Audio Production: Learn the Fundamentals

hi I'm Dave Bodi and in this video course you are going to learn about the fundamentals of audio recording this course will cover some basics like what is audio recording what type of hardware is needed input and output connections what microphones do and which mics to use recording instruments software and more so what is audio recording audio recording is simply the capturing of a sound source the conversion from analog to digital information in the storage of that information there are dedicated systems used for recording editing and manipulating audio and they are referred to as digital audio workstations or DAW a DAW includes components like a computer an audio interface audio editing software and at least one device for adding or modifying musical note data the software is the core of a DAW system but we'll talk more about that later there are also portable battery operated systems for recording audio in the field or on location which we'll get into more later in this course one concept that we will refer to several times in this course is signal-to-noise ratio signal-to-noise ratio often abbreviated as SNR or s / n compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise this signal to noise concept can apply to many things in electronics and imaging but an audio background noise can literally be noise in the background but it can also be noise generated by your microphone noise from the preamp noise from a guitar amplifier or noise generated by the electronics in the analog to digital conversion itself getting more signal-to-noise means a cleaner clearer recording and it's a fundamental concept in recording let's take a look at this example in this example I've moved the microphone a good distance away from me and I've also turned on my air conditioner to introduce some background noise now what I've done is leveled the audio so that my voice is the same as it would be if the microphone was closer now I'm going to move the microphone closer and let's check that out alright now we're in the same exact location but this time I've moved the microphone back - it was before the air conditioner is still on I'm speaking at roughly the same level and what you end up with is the sound where my voice is louder but the sound that we don't want the air conditioner is softer and that is an increase in signal-to-noise we've gotten more of the thing we want and less of the thing that we don't want okay here is a less extreme example again the microphone is a good distance away from me and I'm speaking at the same level that I was before but now we don't have a large noise source such as my air conditioner now we're picking up ambient noise in the room which is some of my own voice reflecting off the walls it's also the birds outside okay there's no birds right at the second it's also my computer running and any other tiny little vibration that's happening in this structure is being picked up more now that the microphone is further back and we have to boost the overall level to make my voice the same as it was before now that the microphone is back where it should be you can hear that the ambient noise will have dropped off and my voice remains about the same the tonal characteristics of my voice have changed a little bit because now you're getting a more direct sound rather than more of a reverberant sound where my voice is bouncing off the walls as well as getting a direct sound by the time it gets the microphone when it's out there and now you're getting more of the direct sound and much less of that a very important property of sound is that it becomes weaker as you increase the distance to the sound source the amount of change is controlled by the inverse square law which states that when the distance from a sound source doubles the sound level decreases by six decibels the principle of the inverse square law applies to sound in free field a free field is a space with no reflective surfaces and because there aren't any real places like this where you will be recording the results won't be as exact but they will be dramatic the doubling of distance and six decibel decrease is a noticeable decrease as a decrease in 10 decibels it's considered to be about half as loud the decibel is a logarithmic unit so a one decibel increase is not a perceivable change a three decibel increase is barely noticeable and a 10 decibel increase is perceived as being about twice as loud this is important because as you have the distance between the sound source and the microphone you increase the volume by 6 decibels which is a substantial amount but what happens to the ambient sound in the room the ambient sound in the room is nearly the same level throughout the room this is because ambient sound has been reflected many times within the room until it's essentially non directional let's say you are trying to mic someone outdoors but there is a car running directly behind them the distance from the microphone to your subject is 2 feet the distance from the microphone to the car is 10 feet at that distance the person speaking is around 70 decibels and the car is around 50 decibels by moving the microphone closer to the subject by one foot half the distance you will have increased the level of your subject by 6 decibels but the car would only have increased by point 9 decibels if you cut the distance in half again and put the microphone 6 inches from your subject they would increase again by 6 decimals but the car would only have increased another point 5 decibels making this change would have resulted in your subject being 12 decibels louder and the car being 1.4 decibels louder which works out to making your subject about twice as loud without really increasing the level of the car as you increase the signal-to-noise you get a cleaner clearer recording more of the sound that you want and less of the sound that you don't want this is a fundamental concept not only in recording but working with audio in general something you need to think about every time you set up a microphone or when you're working with audio you need to get the most signal-to-noise that you can all digital recording will need some sort of device for the analog signal to be converted into digital bits and bytes when the analog audio comes in either by microphone input or line input it gets converted with an analog to digital converter when you're looking at audio interface specifications to terms that you'll come across our sample rate and bit depth without going into too much detail let's talk about each one of these one way to think about sample rate is taking a snapshot of the audio frozen in time the sample rate is simply how many times the audio to digital converter takes a snapshot of the audio per second for example CD audio has a sample rate of 44,000 100 and is referred to as 44.1 k or sometimes as 44 k k is short for kilohertz this means that the audio is sampled 44100 times every second when you're looking at audio interfaces or recording gear you may see several sample rates listed anywhere from 40 4.1 K up to 192 K for purely audio applications such as CD or iTunes 44.1 K is the standard for video work 48 K is the standard high definition blu-ray discs and DVD audio use higher sample rates but if you're just starting out that's not something you need to focus on bit depth is another term that you'll see when you're looking at digital audio gear the two bit depths that you'll see in most modern devices are 16-bit at 24-bit let's take a look at one sample of audio this sample contains all of the frequency of the sound and the amplitude of the sound if we take the amplitude of the signal which is represented vertically and break that up into segments we get an idea of what bit depth looks like the more segments the more resolution of amplitude we can achieve 16-bit audio will give you 65,536 levels of resolution 24-bit audio gives you 16,777,216 a common thought is that a 24-bit recording is somehow louder than a 16-bit recording but that's not true what a 24-bit recording will help with is very soft signals that fall close to the noise floor because you have more data to work with you'll be able to resolve more of the detail and therefore have a cleaner signal to work with I would recommend that you record everything in 24-bit if you can in summary sample rate provides frequency resolution and bit depth provides amplitude resolution ultimately you will have to choose your settings but you will want to consider the storage requirements versus the perceptual differences of these settings for example a stereo audio recording at 16 bit and 44.1 case sample rate is 1.4 megabytes per second at 24-bit in 44.1 K you are looking at 2.1 megabytes a second at 24-bit and 48 K it's 2.3 megabytes per second if you want it to go to 24-bit 96k is 4.6 megabytes per second I usually stick with 24-bit at 48 K as it is a standard for video and converts to 44.1 K and 16-bit without any perceivable loss in quality an analog to digital converter is not an extra device that you will need to get analog to digital converters or a dcs and their counterparts digital to analog converters or Dax are built into audio interfaces phones mp3 players computers TVs DVD players etc anything that works with digital information and output sound will have a DAC or an ADC it's important to know a little bit about them because when you are looking at audio interfaces or recording gear you will see these specs listed and comprehending them can be a little bit confusing if you don't have an understanding of some of the basic principles involved when you are purchasing new audio gear don't be tempted by getting something with the highest sample rate which might be 192 kilohertz first you will have to know if you can even tell the difference between 192 kilohertz recording and a 48 kilohertz or 44.1 kilohertz before if you are selecting a new audio interface there are many more factors that will play into the decision the great thing is that the tools available today are all very good and can produce excellent recordings we'll talk more about audio interfaces later in this course let's talk a little bit about microphones microphones convert acoustic energy into an electrical signal the topic of microphones is complex but for this course we're going to focus in on a few basic types of microphones the two most common types of