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Quote: 1) what caused the bump? is it a common issue with metalheads? 2) how should i deal with this problem in the future? maybe carving out the annoying freqs on my mixer while recording the guitars? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ carnederes. I'm working tonight. Right now, I'm playing 2 seconds of hooky. This is a $10 million question in my trade. In some ways, on some days, this question is a big part of WHY I'm working. I will log on later tonight if I can keep my head up and hit some of this with you. I could write AT LEAST 1 book on this. How good a book it would be...???!!?? is another story. HOHO-fucking-HO. OK. Jesus, what a fucking death march this is gonna be... For starters, at the root of this question is the concept of frequency dependant dynamic swing vs. (perceived)'steady state' volume. The way this impacts your job as an audio engineer is a massive, shitty can of worms, not only on input, but during the course of the remaining tracking and (Who woulda thunk?) downstream in mix as well. You gotta start in the room with 'the sound'. First, Put in some fucking earplugs, so when you go to get sounds on the desk later you'll actually have an opinion on ANYTHING. Then, get 'Einstein' to fiddle with his miserable square wave rectifier/noise generator until he confirms it is indeed producing "his sound". The incredibly new and amazing sound you haven't heard from anybody else.... in the last 15 minutes. This is MAJOR, once attained, we now have a starting point. We can now feel free to embark on our hellish voyage into the most fruitless and subjective undertaking ever conceived in the history of man's sad efforts on this sad and forgotten pebble in space. "A great guitar sound". Something NOBODY has agreed upon for more than 15 minutes since Ike left the White House. If you can't get by this first hurdle IN THE ROOM. You are in deep shit.... I can't help you. God can't help you. YOU ARE FUCKED. FUCKED. KILL YOURSELF. It is imperative that the zorch-fucko-twerg playing guitar is hearing 'his sound' in the room. IT CANNOT BE OVERSTATED. Now, the crux of the specific question raised in this thread rears it's repugnant visage. In the original post 'buffer' indicates...(and I take the liberty of paraphrasing here) "Crazy LF shit is flying around like mad and you KNOW it's gonna get nutty when you whip a mic in front of that speaker enclosure". You may ALSO be hearing some nasty, vibrating, rattling, farting, buzzing noises emanating from the enclosure that bugs, or (more commonly - and much more horrifyingly) doesn't bug the brain surgeon wielding that cleverly disguised canoe paddle. EVERYTHING can be a potential contributor to the problem(s). You gotta find out WHICH things are killing YOU from a seemingly endless list. Don't look to 'twinkie'. He cannot be trusted. He is a MUSICIAN. THE ENEMY. An irritating blip on the FOF indicator that must and will be erradiacted for the sake of all that is noble and the preservation of man's glorious march into the future. He is hell bent on forcing you to make SHITTY SOUNDING RECORDS AND YOU MUST STOP HIM. But, I digress. Pull the cab into a space where you can clearly HEAR the offending piece of shit WITHOUT a whole lotta distractions ie. nearby walls, rattling drums or stands, road cases etc. With 'Mozart' still pounding a riff that alternates regularly between the 'chuggs' and some chords, on his pitiful penis extension, run a few tests. Whip the master gain on the head up and down a little and see at what points the following things start to happen. 1.) The speakers in the cab start to 'excurse'. Ya know like an 'excursion'? ie. At what point do the speakers start to REALLY move in the cabinet? Look at the fucking things up close. Put your earplugged head right up next to them and eyeball the speakers. Get a fucking flashlight and peer thru the grille. Not working out for ya? Can't see shit? Cut the fucking grille away with an exacto knife. No, I'm not kidding. Have the fucking label pay for a new fucking grille. I don't care, you want a great guitar sound or fucking not? Have some other bozo twist the knobbie while 'meathead' is twanking.... Seeing it now? Good! OK, make a mental note of the gain setting at the point of 'baseline excursion'. 2.) Have your cretinous minion twist der knobbie around more(zorch-fuck is STILL endlessly playing pitiful chugs to chord riff) to find out thingie numero deuce. The point of 'Cabinet Involvement'. That's right. Like 'Bill and Monika' if you heat things up enough with those two suckers in close proximity, eventually one is gonna start shaking, banging, and blowing the other around. By observing the cab at different volumes you will find a point at which the enclosure starts to get "involved" in the 'chuggs'. Just shut-up and do it. It is NOT always the point at which the speakers 'excurse'. Sometimes it is BEFORE(in master gain volume) the speakers 'bark', sometimes it is AFTER. This is gonna provide you with some GINORMO clues as to what's going on with how you're going to get 'freaknicks' sound to tape. Recording distorted guitars. It's a bizarre undertaking, and one that has consumed an appreciable portion of my adult life. I've always thought making heavy records was one of the most difficult and underestimated tasks in AE. For a bunch of reasons I may cover in these posts. OK. We figured out in part 1 that there are a couple of critical points we've gotta have a handle on when getting ready to mic our expectant 'GuitarGod'. One was the point at which the speakers really got 'moving', and the other was the point at which the cabinet started to get 'involved' in the low end. Lemme start by explaining WHY these are important. The 'excursion' point of the speakers is a 'critical mass' juncture at which the timbre of the sound ANY speaker that a common 'rock style' enclosure is presenting starts to change in a pretty dramatic way. HOW it changes is the rub..... NO FREE FUCKING LUNCH. Learning the various 'curves' and characteristics of each amp and speaker/enclosure type is one little part of the reason this shit takes YEARS to master. Different combinations produce dramatically differing results. Even more baffling is the ENORMOUS amount of other variables thrown into the fray. Little goodies like (Mind you, this is JUST from the ACTUAL speaker end-the cabs are another story we'll get to soon!) the type and size, electrical and sonic properties(cute