Saturday, May 12, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
How loud should the bass instrument be?
An RP reader wants to know how loud the bass should be, in percentage terms.
A question from an RP reader..."When balancing the instrumental, at what percentage (volume) should one's bass instrument be?"
I'm guessing that by 'instrumental', he means the backing instruments of a song.
Firstly let me deal with the concept of percentage. It doesn't really work all that well for audio. For instance, consider a signal at a good, healthy, but not ear-damaging level. Reduce it by 6 dB. You can clearly notice the difference, but the level is still strong. Try another 6 dB. It seems to have gone down by a similar amount, yet is still very clearly audible. Another 6 dB. It has far from gone away yet.
But considered in percentage terms, the signal level is now down to 12.5% of what it was originally. You'd think that the signal would hardly be audible at all, but it most definitely is. A reduction in level of a total of 18 decibels corresponds very well to the way the ear perceives sound. Measuring a change in level in percentage terms isn't wrong, but it somehow doesn't match up with what we hear.
Let's try and put a figure on how loud the bass instrument ought to be. What about 50%?
In terms of decibels, what this would mean is that the bass instrument is as loud as all of the rest of the instruments playing together. So if you look at the level on a meter and you take away the bass, then the level may hover around -9 dBFS. If you take away all of the instruments except the bass, then likewise it hovers around -9 dBFS.
Interestingly, if you combine the bass and all of the rest of the band, the level will now hover somewhere around -6 dBFS. Somehow 50% plus 50% doesn't equal 100%. This is because the two signals are uncorrelated, but that isn't particularly relevant for the issue in hand.
But what would it sound like?
In this case, the bass would almost certainly be too loud, unless the bass really is the most important instrument in the song. So what is the correct percentage?
Well I'd like to move away from the idea of percentage and look at the issue in a rather different way.
Suppose you play the instruments without the bass and the meters are hovering around -9 dBFS. Now raise the bass. Lift the fader until you can just see the meters rise up from around the -9 dBFS mark. This is the point at which one instrument starts to dominate the mix. Now you have to ask yourself, do you want it to dominate, or do you want it to blend in?
You can't mix by looking at meters, but they can give you an interesting indication of the way in which different instruments contribute to the song. This 'point of dominance' is of particular relevance to vocals. Often when a vocal crosses this point, it is too loud in comparison with the instruments. It's a useful quick check when learning how to mix.
In conclusion... Well I'm sorry that I haven't really come to a conclusion. But it isn't the kind of issue where there are hard and fast rules. But thinking around the issue can be very instructive. Those who are thinking carefully about what they do when they mix will create better mixes.
By the way, the photo illustrates a track where the bass guitar is vitally important. Without the bass, this song would just be a lot of hot air!
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Retro recording: How to get more tracks through bouncing and track sharing
Many a great record has been made using only 24 tracks. But how can you expand a 24-track recorder to 25, 26 tracks or even more?
It is the 21st century and our digital audio workstations allow us pretty much as many tracks as we like. I can't remember the last time I ran out of tracks in my DAW. But if I cast my mind back to an earlier era of recording, running out of tracks was an everyday occurrence. So how did old-style engineers get more tracks out of a 24-track recorder?Oh, and it's worth saying that having a 24-track recorder was the 'gold standard'. They were mightily expensive at $50,000 or more. Many of us had to work on a budget 16-track machine. My early days in pro recording were on 8-track, and at home I used a 4-track cassette multitrack recorder. So getting those extra tracks was of vital importance.
One basic technique that was commonly used was 'bouncing'. These days, we use the term to mean mixing to a stereo file. But in the days of multitrack tape, it meant mixing several tracks together onto a single track (or two tracks for stereo) on the same tape.
Suppose therefore you were overdubbing and had already filled 22 tracks of your 24-track tape, and had quite a number of overdubs still to do. You could take a group of similar tracks that were easy to mix, such as the background vocals perhaps, and bounce them in stereo to the two remaining tracks. So if you had recorded six tracks of background vocals, you could bounce them to two, and free up four tracks.
Of course, once tracks were bounced in this way, they couldn't later be rebalanced. So you wouldn't choose dissimilar instruments to bounce unless you really had to.
