Master the use of reverb and your lifeless, two-dimensional mix will become a three dimensional panorama, says Steve Hillier.

Things that people do wrong with their music:

1. Write a composition starting with the drums. This is madness. Can you imagine Lennon and McCartney waiting for Ringo to set up his drum kit before writing their next Beatles smash? Obviously not.

2. Compress everything. At least twice. Anyone doing this in their mixes should stop now. Modern DAWs have an internal dynamic range that’s comparable to a pin dropping versus the sound of the big bang. Try using it, rather than squashing your music to the flatness of a pancake being sucked into a black hole . Compressors are like guns…only the sane should ever pick one up.

3. Use reverb badly, or not at all…

Unlike compression, everyone likes reverb. How can I say this with such confidence? Because nearly everything you’ve ever heard has been covered with reverb. Everything. Reverberation is what you hear when the sound from an event, such as a gun shot, bounces off a reflective surface, such as a wall, and then into our ears. It’s a fundamental attribute of how we experience sound, and our brains have evolved to use the information contained in reverb to help us survive in our everyday lives. If we’re hearing lots of sounds with long reverb tails on them, that suggests we’re in a large room, such as a church. Lots of short ‘early reflections’, we’re probably in a small room. Everything we hear has some reverberation on it before it ends up in our ears (we’ll ignore scientists who work in anechoic chambers for today).

Too many novice programmers don’t know how to use reverb, so they shy away from it, leaving their mixes dryer than Stewart Lee. Or they go the other way and use completely the wrong reverb sound, and get wetter than a Michael McIntyre show. Maybe programmers are confusing acoustic size with acoustic impact? Imagine this text on your page is your tune:

This is your mix,

This is your mix with the correct use of reverb on it,

Here’s your mix with a little too much reverb on it,

And here it is with way too much!

The effective use of reverb will make a component of a mix sound bigger, fuller and more comfortable for your audience. Without it, the sound will be tiny and illogical; think about it, in real life when will you ever hear a big dry sound? The answer is never. Ever! On the other hand, too much reverb and the mix will be wet and flabby, too big for anyone to comprehend.

How to use reverb:

So what do we do then? First, you need a decent reverb unit or plugin, don’t use just any old reverb plugin. I have a theory that the reason that reverb went out of fashion was related to the fact everyone used way to much  of it in the eighties. And many of them were using horrible cheap digital units*. There’s no excuse for that today. Invest some money and buy one each of both of these:

1. A traditional digital reverb

2. A convolution reverb.

A convolution reverb unit works by generating reverb tails based on impulse responses, recordings of reverberations from a real-world environment. They sound amazing; the best are extremely realistic and open up a world of possibilities. But you’ll need a traditional digital reverb too, probably a plugin based on classic hardware form the past. Since the late 1970s and up until about five years ago pretty much all reverb on records was simulated in some way, often by a microprocessor delaying audio, feeding it back into itself, doing some clever filtering and sticking it out the other end. It sounds great, if a little synthetic. But who cares? This is the sound of records, and they still sound great now.

Here’s how I use reverb in my own work. Your mileage may vary but most mix engineers I know use this approach or a variation on it:

1. Set up three reverb plugins as send effects on a bus, not as insert effects. The first will be short (less than 0.5 sec) and come from a convolution reverb using a room impulse response. The second will be a traditional digital reverb sound, such as a plate reverb, set to around 1.5 seconds decay. The last will be a ‘third option’, normally reserved for vocals and normally another plate or hall sound.

2. I then balance my sounds without reverb. Please note that I only use the bare minimum of compression at this point too!

3. When I’m happy with my mix, I then start placing my sounds in an imaginary three dimensional space. The shorter reverb sound places the drums and other high energy or rhythmical sound sources at the front of my stage, the larger reverbs put those sounds slightly further back and into a supporting role. The more reverb, the bigger the sound but also how far away it is.

Thinking of your mix as a three dimensional illusion is crucial for a comfortable and exciting result. Without reverb, your mix will sound like it’s stuck inside the speakers. Reverb brings the sounds alive and gives them the opportunity to leap out of headphones!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCKbHz3JuFQ

Why do so many programmers get this bit wrong?

What this all comes down to, time and time again, is the disconnect that bad programmers have between their brains and their ears and their music. They get into the habit of searching for answers to why their work isn’t working with the same cognitive tools that they use to explain why their internet router isn’t connecting to their laptop. This is not how music works. Our ears and our hearts should guide 99% of our musical work, the remaining 1% comes from experience and knowing how to use our equipment. So, from here on, start listening carefully to what’s going on around you. Listen to the difference between the sound of talking voices in a car and in the street. That’s reverb. Listen to the difference between the sound of tune in a club or in your iPhone headphones. That’s reverb. Listen to the sound of you brushing your teeth in a tiled bathroom. That’s reverb. And then, listen very carefully to the difference between your lifeless, static, two-dimensional mixes and three dimensional panoramas of the artists you most admire.

*Actually, the MIDIverb does have some great uses and you can probably pick one up for nothing at a jumble sale now if you look hard enough. Just don’t use it as your primary reverb tool.

Steve Hillier is a songwriter, DJ and record producer, who has worked with everyone from Keane to Gary Numan.  Steve is also a journalist and music technology expert, writing for Future Music & BBC Worldwide. Steve teaches Music Business and Logic Music Production Online at Point Blank Music School.

For more inspiration on using reverb have a look at these videos:

Listen to Mike Koglin: Reverse Vocal FX in Ableton:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7RbXtLGjzs

Jonny Miller: Reverb – Dub FX

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ0DopG3Bqs

Keep up to date with all of Point Blank’s news, tutorials and giveaways by subscribing to our Youtube channel, or following us on Facebook and Twitter… and if you have something to say about this post, start the conversation with a comment below. Thanks!