stuff like ohms, wiring schemes and wire gauges, wattage, freq. response, efficiency... the list is ginormo-dome) and total age of/wear on, the speaker. Just to name a few. Whew! Sure you don't wanna do boy bands? OK. Here's some useful LOOSE guidelines when you look at 'excursion point'. MOST. I repeat, MOST speakers start to 'flatten and fatten' at this point. Almost like tape compression(boy are we gonna be getting to that IN THIS THREAD soon, you didn't think I was gonna stop at micing did ya?). There is a 'zone' you can get into with MOST speakers that makes A HUGE DIFFERENCE to what the mic hears UP CLOSE. It's the point at which the actual mechanical activity of the cone flipping back and forth in the speakers 'tether' starts to generate it's OWN, DISTINCT, very audible, 'sonic additions'. The TOTALLY SUBJECTIVE, and VERY HOTLY CONTESTED, opinions that 'twinkies' have about various speaker brands and types(on distorted guitar rigs) HINGE, for the most part on how speakers get TO the 'money zone' and what they 'DO' when they get there. I have seen bitter and brutal FISTFIGHTS over hapless roadies or techies accidentally replacing 'Gold back ROLA's' with 'green back vinties'. 'white backs' vs. 'black backs'. And this example in just the 'Celestion' brand family ALONE. Between all the brands and types.... IT GETS FUCKING CRAZY. GUYS GET CRAZY. And at the end of the day. They have every right to. Yep, as much as I bust balls on musicians in my posts, the better ones REALLY CAN 'feel' the differences in these little details, and often 'get naked' and REALLY bummed out if you alter the 'window' they talk to/with the instrument through. I may be a jaded, miserable, bitter, old AE prick, but I GET IT. Anyhoo. As you go thru yer career micing up these various rigs, you will start to develop a series of judgments, observations and assessments as to your expectations from, and approaches to... micing this horrific host of (un)holy horrors. For example. If a kid comes in with a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier head and a Marshall JCM800/1960 slant. I'm gonna be asking some questions. Yo dude. What's in the 1960? Yer cab? Whites?(Yuk.) OK. They're not the originals, right? OH, ya blew the golds... OK. Lotta miles on em'?(never believe the answer to this question) Cool. Alright. Let's get ya hooked up. See what we got.... I FUCKING STAND THERE, DUDE. "Is that a speaker cable going into the cab?(Duh! wish I had a NICKEL!). NO. Yer not using that 50 ft stage wire. Use THIS.(15ft monster cable). Hohhhh. What's with the stomp box adaptors....? Here's some 9v. batteries for our purposes today. Batteries are cleaner, less noisy power than most cheap AC adaptors. OK dude. Let's make yer sound happen right here! That's about it, right? Yer in the zone? Cool. OK man, here's what we're gonna do. You guys 'chug' a lot, huh? Cool. Give me a riff that alternates between the chug and some chords. Yeah. That's it! Cool. Keep playing that! Perfect. Just play that like a madman while I do some shit with 'freaknick'(point at asst. eng.)." Let's review. We check the stupid stuff. Instrument prep(lightly touched on in thread). Somebody ELSE please hit practical wisdoms re: pickup placement and selection/maintenance, neck and fretboard issues, intonation and tuning issues based upon the ASSUMPTION that what the kid is WEARING is what he's gonna be PLAYING. Any other approach will turn into an endless discussion of the relative merits of the various instruments, interminable and wholly subjective. Amplifier prep(not covered in thread). Same banana as above. Tube conditions and anomalies(microphonics, age, 'matching' and other electrical characteristic scenarios etc.) No 'best amp' shit. Doom. Cabinet prep(pretty well covered in thread already). Let's work under the following far fetched assumptions or I'm NEVER gonna get done here. 1.) All this shit is spec. and the player has 'his sound' emanating from the cabinet. 2.) You've sussed out the major 'master volume issues'. In short: You KNOW at what Master Volume setting the speakers start to 'excurse' and where the 'cabinet involvement' starts. This is the point at which we start to separate the boys from the men. Spend just a few more moments with somebody twisting the Master Volume up and down slowly and do a couple of things (and this is gonna suck) take the plugs out for just a minute and at the point of 'excursion' FIND THE BEST SPEAKER. Eek. My LEAST favorite part of ALL dirt guitar recording. I'm not even gonna tell you what to do.... Nobody should have to do it. Just do it. Stick yer fucking coconut in there. Hail Mithra. All of 'em sound the same to ya? Fine. Pick yer poison. On slant cabs there is almost 0% chance you're not gonna have a preference. On straights there's still very little chance that(once you know what yer looking for) you're not gonna have a preference. So the million dollar question. What are you looking for as yer destroying your hearing? Forget about the 'cabthrum' stuff for a minute and just concentrate on the following. Which of the 4 speakers(yes, I'm ASSUMING 4x12) has the clearest and most powerful impact at the 'excursion point'. Hurry! Your ears will NOT last for more than about 3 minutes of this abuse, and once you kill them you're outta the loop for 24hrs. I try to spend about 1 minute MAX on this little fiasco. Even better yet, train an assistant you trust(is that possible?) to take the beating for you - Hey! Fuck you... 'old guys' did that shit to ME for fucking years. Anyways, find the BEST speaker. More you do it. Better you'll get at it. Some basic tips. The 'softer' speakers will start to choke and sound tubby as you pass the 'exc-pnt'. Others may be too 'stiff' and require driving the whole bunch too hard to get them really moving. Get "Hendrix Jr" to play some suspended chords(you may have to show him some), and see what happens to the note clarity in this critical juncture. Are the low-mids a murky mass at ANY volume? Or just when the speakers hit our 'ep'? OK. Let's ASSUME you find a 'sweet' speaker for 'close range micing'. Cool. You ain't done sonny. Now get the Master Volume on the head back to the 'enclosure involvement' point. Ya know. The cabinets just STARTING to 'thrum'. Have the fool holding the oversized cricket bat with tuning pegs keep playing just 'palm mutes'. Step back from the enclosure and see WHERE in the room, as far as distance, the sound of the cabinet starts to 'bloom'. That's right. Walking(I