Ron's Blog

What type of carpet will work best in a recording or mastering studio environment?

Ron Leeper — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:51:12 +0000

This is actually more complex than it seems at first. There are at least two questions here – one is what carpet is recommended for the recording or audio mastering area, the other is what carpet is recommended for the control room or mastering suite? Conventionally the answer has been for a long time that no carpet is recommended – just bare wood or laminate flooring. One reason for this is that carpet quickly wears out or becomes ‘old’ looking, particularly in the control room under the engineer’s chair, and in areas where equipment is loaded or stored. These areas should not be carpeted, for purely practical reasons. The other areas can be carpeted if you wish. Research has shown that carpet is a great absorber of high and high-mid frequencies. Compared to other forms of absorption it’s quite cheap too. But carpet has little or no effect on low frequency sounds – it’s too thin even with thick heavy carpet. So a room that is carpeted will have a lot of absorption at high and high-mid frequencies, a little at mid frequencies and none at low frequencies. At this point, other measures should be taken. One is to reduce the area covered by carpet and use a thinner carpet. The room will be livelier, and there will be a better balance of frequencies. The other is to provide low-frequency absorption, which can be done using proprietary modules, or by constructing panel or membrane absorbers. You can actually make a low-frequency absorber out of carpet. Hang the carpet on the wall supported by a wooden batten spacing the carpet 2 – 4 inches away from the wall. Now, fix similar battens all around the edges of the carpet, and nail the carpet down. Such an absorber will still have more high and mid absorption than low, but it’s better than just carpet alone, and it can be balanced out with other acoustic treatment methods elsewhere in the room.

What makes a hit record? Sometimes it’s the song, sometimes it’s the sound.

Ron Leeper — Wed, 05 May 2010 17:38:56 +0000

Knowing what makes the ’sound’ for a hit single is exactly the job of a Record Producer. However there is someone for who this is even more important… The record label’s A&R Manager! The A&R Manager’s job is to find new talent and by whatever means get them to make a record that will sell. Suppose that an act he or she has signed has just finished a recording. The A&R Manager listens to it. What they are thinking about above all else is whether the record will sell. There are four possibilities…
• The record will probably sell.
• The record probably will not sell.
• The record probably will sell, if remixed.
• The A&R Manager doesn’t really know and is only guessing.
Believe it or not, the last option is more common than you would think. However, the powerful marketing techniques of the record industry, coupled to the fact that pretty much the whole of the industry is owned by only four companies, means that the A&R Manager can get away with the occasional mistake, as long as they have a good track record of recent successes. So the A&R Manager doesn’t need any musical talent or production skills. He or she merely needs to know whether a record will sell. However, to be successful, a Record Producer has to be able to create a record that will sell. This is where a critical choice is made in choosing the correct mastering engineer and studio for the album. Today the dividing line between the song and the sound has become blurred, but the deciding factor is whether or not the public will buy in sufficient quantity to pay back the marketing budget and make a profit. Naturally that involves knowledge of the sounds that are currently selling, and the instinct to be able to provide just the right amount of novelty in a record that will catch the public’s attention. How easy is it to become a successful Record Producer? If you work in a musical style that uses samples, then often you can ride on the back of your samples and produce a sound that is marketable without actually having all that much of your own knowledge of how to create sounds that sell. It’s then down to luck. Outside of that however it is extremely difficult to become a successful Record Producer. So better get ready for the long haul and learn your trade from the ground up thoroughly. It won’t happen by accident!

Do you suffer from dull, lifeless sound? Do you wish you could have just that little extra sparkle? With the right preparation, you can!