microphones are dynamic and condenser dynamic microphones are highly dependable rugged and reliable dynamic microphones are fairly simple in construction in fact they work much the same way a loud speaker does only in Reverse or is a diaphragm that is attached to a small coil of wire the coil is positioned in the field of a permanent magnet when the sound waves move the diaphragm it also moves the coil and produces a small electrical current and this is the signal of the microphone it is because of this construction that they are comment on stages where ruggedness is important although dynamic microphones are not super accurate modern dynamic microphones sound fantastic and are widely used in recording and live productions condenser microphones are different from dynamic microphones for 4u reasons the diaphragm element which is the component that moves when it gets excited with sound is much lighter compared to a dynamic microphone because the element is lighter it could respond much faster to vibrations and is much more accurate than a dynamic microphone condenser microphones also contain electronics to make them function because of the more delicate construction and electronics condensers are not quite as rugged or durable as dynamic microphones to make these electronics function all condenser microphones need power some condensers use a battery but more often they use something called phantom power now not that phantom phantom power in the context of professional audio equipment is a method of transmitting power through microphone cables to operate the active electronic circuitry all microphones have a polar pattern that indicates how sensitive the microphone is to the sound coming from different directions you can think about this like a flashlight in a dark room wherever the light is emitting is where the microphone is most sensitive to sound an omnidirectional pattern responds to sounds in nearly all directions a cardioid pattern looks like a fat heart and reject sound from directly behind the microphone element super cardioid and hyper-cardioid have slightly narrower patterns in the front but start to accept sounds coming from the rear of the microphone these microphones reject sound from a rear angle a shotgun microphone has a pattern that is very narrow in front and has a narrow response from the rear but does a good job of rejecting sounds from the sides let's take a look at some different microphones and see how they respond to sound coming from different directions alright for this example I'm going to try and show you what the directionality or the polar patterns might sound like on some of these different microphones this is a shure sm58 microphone it's a dynamic microphone with a cardioid pickup pattern we're going to test this by holding it up to the speaker and rotating it so we get sound on access where the microphone is pointed directly at the sound source and off access where the microphone is pointing away now as I rotate the microphone around you should hear some of the frequencies kind of fall off so maybe the higher frequencies will roll off as it gets turned away from the microphone and the volume should vary as its rotated around as well this should reject sound fairly well from directly behind the microphone but let's check it out ah right up next we have a Behringer ECM 8000 this is a measurement microphone but it can also be used in recording as well it's got a very small diaphragm and it's a condenser microphone now this microphone is an omnidirectional microphone so it should pick up sound fairly well from all around let's check it out all right this is another sure microphone this is a beta 57 a now this is a hyper-cardioid microphone so it accepts sounds mostly from the front it probably has a small little node where it will accept sounds from the rear but most of the rejection happens from about a sixty degree angle along this axis in like this so let's check it out and see how it sounds all right this ridiculous-looking contraption is a shotgun microphone on a shock mount with a boom pole attached the microphone is actually just this cylindrical black object here and the rest of it is the apparatus to hold it for video productions things of that nature now this is a Sennheiser microphone I believe the model is an Emmy 66 and because it's a shotgun most of the sound is gonna come from directly in front of the microphone it's going to reject sounds extremely well from the sides and it may pick up sound just a little bit from behind the microphone I'm going to use the boom pull here to manipulate it because this is a very large microphone let's see what it sounds like knowing about the polar pattern in a microphone is important because it will help you decide if the microphone is appropriate for what you are trying to record directionality in a microphone can be a good way to focus in on the sound source but directionality also causes proximity effect the proximity effect in audio is an increase in bass or low frequency response when a sound source is close to a microphone this is good to know because it can help with some sound sources and make other sound sources a nightmare to control for instance proximity effect can be good to beef up a voice but if the singer or speaker is varying the distance from the microphone the bass response will be all over the place the only microphones that do not exhibit proximity effect are omnidirectional microphones here's a quick demonstration about proximity effect I will start this test with this large diaphragm condenser microphone with a cardioid pickup pattern and then do the same test with an omnidirectional microphone I will start a few feet back read a line step closer and read it again listen to how the bass will shoot up as I get right up on top of the microphone and then compare that with the omnidirectional microphone maybe wondering what this black circular thing is here this is called a pop screen or a pop filter and that's to protect the microphone and your recording from plosive consonant Slyke peas and bees things that have air that shoots out of your mouth when you say them this large screen helps dissipate that and really helps with a smooth sounding recording I love peanut butter and jelly I love peanut butter and jelly I love peanut butter and jelly I love peanut butter and jelly I love peanut butter and jelly now we'll try the same test with an omnidirectional microphone I love peanut butter and jelly I love peanut butter and jelly I love peanut butter and jelly I love peanut butter and jelly hopefully you have just heard that as I got closer to the microphone the base in my voice increased substantially this can be a great way to defy vocals or drums or another instrument that you're recording but like I said before it can also present a lot of problems if perhaps you're recording something that already has a lot of low frequency information in it or using a microphone that's extra sensitive to bass or low frequencies something you definitely need to keep in mind when you're using directional microphones be it condenser or dynamic or whatever proximity effect can help or hurt your recordings every microphone gets plugged into a preamp a preamp is a type of amplifier specifically designed to amplify very weak signals before they are fed to subsequent gain stages or devices preamps are commonly used to bring things like the output of a microphone up to a level where more equipment can work with the signal similarly magnetic pickups as used in guitars and basses are generally run through a preamp to prepare the signal to be used by other equipment downstream preamps are called upon to deliver extremely high amounts of gain while introducing very low amounts of noise and distortion your microphone input on your laptop or computer as a preamp although it's terrible many audio interfaces have preamps built into the unit and there are standalone preamps as well you can also find preamps in a mixer that has microphone inputs okay in this demonstration I thought I'd give you an idea of what the effect of a microphone preamp has on an actual microphone so in this demonstration the microphone that you're actually hearing is this large diaphragm condenser microphone here that is running through a preamp now this shure beta 57 dynamic microphone is running into the line level input of my audio interface which is channel number 1 now over here on the screen you can see I have two inputs that are recording and you can see the levels here the first one is this microphone right here the second one is this dynamic microphone that I'm talking in here now you can see that technically you don't actually need a microphone preamp to get signal from this microphone as you can see right here I do have signal but you can see the difference between this channel and they condenser microphone that is running through a microphone preamp is the level is much much much greater on the microphone that's running through a microphone preamp now this microphone does have a more substantial hotter output which means it it has more voltage at the same level compared to this dynamic microphone but this microphones further away this microphones right up against my face and still even if I get right on top of this microphone and shower it in it 1 2 3 you're still only getting about negative 18 with the gain which is not very much at all it's also worth noting that this would only really work with a dynamic microphone because phantom power is not transmitted over line level input so the only way to use a condenser in this type of situation is if you had a condenser with a battery but using a line level input with a microphone is not a very good idea unless you run it through an external preamp you can see that the level is not very usable so what you'd have to do is after you've made your recording is boost the overall volume in the track which would bring up all of the noise that's in the track as well because there is inherent noise in every recording you just don't hear it as much because you have so much signal that the noise is really really low when you don't have a lot of signal and you bring everything up the noise comes up with it so now let's check out this same microphone when plugged into an actual microphone preamp so now I have plugged this microphone into the front panel which is the same exact channel and by