actually sit in a rolling office chair for some reasons I'll get into later... yeah, yeah, I know, "Cause I'm A FAT LAZY ASSHOLE" HOHO) STRAIGHT back from the enclosure, find THE FIRST(closest to cab) spot the low end starts to 'swell'. It might be 3 or 4 feet... it might be 6 or 8 or even 15 feet. Find it. Have your assistant run and cut a piece of twine to mark the 'approximate' distance. Move the cabinet to the area where you will actually be micing it up. Do you have enough room for your 'twine run'? No? Not the end of the world. We'll get back to that. Get the head and player into the control room and makes sure the new cable run has not changed our 'critical' Master Volume points. Depending on your situation it's VERY possible it will have. Some shops have hard-wired speaker 'wall-runs' and on ocassion these can be VERY lossy indeed. Find out what's up and make the necessisary adjustments to the head. Let's ASSUME. For brevity's sake, we are going to use a single Shure SM57 on the cabinet. If we get into other scenarios right now, we're gonna be here forever, fine. Take your 57 and place it dead in the middle of your 'sweet' speakers cone touching the grille, or where the grille used to be. Now pull it straight back out about 2- 3 inches and turn it so the diaphram is pointing 'flat' at the ANGLE of the speaker cone. So about 30-35 degrees to one side or the other. Don't go crazy. This is a STARTING point and may not mean shit in the long game. Get your ass in the control room, the games are about to begin. At the end of our last installment we had positioned a cabinet in an isolated space. The subhuman twerp beating on the hapless and offensive instrument had confirmed for us that his 'tone of God' was indeed emanating from the cabinet. We had checked and fixed all the obvious bullshit bug-a-boo's in the amp, cabinet and instrument. We knew the master volume position for 'excursion' and 'involvement'. We had determined the distance for low-end 'wave fruition' and had made our mentally challenged assistant cut a piece of twine to measure and mark it. We had identified the 'sweet' speaker, hung a solitary 57 in front of it, and were headed back to the relative safety of the control room. Whew. Should have taken about 20 mins. to accomplish these tasks all told. Took about 6 hrs. to describe via post in my admittedly tangential and laborious fashion. I assume that we will be recording our guitars to a 2" 24 track analog deck today because, by and large, 'digital guitars' suck giant moose peenie with a huge throbbing purple vein on it (for reasons I will cover in depth soon) and anybody who doesn't know/admit that needs more help than I could ever provide for them. I would also like to point out that we will be employing a HIGH quality pre-amp and a truly bad-ass outboard or desk EQ AND (possibly) a money compression device or 2, or we are going to get 'good'. And we don't want fucking 'good'. We want fucking 'great'. If you think a great guitar sound is cheap. You are fucked in the head. Period. Some will protest this seemingly apparent 'elitist attitude'. Fuck 'em. They will be beaten briefly. Then killed. Later, their corpses will be exhumed for copious spitting and further beatings. OK. Let's say. Neve 1073 to GML 8200 to EL-8 Distressor to Studer A800MkIII. Whatever. Quality. Could be a bunch of other shit that ALSO sounds great. I ain't going there without a production agreement and generous per diems. Get a headphone feed into the iso space containing the cabinet. Bring freak-boy twanker and his amp head into control room with you. Send poor sap of an assistant with a pair of CLOSED EARPHONES into the howling vortex of deafening white noise that is the iso booth. Hell awaits. FIRST. Let's figure out our 'steady state' requirements. If you go back to my second post in this thread, you'll see that I stated that the majority of the battle we had to fight here was "steady state tone vs. frequency dependant amplitudal swing' issues. Remember. We're recording HEAVY GUITARS WITH f1i BIG LEGS f0i0 . OK. WITHOUT MOVING ANYTHING, let's dial up a basic gain structure from the 1073 into the A800. No EQ yet. Just gain. Turn around and LOOK at the meters on the 800 you lazy sack of shit. Depending on the desk, you might have NO fucking idea what the 'real deal' reading on the 'swing' is from the desk. A lot of LED and Plasma stylee meters are too hard to read in these cases. On the other hand, some desk metering is AMAZING and will KILL the machine on what you can SEE about how yer banging tape. Time to make the assistant wish he was dead. Tell him his job is to loosen the various fixtures on the boom stand holding the SM57 enough to allow him free and unfettered range of motion to 'sweep the speaker' with the mic. THAT IS...... He is to SLOWLY sweep the head of the mic around the cone in a continuous fashion until you hear something you're LOVING for 'steady state tone'. Get 'twinkie' to play some VERY REPETITIVE chord stuff that omits the 'chugging' for a couple of minutes. Tell him that when you need him to stop playing, he must stop playing IMMEDIATELY or you will fucking KILL him. Pet the handgun every sane engineer keeps on top of the console lovingly, like a favorite cat, as you say this. Look purposefully and coldly THRU him and say these EXACT WORDS. "IF YOU DON'T STOP PLAYING EXACTLY WHEN I SAY STOP... I'M GOING TO SHOOT AND SHOOT AND CONTINUE TO SHOOT YOU UNTIL I RUN OUT OF AMMUNITION..... THEN I'M GOING TO RESUME SHOOTING YOU AFTER 'ASS-BOY'(point at shivering assistant) GETS BACK FROM THE GUN SHOP WITH MY REPLACEMENT AMMO". Anything short of this type of explanation/arrangement will usually NOT provide the necessary results. This person is a guitar player. They have the intellectual capacity of freshly mown grass. Do not ALLOW them to think. That will doom the record. Cause band to switch to 'rap metal'. Compel them to start whispering in a really corny tortured voice about their miserable childhood growing up in a trailer park in Florida. Bring about pestilence. Locust. Scorched Earth. Mass destruction. OK. Time to get twisted into form. Tell 'ass-boy' the INSTANT he hears the guitar stop playing OR he hears YOU TELL HIM TO STOP. He is to stop 'sweeping the speaker' with the SM57. Get busy. TAKE YER TIME. Drive 'ass-boy' and 'twinkie' nuts. DON'T fucking rush! Feel free to make them sweep and play/stop. Sweep and play/stop until the fucking cows come home. Fuck them. You have to learn the 'range