Hands up who likes analogue synthesisers?! Of course you do; there’s dozen of models out there and the best thing is, they’re all different. That might seem strange at first glance because when you examine them, most models appear to be basically the same.

My Roland SH101 has one oscillator, one filter, one envelope generator and plays only one note at a time. Put that next to my Yamaha CS10, which is nearly exactly the same in terms of sound making facilities, and everyone except a guitarist would tell you they’re different, as different as a grand piano and a Yamaha DX7 (and the SH101 sounds far better in my opinion). And as every synth sounds different, each is unique. Which brings us to a tiny silver box manufactured in 1982. It’s the antique synth that inspired every dance music genre since Acid House:

The Roland TB303 Bassline. On paper it looks extremely limited. It has one oscillator, one envelope generator, one filter and a tiny keyboard that’s next to impossible to program. And yet, this synth sounds like no other. It’s weedy, shrill and despite it’s ‘bassline’ tag the thing it does worst is basslines. How ironic! TB303 are very rare and very expensive these days, and quite frankly you’d be better off spending £1200 on a decent set of monitors. To save you some money I’m going to show you how you can make Logic’s ES1 software instrument do a close imitation. And if you don’t have Logic, don’t worry, because these steps will work on just about any softsynth.

The basics

1. Load in the ES1 and set the oscillator to ‘sawtooth’. Set the oscillator mix so you have only the main oscillator, not the the subsoscillator. The TB303 has no suboscillator and only a dial between sawtooth and ‘square’; you can switch the oscillator to square if you prefer.
2. Set the oscillator range to 16’.
3. Make sure the ES1 ‘Voices’ setting is in ‘Legato mode’ and with ‘Glide’ set to around a 1/3 of the way up.

This setting is extremely important; we must not have notes overlapping and creating chords. We need the ability to slide between specific notes too!

4. Set the ADSR to very fast attack (but not instant, just slightly off will suffice). Set sustain to zero. Set the release and decay to two thirds of the way up.
5. Set the amp to ‘Gate R’ and the ‘level via vel’ triangles to one at the top and the other 2/3 up.
6. Set the filter to 12dB (the TB303 actually has an 18dB filter but the ES1’s filter sounds far more realistic at this setting) and the ADSR via vel triangles at zero and 2o’clock. Drive should be at zero, and ‘Key’ at half way.
7. Set ‘Analog’ to 100%
8. Set both modulation faders to zero. There’s no modulation other than ADSR on a TB303!

So, with your synthesiser set up in this way, you should have an approximation of a TB303 coming out of your speakers. That’s only half of the battle: to really get that acid feel you need to play the ES1 like a TB303 too. Which actually means that you mustn’t play it but manually program in a pattern in the style of a Roland sequencer from the early 1980s.

The Pattern

1. Create a one bar region in the arrange area using the pencil mouse tool (esc > No.2)
2. Open that in the piano roll editor and draw in the notes you want to play using the pencil tool. Note that the default length on velocity setting is ideal for us because the note is one 16th note long and the velocity is 80. Remember, no chords!

Here’s where things get really clever. At the moment, you’ll probably have a string of notes, each clearly firing one after the other. The TB303 can do that, but the best patterns use glides, legato and accents to create that classic Acid House feel.

1. Drag the right hand corner of the note that you want to ‘slur’ into the next one to the right so that it overlaps with the next note. This will do two things: it will stop the envelope generator triggering again and it will make the ES1 sweep to the new note’s pitch. Nice!
2. The finishing touch is to add accents. You do this with the velocity mouse tool (esc > No.9). At the moment, all your notes will be at velocity 80. Click-drag up on the note you want to have an accent until the velocity is at, say, 100. That note will not only be louder but it will also be slightly brighter too, just like in the old days.

The finishing touches

Of course, it’s how you adjust the settings on the synth that makes that TB303 ‘performance’. The best ones to play with are the Decay/Release settings on the ADSR, Filter Cutoff, the Filter Resonance and the degree of Filter Modulation (move the fader by clicking between the two triangles). If you want to emulate the changing of the ‘accent’ setting, try moving the top filter triangle up and down. Also, you can adjust the attack setting on the ADSR; moving it up to just under a quarter of the way will give you an accurate ‘filter lag’ sound. The key here is subtlety. The real TB303 connoisseur can also add a touch more resonance on every accented note; this is most easily drawn in with automation.

Clean TB303 sounds went out of fashion in the 80s. Try these effects to dirty up your fake TB303:

1. Bitcrusher. But don’t use it to down-sample the audio. Instead, just adjust the drive setting. This will give you that classic ‘abused preamp on a cheap mixing desk’ grit.
2. Ensemble. This can help a pattern come alive, and adds a nice movement to the sound.
3. Tape delay. Throwing a dash of this into your mix can give the ES1 pattern an extra bounce and sound great with those shrill filter sweeps.

Enjoy!

To learn how to produce the classic Roland TB303 sound using Ableton Live, check out this tutorial from fellow Point Blank tutor, Danny J Lewis.

Steve Hillier teaches Music Business at the London College and Logic Music Production Online.
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Colour-coding your tracks can be an extremely useful tool when it comes to mixing. It enables you to quickly acknowledge what you’re listening to and jump to it without hesitation. This can be particularly helpful when you’re attempting to glue together 15 or more tracks. Now, you’re probably thinking that colouring tracks isn’t very ground-breaking when it comes to mixing techniques? Possibly. But Logic has deeper functionality that enables you to take track colouring further. Read on…

1. Take 3 separate groups of tracks. For this example, I’m going to use Drums, Guitars and Vocals.

   

2. Open up the Colour Palette <OPTION C>

   

3. Colour the Drums BLUE

   Colour the Vocals RED

   Colour the Guitars GREEN

   

4. It starts to get interesting now…

   Select just ONE region of the Vocals (The one that is selected is partially black)

   

5. Now hit <SHIFT C>

   

   As you will notice, all of the Vocal tracks are selected in one go. You’ve just used the ‘Select Equal Colours’ command.