doing so and switching this mic line input selector now it's running through the microphone preamp and you can see now that I have a much healthier signal to work with it's still not as hot as this condenser microphone but that's just because this microphone doesn't have as great of an output and it's also running through a different preamp which has a different gain structure so the two levels are not exactly comparable but you can see that the level we have to work with now that it's running through a microphone preamp is much greater and we have a lot more flexibility a lot cleaner of a signal to work with and will get a lot less noise in our recording so microphone preamp with the microphone always the way to go another device typically used in recording studios and live productions is a direct box sometimes called di unit di box or simply di a di is used to connect a high impedance line unbalanced output to a low-impedance microphone level balanced input usually via XLR connector put simply d eyes are used to connect an electric guitar electric bass or keyboard to a microphone input the DI performs level matching balancing and more to minimize noise distortion and ground loops if you are close to your audio device you may be able to plug your bass or keyboard directly into a line level input if you have to run a cable more than 15 or 20 feet use a DI and an XLR to go into the mic input of your device one thing you'll need to be familiar with in recording is cables and connections connecting a microphone to a preamp or guitar to an amplifier requires a cable in the analog world there are balanced in unbalanced connections balanced cables and connections are designed to reject external noise from radio and electromagnetic sources and balanced cables can be run long distances without picking up noise there are also different connections that you will need to know about professional microphones for example use an XLR connection the XLR connector is a style of electrical connector primarily found on professional audio video and stage lighting equipment the connectors are circular in design and have between three and seven pins but for almost every microphone it's only three pins these pins carry the signal from the microphone to the input of your device pin 1 is ground pin 2 is positive in pin 3 is negative these pins also carry phantom power this connection has many names like TRS phoned plug audio plug quarter-inch cable it was invented for use in the telephone switchboards in the 20th century and is still widely used today in both its original quarter-inch size in miniaturized versions 3.5 millimeter or approximately 1/8 inch and 2.5 millimeter approximately 3/32 inch the connectors name is an initialism derived from the names of the three conducting parts of the plug the tip ring and sleeve hence TRS this connection has many uses for example professional headphones use this connector and it carries the signal as left-right and ground unbalanced outputs of a device this would be positive negative and ground there are also mono or TS versions of this cable which you may know as a guitar cable these are the same size will only have a tip in the sleeve some pro audio speakers use the same quarter-inch TS connector but speaker cables are not the same as instrument online level cables and shouldn't be interchanged there is more to TRS cables and connections but these are the basics an RCA connector sometimes called a phono connector is a type of electrical connector commonly used to carry audio and video signals the name RCA derives from the Radio Corporation of America which introduced the design in the early 1940s these cables are used for many things such as video line level audio digital audio speaker connections and more the use of quality cables is especially important when using RCA cables for a digital connection you may see cables bunched together in a group called a snake an audio snake is used for getting several cables to the same location while minimizing size typically these will be a combination of XLR and TRS or just XLR connections one end will typically have a box with inputs and the other is a fan of cable ends with the corresponding outputs there are also several kind of adapters that you can get to help you connect one kind of cable to another kind of cable here's an example of a 1/8 inch tip ring sleeve to a female quarter-inch tip ring sleeve this will be useful if you needed to connect a set of professional headphones where you had a stereo quarter-inch cable or tip ring sleeve quarter inch to an input that only had a 1/8 inch tip ring sleeve plug such as a laptop or mp3 player if you wanted to connect those to your professional headphones you'd need an adapter just like this here's another useful adapter this is a male quarter-inch to female RCA so this would be useful if you needed to connect a male RCA cable and go into a quarter inch input and here's the reverse of that this is a male RCA to a female quarter-inch this will be useful if you maybe have to go from a RCA output to a quarter-inch input so you plug this into your RC output you plug a quarter-inch cable into here and that would go to your quarter inch input there's another cool adapter that I have laying around this is a female RCA 2 female RCA adapter so this would be useful if you perhaps they need to extend an RCA cable a little bit longer and all you had or two male RCA cables so that would be the adapter you'd use here's another example of kind of an obscure adapter this is a 3/32 inch mono plug or tip sleeve going to a stereo 1/8 inch or tip ring sleeve plug I use this on an old Korg metronome that I needed to go to headphones here's another adapter this larger one here this is a tip ring sleeve quarter-inch 2 female XLR connector also be useful maybe if you were going from a balanced output and you needed to run that to something with an XLR balanced input there's some different type of adapters this is a tip ring sleeve or stereo quarter inch male to 2 quarter inch female here another set of useful adapters this this one here is a female RCA going to 2 male RCA cables and this is the reverse of that this is a male RCA going to 2 female RCA this is useful if you have to split some signals and send them to two different inputs here's another useful cable this is a female quarter-inch to two male mono quarter-inch here's an example of another super useful cable this is a male 1/8 inch tip ring sleeve or stereo going to two male RCA cables now this is useful if you want to connect the output of your iPhone or mp3 player or even your laptop into the input of a mixing console that has RCA inputs or your audio interface that will have RCA inputs this is the cable that you need to do it let's say you wanted to go from this stereo 1/8 inch input to quarter inch well you could get a special cable for that or you can use this same cable and put two RCA two quarter inch adapters on it and that would work too this is maybe not the greatest way to do it although there's nothing particularly wrong with this but if you have a cable that doesn't use an extra connection that would be better but this is perfectly acceptable to do another cable type that you'll come across in the recording world is MIDI MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface and is a way of transmitting musical information to an audio interface and then onto your computer now you can see in my setup I have a keyboard back here which is connected via a MIDI cable to my audio interface now the MIDI protocol is quite old it was developed in the early 1980s but is still a standard in studios today you'll find newer keyboards will use maybe a USB type protocol to send the same sort of information to a computer but it's not necessarily any better than the good old MIDI standard now MIDI contains information about the notes that you're playing the velocity or how hard you press the keys it has information on your sustain pedal when you press the sustain pedal and when you release it on the pitch Bend wheel on the modulation wheel and more you can use MIDI for all kinds of information to control all kinds of different devices you can have a MIDI keyboard control several rack units of sound samplers for a live performance type application or you can have a very simple application like I have going on here where I'm taking a keyboard and I'm using the MIDI output of the keyboard going to the MIDI input of my audio interface and that's how I'm getting the musical note data and other data into my computer now that data is used for controlling things like virtual instruments inside of my multitrack recording application now anyone who's played a keyboard ever knows that keyboards already have these sounds so why would you use these virtual instruments inside the computer well the computer has far more memory and processing power than any keyboard will ever have in fact it's popular in live performances to see a controller keyboard which is a keyboard that doesn't have any sounds on it but it only sends MIDI data going to an audio interface that goes to a computer or through maybe USB goes directly to a computer and then the computer will host all of those sounds your piano sounds your drum sounds and the reason is that the amount of information in one sound pack say for instance a piano is so much larger than you'll find on the keyboard now you'll hear keyboards that have some great sounds in headphones or played through a speaker system but they pale in comparison to what's available in the plug-in world another thing to note when talking about cables is that the use of a quality cable is very important in any application when you're looking at cables be it XLR instrument cables RCA doesn't matter you'll always see a range of prices and a range of pull and qualities you'll also see some companies that are well above what's maybe the standard or average pricing and those companies will claim a lot of far-out and fabulous things about their product they'll somehow transmit the audio better or faster well I want to caution you about those particular products and cables I want to caution you about those special cables because a good quality cable made by a reputable manufacturer is just about the best that you can get anyway electricity travels at a super super fast speed some 300,000 kilometers per second so as long as you have good