of tone' possible with this sound/mic/pre. FEEL NO GUILT. LANGUISH. GET A SLURPIE. ANSWER PHONE CALLS AND EMAILS. NO HURRY. WATCH 'EXTREME DATING'. NO FUCKING HURRY. FORCE GUITARIST TO PLAY THE SAME FUCKING RIFF OVER AND OVER. AIM GUN AT HIM IF HE TRIES TO CHANGE THE RIFF OR HURRY YOU IN ANY WAY. Why? Because he is the prick who will blame you forever if you don't capture his feeble noise emanations properly. Make no mistake. And you need the repetition to assist you in determining the differences in the various mic positions. After a bit you will hear a trend in the sweeps... Ask 'ass-boy' questions.... Where is it now? Right edge of cone? Cool. More. Where is it now? Dead center pointing slightly to the left? Fine. You will start to see trends in the placements effect on the sound. I'm not going to explain it fucko.... It's your fucking journey. Get on it. I will offer this little tip. A lot of young engineers will gravitate towards the BRIGHTEST placement. NOT necessarily the best idea. 'Fizz' above 6k is rarely useful in the 'steady state' part of heavy guitar tones. If you avoid capturing a signal too skewed in this direction you will be able do do less low pass 'trapping' later. I'll explain that shit later too. OK. Sooner or later you will get under the impression you know where the mic is going to work best for your 'steady state' tone. Get 'ass-boy' to lock it down. Check his 'locked down' positioning before you command him to return to base. Got summore bad newz. We're just getting going. By the way. Once you train a good assistant to do this shit with you, you can rip out BADASS mic placements in A LOT less time than it took to write this mess. Probably about as much time as it took to read it. On 18 Jan 2003 13:25 fletcher wrote: Quote: The sound comes from the player, not the equipment. You can get a wonderfully heavy guitar tone with a Telecaster and a Twin Reverb... it's all in how you approach it, and how the player handles it. Not at the gain structures my clients use. HOHOHO. I'm going to give Fletcher a stock Tele, a stock Twin, and 8 million years to get the "Carcass" guitar tone. He may get something he or others believe is 'good', 'heavy', or 'whatever'. But you ain't gonna get that guitar and amp combination to give you the level of distortion, saturation and flat out square wave rectification activity yer gonna get from a Les Paul Standard with EMG's into a Mesa triple rectifier. God ain't gonna do that.... Hence the first "requirement" in my previously posted portions of this thread. 'MAKE SURE THE PLAYER AGREES THAT HIS SOUND IS COMING OUT OF THE AMP.' The "hang a 57 and run" bunch are dead fucking wrong about this one... In my neck of the woods, various shades and flavors of the above attitude are for quitters and minor leaguers as far as tracking and mixing distorted electric guitar. ESPECIALLY super-saturated 'nu-metal' type of sounds. Which are a SERIOUS pain in the ass. It's a cop out. Like everything else you encounter in AE, this stuff is about YEARS of observation, assimilation and refinement. Period. There is a list of about 25 guys I can think of off the top of my head who are masters of the 'heavy guitar' game. They didn't get there by accident. You don't have to like or agree with the decisions they make on their records, but have a little respect. And common sense. THIS SHIT TAKES WORK. In heavy music AE there is a REAL tradition... A passing of the torch. It dates all the way back to the roots of the music. AE's are a GIGANTIC part of how/why this happens. I've lived to witness it. More than once. Flippant disclaimers of the wisdom of scope and scale of these undertakings can be heard echoing in the empty side asiles at AES. I, for one, would like (Who knows?.. maybe NEED) to believe some of us know better and have not expended formidable portions of our lives creating and refining these traditions in vain. OK. More 'things that go bump in the night' shit here.... We have moved thru the dreaded 'sweep and suffer' phase of mic placement and are going to discuss some particulars of "what is what" in our capture and subjugate process. First: Lets look over some critical 'dirt guitar' EQ ranges and how they affect the myriad of choices/possibilities we might wish to examine in our undertaking. Bottom to top. 20-45Hz. Never say never. Just say rarely. 50-90hz. Ahh the madness. Here's the 'swing' range in our 'chugging'. 100-150. Bottom of the meat. 180-240. Lo-Center of the meat. 250-320. Hi-Center of the meat. 340-650. Danger Will Robinson. Top of meat/Bottom of mids. CRITICAL. 700-900. More danger. Hard to hear. Kills 'newbies' on contact. Will explain. 950-1.2k. Pure Satan. Make or break ya. Easy to hear. Hard to control. 1.3k-1.6k. Ditto the above. 1.7k-2.2k. Top of the mids/Bottom of pick attack range. Oh, the fear. 2.3k-3.1k. Middle of pick range. Picky de poison. Mucho Satania. 3.2k-4.2k. Top of pick range. Pick out a nice coffin. Yer gonna need it. 4.3k-6.5k. Bottom of fizz. Add Beefeaters for gin fizz. Guzzle many glasses. 6.6k-8k. Top of fizzy. Many will kill this range ruthlessly. Careful. Can O' wormies. 8k-10k. Road to hell. Paved with good intentions. Enjoy. Not. 10-15k. Less obvious road(s) to hell. Gravel. Lose a windshield up here. 15k-25k. Same disclaimer as 25-40Hz. Can you say 'sometimes bandwidth matters'? WhaddaWeGot? 17 ways(freq. ranges) to kill yourself? OK. DISCLAIMER TIME FOR "OLD GUYS". I'm describing the Grand Canyon. We both know it. Can't REALLY be done. Gimmie some rope and I'll hang myself impressively. Stop laughing, you pricks. By the way fellas, we're STILL tracking. It's gonna get WORSE in mix. Let's just talk about EQ APPROACHES. Schools of thought. School 1: Capture it ALL. School 2: Capture it ALL but capture LESS of what yer pretty sure yer not going to use much of later. School 3: Capture MOSTLY what you want with a TINY nod to the wacky shit. School 4: Fuck everyone. Capture ONLY what you like. HAMMER the fuck out of everything else. School 5: Shit pants in terror. Return to recording rap with SP1200. OK. So there's REALLY only 4 schools..... Each one has it's advantages and drawbacks. I was trained by a guy who vacillated between schools 1 and 2. For more than a decade I would only trim away that which I truly knew I was NEVER gonna use... if even that. The philosophy was... If you gotta EQ, something is wrong. Wrong mic, wrong pre, wrong placement, wrong guitar, wrong amp, wrong player (so kill me), wrong SOMETHING. Go change