Ron Leeper — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:28:01 +0000

There is a fine dividing line between dull and lifeless, and harsh and over-bright. Discovering that dividing line is an important part of the production process. Let me explain. The process starts with the recording of individual tracks. Let’s say you are recording an electric guitar. Does the sound from the amplifier, as heard by your ears rather than microphones, sound dull and lifeless? At this point you should make every effort to get the best possible sound right from amp. The same applies to your vocalist. There are many people who can ‘nearly’ sing. But compared to a top notch singer they do indeed sound dull and lifeless. Next, is the microphone. You should select and place the microphone to get as close to the sound that you want, without any processing. If you fail to do this you will end up trying to make a silk purse out of the proverbial sow’s ear. At this point, it really shouldn’t be necessary to EQ or compress. But if you know for sure that you have certain EQ and compression preferences for certain sounds, it won’t hurt to add a little, to get things sounding as they should. Dullness and lifelessness in the mix can result from too many tracks all competing for the same place in the frequency spectrum. You need to ’shape’ each sound so that it is strong in the frequency range that is important for it to cut through, but not too much that your tracks become brittle and harsh in tone. One problem that could occur is too much high frequency equalization on the vocals will make them harsher or silibant and this is a major problem to fix at the mastering stage for CD or vinyl. Do all of the above and you will have a clean mix full of great sounds. In fact, you’ll find mixing easy because of all the preparation you have done. Further fine tuning of the sparkle of the mix can be done through EQ of the mix as a whole. At this point you are ready for mastering and the group or artist would hand over the final mix for me to master. No more dull, lifeless recordings!

Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today’s Music Is Too Loud!!!

Ron Leeper — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:37:05 +0000

Can a Metallica album be too loud?
The very thought might seem heretical to fans of the legendary metal band, which has been splitting eardrums with unrivaled power since the early 1980s. But even though Metallica’s ninth studio release, “Death Magnetic,” is No. 1 on the album chart, with 827,000 copies sold in two weeks, some fans are bitterly disappointed: not by the songs or the performance, but the volume. It’s so loud, they say, you can’t hear the details of the music. “Death Magnetic” is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.
Audiophiles, recording professionals and some ordinary fans say the extra sonic wallop comes at a steep price. To make recorded music seem louder, engineers must reduce the “dynamic range,” minimizing the difference between the soft and loud parts and creating a tidal wave of aural blandness. “When there’s no quiet, there can be no loud,” said Matt Mayfield, a Minnesota electronic-music teacher, in a YouTube video that sketched out the battle lines of the loudness war. A recording’s dynamic range can be measured by calculating the variation between its average sound level and its maximum, and can be visually expressed through wave forms. Louder recordings, with higher average sound levels, leave less room for such variation than quieter ones. Some fans are complaining that “Death Magnetic” has a thin, brittle sound that’s the result of the band’s attempts in the studio to make it as loud as possible. “Sonically it is barely listenable,” reads one fan’s online critique. Thousands have signed an online petition urging the band to re-mix the album and release it again.
Metallica and the album’s producer, Rick Rubin, declined to comment. Cliff Burnstein, Metallica’s co-manager, says the complainers are a tiny minority. He says 98% of listeners are “overwhelmingly positive,” adding: “There’s something exciting about the sound of this record that people are responding to”. But the critics have inadvertently recruited a key witness: Ted Jensen, the album’s “mastering engineer,” the person responsible for the sonic tweaks that translate music made in a studio into a product for mass duplication and playback by consumers. Responding to a Metallica fan’s email about loudness, Mr. Jensen sent a sympathetic reply that concluded: “Believe me, I’m not proud to be associated with this one.” The battle has roots in the era before compact discs. With vinyl records, “it was impossible to make loud past a certain point,” says Bob Ludwig, a veteran mastering engineer. But digital technology made it possible to squeeze all of the sound into a narrow, high-volume range. In addition, music now is often optimized for play on the relatively low-fidelity earbuds for iPods, reducing incentives to offer a broad dynamic range. The loudness war began heating up around the time CDs gained popularity, in the early 1980s. Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” upped the ante in 1987, as did Metallica’s 1991 “Black Album” and then the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” in 1999. Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that’s 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud. Many who’ve followed the controversy say “Death Magnetic” has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album. Sound engineers say artists who insist on loudness paradoxically give people less to hear, because they end up wiping away nuances and details. Everything from a gently strummed guitar to a pounding snare drum is equally loud, leading to what some call “ear fatigue.” If the listener turns down the volume knob, the music loses even more of its punch. But many musicians, producers and record-company executives “think that having a louder record is going to translate into greater sales,” says Chris Athens, Mr. Jensen’s business partner and a fellow engineer. As for the deafening “Death Magnetic,” it struck one fan as fitting for these tumultuous times, thanks to songs like “Broken, Beat and Scarred” and “All Nightmare Long,” says Metallica’s co-manager, Mr. Burnstein. He says an investment banker emailed to say that “the album and its song titles have just become the soundtrack of the Wall Street crash of 2008.”