quality copper and it's insulated well and it's shielded well that's just about the best that you can get there is a difference in the actual connectors on cables and you'll find like some $5 xlrs will have some really cheap looking connectors and I would stay away from those cables but things that have a real sturdy looking connector especially ones made by switch craft or nitric are probably a really good cable that will last you a really long time alright lastly let's talk about how to wrap a cable now in my opinion there are two ways to wrap a cable there's the right way and then there's the wrong way now the wrong way looks like this if you take the cable and you bring your elbow up in this kind of motion you're wrapping the cable the wrong way doesn't matter what kind of cable it is it could be an XLR cable it could be an instrument cable it could be a 50 foot 12 gauge power cable it doesn't matter that's the wrong way to do it and here's the reason why when you wrap the cable like this what you're doing is you're making a lot of twists in the cable because all these loops are going the same way and so when you undo this you'll find that the cable has a twist in it see if we put this cable together it wants to be twisted together and that means that there is a slight twist of the cable over the length of it what this means is that your cable will never ever lay flat on the ground and that's bad because cables that don't lay flat our tripping hazard and the long-term effect of this is even worse because if you leave your cables wrapped the wrong way you are leaving them wrapped with all kinds of twists in them and especially if they get warm the rubber or PVC molding on the outside of the cable will actually kind of reset itself so that the cable will be permanently twisted or corkscrewed this is no good for cables so let's talk about the right way to wrap the cable now you may hear this technique referred to by some different names one is twist reverse twist one is a studio wrap one is over-under this is what it looks like hold one end of the cable in one hand and then you're going to make a loop here now the first loop should look like this where the long part of the cable is on the outside then the next loop you're going to take your other hand in my case the left hand and you're going to make kind of a half twist on the cable so that it goes underneath the line let me show you what that looks like again here's the first loop like this I actually twisted that over and now here's the next one where I'm going to twist it under so the cable actually goes underneath the long part of the cable is underneath this loop and we do the next one and we make an over twist and we do another one and we go under and so you twist one way and then you twist back the other way and by doing this you are essentially not twisting the cable at all because you are twisting it one way for one loop and then you are twisting it back the next way for the subsequent loops and what you get is a cable that essentially doesn't have any turns in it whatsoever so if you were to take both sides of this cable and pull them straight the cable would be absolutely dead flat that's exactly what you want now if you end up wrapping your cables a whole bunch of times the wrong way you basically will never be able to wrap those cables up the right way ever again because they will have twists in them and when you try and wrap them up it doesn't matter which way after they've been ruined they'll never wrap up nice like this with nice tight loops or loops that are all uniform like this storing them like that can be a real nightmare let me show you one more time so we do the first loop like this and make a twist we do the next loop and we twist underneath we do another loop we do the next loop underneath now you want to make all your loops roughly the same size and as big as you can without being completely impractical now in this particular case the last loop happened to be an under twist or a reverse twist now it's really really important that when you when you secure this cable now in this case I'm using a velcro strap that you keep both ends of the cable on opposite sides of the coil and you want to keep them on the same sides as you coil them and the reason is if you accidentally pull this side underneath the cable you will create a whole bunch of knots literal knots in the cable and that can be annoying as well so the only real trick to this is making sure when you secure the cable or tie it up that the ends remain on the sides and then when you pull it out again you grab the right end of the cable and make sure you're not pulling it back through the loop now it's also okay to cheat the last part of the cable so in this particular case the last loop feels like it should be an under loop or a reverse twist but it's perfectly acceptable to do the last loop and double it so you do two twists in the same direction you're drastically reducing the possibility that you will screw this up when you uncoil this wire so this may seem like a bit of a hassle to start if you're not used to it but I promise as you get used to coiling the cable this way it's very very easy to do and you do it without even thinking of it I do it so fast I'm like a rodeo Wrangler you can get nice beautiful looking cables every time that will always lay flat so except for cables that are super short like maybe under three feet you can wrap every cable this way and always be sure that it's gonna lay flat and come out looking beautiful and always wrap up nice the next time let's talk audio interface an audio interface is a device that is designed to allow input and output of audio from a personal computer running audio software audio interfaces connect to the computer using firewire or USB protocols or using a dedicated expansion card that installs in the slot in the computer some of the features you'll find in these audio interfaces although not all features are found on all interfaces are mic level audio inputs line level audio inputs instrument level audio inputs line level audio outputs spit of format optical or coaxial inputs and outputs AES EBU format digital input and outputs ADA optical format 8 channel input and output studio monitor control features such as mu dim volume control speaker switching headphone outputs with volume controls MIDI input and output built-in DSP for low latency Q mixing built-in DSP for effects such as reverb or delay while tracking that's a lot of stuff but let's break it down to find out what you really need to get started inputs and outputs you need a way to connect an input to record and this should be a mic input with phantom power and maybe a quarter inch line level input then you need outputs at least two for right and left and probably a headphone output lastly you'll need a way to connect this with the computer and this will probably be in the form of USB or firewire the number of inputs and outputs is only limited by your budget I chose my audio interface back in 2004 and because I wanted to record drums I figured I would need at least eight inputs practically I have only ever used it to record multiple tracks a few times because as drum plugins improved I didn't really need to record my own drums anymore for the last six years I have basically only used two inputs one for a mic input and the other for my line six guitar pedal pricing for inputs and outputs which is basically the thing that you pay for it really changed all that much in the last several years but I'm sure that quality latency and noise performance definitely has been improved there are also some standalone digital audio recorders out there I use a tascam dr 100 for recording audio when I'm doing video production and it works well this unit has two XLR inputs with phantom power line level inputs headphone and line level outputs and it has two sets of stereo microphones built-in an omnidirectional set and a unidirectional set in an XY pattern it runs on batteries and reports to SD memory cards there are many other devices out there that have more features more inputs more outputs and are available at all different price points now at some point in the recording process you will need to hear what you have recorded and this brings us to headphone and studio monitors studio monitors are special speakers designed to give you a very precise uncoloured reproduction of sound you will almost certainly need headphones and studio monitors because you will want to monitor the audio as you record it and you can't do this with studio monitors unless you are in a separate room and it is acoustically isolated from where you aren't recording otherwise you will get bleed from the speakers into the microphone or worse feedback which can destroy speakers and your hearing headphones also allow you and your talent to hear what is going on while recording and this is important studio monitors range from out-of-this-world expensive to budget bargain-basement select something that fits your budget but this is not a place to skimp or cheap out most studio monitors are fairly small but you should consider getting something with at least an 8 inch speaker or larger otherwise you won't have an accurate representation of low frequencies if you get a smaller speaker system you could also augment the low frequency with a subwoofer but you may want to find the set that is designed to go together headphones are probably a little less critical and you can definitely get some great sounding headphones for cheap what may be more important is how comfortable they are you could be wearing them for extended periods of time and they can get really uncomfortable on years the last component besides the computer is software the software handles the recording and the processing of audio files there are many many applications out there such as studio one sonar reason Pro Tools logic GarageBand and more some apps are PC or Mac only but the one I like best is Reaper Reaper is a powerhouse of an application supports just about any hardware uses nearly every kind of plug-in is consistently updated the install file is very very small and it's cheap in the next section we're going to take a look at what's inside of Reaper you'll find a lot of the controls and functions are the same throughout a range of applications but let's jump in and find out more so here we are inside of Reaper now