it.... If you've got the time and budget, School #1 can potentially be the way to go. The wisdoms seem glaringly apparent. You build your basic sound to tape with the shortest and cleanest signal path. One that gives you the least 'phase smear', the best bandwidth and noise floor (I don't think THAT'S gonna be a "huge one" on these types of sounds but...) etc. Later, in mix, with the 'big picture' in hand you can 'size' the tones up and down as needed without digging yourself into a corner beforehand. However.... This approach DOES NOT optimize the most effective use of some of the best tools at your disposal. Tape compression/saturation work MUCH more effectively on very focused tones rather than 'everybody's welcome' ones. Think about it... If yer jamming a shitload of signal to tape and that signal contains a lot of 'schmotz'... yer gonna end up getting a lot less 'steadystate' type level than if you trim away EVERYTHING you don't want. That tape compression you're NOT optimizing is the coolest, cleanest and yes, WARMEST, type of 'lossless' compression you will EVER get. EVER. If you learn to shape that shit around and find out what your tape deck will, and will not, do before crapping out.... You can do some fucking DAMAGE. Also, your pre's inputs can accommodate seriously elevated levels of gain without the constraints of 'full bandwidth operation'. The difference this can make in getting dirt guitars 'in yer face' can be colossal. Many of the better micpre/eqs will take a substantially greater amount of gain before distortion at the front of the circuit if you rip them properly. More on this in a minute. So now we're in the realm of Schools 1-3. Which are kinda like Judaism. You got the 'reformists', the 'conservatives' and the 'orthodox'. They're all Jews. They all worship the same deity. They all follow the same basic spiritual precepts and espouse similar beliefs. But some are pretty mellow about it... some are kinda strict about a lotta shit..... And some are FUCKING crazy mothers on a major religious mission. If my audio work was Jewish. It would be Hassidic. AN EXAMPLE with a 'common' pre/eq. module: Take a AMEK9098 module, 'shunt' the nasty/toppy crap with the low pass at say 7-9k, trap the 'mud' with the hi-pass at 50-90 range(whatever.... sweep it around, freaky). Great. Now rip the 'wool' at 130-240 narrow with the low-mid on either 'wide notch' or 'narrow bell'. Then, engage "bell" on the low band and roll it up to the top of it's range(300) and slam a couple of db off the low-mids 'murk' area. Now engage a similar 'Q' shape on the hi mid band and suck the hell outta the 'rat' at 6k. Now, being the sneaky fuck that you are.... Flip the top band around between bell, sheen and shelf, and boost ABOVE the low pass. Like 15-26k. That's right freaky.... 26k. Keep shifting the low pass filter point and the hi-boost against each other until you've lost the nasty 'fizz' and haven't KILLED the top end. The effect of the different 'stupid' combinations is quite an eye opener. PHASE ANOMALIES AS A CREATIVE TOOL. Don't leave home without them. Great analog EQ's FUCK SHIT UP when you abuse them. Impress me. Similar work can be done with ANY 'money' pre/4+2 parametric eq. out there. Now the whole time you were doing those rips what where you doing? You were boosting the 5db clickstops on the mic level and goosing the trim as you WATCHED (and listened) to the signal slam the shit outta the 2". You've now ended up with a 'sensitivity' level on the front end that would flatten everything to hell and back if you disengaged the Eq in button. Your pre is running MUCH hotter on the front end. In a lot (not all) of pre/mic combinations this is HUGE. Which brings me to my next point.... In dirt guitar recording, and ALL AE. Gain 'scheduling' is EVERYTHING. I go berserk on my staff about this. It drives me fucking crazy when I see my guys ignore this stuff. I quite literally start throwing shit around.... We have had some legendary Slipperman "Total Room Recalls" (It's a looooonnnnggg and very ugly story). Anyhoo. You've got to find 'nominal' operational gain structure on every piece in the chain and OPTIMIZE everything. If I do this, and YOU do not..... My work will seriously outperform yours sonically 100 times out of 100. Find the 'gain range' of the various pieces and learn to exploit and abuse their strengths AND limitations. It ain't GLAMOROUS. It takes time. It often looks like folly. It's the road to your audio salvation. Abandon it at your own peril. My SUGGESTION to you young man..... No less than 4 bands of full parametric with lo/hi pass filters ON INPUT. We're talking 'Nu-metal' here kids.... Piss, moan, bitch, hem and haw. Run your minimalist, purist, traditionalist, 3 bands of 'wide' EQ' mouth off all fucking day. I WILL KILL YOUR ASS deader than dickens with a great 4+2 Parametric 60 ways to Sunday. ie. Manley 'Massive Passive'. GML8200. Shit I'll even use an Orban 624 with a small pistol to my head (NO headroom, bizarre clinical sound). Then again, if it were REALLY that simple, it wouldn't be much fun. 'Cause SOMETIMES it don't workee that way. In the end yer gonna use what you can and if you're good, you'll make it happen. "Fletcher" suggested that I document the session I have going on... The one that has been keeping me from posting here with any degree of regularity. I may. We sure as fuck are leaving "no stone unturned" doing the guitars on this record. We have a 30 x 40 live room, a control room and 3 iso booths jammed full of: Amp heads of many different makes, features and wattages. Like.... Way more than a dozen. Walls of cabinets of differing size, style and speaker type. Also near a dozen. 2 Zillion dynamic, ribbon and condenser microphones, some from companies that are so esoteric, their own families don't know what 'Dad's making in the basement'! HOHO. Eq's (With and without attendant pre's) in a myriad of flavors and styles. Some of the 'twist' combinations would probably cause R. Neve to hurl himself screaming thru a plate glass window. Micpre's OUT THE FUCKING WAZOO. 