6. This can be a very powerful tool. With groups of tracks selected at once, you can instantly take control over the arrange page and speed up your work flow.

   Hit ‘S’ and everything in the group is soloed

   

   Hit ‘M’ and (you guessed it) they’re all muted.

   

   All of this came simply from selecting one region after colouring. It works in piano roll too.

7. So, as you can see, colouring tracks isn’t just to make your session look pretty – although it does that too – but it aids with your visual recognition of tracks and, more importantly, allows you to take more control.

Get colouring!

By Daniel Rothmann – danielrothmann.com

Introduction

So, you’ve made it this far. If you’ve read my previous articles in the EGE series you should have a pretty good overview of how electronic music actually works. In addition, you should also be able to put together some pretty cool beats for your tracks! So, what’s missing? You guessed it: Synthesizers. Electronic music is all about synthesizers. You may be wondering how the heck these things work, right? I can understand that many people are intrigued by synthesizers; all those knobs and buttons can certainly seem very confusing! In this article, I’m going to give you a basic overview of how the common synthesizer works and what important parameters you need to know of in order to produce the sounds you want.

Choosing your synthesizer

Before we can get tweaking, we need a synthesizer to work with. Depending on which DAW (if you don’t know what this means, read EGE#1 – Getting Started) you have chosen for yourself, you may already have one or two basic synths included in the package. Or maybe you already own a hardware synth that you’d like to explore. I highly recommend that you start by using a simple synthesizer like Reason’s Subtractor or Togu Audio Line’s VST synth, TAL-Elek7ro. Both are what you call “subtractive” synthesizers. You can always get a more powerful synth later – You don’t have much gain of the power if you don’t know how to use it, right? I’m going to be using the TAL-Elek7ro synthesizer for the later tutorial since it is free and available for both PC and Mac.

Basic schematics of subtractive synthesis

There are several ways of synthesizing sounds with machines – Subtractive synthesis (also sometimes called “analogue”) is one of them. Subtractive synthesizers work by producing a harmonically rich sound (a periodically repeated waveform) and then subtracting elements of the sound, actually removing harmonics to achieve the sound you want. I don’t want to get into technical talk, but I will give a short introduction to the various elements of this technique:

Preset tweaking – The essential parameters

I’m going to quickly go through the parameters you need to know in order to begin tweaking your sounds. Choose a random preset on your synthesizer and try changing these parameters:

The oscillator:

• Waveform
  This parameter will change the raw oscillator sound that you’re working with. The waveform defines the basic sonic characteristics of the sound. TAL-Elek7ro doesn’t actually have a parameter labeled “waveform”; it has four buttons with different symbols illustrating the waveform.
• Semi/Pitch
  This one is pretty self-explanatory. Try it out.

The filter:

• Cutoff
  The cutoff parameter defines the frequency where harmonics are cut off (duh) the waveform, either above or below. If you’re unsure what his means, try it out, and you’ll notice immediately.
• Resonance
  By raising the resonance, you put additional emphasis on the cutoff frequency, making for some cool filter sweep effects. Also sometimes called “Q” or “Emphasis”.

The amplifier envelope (ADSR):

• Attack
  Defines the time the sound takes to go from no volume to full volume. A big attack value would result in a long “fade in”, while a small value would make the sound punch in very quickly.
• Decay
  The time taken for the sound to decay from full volume (when the attack reaches its maximum) to the sustain volume.
• Sustain
  Sustain defines the volume of the sound after the decay – If trying to emulate a flute sound, you would use a high sustain value, while trying to emulate a piano, you would use no sustain.
• Release
  The amount of time taken for the sound to “fade out” when you let go of the note on your keyboard.

Let’s get designing!

So, now that you have all the synthesizer fundamentals in place, all there is left is to start working with it. The best advice I can give you, is to start by fooling around, trying out all the essential parameters. Then, when you’ve developed a sense of how these things work and how they each affect the sound, try to imagine what kind of sound you would like to make, and imagine what characterizes that sound. Can you emulate the desired sound using the essential parameters? There is no way you can memorize how every cool synthesizer sound is made, so the best thing is to learn how the synth works and make it work for you to produce any sound you want, maybe even a sound nobody has ever heard before!

Tutorial: Creating a synthesized bass

Here’s a short tutorial to help you improve your sound designing skills. We’re going to be making a house bass/lead sound from scratch using the TAL-Elek7ro VST synthesizer. This is what we’re going to be making: House Bass

1. Load up TAL-Elek7ro. If it is not already set, choose the “BS Startup” preset.

2. Let’s start by setting the oscillators. The sound we’re trying to make is made up of 3 oscillators; The fundamental note, the octave below and the major 3^rd. To get the rich and fat sound, we’re going to use the saw waveform for all oscillators. Let’s start by turning SYNC off, and turn the sub oscillator (also called “OSC 3”) down a bit:

3. Now, we’re going to turn up the second oscillator. We want this oscillator to play the major 3^rd above oscillator 1, to give it that house feel. Adjust the “SEMI” knob until you find the major 3^rd.

4. Let’s move on to the filter. For starters, we have to choose our filter type. Let’s take “BassLine 18 dB” since we’re going to be making a bass sound.

5. The first thing I’ll do is to take down the cutoff value and raise the resonance value. It sounds a bit dull at the moment so we’re going to add some movement using the envelope below. Raise the “CONTOUR” amount, and you’ll begin to notice a difference.

6. Let’s set the filter envelope. At the moment, it is just quick attack, quick decay, full sustain and some release. You shouldn’t actually be able to hear a difference in cutoff movement at the moment, but you’ll notice the sound is brighter when contour is raised. What you’ll want to do is to lower the sustain and raise decay, and you’ll notice the sound is becoming more punchy and percussive.

