General Music Chat

Phase cancellation = listen to your mix in mono to see if its happening. A lot of people these days are listening to music in mono - one earbud, a phone speaker, a house sound system playing tunes from the jukebox. You can also get some phase issues if you record two guitar parts with similar playing and sound - the minor differences in strumming can induce a phase issue. Better to change ht eosund/guitar/playing to make them different.
Most phase cancellation comes from having 2 (or more) mics recording the same sound source. There is the general 3 to 1 rule, but that's not hard and fast - depends on the source, the room and the mic type. Drum miking can be tricky that way - you've got a kick and a snare mic, two overheads plus ...

No, that's the point of mixing. Really, Ted I thought you knew this stuff. You might want get more actively involved with the process next time instead of shipping it off somewhere and trusting what your "world class" people tell you.

Here is a list of the "world class" Producers I have worked with side-by-side



Jerry Abbot - Pantera (this is who told me Mastering is about making it sound the same on any speaker systems)

Jerry Marcellino - Staff Producer at Motown including Jackson 5, Michael Jackson, Bobby Vinton, Smoky Robinson

Bill Cuomo - The guy who produced almost everything Keith Olsen was credited for. Almost every project he did in the 80s went platinum including Heart, Whitesnake, Loverboy,.....70 million sold

Phil York - 3 Willie Nelson albums including his biggest "Red Headed Stranger"

Pawel Zarecki - Mostly Polish artists you wouldn't recognize, but also Pat Methaney

Wendy Waldman - Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band,

Rob Hoffman - Michael Jackson, Christina Agulerra, Etta James

Brent Rowan - Blake Shelton

H.B. Barnum - Sinatra, Lou Rawls, Count Basie, and currently Aretha


I didn't "mail it in" on any of these projects. Would you miss the chance to sit next to these guys if they were working on your music?

Admittedly, I haven't tried to become an engineer but I've produced several albums myself which are distributed and selling worldwide. Mastering does even the volume of finished mixes, but its main purpose is making the frequencies stay in relative relation whether it's on headphones or massive speaker system.



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You have to ask yourself when mixing, Do I want total accuracy in sound? Do I want in your face punch wall of sound? or Do I want a artistic mix that has never been felt before?

Most recordings don't involve some degree of multi-miking and subsequent mixing and processing. This may make the recording sound better in some respects, but it rarely adds to a sense of live accuracy. Even if you have a perfect recording (which doesn't exist) it is still impossible at the current state of audio technology to capture every characteristic of live sound in a recording and then have it come back out of a box with every characteristic intact.

If you really want to hear everything going on with your recording then go with a pair of these. One of the worlds most accurate sound producer ever made. I use them to tell the truth in where the noise shelf is.
Pure Class A STAX SR-009

stax sr 009.jpg (35.49 KiB) Viewed 1387 times

And another question. If the user is downloading a crappy 128 bit MP3 and listening to it over a crappy pair of miniature built-in laptop speakers, what the hell difference does it make anyway???

I was stupid for even starting this thread.

Nope great question....

With USB 2TB hard drives going for under $100 start saving all your songs in uncompressed wav format. I picked up three 1TB hard drives for $49.99 each. One for jazz, one for other and one for pop. The truck has a USB port and I never had any of them skip. I used to be able to tell the difference between 128 and 320........ not any more.

I also like lo-fi recordings as well. And another question. If the user is downloading a crappy 128 bit MP3 and listening to it over a crappy pair of miniature built-in laptop speakers, what the hell difference does it make anyway???

I was stupid for even starting this thread.

No, not at all, good thread, if a tad contentious.

As to quality - a GOOD file is going to sound better than a crappy file, even on a crappy playback system. Think about recording an AM radio broadcast from a portable radio with 2" speaker using a $5 plastic microphone into a cassette recorder. Crap sound > crap recorder > really crappy recording/sound. Now take that same song, play back through a high quality sound system, but record the same way - sounds much better when playing back the cassette.

As to Yod's producer list - "producers" are different than engineers (mixing and mastering) in most instances. They will often have influence on the mixing and mastering, but that's just part of a producer's work. Sometimes, producers are directly doing or overseeing the studio work, other times they are not.

Absolutely correct Mike.

Producers:
* Hire the musicians
* Arrange the recording sessions
* Help the musicians with song selection, arrangements, themes, etc.
* Play on the sessions (sometimes)
* Select and work with the mastering entity
* Suggest and help select artwork, packaging, etc.
* Market the finished product to labels, suggest "singles"
* Underwrite the project

Producers make the calls because they write the checks.

Ya know...when you guys try to paint me as not knowing what I'm talking about, I feel the need to defend myself....so here is more of what you don't know;

What you are describing is called "Executive Producer" and it's not necessarily the same. In fact, the executive producer is rarely the Producer (who is usually hired by the Executive Producer at the label). They may, or may not be, the engineer also.

For example, on my last project I hired 5 Producers to help me with 3 EPs; and then got out of the way to let them do their jobs. One of those Producers hired an outside Producer to score and record the string sections. Three of them were engineers on the EPs they produced, and all were musicians on their respective project too. Another Producer handled vocal arrangements and consulted the mix, while another provided the templates (pre-production) and played lead guitar.

There was a guitarist on two of the projects whom I credited with co-producing because of his contributions to the arrangements. He was working the drummer much harder than the parts we had originally scored, and his parts were altering the general tone of the songs quite a bit.

But I did all the tasks you listed above and wrote the checks, which makes me the Executive Producer of several Grammy award winning Producers.



And that's my position in the VR company also. It was my idea, I hired a Producer, formed the business plan, arranged air travel and locations and tour guide and security and lodging and food and transportation for the shoot. I paid for stitching, editing, promotion, Film-festival fees, etc.

You can get by as an Executive Producer without any skills other than an understanding of all the moving parts, and the courage to take risks. Knowing how to do something well is actually very different than knowing what to do.

It's a damn shame that those albums haven't been bigger than they were, but I'm all they had to work with for a singer


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Jerry Abbot - Pantera (this is who told me Mastering is about making it sound the same on any speaker systems)

Ted- I'm sorry to break the news to you but you have been deceived. The tiny speakers in a laptop computer have a frequency range from approx. 220 Hz- 10 kHz. The frequency range of my monitors is 20 Hz- 20 kHz. You can't produce proper bass frequencies for a laptop computer when the speakers won't reproduce them. It's that simple. Really.

...and yet the frequencies remain relative no matter which system you play it on


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Yet the frequencies remain relative no matter which system you play it on.

I don't quite get your drift about 'remaining relative'

It's mostly in the EQ and compression, but I assume you mix with several sets of speakers to find the happy medium, right?

Mastering smooths out random peaks and separates the lows, mids, & highs while keeping the ratio between them relatively the same on any system. Whether a playback system can reproduce all the frequencies evenly is a separate issue.