Tips & Techniques:Tips & Techniques

If you have a tip to share or would like to suggest a forum post for inclusion in this archive please PM "Jules" about it!


*** YOU CANNOT POST "QUESTIONS" IN THIS AREA! ***

Those go in the main forums

Articles in Tips & Techniques
There are 132 articles in Tips & Techniques.
A A comparison of current production 12ax7 tubes (2013) A Pet Trick for the 2500 Fans out there Acc Gtr - Getting rid of guitar string squeek... Acc Gtr - Vocal separation accordion recording Acoustics - Hearing your room Acusonic Recording Process - Bruce Swedien Adobe Audition does work on 64 Bit vista Analog tape - a tip on how to EQ and get perfect levels to analog tape B Bass Guitar Recording Big Bottom Binural Head Microphone - Tchad Blake Bit Rate and Frequency Recording Guideline Brass Recordings C CDs - Good trick to reduce a project's CDR usage Compressor / limiter basics Compressor sidechaining for dance music Convolution Pads and Galore creating a vibey loop with drums & a guitar D Drum Fills Drums - Cutting drums using Pro Tools LE and Elastic Audio: Tutorial and Tips Drums - comparing compression plug ins on drums Drums - Getting more snap or whack out of the snare Drums - kick drum - poor technique remedy Drums - Mixing tips by James Meeker Drums - Room mics facing walls away from kit Drums - Time align - quick technique Drums - Tracking the Drum Sound You Want..mike tarsia Drums - Triggering a snare with drumagog the easy way. DRUMS - tuning toms for pitch bend - a formula Drums - Using noise gates - in a DAW Drums--phasing cymbals at the SOURCE..mike tarsia Drums-Getting That Fat Bottom Snare. Drums: How to align drums to any grid in Cubase/Nuendo: E Ego Preservation - Assigning Blame Elec GTR - tone tips from Gibson website Elec Gtr - (Heavy) How To Bring Out The Pick Attack W/O Using Compressors Elec Gtr - (Thick) - SM7 trick Elec Gtr - Getting the pick attack back on over distorted sounds - Mike Tarsia Elec Gtr - Ground Hum Elec Gtr - heavy guitars... use a pedal for more defined tone Elec Gtr - Jules' Sex Pistols compression trick Elec Gtr - Reverse wah fx (oldie but a goodie) Elec Gtr - Slipperman's Recording Distorted Guitars From Hell Elec GTR - Tracking thick downtuned El. Guitars Elec Gtr - You've Got The Best Pedal And Don't Know It! Elec Gtr and Bass - Multi-Mic Phase Alignment	E (cont.) Extreme Side-chain compressing (techno, house, electronica) F Fab Dupont's mix hybrid mixing tutorial on Analog summing and outboard gear.. File Management File Management (using dates) G Gefell Owners w/ Noise Problems - the FIX! General EQ tips Getting to know your preamps Guitar ground buzz H Harddrives, File systems and accessing from OS X & Windows Hearing Test DIY How to make a kick stand out more in a mix HOW TO SUGGEST A TIP OR TECHNIQUE FROM A THREAD ON THE FORUM I Improve quality by importing tracks into a session with a higher sampling rate Instrument tuners are always around, you may not realize it. Intersample peaks K Kenny's - Beat Detective Bass Guitar Kenny's - Fatten Up Kick Drum Kenny's - Look Ahead Compressor Kenny's - Making Stereo Chorus Kenny's - Ping Pong Panning Delay Kenny's - Scratching With Audio Kenny's - Stutter Effect for Pads Kenny's - Stutter Guitar Effect in PT Kenny's - Wah Wah Effect Keyboards- Fatten 'em up! Kick drum, outer shell L Lexicon reverbs: a brief bestiary Logic 8 How to migrate samples to external drive M Macintosh Maintenance Make sturdy mic stands using ankle weights Microphone Research Resource Miking complex ethnic stringed instruments... Mix Buss Compression by Charles Dye Mix Riding Approach..mike tarsia Mix tips - Russell Elevado Mixing - Submitting your Material to be Mixed Mixing - Width and Depth from James Meeker Mixing ITB Set Up..mike tarsia Music Industry Survival Guide N Noisy Guitar amp.. O Optimum recording Levels - 'Hot' it's not! Organization- power adapters (which wall wart was it?)	O (cont.) Organization: The Studio Capability Inventory Outboard gear recall sheets! P PC - Setting up an iTunes server to play through your high end studio gear Phase as a widening tool Plug-in Delay Compensation with Protools LE / MP Power adapter (wall wart) matching Pro Tools - Getting 96 audio tracks with Pro Tools LE Protools mix template Putting the humanity back in your programmed tracks R R&B - Mixing - Heavy Kick & Bass - Dave Pensado R&B - mixing - Kick drum R&B Mixing-- Pumping Pads...mike tarsia Recording - Electric guitars Recording a String Quartet - Tips and Technique Recording Advice From Me To You Pt. I Recording and pre-mixing in the live room. Recording Baritone Acoustic Guitar: Tips and Techniques. Recording trumpet and brasses in general: seeking tips Recording Vocals Reducing surface noise when recording live strings in the studio. Room Analysis Primer S Screaming modulation, Savernake style Sidechaining in cubase Strings: Reducing surface noise when recording live strings Subwoofer Placement Summing ITB Considerations Surround Sound Mixing Technique - MSS - Multi Stereo Surround T The "lost art" of riding a fader on a vocal? Tips & Techniques Two Ways To Sum U Upright bass Upright Bass II Upright Bass Sound III Urei 1176LN is a Free PreAmp Use ITunes as an EQ V Vocal recording - Figure of 8 special effect tip Vocal riding tips [mix] -from Mike Tarsia Vocal tip odd but good Vocals - Mixing - Riding fader techniques by Russell Elevado Vocals-split duties Vocoder use - not just for robot voices! W What the best way to mute the intial pick attack for guitars? Why this section is a "tips & techniques directory" and not a wiki