7. Increase the amplifier envelope release time (we were working with the filter envelope before) and decrease the filter release time and adjust the cutoff until you like the sound.

8. As our final touch, let’s add some velocity control to the cutoff (VCF) to make the sound more expressive. This means, that when we play the notes harder, the cutoff will increase. This may require that you decrease the cutoff.

9. That’s a pretty cool sound, isn’t it? Congratulations, you have significantly increased your sound designing skills!

That’s all for now, hope to see you again soon!

By Daniel Rothmann (T7) www.danielrothmann.com

Introduction

So you’re new to electronic music production. You don’t know much about it all, but that’s OK, everyone has been at this point of experience. I figured the best way to start this series out would be explaining basic drum programming. While many may know very little (if any) theory on the subject, drum programming is quite a bit easier accessible than chords and harmony, since it doesn’t require direct acquaintance with music theory. Even for the inexperienced ear, you can usually tell if a rhythm just isn’t right, or sounds strange in some way. During this tutorial we’re going to set you up with the basic tools you need to get grooving. First, let me introduce you to the software.

The software

The two most widely known techniques for producing drums sounds on a computer are drum synthesis and drum sampling.

Drum synthesis is typically a polyphonic synthesizer that comes with a set of preset parameters that you can change to a certain degree. Some of these could be drum pitch, waveform, noise amount, saturation, and so on. Drum synthesizers are similar to regular synthesizers in the way that they generate (synthesize) a drum sound from scratch, live. Generally, drum synthesizers differ from regular synthesizers in the way, that the drum synth generally have some preset parameters that can only be changed to a very small degree. This could, for example, be the pitch envelope of a kick drum. The way the kick drum very promptly (in a matter of milliseconds) drop from a high pitch to a low one in order to generate a ‘punchy’ effect in sound.

Drum sampling is essentially taking a sample (a recording), i. e. an acoustic snare sound or an electronic hihat from a drum synthesizer, and playing it back whenever a certain note or switch is triggered inside the software. Drum samplers usually feature parameters such as individual sample volume, pitch, length, pan etc. Drum samplers differ from the drum synthesizers by not producing any sound from scratch, you utilize a sample that has already been recorded, prefabricated and modify it according to your musical aspiration.

First of all, let me introduce you to the drum sampler we’re going to be working with: Ableton Live’s ‘Impulse’. It is a decent-quality drum sampler, with some relatively typical features (and a few not-so-typical). In eight square slots, samples can be loaded and played back. Each sample has separate controls for pitch, decay, volume, pan, filter, saturation, timestretch and more. Some of these can be affected by velocity (how ‘hard’ the note is pressed on the keyboard, defining the strength of the particular tone) and some parameters can be set to select a random value with each new note. These things can come in very handy when you want to program a bit of variety into your beats.

Let’s get busy

In this tutorial, we’re going to program an electronic drum kit from scratch, using pre-fabricated drum samples from the internet. We’re going to be using Ableton Live’s ‘Impulse’ which is, as I’ve already mentioned, a drum sampler.

1. For legal reasons, I cannot supply you with samples, even if they are available for free on the Internet. The samples I’ve used are from www.Pettinhouse.com, a site that provides free drum samples. I chose their ‘VKE Modem’ drum kit ‘“ You can download it for free here: http://www.pettinhouse.com/html/vke_modem.html.
   
2. Download the drum kit (for NI Battery, even though we will be using Abletons Impulse, the raw samples are in that package) and extract the folder named ‘Modem Kit Samples’ to wherever you like to have your drum samples.
   
3. Open up Ableton Live and make a new MIDI track. Drag Impulse on to the MIDI track. Impulse is located under ‘Instruments’ in ‘Live Devices’.
4. We need to navigate to the place we saved the samples. Use Live’s browser (on the left, named ‘File Browser 1′), and locate the folder.
    
5. For starters, I’ll drag ‘BD_RnB_SS2′ on to the first free slot in Impulse. BD is short for bass drum. The sound is a bit harsh for what I am going for, so I am going to turn Transpose (Transp) down by -2 semitones (st), dial the Volume to -9 dB, and apply a low-pass filter (LP 1). You accomplish this, by pressing the ‘Filter’ button, make sure that Mode is set to ‘LP 1′ and turn the Frequency down to 825 Hertz (Hz). I also turn the Resonance (Res) to its’ minimum, 0.30.
   
6. For my snare, I’ll drag in ‘SD3_Modem’ and turn the volume to -3 dB. Next up I’ll add a clap sound, named ‘Clap’, and set the volume at -2 dB.
   
7. In the next 3 slots, I’ll load in some effects. I’ve chosen ‘SIGNAL’, ‘Tu3′ and ‘Tu’. I pan ‘SIGNAL’ slightly to the left (24L), and turn the volume down to -10 dB. Basically, I used the same procedure for ‘Tu3′, though I pan it to the right (23R), and dial the volume in on approx. -7 dB. I transpose ‘Tu’ up by 8 semitones, and set the volume at -12 dB.
   
8. We are now left with 2 empty slots. I am going to fill one of them with a hihat; The sample I’m using is named ‘Hat’. I find the hihat a bit too deep and harsh, so I turn the Transpose up by 4 semitones, Stretch down to -16% (this will make the sample slightly shorter, using a time stretching technique), Decay down to 120 milliseconds (ms) and Volume to -7 dB. I also throw in a low-pass filter (LP 1) at approx. 9.5 kHz to take off some treble.
   
