the stairs.

The most common nearfield monitoring systems found in professional studios are Yamaha NS10′s, usually used closed up and reasonably close to each other. The idea of having the same make of studio monitors in every studio you go to seems like a good one, you’d expect the sound to be the very similar from one studio to another, but because they’re passive (they need an external amp which can differ) the mix can sound completely different. On top this of course the differing sound of the rooms themselves. I personally wouldn’t fancy listening to NS10′s all day every day; high-mid frequencies feature prominently in their curve so they can be quite harsh on the ear, and there’s not much bottom end at all. I remember some engineers using them with a subwoofer, but not many. My NS10′s and amp are in my Dad’s garage – I just didn’t have the surface space for them in my programming suite right now but when I move, i’ll try and fit them in somewhere . The more ways I can check the mix as I go the better of course.

Left: Event Studio Precision 8. Right: Yamaha NS10m

This is the main reason why engineers like to use the same room for mixing time after time – they know the sound of the room, monitors and what’s powering the monitors, they are of course used to the console, outboard, assistants, staff, restaurant etc but in some cases they’re superstitious. Mark ‘Spike’ Stent was never comfortable venturing outside of the old Olympic Studio 3 after all the success he had in that mixing room. Once he outgrew the room, he had no choice but to move and he ended up buying the SSL G-series console he’d mixed so many hits on and plonking it in a bespoke control room he had built at Olympic just after my time there in the late 90′s. His near-fields of choice were the passive KRK 9000‘s. I wonder if they still are.

Then you have the main monitors or ‘biggies’ – some teachers and magazines say ‘far-fields’. One use for these monitors is when the A&R guy pops into the studio to tell us all that we need more midi or something (A&R people are much better these days, especially the ones who employ me now!). The biggies have plenty of bottom end, they are VERY flattering – you can fart down a mic and it’d sound amazing out of the biggies! The typical 90′s A&R guy will always leave the studio happy after hearing the a rough balance of the mix on the biggies before we’ve even turned on the (automation) computer. And of course after he’d played producer soloing the entire desk for no reason.

Genelec main monitors and some NS10's in Olympic Studio 1

But is this what we want all of the time when mixing a record? Of course not – we are not looking for the most pleasing experience for our ears, we want an accurate tool that will help us make the correct decisions, but at the same time not give us earache after an hour of monitoring. For this we want a pair of what I would call ‘alternative near-fields’. I say alternative nearfields because these monitors would not be the standard Yamaha NS10′s and be situated (usually) either side them. These are the monitors we should buy for our home studio set-up. So what are we looking for when we are choosing near-field monitors? And where do we put them?

To be continued…

Standing waves and home studio acoustic treatment:

With technology advancements and computer processing power as it is now, the whole process of making hit records can be done in home studios, unless of course, you require a real orchestra!

People with home studios often do not realise just how important the acoustic environment is. We tend to get a lot more excited about spending a few hundred quid on a shiny new synth than home studio acoustically treating a rooms walls, ceilings and floors for standing waves. There is also the issue of aesthetics.

My lecture on acoustics can be six hours long and sometimes it can be difficult keeping some of the more musical and less scientific of students interested, specially when I start on standing waves. If we are in a room small enough (a control room or classroom and not lecture hall), a good way of vibing things up is to measure the distance between two parallel solid walls and try and generate a standing wave. You can determine what is the frequency of the standing wave for your room with this simple formula: V / 2d=f

• V = Velocity of sound (343m/sec)
• d = Room dimension in meters (length, width, or height)
• f = Frequency of the standing wave

Other standing waves occur at harmonics of the frequency that is 2, 3, and 4 times the fundamental but obviously, the higher the frequency, the less noticeable they become.

Why not try it yourself. Grab a tape measure and use the oscillator in your DAW. You need to have solid parallel walls in your space. Standing waves are the reason you never see parallel solid walls in a professionally treated recording studio control room.

Neil Johnston from Focusrite showed me the KRK ERGO. Wow, what a little box this is (if it does what they say it does of course). KRK make fantastic nearfield monitors and I would say are a company to be trusted. The first time I listened to a pair of KRK monitors was when I was assisting Mark ‘Spike’ Stent mixing Madonna at Olympic. The article the link goes to was written a few years after. Seems ancient now when he talks about Zip and Jaz drives! He had a pair of KRK 9000′s which sounded fabulous. Back then pretty much all monitors were passive and so were the 9000′s. It seemed crazy to me but a lot of freelance mixers karted around their monitors of choice from one studio to the next but just used whatever amp that was in the studio. Active monitors solved that one.

I’ve always had a problem with bass in my studio. I am lucky to have very high ceilings but unfortunately I think most of my bass gets lost up there in the chandelier. I do get a bit of bottom end but much further back from my seated position in front of the monitors. I have treated my room behind my monitors and I have some bookshelves at the back with act as nice diffusers for the mid frequencies. I could’ve of course have lost the chandelier and replaced it with a huge bass trap but I don’t think my girlfriend at the time would have been feelin’ that! And quite frankly, I like my chandelier, my high ceilings and the position of the studio so I make do for now by sticking my head in certain spots just before any waves get diffused by my bookshelves to check the bottom end. Also, I check in the car which is only on the driveway. It’s inconvenient, but I know the curves so well now in the space, I can make it work.

So maybe the KRK ERGO will be a much more convenient solution for me. It works like those Bose hifi systems by chucking out a load of test tones (all frequencies at the same time interestingly), monitoring them with a microphone and feeding back the data to the software (Mac AND PC btw). The box will then tweak your curve and theoretically, you will get a much ‘truer’ curve where you position the microphone. Gav said he would be able to get one for me to try. I will get back to you with my thoughts i’m sure.

If it is as good as they say, they will sell bucket loads. Given Bose have been doing something similar for the consumer market for years, I wonder why no one thought of doing this ages ago especially now with so many more records being made in home studios. I also wonder if the technology is any better than Bose’s or if there’s any patent. If no, I reckon KRK won’t be the only people making these boxes in 2010. I wonder if it can do anything about standing waves. I didn’t think at the time to ask Neil. Oh, that thought is what got me on standing waves here in the first place!

I do cover standing waves in my acoustics lectures at music production schools, colleges and universities and also in my music production courses in London.