what you're seeing inside this program is somewhat similar to what you'll find in many audio recording applications even though there are several out there they all have some similar traits for example this section right here is called the transport controls and here's where you'll find the play/pause record and loop or repeat buttons you can also rewind and go to the beginning of your project or the end of your project with that button they also find your time indicator here this gives you your actual time and this is a representation of how many measures and beats you are at at any given time so if we go back to the beginning see we're at measure 1 beat number 1 and that's that's helpful for when you're recording music now you also see this kind of layout in many programs this is a representation of the track mixer and it's kind of similar to the old way of mixing where you might be using a tape recorder and then you would play that tape recorder back through an actual hardware mixer an analog mixer and so this gives you fader controls and some routing this is a mute button so we can mute this particular channel or solo this particular channel and yeah it also gives you this button here record arms the track for recording which makes it able to record you can also set the input here and if you pull this up here you can also put in plugins or effects on these tracks and that's where they would lie here very similar to if you're using a hardware mixer back in the old days and you would use a physical reverb for example you would insert that into a particular track or into a particular subgroup and send and send instruments to it now this section up here is where we have the actual recorded sound sources so you can see here let me get rid of this mixer panel and so here you can see what multitrack recording is all about each one of these tracks or lanes is a separate instrument and you can see that if I solo this you will hear on this channel it's a Rhodes keyboard by solo this channel it is a pad or a synth kind of zone this is a high guitar part which I just named this is the bass guitar to say rhythm guitar is another rhythm guitar and another rhythm guitar and then down here we have a what's called a track folder or a subgroup some other applications may refer to as a subgroup this is the drums now we have individual drum tracks in here so this one right here is the kick drum and you can see here those are the actual waves from the kick drum recording scroll down we can take a look at this is the snare drum actually start drama has reverb on it so that's exactly what the microphone will be hearing and then you have a hi-hat and toms and some overhead microphones which get a general mix of the entire drum kit and so with this kind of setup you have a lot of power and flexibility for example if I was recording an entire band I could theoretically plug in each instrument into an audio interface and record the entire band's performance with all of the instruments on a separate track just like this I mean imagine if this were the drummer right here these were two separate guitar players and a third guitar player right here and maybe this guy's the bass player let's scroll that up here's another guitar player who has some cool stereo effects that he's playing here's the keyboard player and here's another keyboard player we could have vocals and and on and on the number of tracks that you can play back in a system like this is only limited to the processing power of your computer now my particular computer can run more tracks than you'd ever need to I've done projects where I've recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 different vocal tracks about doing a lot of vocal percussion and and things of that nature it also gives you the ability to adjust the volume of each track not only globally by moving this fader here or this volume fader so we could make this quieter we can make it louder but the other thing you can do in these applications is do something called track automation and that means that you can adjust the volume over time so as this plays I can put in a keyframe here and then put another one here so now you can see this is the volume what they call an envelope so basically the volume will follow whatever this line does and that is a very very powerful tool for when you are mixing all of these instruments together it gives you the ability to really really finesse the various volumes of different instruments if you have a singer who sings a particular passage quieter you can boost that whole passage up so you can not only automate the volume of a track you can also in modern applications automate nearly every parameter that has any adjustment whatsoever this button here brings up all of the automation properties for this particular track so we can automate the volume the pan the volume pre effects the mute we can also automate where this track is going so right now this bass is being sent out to a separate channel which is adding some more kind of sub harmonic frequencies and we can automate that by clicking here we can also automate the send to the sub pan and mute and also we can automate all of the effects that are on this channel so I have any cue on here which is giving it a little bit of a curve and I also have a compressor here which is kind of just regulating a little bit of the dynamics of this bass guitar and in here I can automate all of those parameters and it can give complex but that just shows you some of the that just shows you some of the power that's available in these audio applications now like we said before this is a multi track recording and editing application but that doesn't mean that you have to record more than one track at the same time or even playback one of the more than one track at the same time for instance you could imagine that this might be a recording of an entire band where we have the drummer the guitar players the bass guy and maybe two keyboard players when in actuality I was the one who recorded all of these instruments I recorded each track individually so I would set up a track to record arm it for recording go back to the beginning here and I usually set up a metronome in here so I can hear where the beats are and then I would record so I lay down my guitar and so on and so forth and that really is one of the most powerful aspects of this program is you can basically go back and record over and over and over again until you get it right or you can take multiple sources from pre-recorded things and mix them together to get all kinds of new results that the possibilities are literally endless let's talk a little bit about some of the controls you get here it's like a just the roads track for a second will solo this and what soloing is is we're only hearing this track it basically shuts off the sound playback from the other instruments so at this point in time you could only hear this one track now what we have here this is a this meter here is showing you how much signal is coming back through this channel and that's useful if I were to what's called normalized this tract oops normal so now that tract is a lot louder and basically what what normalizing does is take thee the highest peak or the loudest thing that was recorded or is in the audio track and pushes that all the way up here to to zero decibels so basically you can't go above zero decibels because it then it goes into clipping and Distortion so this basically took the loudest thing that was there which was down here or something and pushes it all the way up to the top oh it actually was right there here you can see that this track hit negative point 1 decibels which is just about the loudest you can get on a single track now you don't want all of your tracks like that because the summing of a whole bunch of tracks that are basically as loud as they can be means that the end result is way way way way too loud but that gives you an idea of what this meter is so this is showing you what the playback is now also we have here this is a pan control now pan controls how it gets routed from the right to the left this is another parameter that is automatable so the signal is showing you that because it's panned to the center it's coming through both right and left channels even though this is a mono source meaning that it's it only has one channel it's being routed because this is a stereo project meaning that the output is going to two channels this one channel is being routed to both the left and the right channel equally and if we move this say 61% to the right now you will see that reflected in the metering I can actually change the metering here big meter so now you can see let's put it back the way it was before cuz I don't like that at all now this is the volume fader just like you would find on a an analog mixer console here you have this is your input selection so if I was setting up this channel to record I would click this and this gives me a number of options to select which input I want to record now in my particular setup I have 8 analog inputs plus 2 digital inputs is there this is actually a stereo so I can choose the left side of this stereo or the right and that will get recorded as a mono track because this input is just for mono now if I select stereo these inputs are grouped in twos so this is the input for analog input 1 & 2 then there's 2 & 3 3 & 4 and so on and so forth you can even do analog input 8 to digital spit if input left and group those as a stereo channel you can also select a MIDI input to record if you wanted to control a virtual instrument or a synth in this panel here this is the that little I /os stands for input and output and this is basically where you can route this track to go so this is telling you that this track is going to the master buss which are 1 & 2 and this track contains 2 channels and this is the volume now we could send this someplace else which is where this is here and you can see this already has a send to the verb which is short for reverb now I have the reverb muted but if I unmute it you can hear now it sounds like it's in a large Hall or something and that's how I added reverb to this particular project I took the signal that was coming from this channel and not only is it going to the master it's also going to the reverb but a lot less so if it's going to the reverb see this this represents the