9. All we need now is our last effect ‘“ Let’s use ‘Crash2_modem’. By itself, this sample does not sound very good. I am going to transpose it and make it shorter, controlled by gate (this means that when the drum note for this sample in the drum editor stops, the gate will cut off any of the remaining sample material that has not yet been played back. It makes us able to create a much ‘sharper’ release with this sample). Here is the parameter values I used: Start: 15 ms, Transpose: 7 st, Stretch: 48%, Decay: 9.14 ms, Volume: -21 dB. Remember to press the button that reads ‘Trigger’ so that it displays ‘Gate’ instead. This enables the gate function.
   
10. All we need now is a beat to play back on our new drum kit! I’ve chosen a electro-inspired beat I thought fit for these sounds.
    
11. Finally, I’m going to use a Compressor to get a bit more consistency in volume. I set the Threshold at -19 dB and Output -5.6 dB.
    

Enjoy your new drum kit! You can drag the Impulse instrument back up in your browser and create a preset you can use at another time.

[audio:programming-beats.mp3]

Imagine listening to a recording and half a minute into a song you notice something wrong. You can’t quite put your finger on it; you just can’t feel the instruments, you feel attacked by the singer’s in-your-face voice and everything is just too…..dry. It’s like listening to music in a vacuum. There’s no space.

Although listening to a reverb-free record is nearly impossible, (unless it was recorded entirely in an anechoic chamber), you can still have a really dry record if you don’t put any reverb on anything.

Reverb can be perceived as a glue that holds everything together, yet retains enough space to maintain a perceived distance between each element. It makes a three dimensional picture of the soundscape you just recorded, causing you to feel that you can hear the room accompanied by the instrument.

Different modes of reverb

There are quite a few different types of reverb. You can call them reverb modes, or room types. Some of the more common types include; Room, Hall, Chamber, Spring, Plate, and Convolution. In our age, we have access to digital reverb simulators which can simulate, quite realistically, all of these programmed room or reverb modes. Let’s take a look.

• Room reverb – These types simulate the sound of having recorded something in a room. Whether the parameters are for a big room or a drum room, they usually simulate smaller spaces than their Hall/Chamber counterparts.
• Hall reverb – Rich, warm and big are the first adjectives that come to mind when thinking about Hall reverb. These types simulate halls, whether they be medium halls, concert halls, or whatever lush parameter name the hall has.
• Plate reverb – Plate reverb is a personal favorite of mine for vocals. Live, I propably use it too much, but I just think it does wonder to the vocals, without taking it too far or drowning it in reverb. Plate reverb is basically sound being sent to a metal plate which vibrates back and forth. These vibrations are picked up and transformed into an audio signal. Plate reverbs are very bright but clean, so they suit vocals especially.
• Spring reverb – I was once asked what reverb was when I was fooling around with my guitar. I cranked up the reverb on my small practice amp and then kicked it. “That boing you heard?” “Yeah?” “That’s reverb”. Although true is some form, that boing wasn’t all reverb, it was spring reverb. The reverb found on guitar amps so most usually used for guitar.
• Chamber reverb – In the old days, studios had so called echo chambers. In these chambers they had speakers that they routed the audio signal that they wanted to put reverb on. The signal, be it guitar, voice or whatever was produced through the speakers into the chamber and picked up by a microphone that was positioned to capture the reverb in said chambers.
• Convolution reverb – This is the type of reverb that allows digital emulation of real three-dimensional spaces. If you’re familiar with the famous reverb plugin Altiverb, then you have heard convolution reverb. In order to capture a room’s reverb characteristics, an “impulse” sound is played in a real space, such as an opera house or a cathedral, then recorded into a computer. The impulse sound allows the computer to simulate that space just from the impulse sound. This is possibly the best kind of digital reverb around

So now you know a little bit about the reverb modes you most commonly work with. Below I have brainstormed a few fun tips you can use whenever you like to spice things up.

1. A different take on reverse reverb:
   You all know the classic reverse reverb, where the reverse seems to swoosh in before the phrase of the singer or the hit of the drum. A neat trick for something different is to record an infinite reverb on a different track and then reverse it. For example, say you have a slow intermission type middle part and the part before ends on a snare hit. You can record that last snare hit on a different track with a big cathedral like reverb with infinite decay. Then you can reverse the audio part and put it low in the mix, then you have a weird controlled reverbed ambience filling out your slow part.
2. Gated Reverb on vocals:
   Gated-reverb on vocals is something I think is pretty cool. I think this is used on the song On call, by Kings of Leon. His vocal reverb stays on while singing but cuts off abruptly when he stops. You patch your effect processor to a gate and the sound source is side-chained to the gate. That way, the gate opens and lets the reverb out whenever the singer is singing, but cuts off as soon as the sound level dips below the threshold of the gate.
3. Making things feel bigger and bigger:
   Say you have a really spaced out Sigur Ros rock outro(I’m Icelandic, I’ve got to namedrop here) and the drums are going wild in the end. It can be fun experimenting with automating the reverb so the drums, or maybe only the snare, or everything, whatever you choose, gets bigger and bigger. I know for a fact that this can work wonders live to really give that last song a huge impact on the audience.
4. Pan it:
   Use mono reverbs for a mono sound source and pan them to a different location in the mix. It can give an interesting impression.
5. Put space between source and reverb:
   Using a standard room reverb, adjust the pre-delay to give the impression it is a little big bigger without making it linger too long. On vocals for example, it can give space between the singing and the reverb.
6. Reverb only:
   Send your drums to a big reverb and solo-safe the reverb. That way you are only hearing the reverb and not the original sound source. It can make for a cool fade-in intro for a song. Especially if you add reverse reverb for the change into the real drum kit.
7. Mix it up:
   Use different types of reverb on the same source. Mixing a couple of types of reverb can create an interesting effect.
8. Don’t use any:
   Keep some instruments reverb-free. It can add an interesting contrast to the rest of the song. It can put a solo intrument to the forefront in a special way.
9. Add other effects:
   Add other types of effects on the aux channel where you have your reverb. Try distorting it, phasing it or anything else you can think of.
10. Use REAL reverb:
    Try ditching your plugins and use real reverb. Upload your audio clips to Silophone, an old grain silo that has been converted into a do-it-yourself reverb chamber. You upload audio and it is played back in the empty silo, then recorded and sent back to you as a download.