'Fletcher' (in his evil genius) has turned me into a TOTAL pre-amp junkie- whore. Guitars of every shape, size, and description (Like over 20 of them). It looks like "48th. St. Guitars" in there. A bewildering array of compressors and limiters. New ones.... New ones that make like they're old ones. Old ones that are older than the band. Ones that are older than the producer. Ones that are older than me, and even ONE that is older than Fletcher. Active and passive splitter boxes, re-amp boxes, di boxes, stomp pedals from the 60's - current, tape echos, rack mounted efx/pre/di fiascos, massive AC power conditioners, line drivers, gain soaks, ibp boxes, digital and analog strobe tuners..... Kill me, I wanna make bluegrass records no wait..... Techno. Sit around blowing lines in a Soho apartment with 600 sound modules, a Mackie Digital 8-buss and a few vintage keyboards waiting for the fashionably underweight supermodels to come and pick us up for a quick 'hummer' before we head over to the 'Slimelight' to blow our brains out dropping 'X', flailing around like silly freaks and humping in the bathrooms all night. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Somebody wanted to know about phase issues with 2 mics. I purposely stated way back in the thread that for our example here we were going to limit our discussion to (1) SM57 on (1) 4x12 cabinet for exactly that reason. Multi mic stuff is a BIG can o' wormies. Can be as simple as falling off a log... Can be a giant clusterfuck from hell. I may go there later if I really need to make my life a waking nightmare. OK, We did some placement, we did some EQ./Gain scheduling 'To Tape'... BUT..... Our original question was posed about some HUGE dynamic stuff swinging around in our signal input. Prudent mic placement, some 'frontface twist' on the amp itself and and some Eq. on input SHOULD have helped these little dilemmas BUT... What if yer still swinging around 10-12 Db. on 'chugs'? Time to break out the compression gear kids. All there is to it. First , let's get one thing straight......ANY compressor is going to fuck with important parts of your signal. Especially pick attack and the 'life' of the guitar sound by hammering the transients from the input waveform. Wait. Lets back up here. Try this: Take a guitar amp that has separate clean and dirty channels with gain controls that feed a master volume output knobbie. Set the 'pre' channels to about the same o'clock on both channels and crank the master volume with the dirt channel engaged. Then hit a big chord. Twist it up to 'Stage Volume'. Now, right in the middle of a riff........ SWITCH TO CLEAN. Hurts huh? FUCKING LOUD! Now switch back to the distorted channel. TINY! By comparison. FUCKING TINY. The pummeling impact and SHEER OPPRESSIVE VOLUME of that 'clean' sound that's ripping your face off is caused by the transients lost by the distortion process. The more distortion, the fewer transients (Not really a totally factual statement, kind of a BLANKET answer, but close enough for our purposes here). Anyways. It's amazing how many twanker bozo's can't get a grip on the concept that increases in distortion MAKE DIRTY GUITARS SOUND SMALLER, NOT BIGGER. Nu-Metal guys are gonna have trouble buying into any flavor of this concept, and we agreed we would "Work with what they gave us" Right? 'Their Sound'. In my shop...When "Your sound" is swinging 12Db common on palm mutes WE GOTTA PROBLEM. I'm going to be compressing the living shit outta your ass one way or the other. A lot of guitar purists state... 'NEVER COMPRESS DISTORTED GUITAR' on input or mix. The wisdom is based on observations (and their logical extrapolations) of the phenomena we just got done discussing. That is... Heavily distorted guitar sounds ALREADY ARE COMPRESSED (for lack of a better term) by 'square wave rectification' of the signal in circuit that's being used to produce the 'dirty' sound in the first place. By and large, I agree. If I can get away with clever EQ rips to 'tame' a guitar 'To tape' or 'In mix' I will always do that first. However, we live in a big shitty world full of fukwit fools who will insist upon capturing OUTRAGEOUS amounts of 'Swing' from a rig.....So I say... SMASH THE FUCK OUT OF THEM. But BE CAREFUL; if you don't set up compression correctly on input, you stand to shovel yourself into a hole you will NEVER get out of for love or money. Lousy compression CANNOT be undone after the fact. Period. One of the best compressors in the world for smashing Nu-Metal gtrs is the Empirical Labs EL-8 'Distressor'. Here's why: The distressor has a bunch of fun little knobs and buttons on it that can keep you from digging yourself a big grave while you gain control of a wayward signal. It is also VERY precise in terms of how the knobs on the front face OPERATE. OK. The EL-8 to tape. NOT ALWAYS THE BEST IDEA... but one that can save yer ass in a pinch. How we gonna do it? In a nutshell. LISTEN. AND TWIST IT AROUND. Stunning huh? First I'm gonna ramble aimlessly about EQ. to tape a little more. Why? 'Cause I'm fucking mad as a hatter shooting LSD-25 into his eyeball. Today in my 'B' room a new record has started for a solid indy we do about 6-8 records a years for.... The usual drill is, my 'kids' get sounds up 'across the desk' and the 'old man'(that would be me) runs in to take a listen/make some adjustment before tracking starts. I usually bring my Grado headphone rig {pre-amp and headset) and listen to the whole band coming off tape. Then we make any necessary revisions and I go back to whatever Satanic deathmarch I'm currently engaged in on my schedule. Today we've got a REALLY fine young 'Emo' band comprised of 4 kids who can write and play like motherfuckers. Not something I see every day. We have done a full length for these jokers in the past and it's 'Old Home Week' with a lot of ball busting, nicknames and general grab-assing around. As far as the guitar sound goes....these guys use WAY to much focused midrange (More Helmet-like 'bark') to ever be considered "Nu-metal" but some of the same dilemmas arose anyways. Here's what we did. In the 'Big picture' the Guitars sounded a little veiled and indistinct. These kids play all the cool chords like a bunch silly freaks so 'clarity' is a big issue. In other words... You gotta shape the guitars (either in tracking or mix OR BOTH - See earlier post) to work for the SONGS. This is why, at first, I'm usually relatively uninterested in the 'SOLO'D' guitar sound. I need to be able to throw the faders up and BELIEVE. Believe in the band. Believe in the song. Believe the shit can be shaped around to serve our nefarious purposes later in mix. Hearing the guitars 'in the fray' with the other instruments is piviotal to accomplishing these objectives. Today we 'formed' the gtrs. on input with EQ. to sculpt out some of the 'schmotz' at 100-150hz narrow. We also hi-passed at 50hz to reduce some 'lo-freq. swing' without seriously killing our "chugg factor". Another narrow cut at 280-380hz was employed to diminish a bit of the low-mid 'murk'. A narrow boost at 900- 1.2k(unusual for me) was performed because it made some of the suspended chords 'gel' better in the 'big picture'. However. This made some stuff at 2.5k start to sound 'pointy' so I notched very narrowly there. I then started to feel that our sound had gone from 'muslin' to 'peanut brittle'. The changes we had affected in the low and low-mid bands had dramatically revealed what the top end was REALLY doing.... It was still smeared and 'forced' sounding up there... What the fuck?...... On go the 'Grados'. Walla. Houston....We got a problem. We're flattening the mic diaphragm more than a little. Some of our 'grit' is coming from the microphone screaming in agony at the tsunami of SPL we're pounding it mercilessly with. The EQ. 