full signal amount and then it was more like down here and that's how you can you can kind of adjust and you can also set this track to receive say I want to get some of the rhythm guitar for whatever reason coming back on this track I don't know why you would do that for this particular track but as you can see you can have a lot of a lot of flexibility you can also set what you have enough you can also set this track to play back through one of the outputs of your audio interface so if for whatever reason you might want to send just this channel out you could send it through any one of the outputs any one of the analog or digital outputs so you can see you have a lot of flexibility and then here of course you can name the track now this is the mute button so it's actually solo and mute at the same time which doesn't want to do much and then here is where you can add effects you can see right here it says effects and this is the when you click it the first time in this particular application it brings up the browser to browse what effects you might want so we could add say an equaliser here to this channel and now you basically have a power button for this which tells you that the effects are now bypassed or they are enabled so with a new pen EQ for example when you solo this we could take and modify the the frequency bands to kind of shape the frequency spectrum of this particular instrument now you could do this on any instrument and that's often how music is produced each track may get a little or a lot of Equalization to bring out certain parts of the audio spectrum it it's what gives maybe vocals a super crisp sound or jazz guitar that really kind of mellow sound in addition to EQ there are tons of effects from compressors to reverbs to gates which let the sound come through at a particular level and keeps it out when it's below that particular level these are just the stock plugins that come with Reaper there's tons and tons of other plugins these are a plug-in that uses the VST protocol it's basically a somewhat universal plug-in system that works with a bunch of different applications in fact many of these are available for just about every multitrack audio application and there's tons of things in here from guitar cabinet emulators to all kinds of different compressors to things that make it sound low fidelity all kinds of different things in here that's pretty much it so you can see with with all these controls you can get a ton of flexibility in how you can record and then what you can do after it now in addition to that we can come in here and take this wav file we can chop it up so we can come in here and slice it here you solo this up we can move this part over we can take this copy it and now this section here will basically repeat is that call a little bit iffy the end of that phrase there but so you can do this on a on a more somewhat global scale or we can we can take all of these and duplicate them so say I just recorded the chorus to a song and we need another one well I could record it again or I could just take the good recording I already have copy it and move it down and now I have another chorus that's ready to go and so you can have a ton of flexibility in fact I did another tutorial for audio Tut's plus calm in which I took this very project and I intentionally recorded some things rather sloppily like this tambourine track here and the timing of each one of these tambourine recordings this is - and then I grouped them in a in a stereo channel here was all over the place I mean it sounded like I had never picked up a tambourine before or I didn't know how to play drums at all and so you can get in here and make really really fine adjustments you can cut this track and then move it so that it lines each one of these little hits lines up with a beat and that's how I basically fixed my tambourine track because the timing was all over the place and this is another thing that's used in modern recordings where it'll take a a drummers drum set and they'll take it and chop it all up and make all of the hits every single hit be right in time where you know if you were to hear the original there would be slight variations even from a crow drummer you know a studio drummer there would be slight variations and fluctuations to each hit and everything may not be metronomic ly perfect but that's a way that you can do it so that when you take a chorus and you need to grab it right here at beat one measure 10 you will not be grabbing a note that's slightly ahead or slightly behind you'll be grabbing one that's right on there so that when you pay stuff around it's a really accurate way to do that and then you don't have timing issues if someone's trying to record a guitar part let's say - a drum track that's not metronomic ly perfect you know there's some fluctuations they his kind of perception of that is going to be all kinds of screwed up the principles and ideas that I demoed here in Reaper are possible in many applications hopefully this has given you an idea of what is possible in multitrack recording software let's take a look at a few examples on how to record some different instruments first we're going to take a look at how to record an electric guitar a really simple setup would be an electric guitar amplifier and a microphone now if you look behind me this is exactly what I have here the amplifier is a simple 23 watt tube amplifier and the microphone is assure beta 57 the microphone is positioned right in the center of the con and it's maybe 2 to 3 inches from the cone now setting up the microphone this way pointing directly towards the center of the cone will give you a good amount of high frequency response as you move the microphone away from the center of the cone you'll get less high-frequency detail it's also worth noting that when you mic an instrument or even the human voice that your results will never sound exactly like it sounds to your ear especially with an electric guitar amplifier because of the way the frequencies radiate from the speaker cone it doesn't sound anything like it does to your ear a lot of the high frequencies come straight out of the center of the cone most guitar players that I've seen playing on stages and even in the studio don't position their guitar amplifiers so that they are getting a direct kind of feed from this high frequency beam coming from the center of the speaker to their ear a lot of times you'll see guitar players with their amplifiers on the ground where it's pointing at their knees so they are hearing something that's quite different than what a microphone pointed directly at the center of the speaker is going to hear now you can position the microphone further away but just like in our other example that'll get less direct sound and more of an ambient type sound that may be the sound you're looking for but let's check out what this setup sounds like all right I have my microphone plugged into my audio interface and I have set the gain so that the loudest sound coming from my guitar at this particular amplifier level will be around negative 6 decibels now a lot of times in the recording world in the audio world the volume spectrum is represented from negative infinity to zero decibels zero decibels would be the loudest thing anything above zero decibels would be what's called clipping and that's a type of distortion and it's very very bad a pretty bulletproof technique is to take the loudest possible sound that you're gonna get and make that negative six decibels that gives you about six decibels of headroom or kind of room above the loudest thing and it gives you a margin of safety so let's check out at this volume what we get going on here cool we get a nice direct sound it's full its punchy now let's check out what a distorted tone might sound like with the same exact setup you with the same microphone at the same distance away from the speaker changing out these variables changing the tone changing the EQ changing your guitar settings your pickup settings your tone settings you can get an almost limitless number of tonal possibilities now the way I have my guitar amplifier set up right now with both the clean and the distorted signal are with the equalization knobs pretty much flat so it doesn't have a lot of boost in the low end or the high end or it's not cutting any mid frequencies it's just flat right across the board and generally that gives me a good pallet of tone to work with now I can further modify that in my recording application with EQ and other sounds now I should also tell you that when you're recording electric guitar it's always a good idea to record a dry signal so you'll notice that my guitar amplifier didn't have any reverb it didn't have any compression it's just my guitar going right into the amplifier no extra pedals now if in your setup you use some compression pedals or some overdrive pedals before the amplifier that's totally cool to use that's part of your tone anything like delay chorus reverb those kind of modulations and time-based effects you want to add those after in the recording application because you'll have a tremendous amount of control over them then whereas if you kind of baked them into the sound now you're basically stuck with whatever you have it can make editing a nightmare because as you cut a sound with reverb and kind of trim it and mash it together with other clips it can sound really messy and it's a much smoother sound if you record a completely dry signal and then add all of those other effects later now you can also get some different tones by using a different microphone in this situation I'm using a dynamic microphone but you could use a large diaphragm condenser like this microphone you could use a small diaphragm condenser you have a lot of options you can also kind of vary the situation by moving the amplifier in your space if you put your amplifier in the corner which is how I have mine set up you may get more low-frequency response in your microphone because as you put a sound source in the corner you're kind of reinforcing the lows so by putting the amplifier in the middle of the room or near another wall you may get some different more desirable sounds so you have a lot of options moving things around changing microphones this is a basic setup that can get a lot of different tones without very much work using an electric guitar amplifier and