I’ve decided to do an example of tip #7. I’ve taken a small snare sample and put two types of reverbs on it via an aux send. I used the Logic presets “Ambience” in the Platinum Reverb and the “Short Snare Hall” in Space Designer. Although I am using Logic, any DAW with decent reverbs works just as well.

First audio sample has the untreated snare drum.
[audio:original untreated snare.mp3]

Second audio sample has the snare with a tiny bit of ambience reverb. Not a huge difference but not as dead.
[audio:snarewambiencerev.mp3]

Third sample has a snare hall preset. The reverb makes the snare much bigger.
[audio:snarewhall.mp3]

Fourth sample has both the ambience and hall reverb patches together. Notice that the predelay on the ambience preset delays the hall reverb so it enters later than the actual snare hit. Could make for an interesting sound.
[audio:snarewboth.mp3]

Reverb is an instrument of endless debate. Everybody has an opinion of what works best(like in everything else regarding audio). But reverb can often make or break a song, too much fills it with too much space and you can’t hear what it’s all about and too little just kills the emotion of it. So you have to take particular care in your appliance of reverb, and also be open to a lot of experimentation. Since it is such a big topic you are sure to find something interesting in your endeavours.

Who knows, maybe you’ll be the next one to invent the next “reverb studio trick”?

If you stumbled upon this article and like it, please tell the rest of the Stumbleupon community.

]]> http://emusictips.com/2009/03/top-10-reverb-tips-and-tricks/feed/ 34 http://emusictips.com/2009/03/creativity-in-the-control-room/ http://emusictips.com/2009/03/creativity-in-the-control-room/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:10:47 +0000 bjorgvin http://emusictips.com/?p=293 by Björgvin Benediktsson

Where the magic happens

From an idea to the finished product, a song or an album goes through many stages. A little ditty in the songwriters head, a rocking riff on the Les Paul or a quiet chord progression on the piano transforms exponentially as more thought and work is put into it.

All of this isn’t done by only the songwriter. There are a lot of people behind the scenes, helping with the process, from A&R scouts to mixers, to engineers, to producers. But how much of the band is left on that CD after it’s been filtered through all those people? How much does a producer change the creative vision the band had?

Do the engineers and producers help or hinder creativity?

There are three primary roles in the recording studio. The artist, the producer and the engineer. All of them play a pivotal role in the production of an album. Sometimes these roles mix together and sometimes they clash. Other times one person performs the role of all three. Let’s take a look at what goes on in each of these roles:

The Producer

The record producer is the person who, on paper, is the one responsible for fleshing out and making a masterpiece out of the creativeness of the band at hand. He’s the savant that knows how music works, how people react to it and how it should sound. He’s the one responsible for squeezing out the musician’s best performance, for generating new ideas, and for making the artist as comfortable as possible while in the studio. Some producers are known for their signature sound, or their knowledge about a certain genre. Sometimes you just have that new band that needs a Ross Robinson type producer to make them sound amazing.

Examples of famous producers.

• George Martin
• Timbaland
• Rick Rubin

The Engineer.

The tech guy. The guy that knows how to capture that sound you are looking for. He knows how to make the guitars sound like dinosaurs and the drums like locomotives. He knows where to place microphones and to connect all the cables.

The engineer knows how to make the guitars sound like dinosaurs and the drums like locomotives

He knows what’s technically right and wrong.
He’s the producer’s right hand, helping him achieve the creative vision he’s seeing for the band.

Examples of famous engineers/producers

• Alan Parsons
• Geoff Emerick

Sometimes, these two jobs are the same person. Producers who are tech savvy enough to know exactly how to capture the sound of the band can fill both roles. Often they are engineers who worked their way up to producer status and end up doing both jobs. I only differentiate these two professions to show you the difference between their job descriptions. But more often than not, they move seamlessly between the two.

The artist

The talent. The new spark of creativity and vision the world has never seen. The musicians girls will cry for and guys will dress like. The poor artists that have slaved away on their music for years before becoming successful enough to be noticed by the big guns. Sometimes, artists double as producers, like Prince. And other times, they are collaborators with producers, joined at the hip in making new and exciting music. These people are the heart of the music industry. The pulse that keeps it all together. Because if it weren’t for all these artist making this music, not only would there be no music industry, I wouldn’t have anything to do.

Some people would think that an artist is perfectly capable of producing, recording and publishing his own stuff, without supervision. And in this day and age some people certainly do, but many producers agree that artists often stand too close to their own songs and do not see the big picture and what they could accomplish with it.

Which brings us to the question: how much creative control should the producer have?

The role of the producer

Since the producer is usually the most knowledgeable person in the studio, hired for his ability to know what works in a specific genre and such, should he be in control?

An underground band finding themselves in a major recording studio because somebody thought they should be recorded and sold will often flip out. The average underground band doesn’t know much about professional recording environments. I remember the shock and awe I experienced when I first saw all the gear the average recording studio has.

Is the artist always right even though he doesn’t know how to work all the studio equipment?

Behind the scenes, engineers and producers are responsible for capturing the best possible performance from the artist

In my opinion, the producer should be there to take care, guide and help the artist in expressing what is already there in the first place. Namely, their own creativity and vision. Maybe the producer has different ideas and more experience in knowing what works and what doesn’t; but ultimately, it’s the artist that should approve of everything. If I were to record my songs with an experienced producer I would listen to what he had to say. Because if somebody is hired to make you sound a certain way or to help you catch that spark, that is to be greeted with open arms.

