Understanding Mic Specifications - Part 2 - Frequency Response

Grieg: Peer Gynt / Järvi · Berliner Philharmonike

Can a technical error cost you your record deal?

So you're signed to a label and your first release is only weeks away. Is there any way you could screw up your whole career with a simple technical error?

By David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

Not so long ago we published an article titled How to prepare your recordings to be PROFESSIONALLY mixed, by engineer Dan Guerrie. The article was about mixing, clearly, but there was a paragraph that has implications in other ways. Read this carefully...

"I had a project come to me last year for a remix from an indie label who wanted to sign an artist and release their CD. The engineer had used Auto-Tune on all the vocals. The parameters were improperly adjusted and the result was a lead vocal which sounded like Cher's vocal on Do You Believe. OK for the pop and dance genres, definitely not OK for the heavy metal genre. Because the Auto-Tune plugin had been rendered to the original vocal tracks there were no unprocessed tracks to use. The only option would have been to put the vocalist on an airplane to me so we could re-record all of the vocal tracks. The label didn't want to invest the time and money into doing this so they dropped the artist. Less than a month later I got another heavy metal band's tracks from that same label to mix for release."

So one technical error got a band fired from the label, which took on another act instead.

You might consider this harsh, but no-one goes around talking about the people in the record industry being as gentle as fluffy little lambs, do they?

Although it seems, according to Dan, that this band didn't yet have a contract, having a contract doesn't make things much better. Recording contracts are full of obligations for the act to fulfill, and equally full of options for the label to cancel the deal at the slightest opportunity.

So the moral here is not only should you have a great act, you need to dot and cross every technical 'i' and 't' too. Thoroughly!

Publication date: Monday April 02, 2012
Author: David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

Understanding Mic Specifications - Part I - Operating Principle

How a microphone works.

New piano piece by W.A. Mozart - Allegro Molto in C Major

02। 03. 12. - 16:24-Austian Independent

Previously unknown Mozart piece discovered

A previously unknown piano piece from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been discovered in Tyrol in Austria. The Mozart Foundation in Salzburg has reported that the piece was recently found in a music book from 1780.

According to the "Stiftung Mozarteum", the music book, which dates back to the 18th century, was found by university lecturer Hildegard Herrmann-Schneider from the institute for Tyrolean music research at Innsbruck University. The lecturer encountered the music when gathering handwritten pieces for the "Répertoire International des Sources Musicales", an international organisation which catalogues music sources preserved around the world.

The handwritten piece was handed over to a professional music copyist in Tyrol who identified the writing. The piano piece, he and the foundation in Salzburg have claimed, "is clearly written by the young Wolfgang Mozart". Experts have now confirmed that the work was produced by the young Austrian born composer.

The piece will be presented in the "Tanzmeistersaal" in the house of Mozart in Salzburg on 23 March at 11am। Prior to this, the most recent discoveries were in 2006 and 2010 of the so-called "Nannerl-music books". Leopold Mozart, the father of Wolfgang is thought to have written pieces in the books for his daughter Maria Ann known as Nannerl and later put in the compositions of his young son. The Mozart Foundation in Salzburg identified these as containing several piano pieces from the musician.

During his short lifetime, Mozart completed more than 600 works and began an additional 150 works which were never completed, a fact which is often overlooked.

Managing noise at the end of a mix

Any noise that is present in your multitrack recording will probably be unnoticeable until the end of the song. But when the instruments fade away, noise might become embarrassingly audible.

By David Mellor, Course Director of Audio Masterclass

Where does noise come from?

In the olden days of analog tape recording, tape hiss was like a lush carpet upon which every instrument and singer stood. But with digital recording, unwanted noise should be a thing of the past. Sometimes it isn't...

Perhaps your microphone is a little noisier than the best a mic can be. For example, the Beyerdynamic MCE 72 is a nice-sounding stereo mic. But it has a certain noise background that must be considered.

Perhaps your preamp isn't up to scratch in respect of noise level. There is no reason why it shouldn't be within a decibel or two of theoretical perfection. But that doesn't always happen, particularly with designs that tend towards a 'warm' sound.

Guitar amplifiers are commonly noisy. So are effects pedals. Compression always increases the noise level of a signal. And some plug-ins even emulate the noise component of the physical hardware they model!

And of course there's the computer. It shouldn't really be in the studio but in a separate machine room, connected by long cables or a KVM extender.

Since noise present in any individual track of a multitrack recording will almost always be masked by the instrument or vocal on that track, noise should not be a problem during the verses and choruses of the song.

But at the end when the instruments play their final notes or chords, the sound will die away leaving the noise clearly audible. This sounds ugly and amateurish, and must be corrected.

One solution to the problem is firstly to fade each individual track in such a way that any noise on the track isn't noticeable. If each track is fixed individually, then the whole mix will fade into absolute silence.

Another is to allow a prominent and noise-free track to dominate at the end, masking the noise on other tracks that should be faded out a little earlier.

One could of course just fade everything out before any noise becomes audible, but this is a rather cheap-sounding solution, as though the mix engineer doesn't really care about their craft.

Sometimes however, one important instrument might pose a real problem and there is no way to fade it out with elegance while at the same time eliminating the noise.

In a case such as this one option worth trying is to insert a low-pass filter into the track, setting the cut-off frequency to 20 kHz, then using automation to bring down the cut-off frequency as the last note fades away. Since noise is more noticeable at high frequencies than at mid and low frequencies, then this, combined with a fade, can lower the perceived level of noise to an extent that few listeners would notice.

One last point - sometimes modern-day digital recordings are just too quiet. Recording a track consisting of nothing but the hiss and hum of a guitar amplifier can provide a useful 'glue' that holds all of the instruments and vocals together. Just be sure to fade it out nicely before the end.

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 20 / Schiff · Berliner Philharmoniker