a microphone is not the only way to record electric guitar this device here is the pod x3 live and this device models guitar amplifiers guitar speaker cabinets stompboxes and other effects all inside this hardware unit now what I use this for when I'm recording it's much more basic I use it to emulate guitar amplifiers and speaker cabinets and the microphones that would be miking those speaker cabinets inside here you can select from a number of different amplifiers and how those are hooked up to some virtual speaker cabinets so you could have a vox ac30 amplifier hooked up to an 8 by 10 amp egg bass speaker cabinet and then use that with a shure sm57 microphone and then even vary the position of the microphone all inside of here I use this to get a lot of different tones very very quickly in this way I don't have to have a whole bunch of amplifiers and sounds that this produce can be very very accurate and very very good if you know how to tweak them now a lot of the sounds do take a good amount of tweaking to get them to sound nice and natural the good thing about this is that when you're recording you don't have to have your studio monitors off like you might if you were using a microphone in the same room because if you had a microphone live in the same room and your studio monitors on it could present a big problem with feedback and destroy your speaker's and/or your hearing this way you can hear exactly what you're playing and exactly what's being recorded whereas if you use a guitar amplifier and a microphone you may be hearing one thing but the microphone shoved right up into the speaker may actually sound a good bit different so this type of setup using this pod x3 live gives me a lot more repeatable type results now this is not the newest model but there's nothing wrong with it it sounded fantastic when it came out and it still sounds fantastic today you can also record bass guitar in the same way using a device just like this because along with all those amplifier models and speaker models it also has a lot of base amplifier and bass speaker models that you can make all kinds of combinations with and record your bass guitar just like this and in that way it gives your bass a lot more tonal possibilities for recording now one other way that you can record both your electric guitar and your electric bass which we'll go into more later is plugging your instrument directly into your audio interface and then doing the amplifier and cabinet simulation later digitally like all digitally in the computer line6 has a plug-in called amp farm which is basically all the features of this pedal but in software and they probably sound a little bit better it also is a little bit easier to see because well you have pictures of stuff and that's kind of easier to see then just some lines of text but there's also some other great plugins amplitude by Native Instruments and there's some free ones like free am-3 dig if you do some searching around you can find some great guitar amplification simulation stuff out there and that'll give you tons of possibilities plugging your guitar or your bass directly in to your audio interface and recording the dry signal gives you a ton of options down the road so you can add any amp that you could possibly think of and you get just tons of variations and tons of options it may not be the fastest way because you can definitely get lost in all the sounds and all the combinations but it is a super cool way to do it and it gives you tons of options alright let's look at how you might go about recording bass guitar now in this particular setup I have plugged in my bass guitar directly to my audio interface because I am pretty close to my audio interface it's right there I can get away with using a regular old instrument cable to plug in doesn't need to be a balanced cable in fact a balanced cable probably wouldn't work but I don't need to use a DI because I'm pretty close now if you're recording more than fifteen or twenty feet away you may need to use a DI to get your instrument to an XLR and get that to your audio interface you don't want to use a super-long like 50 foot long instrument cable that's gonna present all kinds of problems with noise you plug your instrument cable into here into the input you plug your output via XLR and that goes directly into your audio interface but because I'm so close I can get away with this now now all bass guitars are the same this is a really nice space guitar it's mine I love it but it already has a preamp built-in this is what's known as an active bass guitar because it has a preamp it takes a couple of batteries and this control section down here is different than you'd find on maybe your standard you know Fender Jazz Bass or something with just magnetic pickups a volume and a tone and maybe a pan pot from going between pickups the output on here is a lot louder than you'll find on a passive bass and because it's so much louder I need to actually press the pad on my audio interface now what the pad button does is before the signal gets to the preamp it actually makes it 20 decibels quieter in this way I don't send too much to the preamp because the output of this bass is so hot that if I take the pad off and I turn the gain all the way down on the preamp turn the volume up watch the preamp right there that red light that you see is clip I'm sending so much information that even with the preamp turned all the way down it's too much and it's clipping it's going into Distortion that's bad so I put the pad on there and then I turn the preamp volume up just a little bit and now I get a nice juicy signal and it's not so much that it's pushing into Distortion now another way that you can record bass guitar is just like we've recorded electric guitar you can use a microphone on your bass amp I do not prefer this method of recording bass guitar and here's why in general I think bass guitar amplifiers are awful reproducing bass frequencies for an amplifier is probably the most difficult thing out of anything that any amplifier will have to do mid-range and high frequencies are much easier for an amplifier to produce the making situation worse is that our ears detect distortion in bass a lot faster than distortion in the higher frequencies and that distortion creates a lot of other nasty harmonics and makes the bass just awful because bass amplifiers are pretty cheap they are not very accurate and so they introduce a lot of distortion and it's not the good kind of distortion it's not like tube distortion you know gritty its distortion like nasty mangled waveforms distortion and that does not sound good now if you have a real real high-end bass amplifier it may work for you but in general recording your 150 watt practice amp is not going to be a super great sound now if that's your only option go for it and you know it's going to be better than nothing if you ever look at those bass amplifiers and you make the equalization flat so you're not boosting any frequencies or cutting any frequencies and then you just turn the amplifier up to a reasonable level you'll probably hear a lot of hiss if it doesn't have a noise gate on it if you're not hearing hiss it probably has a noise gate on it and it's just hiding it and that is an indication that the preamps on those are pretty sloppy so you're basically recording a lot of extra noise and junk that you don't want to and that's why I don't like that way recording it direct into your audio interface here gives you a lot of options I mean you can Rianne pit later in the computer you get your nice dry clean signal and then you can apply amplification simulators and emulators in the computer and make it sound like anything you want let's check this out and see what kind of sound we get with this plugged in direct to the audio interface it's a pretty nice sound now an active bass often you will have tone controls that are different than a passive bass now in this particular bass guitar I have a volume knob then I have a pan pot which basically mixes between these two pickups all the way this way is this pickup and if I turn it all the way the other way it's this pickup and there's a detent in the knob if you can hear right there where it clicks in the center and that means it's basically equal amounts of both pickups now there's also three tone pots on here and what these do this is high frequency mid frequency and low frequency and there's a detent in these as well you can hear that there so when it hits the click it's right in the center now when it's right in the center it's not doing anything it's not boosting high frequencies and it's not cutting high frequencies now when you compare this type of setup to a passive bass and even your regular old electric guitar the volume knob on electric guitar is not turning it up when you turn it to ten it's not up to ten it's basically doing nothing as you turn the volume down it's adding resistance which also changes the tone of the guitar as you turn it down the tone gets duller and kind of thicker more muddy or jazzy or maybe the tone works the exact same way on both passive bass guitars and electric guitars when the tone is up to ten it's not doing anything it's that is whatever the pickups are normally doing as you turn the tone down it's adding resistance that only affects the upper registers or the higher frequencies so it makes it sound like you're basically turning the treble down and that is in fact what you're doing you're you're turning the treble down when it's up all the way on a passive bass you're not doing anything it's just letting all of the sound go through now when you're recording instruments like that a lot of times you might consider just recording it without any of those tone knobs doing anything so turn your volume up all the way and turn the tone up all the way a lot of bass players that I've come across when they play live some of them especially when they play passive basses will have their tones kind of cranked down a little bit because a lot of passive basses are more susceptible to noise because of their shielding on the inside so by turning down the tone they kind of get rid of some of that noise or buzz but when you're recording oftentimes you'll want those tones in there and if you're a short distance away from your audio interface you're not going to get that much noise so when I record this bass I leave all