Don’t shun advice
Appreciate advice and helpings offered by the producer. Only then listen and critically think for yourself if it makes sense or not. The value of advice is that it is a second viewpoint that will help you step outside of your limited viewpoint to see how you can improve.

The producer should be there for you, first and foremost.
They should not boss you around and change your sound, they should show you possibilities and pathways to bring your music to its full potential.

But sometimes things just don’t work out like that. Major labels have always been associated with creative control and in those cases, the producer tends to have more of direct role in
controlling the creativity of the artist.

Underground creativity vs major label control

There is a subtle difference between being able to record whatever you want on your own time and money and being on the major labels’ money-watch.

In today’s music scene, underground bands have almost unlimited freedom to their own creativity. Because today, you can just plug into your home-studio, record your unfiltered creativity and upload it onto a social music network like Myspace or SoundCloud. There, everybody can listen and love your music, and you embrace your own creative right. But when this creativity gets noticed by the major label, in some people’s opinion things start to go wrong.

An average underground band finding themselves on a major label doesn’t have the same freedom in the studio as other better known artists. On a major label you will have a lot of pressure towards success by any means necessary and sometimes these bands are merely clay for the major label to mold and sell as they see fit.

Steve Albini, a modern rock star producer if you will, has been quoted as saying:

“It always offended me when I was in the studio and the engineer or the assumed producer for the session would start bossing the band around. That always seemed like a horrible insult to me. The band was paying money for the privilege of being in a recording studio, and normally when you pay for something, you get to say how it’s done” (link)

In his opinion, the producers and engineers shouldn’t be allowed to make what they will of the band in the studio. The band is there for a reason, and their own creative spark is usually what brought them there. So the producers shouldn’t be allowed to manipulate and destroy their creative spark with an “holier than thou” kind of attitude. They should be there for the bands’ purpose only, making sure what was there in the first place, stays there in the end.

Creative control differs between a major label and an indie one.

In the world of indie there is less pressure on profit, often because there is also less money. Major labels pay huge advances to bands to go into the recording studio with the best producers to publish the new best hit.

Indie labels don’t have the money to match that. They put less pressure on on the band, ironically putting less pressure on their creativity and often resulting in much better music. So you can argue that because the major labels are paying for it, the band is just there to be bossed around and treated as pieces of clay.

The major label wants to see that money back any way they think will be best, but lets not forget that although the record label is putting up big bucks to pay for the bands studio time, it’s only an advance of the bands record sales. So who ultimately pays for the studio time? The band.

Maybe the horror stories aren’t all true. But if you are ultimately paying for an album with your name on it, wouldn’t you want to have, you know, something to say about the production of it? Only one story of a band being screwed over and being left with an album that they don’t like is enough for me to loathe this way of management. The artist should always have the last say in the matter, however big the producer may be.

What do you readers think? What is the role of the producer in your eyes? How much truth is in major label creative crushing? Let me know.

]]> http://emusictips.com/2009/03/creativity-in-the-control-room/feed/ 12 http://emusictips.com/2009/03/what-does-pro-audio-have-to-do-with-chess/ http://emusictips.com/2009/03/what-does-pro-audio-have-to-do-with-chess/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:40:07 +0000 bjorgvin http://emusictips.com/?p=212 Pro audio is like a game of chess; the best player always plans ahead

“Planning ahead pushes you toward victory” – Sun Tzu

In the life of a sound-tech, you’ve got your mixers, your cables and your mics. You’ve got your patching, plugging and playing to do and if I told you it’s a lot like chess you’d probably just point a microphone in my face and say “Does this look like a Rook to you?”.

In chess you have to be able to think more than one move at a time. It’s a game of cunning strategy and if you don’t think one step ahead of your opponent he will Sun Tzu you and you will lose the game. Working with audio is similar. You have to think ahead and keep everything in mind. Signal flow doesn’t start and end with you plugging in a cable, or adjusting the gain levels.

You have to think things through right to the end or feedback will win the game and taint your reputation. As Sun Tzu said: “Estimating completely creates victory”.

Thinking ahead and keeping all the factors in mind greatly reduces the “troubleshooting brainstorm” that goes on when something doesn’t work.

It also enhances you ability to think quickly on your feet, getting the show or the recording back on track in no time.

A couple of things:

Where does the signal go?

How many stages does the microphone go through before it hits the desk? Are there outboard effects involved that can affect the sound in some way? Check all of the following:

• power source
• mixer
• plugs
• snake
• monitor mixer
• splits
• microphones etc, etc.

Be aware of the monitors.

If you are controlling the monitors from the FOH (Front of House, the portion of the building that is open to the public), will the monitors be sensitive to you tweaking the gain knob? Be aware of post/pre fader buttons as well. Also, when you have many bands playing, you go through a lot of monitor settings. A good way to store this is with a trusty digital camera. That way, you set all the monitor settings just the way you left them in the sound-check and everything goes smoothly.

Think things through.

When packing for a gig you have to go through everything and make sure you have everything you need. This means writing things down! I don’t know how many times I’ve forgotten that necessary XLR/MiniRCA cable that was desperately needed for the show. Make a list and go through it dilligently.

Have a plan

You have to think about every instrument and have a contingency plan if things go wrong. Extra DI boxes, extra mics, a couple of extra cables. Keep everything in mind and think like a grandmaster.

So there are quite a few things you have to think about before hitting record or giving a thumbs up sign. And before you set up for a new gig or a recording, take some inspiration from the grandmasters of chess and always plan a few moves ahead.

What do you guys think? I’d appreciate all your suggestions in the comments.