How Loud is to Loud ?

Ron Leeper — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:47:55 +0000

Mixes have definitely gotten louder in recent years. Of course there is no way that digital audio can go higher in level than full scale (0 dBFS), but the closer and more often a signal approaches 0 dBFS, then the louder it will sound. The tools for this are compression, limiting, and very careful watchful eyes and ears for clipping. The reason why mixes have gotten louder is because the equipment and software to make them so has become more common and more affordable, and more people know about it. The second is that mixes compete with each other for loudness. Take radio for example. Within the terms of a radio broadcaster’s license to transmit, they have to agree to a certain transmission power level. There is nothing that can be done at the radio station to make a signal any higher in level. This is the radio station’s equivalent of 0dBFS. But if mixes can be made subjectively louder in the studio, it follows that whoever’s mix is subjectively the loudest will sound loudest on air. Other mixes will be quieter in comparison. And loudness gets attention. The same applies in clubs. The level of a PA system is set to comply with the limits of the equipment, and often decibel limits applied by law or property rental agreements. So if a mix can sound subjectively louder within the same peak levels, it will be at an advantage compared to mixes that are not subjectively so loud. But the downside to this is that all the processes that make a mix loud downgrade the audio quality. So if you don’t want to listen so loud, it won’t sound so good. There is no area where this is more significant than music for TV and film use. If I am asked to ‘master’ your mixes and ‘optimize’ them for loudness, then you are damaging your audio quality to no good purpose. Your music is probably only going to be background anyway. For a title theme, then the post production house will optimize the levels as it thinks necessary. Although mastering is a straightforward process to apply, it is impossible to ‘unmaster’ a track. Best advice is to make a mix without any compression or limiting on the stereo mix and maybe some EQ if you wish. Also, your mix should be about 3 db down from your highest peaks in the song. This is a good starting point that recommend to my clients prior to mastering there project. This way you always have a clean, unmastered version of the mix that is versatile and can be applied to any kind of use.

The Importance of Acoustic Room Treatment for Optimum Results when Recording and Mixing.

Ron Leeper — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:07:41 +0000

There’s been a bit of talk lately about acoustic room treatment and whether or not it makes a considerable difference. I will try to clarify this as best as I can, so we will start with a few simple questions.
Why should I acoustically treat my recording and mixing area?
There are four primary goals of acoustic treatment: 1) To prevent standing waves and acoustic interference from effecting the frequency response of recording studios; 2) to reduce modal ringing in small rooms and lower the reverb time in larger studios, churches, and auditoriums; 3) to absorb or diffuse sound in the room to avoid ringing and flutter echoes, and improve stereo imaging; and 4) to keep sound from leaking into or out of a room. That is, to prevent your music from disturbing the neighbors, and to keep the sound of passing trucks from getting into your microphones. Yes, it’s true! Not only can a room’s acoustics affect your recording, but it can also have an impact on how much sound is transmitted from and/or into the room. This is why it’s important to employ some form of acoustic treatment; to protect the sound you’re working so hard to create.
Once the sound is transmitted into your room, you’ll have two main considerations to address: absorption and diffusion.
What is Diffusion.
Dedicated diffusion panels will help to diffuse waves which might otherwise be bouncing around the room and cause early reflections and phase issues during critical listening periods and recording sessions.
Bass Absorption.
The thicker and more solid the walls are, the more likely you are to get a problem with bass frequencies (something to be aware of when sound proofing ). Reverberation, the ‘dying away’ of a sound, is natural to music. Most music is designed to be performed in a reverberant space – military band music being an obvious exception. When you make a recording, you need to be able to judge how much reverberation is on the recording. Excess reverberation in the room will color your judgment. Another problem with reverberation in the studio control room is that the frequency response of the room itself may not be flat. More than likely, there will be more reverb at bass frequencies. This will make you think that a recording has more low end than it actually does.
So where do you start?
A rule of thumb in basic acoustic design is live-end/dead-end. If you look around your room and all the walls have hard, live surfaces — that’s going to contribute greatly to a “boxy” sound. Pick a wall, whatever you might call the “front wall” and put absorbing material on at least 50% of the wall — especially in the middle section. The “material” could be anything from blankets to egg cartons to mattresses to carpet padding to bed padding to acoustical foam. One option I’d recommend is something like Sonex Classic. You can buy 2″ x 2′ x 4′ Panels. They come eight sheets to the box for $169, which covers 64 square feet. For a low cost bass trap, I’d recommend the Auralex 2” corner fills. All this takes a little bit of money and a bit of time and tweaking, but considering that the room is really the most important source of how everything recorded in it will sound — it’s worth spending a couple of hundred bucks [or less] and part of a day to get a good-sounding room. You’ll thank yourself in the long run, and your end product might reflect your efforts, and will provide me with great mix’s to master your CD from.
Ron