of the equalization dials dead center so it's basically not boosting anything or cutting anything and I leave the pan-pot kind of in the center depending on the song I leave the volume knob at whatever is appropriate to give me a good juicy signal with the pad in if I was recording a passive bass I would do the same thing give the volume all the way up and give the tone all the way up and then adjust the preamp accordingly so I get basically everything the bass has to offer and then if I need to take anything away I can do that with an EQ plug-in in software if you record something that has the tone down and the volume down a little bit you're already starting from a position where your sound has less treble and less kind of frequency response than it normally would or could have so if you have to add something later you're adding something that's not there you're trying to make something out of nothing you don't have a lot of toning you're trying to boost it back up that's not a great way to do it it's much better to start with kind of all your bass or guitar has to offer and then in the software you can always take away because taking away frequencies is always a lot cleaner than pushing up something that isn't really there hopefully that helps you in your bass recording adventures all right let's talk recording acoustic guitars now this guitar is not a very good guitar in fact it's pretty terrible but you can make it sound pretty good by using a good microphone and getting that microphone right up close to the guitar now this particular microphone that I'm using is an MX l 991 it's a very very inexpensive small diaphragm condenser microphone with a cardioid pickup pattern but it sounds very good I use this microphone all the time with video productions where I'm recording people's voices inside and a shotgun microphone would not work out well for that because a lot of nasty reflections but this microphone sounds great on a lot of sources not just voice it'll sound great on acoustic guitar now you won't be thinking my acoustic guitar has a pickup in it why don't I just plug that in well you definitely could but it won't sound anything like any acoustic guitar you've ever heard on any recording ever the type of pickups in most acoustic guitars are a basic piezo pickup and a piezo pickup is a pickup that sits underneath the saddle and it's pressure sensitive it sounds very percussive very plucky works great for live productions live performances but for recording it sounds pretty awful now your guitar pickup also may have a condenser microphone in it and it may have some kind of system to blend between those that may sound better but it's still not going to be anywhere as good as getting a microphone right in front of your sound hole and recording it that way now there are other ways to mic an acoustic guitar using more than one microphone you could use two microphones and put them in stereo so you have one microphone beep and all the way to the right then you have the other microphone panned all the way to the left now some microphones are actually sold in what's called matched pairs where the frequency response of each microphone is almost identical you can also use two different microphones and that'll give you kind of two different tones as long as you keep them panned all the way right and all the way left you won't have a problem now when that stereo recording gets dumped down to a mono sound or when it's played back through a mono system you could have big problems because if you're recording the same source on two microphones you're going to get frequencies that overlap in a way is the overlap now waves the overlap that are inverted so if you have the same wave and it's completely inverted to its neighbor that wave will completely cancel it out now naturally that will probably never happen so it's not like you could set up two microphones record them both play them back in a mono system and the sound would be gone but you will get some nasty nasty effects phasing and comb filtering where parts of the audio spectrum are completely gone and it's real real nasty so that's definitely something that you want to keep in mind when you are doing that there's other microphone techniques that can avoid that but in general use the least amount of microphones that you can for recording your source or if you want a stereo effect just record it two times using the same microphone and then put each one of those in stereo the timing differences will probably overcome the frequency overlaps unless you are a robot in which case they won't but that's another good way to do it to do two separate takes put those on two separate tracks pan them both right and left and you'll get a really great response now let's check out what this microphone sounds like now that sounded pretty great with an inexpensive microphone and the guitar that's in pretty bad shape and it's already not a great guitar to start with imagine what that would sound like with a great sounding guitar and a great sounding microphone it would sound fantastic but it just goes to show you you can get some great results even with some modest equipment now how about recording singing or someone's speaking doing a voiceover well you definitely could use a dynamic microphone or a small diaphragm condenser but if you can if you can afford it a large diaphragm condenser like this one is a great choice now this microphone was not very expensive it was maybe $300 which he's a lot of money but in comparison to the scope of large diaphragm condenser microphones out there is on the lower end of the spectrum and I bought this microphone some eight years ago maybe the microphone is available today sound great and some of them are super inexpensive I'm sure you can get a large diaphragm condenser for maybe even around a hundred and fifty dollars it'll sound fantastic for doing voiceovers and singing if you're just starting out now is there a big difference between a microphone that costs a hundred and fifty dollars and a microphone that cost two thousand dollars well that's for you to decide there probably is depending on what you're using it for but you can definitely get outstanding results using some lesser expensive microphones now if you're recording someone's singing or someone doing a voice over you may want to experiment with getting the microphone in close maybe even closer than I am to this microphone or maybe a little bit farther away you'll have to figure out how your microphone responds with your talent or if you're recording yourself you one thing that you're definitely going to want to use is a pop screen which you've seen earlier in this course that will help take out the air rush that comes out of your mouth when you're saying the plosive consonants the peas and the bees and all those other ones that'll really help now when you're recording voice or instruments or what-have-you it's good to look at the environment in which you're recording him and that will help you maybe select the microphone or select where you record in that environment in general you probably want to stay away from spaces in areas with large reflective surfaces a lot of hard walls especially hard floors hard ceiling are not going to help your recording now you probably can't find a whole lot of locations where the ceiling is soft now if you can get some moving blankets or some other type absorption material up on the walls recorded in a space that has some nice cushy carpet that's definitely going to help cut down on reflections and make your recording sound more focused you don't want to have a recording sound like it's coming from your bathroom or your shower so getting some things up on the walls getting some things around you will definitely help now there are some products available that are made to create kind of a small acoustically treated space behind a microphone those can work really well on the right applications my setup in my office utilizes some cheap moving blankets now moving blankets are made of some pretty weighty cotton or other material and it's a good inexpensive way to cover a lot of space for not very much money if you're to look at COO stick foam tiling those can definitely work great but the cost per square foot is much much higher I like these moving blankets because I can tie them to light stands or background support stands I can nail them up on the wall you can also use it to cut down any localized sounds like down here I have my computer living in a little cubby that's surrounded by a double-double moving blanket now you don't want to wrap your computer in a moving blanket because that'll cause it to overheat and that would be very very bad but I've done measurements in here in putting my computer in the little cocoon gets it down three decibels which is not huge but it's definitely noticeable so moving blankets or acoustic foam is a great way to help kind of treat your space and make it sound a lot better thanks for sticking with me through this fundamentals of audio recording course we've only really just scratched the surface of what to talk about and techniques associated with recording and making music multitrack recording software but I hope some of the things that we did talk about are helpful for you in your recording process in your music making journey there's a ton of information out there on the net that will help you with your recording process help you find out what gear might be good for your situation but make sure you check back here for more your training more tips and tricks that will help you make better music training that will help you in your recording process again my name is Dave Bodi and we'll see you around you

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 253,012

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Keywords: Audio Production, learn audio recording, audio recording, music production, audio engineering tutorial, sound recording, audio engineering lessons, how to record music, home studio, home recording, how to record a song, how to record vocals, recording, recording guitar, how to record guitar, electric guitar, recording tutorial, record a podcast, record music, how to record a podcast, audio production course, audio production tutorials, recording studio, audio school

Id: qonbJHkxH8w

Length: 101min 4sec (6064 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2019