]]> http://emusictips.com/2009/03/what-does-pro-audio-have-to-do-with-chess/feed/ 7 http://emusictips.com/2009/03/acoustics-part-i-an-introduction-to-resonance/ http://emusictips.com/2009/03/acoustics-part-i-an-introduction-to-resonance/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 02:21:38 +0000 admin http://emusictips.com/?p=242 Galileo discovered the principles of resonance when experimenting with pendulums

Way back in the old days of the 17th century, a man named Galileo Galilei was fiddling around with a pendulum and discovered that if he gave the weight at the end of the string a tiny push at the right time, it would keep swaying back and forth with minimal energy exertion. He discovered that potential and kinetic energy can be set into motion with just a tiny bit of effort. This phenomenon is what became known as resonance. As it turns out, it’s not just pendulums that resonance is affecting. It’s everything. You could say that everything resonates. This affects us musicians and producers in many ways. For example, your room may have too many resonances in the wrong places, which will mess up audio recordings unless you dampen the sound vibrations with sound paneling or bass traps. But since this an intro, I’m sort of getting ahead of myself, and I will cover the practical side of resonance in Part 2.

Nikola Tesla was the archetype of a mad scientist. He invented alternating current, radio broadcasting, and of course, the tesla coil. He is also the subject of many conspiracy theories.

Several centuries later, another guy named Nikola Tesla had heard of this resonance principal, and dedicated his life to discovering how it could be used. Tesla confirmed that everything resonates when he discovered that a pocket-sized mechanical oscillator can cause buildings to crumble and bridges to tremor through the principles of resonance. All that was needed was a pocket-sized piston-driven oscillator sending tuned vibrations into the steel foundations of a building. The power of resonance lies in its ability to multiply force; Just a little bit input energy results in a lot of output energy.

“Although Tesla was not the first to discover resonance he was obsessed with it and created some of the most incredible demonstrations of it ever seen. He studied both mechanical and electrical versions. In the process he created an artificial earthquake, numerous artificial lightning storms, knocked an entire power plant off line in Colorado, and nearly caused the steel frame of a sky scraper under construction in Manhattan to collapse. Tesla realized that the principles of resonance could be used to transmit and receive radio messages well before Marconi.” link

Everything has resonance. Resonance is the principle behind the rattles and vibrations of idle objects caused by the subwoofer hitting a certain note. It is why you can shatter a wine glass with the right audio frequency and a loudspeaker. When the loudspeaker is oscillating at the frequency of the wine glass’ natural resonance frequency, it shatters. Sound waves are pushing the glass at regular intervals, just like you would be pushing the swing, and that regular interval is the same rate that the glass is vibrating. This causes the vibrations in the glass to keep amplifying until the glass can no longer stand the intense shearing action and it breaks into pieces.

Sound waves propagating through a field of air molecules and reflecting off of square walls

In space, electromagnetic waves are exploding out of stars, propagating infinitely outwards. Once on earth, we can detect these vibrations through our eyes, which are like windows through which a certain band of frequencies can pass through. (Interestingly, our eyes are actually tuned to the atmosphere, because the visible spectrum of light corresponds to the spectrum of frequencies which which pass through the filter of Earth’s atmosphere) We can think of all of our senses simply as vibration sensors that are tuned to different frequency ranges. Our ears sense vibration by directing sound waves towards the ear drums, which are compressed and rarefacted by waves of compressed air molecules. Those little drums in your ears are connected to a bone that wiggles some fluid in the inner ear, which excites even tinier little hairs that send signals to the brain, where that information is finally interpreted into what we know as sound. So, next time somebody asks you “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” you can say that it doesn’t make a sound! It only causes compression waves through the air. If there are no ears to convert compression waves into sound, you could argue that the sound does not exist at that point in time and space.

Figure 1: A graph of a fundamental frequency along with the second harmonic

Each and every system in the universe naturally vibrates at certain frequencies. Theoretically, there is an infinite amount of resonances in any system. Think about it, your body is made of cells, all which have their own resonance frequencies. Your body, which is composed of many smaller sub-systems, has a resonance frequency, just as an organ pipe or a flute or the body of a guitar has a collective resonance frequency. All objects (also known as systems) have a primary, fundamental frequency, as well as many overtone resonance frequencies. The fundamental is the one frequency at which the system sympathetically vibrates the most. The other frequencies at which the system vibrates are comprised of a series of progressively “quieter” overtone frequencies that also vibrate in resonance, but at a lower amplitudes. These are also known as harmonics. Almost all sounds are composed of a series of frequencies all “riding” on top of one another In Figure 1, you can see that when two or more frequencies add up, they produce a new waveform (the resultant waveform in Figure 1). You can produce almost any sort of sound by adding sine waves of different frequencies together (this is the principle behind additive synthesis.

How to find an object’s resonance frequency

“The easiest way to find the resonant frequencies is to place the object next to a speaker and also place a microphone attached to an oscilloscope next to the object. Have the speaker play a tone at a given volume, and then without changing the volume slowly change the pitch (or frequency). If you watch the oscilloscope you will notice that at certain frequencies the amplitude of the wave, which is proportional to the volume of the sound being picked up by the microphone, will be greater than at surrounding frequencies. These are the resonant frequencies, and are detectable as the sound energy absorbed by the object is re-emitted more efficiently at these pitches. Note that you can perform the same procedure, albeit less precisely, in a low-tech way: try holding a large bowl, or coffee can, or some other object that you are hoping to make resonate, in front of your face. Slowly sing a tone with increasing pitch. If there is a resonant frequency in the audible range, you should be able to hear the tone emitted back to your ears at that pitch. Or if you have a piano available to you, try singing into the piano and you’ll see the strings vibrate when you sing their resonant frequencies. ” link

Well, that just about wraps up what I’ve got to say about resonance. In part two of this article, I will explore how resonance principles can help us make informed decisions about recording audio. Do you have anything to say about resonance? Let me know in the comments!

A humorous look at resonance:




More Resources

• Interactive applet demonstrating a point source wave reflecting off of a wall
• Pythagoras, string vibration, and standing waves
• AbsoluteAstronomy.com on Resonance
• Bio on Nikola Tesla
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