'rips' have helped to reveal this. Fine. Roll down the master gain on the head....... No fucking way. Cabinet 'Thud' and low-mid 'Body' just went the way of the steamship/buffalo. No problem. Turn the fucking head BACK UP. Send our slave(Asst. Eng.) back into the iso to pull the mic STRAIGHT back out 1-2 inches..... HUGE DIFFERENCE. HUGE. Now our top is sounding better and our mid 'bump' is no longer needed. OK. Time to kill the 'Sizzlean' at 8Khz. Down comes the low pass.... Shit. Sounds murky again.... HOLD IT. PULL THE FADER ALL THE WAY DOWN. Wait 15 seconds. Roll it up. Wha-Hoo. Comparative shopping mirage! That's right. Top end is PRIMO now. Don't be an impetuous Zorch. When you TAKE SOMETHING AWAY and you start thinking, "Oh fuck, we can't lose THAT".... whip the fader down to silence. Get a quick re-adjust for yer ears/brain and bring it back up. You'll be AMAZED at how often this little stunt will SAVE YER ASS. Same theory when comparing EQ'd vs. Un-EQ'd signals. Try to devise little stunts to get the two sounds to play at "PERCEIVED" unity gain when A/Bing. Why? Because the ear LIKES 'Louder'. And louder is very often NOT better. I have often observed young AE's struggling vainly to 'rip' EQ. a mic. input to tape, and getting very frustrated about 'All the shit they're LOSING'. "Everything sounds worse". "This EQ. is not cutting it"... Etc. Meanwhile the EQ. in 'button depress' is losing them 10 Db. of 'Steady State' gain and they are doing NOTHING to compensate for this disparity in monitoring volume. Madness. That's WHAT YOU'VE GOT 2 FUCKING HANDS FOR, FRUITCAKE! Grab the trim with one and compensate for the EQ. engage/disengage you're performing with the other. Or whatever methodology you devise to accomplish this... About 10 ways I can think of off the top of my head to skin this cat. Get on it. Otherwise you're gonna be grab-assing around in the fucking dark convincing yourself..."Everything sounds WORSE with the EQ. in" and other silly folk-lore stylee fables. Fuck that.... EVERYTHING is EQ'd in NATURE. You come up with a way outta this audio conundrum you gimmie a call at the fucking office. Mic placement IS EQ. How hard you drive a cabinet is EQ. The instrument you select to play is EQ. The space you record in is EQ. It's ALL fucking EQ. Even when it's precipitated by 'Time Domain'. Get fucking used to it. Better yet. Have fun with it. Don't take any shit about cutting EQ. to tape.... FUCK THE OLD SCHOOL. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE THE OLD SCHOOL. THEY'LL ALL BE DEAD SOON AND WE'LL SNARK ALL THEIR WORK!!!! Twist that shit around with reckless abandon. Kill everything/one. Make it fucking happen. Hurt somebody. Impress me. If you get something going on with a set of frequency dependent filters in a desk or outboard box instead of one of these "OTHER" E. methods. YOU DA MAN. So where am I going with this? What's this got to do with our 'Chugga-Chugga' dynamic swing bullshit? Well, solving THAT kettle of fish without KILLING the other critical issues of the guitar sound is the ART of doing this stuff with something that eclipses blind ambition and good intentions. In one of the earlier posts I stated that you will often be required to "SAVE THE CLIENT FROM HIMSELF". This is the case MOST of the time. You've got to be able to anticipate WHAT you're gonna need come mix to determine HOW yer gonna put the guitars to tape. The earlier in the process you train yourself to start anticipating these needs the better off you're gonna be, and the more you're gonna be able to refine and focus your efforts and attentions in an expeditious fashion. As somebody said in Spinal Tap.... "It's all one big Globule". OK. Back to our long forgotten EL-8 to tape. So I get this guitar sound that everybody seems to be digging in a major way..... But NOW I've got another problem. As the kid plays palm-mute stylee 'chuggs', I've got to keep backing 'to tape' level down to keep from kryloning the shit outta the meters. This means that when "Twank-Puppet" plays his magnificent Amin9/ sus13 "All hail the Great Pazuzu" chords, they're showing up about 15Db shy of 'ChuggVille' city limits.... Not good; Time for some SPANKY. Input Smash: What you don't hear can kill you. When you're recording dirt guitars there are a few things to remember, that are pretty easy to forget. 'Distortion masking' is one of them. OK. When you record an acoustic guitar it's pretty easy to hear distortion in the chain.... It's also pretty easy to figure out WHERE it's coming from. Let's say some idiot jams an AT 4041 RIGHT up on the soundhole of some other zero bashing away with reckless abandon on a Gibson Jumbo. Pretty solid chance yer gonna hear the diaphragm screaming in agony. Easy. OK. Now let's imagine the mic gets pulled back to a decent distance but you ram-a-jam the mic pre gain like a muthafucka and THAT generates a shitload of nasty clipping downstream. Easy. Back off the pre, you prick... That's more fucking like it. Almost sounds like a recording now... OK. Now imagine you decide to smash the fuck outta yer acoustic with a compressor and you back the attack off to the point where a lot of 'Front' is spanking into the compressor and you compound the problem by squelching the release so fucking fast, the output is starting to sound like a ProCo Turbo Rat.... Easy. Grab a little more of the transient component by speeding up the attack and add a little length to the release so the compressor stops distorting as much. OK. Now you're BANGING that bad boy's output like a MADMAN into the tape machine with peaks so ripping the VU needles are slamming