But another useful technique that did not have this limitation was track sharing. Suppose for instance that you had filled up all of your twenty-four tracks yet still wanted to add some extra color to your recording?
Well just because you have used all twenty-four tracks doesn't mean that the tape is full. Not all of the instruments will be playing all of the time. Chances are there are huge gaps where certain instruments or voices are silent. Those gaps can be used to add extra instruments.
It might happen therefore that you have a 24-track recording with all tracks used, but the electric guitar solo only fills around twenty seconds or so of one track (clearly the producer was very persuasive in keeping it so short!). The rest of that track can be used to add, say, a saxophone.
So as the song plays from the beginning, Track 8 (say) starts with saxophone, then after the second chorus suddenly switches over to the electric guitar solo, then goes back to the sax. Hey - you have just turned a 24-track recorder into a 25-track!
But there is a problem. When mixing the song, the fader level and other settings that suit the electric guitar will probably not suit the sax. If it's just the fader, then this can easily be adjusted manually. If it's the EQ too, then there might be more of a problem, particularly if the change has to be done quickly.
(It might be worth saying that in the days of tape, mixing was done by playing the 24-track tape and simultaneously recording onto a stereo machine. There might be a lot of younger DAW users who would have no reason to know that.)
The solution here is to parallel that track onto two channels of the console, so the same track comes up on those two channels. Each instrument can be given its own optimum settings. Switching between the sax and the guitar is a simple matter of muting one channel and unmuting the other, then vice versa.
By now, you probably want to know whether you can do this with your DAW. Well yes you can, but you would have to be crazy, unless you had really maxed out the track capacity of your DAW and still wanted more.
If you want to hear track sharing in action, you could do no better than to explore the work of Roy Wood, of The Move and later The Electric Light Orchestra. He is well known for wanting to cram his recordings with as many instruments as possible, and track sharing was a technique that he commonly used.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
How to create a realistic bass drum with a lifelike texture
Bass drum samples tend to sound more like samples than the proper way a bass drum should sound. So how can they be given a more lifelike texture?
Since the sampling boom of the 1980s, now such a long time ago, we have become used to mechanical drum tracks. So much so that many drummers sound more like drum machines than real players. But the time is ripe to return to a much more natural sound, the way drumming used to be in the pre-digital era, hopefully with a 21st century twist of some kind.So let's start with the bass drum, or 'kick drum' if you prefer (Google seems to prefer 'bass drum'). Here is the bass drum that inspired this article...
the-wanted-chasing-the-sun.mp3
This is from a guest performance on one of the results shows of Britain's Got Talent, a popular TV talent competition in the UK, masterminded by Simon Cowell. The band is The Wanted and the track is Chasing
The Sun.
Notice the bass drum at the beginning. This is definitely a bass drum with character. It sounds as though it was recorded live (though probably pre-recorded for the show) and is indeed a real drummer's foot pounding a real bass drum pedal beating a real bass drum. And if it actually is sampled, then a hearty 'well done' to the person responsible.
So what does this bass drum have that other bass drums do not have?
Well firstly it has the expected bass drum thud. There's nothing unusual about that; that's what we expect from a bass drum. And it has a click too - being able to record a bass drum with a click is an art that combines the skills of both drummer and engineer. But where a sampled bass drum with click would still sound mechanical, this one lives and breathes. There is a slight irregularity that is human rather than computed.
Also, there is the feeling of other sounds being mixed in there. I swear I can hear the swish of the bass drum pedal. I swear I can hear the squeak of the leather that connects pedal to beater. (If you can hear the rattle of a chain, then I respect your preference.) I can hear a squeaky metal bearing that needs lubrication. I can hear the rustle of the drummer's trouser leg against his sock, the rattle of the loose change in his pocket...
OK, this is moving into the realms of imagination. But sometimes it's the feeling that is of paramount importance, and I feel all of this for this particular bass drum.
Another featured of this bass drum is that it doesn't sound quantized. It sounds played. I tried to check this by measuring the time between beats, but I couldn't get an accurate enough view of the waveform to be sure. Still, it sounds played, and that's the important thing.
So in conclusion, it's a great bass drum sound and I like it. The bass drum might be a small component of the overall sound of a track, but attention to small details can be vitally important.
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