How to use nearfield monitors to get the most out of them for recording, mixing and mastering.

Ron Leeper — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:07:32 +0000

In many Professional CD mastering and recording studios you will see studio control rooms with full-sized loudspeakers. Some with 15″ woofer driven bi amped 3 or 4 way speaker systems. Many control rooms are very large and are designed to use this type of monitoring properly. This type of monitoring environment is still used today in professional recording and mastering studios. With current speaker technology, and the increase in home and project studio popularity, smaller speakers have become more popular. These so-called “nearfield monitors” are designed to be able to somewhat accurately recreate the sound of the music in a smaller environment with the speakers placed more closely to the “sweet spot”. That said, many commercial, home and project studios still do not use them properly. If one is going to go to the considerable expense of buying nice speakers one should also put out the comparatively small effort of using them properly and get the best performance from them.
Stereo Speaker Placement
Nearfield speakers, as the name implies, are meant to be listened to from a closer range than common speakers. Typically nearfields are within 6 feet of the listeners ears. The speakers, in an optimal situation, will form a perfect triangle with the two speakers and the listeners head. If the right speaker is 6 feet from your right ear, the left should be 6 feet from your left ear and the two speakers should be six feet apart. Once you have that situated properly, it’s time to deal with height. I am unsure if this is a rule or just my experience and habit, but I personally place the speaker upright tweeter over woofer and have the tweeter as close to level with my ear as possible since the tweeter is the high frequencies, as they disperse less and die quicker than the low frequencies. Now there is the small matter of what to set them on. I will get in to the details of what works best after I say this: Whatever you set them on, make sure it’s the same for both of them. As we all know, different substances have different properties for absorbing vibrations and sound. Therefore, you want them both on the same surface. Setting them directly on your desk or any furniture like that is usually what happens, and it does work, but it’s not the best answer. This is problematic because if the full bottom surface of the speaker is resting on the desk a lot of vibration is then transmitted through the speaker and into the desk and will throw off your monitoring. Try to isolate the monitor from the rest of the room by absorbing vibration before it creates a problem. You can do this by using speaker stands. Make sure you set them to the correct height and distance from your mix position. You may want to fill the speaker columns with sand to help with sound vibration and to keep them stabilized. I use lead pellets or “buckshot” that is available at a gun shop or at a sporting goods store. This may be a little less messy then using sand. There are some things you can do much quicker, and less expensive. Putting any sort of small “feet” on your speakers, rubber pads or the little felt sticky things people put on chair and table legs that sit on wood floors can help minimize contact between the speaker and the surface it’s resting on, as well as absorbing vibration. Try some of these techniques . I know that they will improve your speaker performance.

When to pan left, when to pan right.

Ron Leeper — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:39:18 +0000

This question comes from a Sound Affair client prior to mastering his CD…..