into the pegs like a symphony of homicidal paperclips. No big. Back the 'To tape' gain back to the point where you've got some cool tape compression going but yer not adding a shitload of tape distortion to the fray. Totally easy, Mel Bay book#1 shit right? OK, Guess what? YOU GOTTA DO THE SAME SHIT FOR DIRT GUITARS ON INPUT, ALL THE SAME STUFF....... PROBLEM IS....... YOU GOTTA FIND THOSE VERY SAME ARTIFACTS IN A SEA OF INSTRUMENT DISTORTION. So right about now somebody's gotta be saying..... WHY FUCKING BOTHER? It's all distortion right? Who fucking cares? MORE DIRT! RIGHT? WRONG. When you go into mix on this stuff downstream, you are going to be hating life as you start to rip and goose various frequencies to make your guitars work in your mix... And you're gonna find a WORLD OF FUCKING HURT contained in the differences in 'Diaphragmatic Distortion', 'Pre-Amp Distortion', 'Gain Reduction Artifact Distortion', 'Tape Distortion', and f1i 'Source Distortion' f0i0 . Which is basically the ONLY form of distortion that doesn't sound like COCK AND BALLS after the fact. Any of those other guys are the totally satanic 'Gifts that keep on giving'. Those other forms of distortion are like herpes..... You may not see those little suckers on yer pee-pee till it's TOO LATE. And you've already started banging the crap outta Mrs. Right. The babe of your dreams. Guess what, loomer? She's GONNA be PISSED when she finds out you gave her the 'Bumpies'. She WILL NOT be taking fond memories of you into her next relationship. VIGILANCE IS 90% of great 'Tracking AE'. Don't be a prick. Check yer math. So, yer slammin the shit outta tape on the chugs WITHOUT an EL-8 (Or whatever) in the path. So you whip one of those bad boys across the bus output and you start to dial around. Start with the release in the medium-fast/medium range. It will make it easier to hear the effect of the attack control settings which is the first thing you should be concerned with. As the 'Rocket Scientist' twanks away on his mutant ukulele, you start adjusting the attack to figure out how 'long' the pick attack is..... That's right. Every distorted guitar tone is going to have it's own little 'waveshape profile' you gotta figure out to gain control over the sound. Sweep the attack knobs setting from fastest possible to midstream and LISTEN to what is happening to the 'Pick Attack' portion of the signal. You should be able to get a good feel for how much total duration is contained in the 'Attack' portion of the signal. Screw around with input gain, ratio and threshold to exaggerate and reduce the effect of compression to confirm your observations. You're not trying to make it SOUND like ANY- FUCKING-THING at this juncture.. Yer trying to figure out HOW the compressor is gonna be able to 'Grab' the signal. You will start to see a trend in how far back you gotta 'offset' the attack and not KILL the life of the pick attack. The slower attack times will sound more 'real' and 'exciting' but you will have to use higher and higher ratios and lower and lower thresholds to get the activity you need as far as gain reduction and signal control. Word to the wise. Be very careful about banging all the attack off a signal as dense and 'Steady State' as a heavily distorted guitar. You fuck up the attack on input and you will never be able to get the excitement back in the track no matter HOW you Eq. it later. EVER. On the other hand, you gotta get yer 'Nu-Metal' Bozo to tape with some moderately sane semblance of dynamic swing between 'Chugs' and 'Chords'. In the most simple, Single(Non-frequency selective) compression situation, what you know about how to set up the attack and release envelope is going to be the single biggest harbinger of your potential success or failure. Now take a similar approach to the release envelope. Fool with yer release time and check out the effect of lengthening the 'let-go' activity of the unit. The faster release times will sound more 'exciting' and 'real' but will get you back into hot water when 'Einstein' starts 'Chugging'. You've got to try to find a happy medium where it's under control but it doesn't sound 'Stepped on'. Chances are, in really bad situations... No single '1 Compressor' scheme is gonna cut it.... Might be time to check the alternatives. A.) Frequency dependant recording schemes: Both dynamically and Non-Dynamically realized. There are a SLEW of them. B.) Multiple unit dynamic reduction scenarios. C.) Phase and Time Domain stunts. The big 3. On 29 May 2003 23:43 austin wrote: Quote: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Slipperman, A question from the gallery... how much trouble can one get into with diaphragm distortion... with an SM57? That seems to be the real question to ask, given that the others would be easier to spot by checking a peak led or fiddling with a knob... right? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A LOT of trouble to be sure. The 'spatter' from the relentless impaction of the SM57 head element is a little 'trojan horse' that can REALLY bust yer balls when you rip away some of the 'Fat' in mix. To avoid this fiasco, I generally will use a pair of hi quality headphones(Grados) at pretty low volume where I try to twist away the same stuff on the monitor output that I may end up cutting as I fit the track into the 'Big Picture' later in mix. ie. Hi pass at 100, shelf down 1-5 db @250, narrow rips swept between 300-3.5k. The artifacts are easier to spot if you have the kid alternate between chugging and sustained chords. Each of these checks are done and undone separately in a sequence of twists. If it's present in the signal, you may actually hear the spatter 'swell' into various parts of sustaining chords better, depending on how much saturation/pregain the guys is using on his rig. The 'spatter' is broadband and can be 'pointed' in a whole load of different areas depending on input but..... It has a different 'transient' quality to it that makes it VERY dangerous. It's duration is longer than the pick attack and much shorter than the 'steady state' signal. It often shifts around somewhat unpredictably playing havoc with the uniformity of the overall sound. Like anything else, the devil is in the details, and a little bit of early vigilance and perseverance in monitoring will save you a world of trouble in the long run and teach you what to 'listen for' so this little drill starts takes less and less time to do. Hope this answers the question. Gotta flee. Be back soon.