[GuitarRuss]

Originally Posted by TheNoize

Can't find the "post new article" option! :/

The Tips & Techniques menu only shows "Tips & Techniques"...

Me too, maybe it's a glitch. I'm definitely hitting the Tips & Techniques at the top with the small triangle.

[Jules]

Yes its broke and needs to be fixed.

BTW just to be clear this forums isn't for questions

Its only for posting tips and reading them - you can comment on tips by hitting the comment link..

OK, I will get on with fixing it so new tips and be posted

[LesGo]

Thank you Jules.

This is a goldmine!!!

Les

[randyct6]

how to hook-up my roland vs-1880 to my computer and do i need software.

[Unne]

One approach to surround sound mixing that I've developed is to use all the possible speaker pairs in a surround speaker setup as stereo pairs.

In a 5.1 surround speaker setup there are 10 possible stereo pairs (I'm ignoring the LFE since it's not full range and won't work well for my purposes):

Left Front + Right Front
Left Rear + Right Rear
Left Rear + Left Front
Right Front + Right Rear
Left Rear + Center
Center + Right Rear
Left Front + Right Rear
Left Rear + Right Front
Left Front + Center
Center + Right Front

In 6.1 or 7.1 systems there are even more possible stereo pairs; 15 and 21 respectively.

Here's a few examples of what you can do:

The common one that everyone tries: Piano recorded in stereo. Left and Right channel panned hard left and right between the front speakers. Then send to a stereo reverb that returns to the rear speakers.

Then take that approach and use it between different pairs.

A guitar recorded in stereo. Pan hard left and right between the Left Rear and the Center Speaker. Send to a stereo reverb that returns to the Left Front - Right Rear pair. And so on.


Advantages with mixing this way is that you can achieve a nice sense of envelopment without putting all the individual sources in all the speakers (which the built in surround panners in DAW software will do unless you disable some outputs or pan hard) and the phase issues it can lead to.

A big reason why mixing in stereo requires so much compression and EQ is that since everything is crammed into only two speakers, you have to work hard to let everything get its "space" in the frequency spectrum.

Then there's summing. Analog hardcores often complain that digital summing doesn't sound good. Well, how about summing in the air. Now that you've got additional speakers available, why stay within the traditional confines of stereo and only use the other speakers for ambience or effects?

For more info on this, you can check out my website: Unne Liljeblad - Mixing Engineer - MSS, Multi Stereo Surround

[Jules]

OK I added that!

[seriousfun]

People seem ill-informed or confused about DIs:

What is a DI?

Instruments, whether pickup-equipped or vintage synths, typically have a high impedance output. Connect this to a low impedance input like a mic pre (without a DI) and the frequency response and other characteristics will suffer (mics typically have a low impedance output, so they don't sound very good when connected to a high impedance input like a guitar amp).

A DI turns the high impedance source into a low impedance output, to match what a mic pre wants to see. There are two kinds of DIs - passive and active:

• A passive DI is typically just a transformer; it can work great, but it can change its characteristics with different output impedance sources (or change as you turn up and down the volume and/or tone controls of passive source like a pickup equipped guitar or bass). And it will impart the sonic character of the transformer, good or bad.
  
• An active DI uses a balancing amplifier, sometimes much like a microphone amplifier circuit (what you find inside the mic); it will not be reactive with different sources (so it will work consistently with passive magnetic pickups, vintage synths, or piezo acoustic pickups, for example) but as with all amplifier circuits it may add some character or noise or distortion. The amplifier can be solid state or tube, and as with all gear one will sound different than another.

Just remember the building blocks: DI-mic amp-line amp. Some devices, active, passive, or both, are just DIs. Some are DIs with line amps (like the Reddi) some are mic amps with DI inputs.

[dmp]

I have often been curious about using Tom Dowd's suggestion to elmono about eliminating a noisy amp by recording two tracks and then switching the phase on one track. I know theoretically this should work, but it often does not. I think it is becasue if the guitar amp buzz or noise isn't 100% consistent, the two wave forms will not be identical and therefore the reverse phasing will not nullify the amp noise. Any thoughts anyone? Dave