“When I use a pan knob on a audio console Studio or a software program and I pan it to the left, sitting facing my speakers, should the music then come out of my left or right side speaker?”

This might seem like an obvious question, but I’m a firm believer in having the obvious well under control before progressing to more advanced issues. So if you pan to the left, the sound should come out of your left speaker. Pan to the right and it comes out of the right speaker. If it doesn’t, swap your speaker cables round. If that doesn’t fix it keep checking your cables intill you discover where they may have crossed.

OK that’s basic. But there are other basics too. One common error in recording is swapping the channels unintentionally.The effects of this could be…

In an orchestral recording, the violins are on the right rather than the left. (If the conductor has chosen to put the second violin section on the right, then the first violin section, which generally plays all the tunes, should be on the left.)
In a film or TV soundtrack, the character on the left of the screen speaks and their voice comes out of the speaker on the right.

Clearly either of these would be major errors, It’s an easy mistake to make though, so you have to be sure and check everything. Also sometimes where you pan is open to interpretation.Take the example of a recording of a grand piano…You might say that the low notes should come mostly from the left speaker, and the high notes mostly from the right. That’s how the piano keyboard is laid out.But that’s not the way the audience hears it…The grand piano is always positioned on stage with the keyboard on the left. So the low-pitched strings, which are longer, extend further to the right than the high pitched strings. So by this example, the high notes should mostly come from the left speaker and the low notes mostly from the right. It’s up to you! There’s no right or wrong. It’s either the pianist’s perspective or the audience’s perspective. Either is equally valid.

If anyone has any other interesting examples of right/wrong/up-to-you panning, I would love to hear about them.

Ron

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Do computers give you a headache?

Ron Leeper — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:45:54 +0000

Computers can be great tools for recording. But they can sometimes give you headaches, and even nightmares…Here’s an interesting question from a Sound Affair Mastering visitor… I have played guitar for almost 30 years, and have been recording on tape for years, and on a Zoom MRS 1266 CD for about 4 years. I have recently been looking to get into computer based recording via Pro tools Mbox (not sure which model yet). My problem is that I want to buy a separate computer to record audio only, as recommended by just about everyone in the know. I have no idea what the system requirements specs actually mean. Is a 2.4 GHz way better than a 2.3? Do I need a separate hard drive to record on and not the one in the computer itself, and what the hell is DDRAM and SDRAM anyway? I keep seeing words(?) like Fat32 and IDE/ATA, SATA, ATTO, HBA and Firmware etc. I can surf the net and get around Windows pretty well, but I cannot speak Computerese, please, can you help translate? Thanks. I got a headache,
Mike O. We all like computers because they give us great recording and audio mastering facilities at an incredibly low price, compared to the way things used to be years ago. Accordingly we often talk about computers and software. But we don’t like the way computers often get in the way of making great recordings. Perhaps you shouldn’t have to be any kind of computer genius to be able to use one to make great music and recordings.So, back to the question…You are exactly right that you should devote a computer to audio. It will simplify things no end. And if you only connect it to the Internet specifically to register software and then disconnect it immediately, you will be fairly safe from being preyed upon by those who would do your computer harm from a distance. Now, talking about speed. Buy the fastest computer you can afford. But also bear in mind that there might be a significant price-hike to gain just a couple of extra points of gigahertz. More speed equals more tracks and more plug-in instances, but 2.4 GHz is only fractionally better than 2.3. You probably won’t notice the difference. Also, bear in mind that your hard disk affects the number of tracks you can achieve. A faster rotation speed is better. 10,000 rpm is better than 7200. 7200 is better than 5400, which really is the lowest practical limit. ATA is the same as IDE and is an internal hard disk connectivity technology that is just on the way out now. SATA is the newer standard and will lead to further progress. However, many great recordings have been made on ATA drives. It is usually recommended not to record onto the system disk. This is busy doing system stuff, so your audio will have to take its turn. A second internal disk is a good option. An external FireWire disk is a good option too. Many people find that external USB disks work fine, but since the whole point of FireWire is that it is intended for audio and video signals, it is a safer bet. Regarding the rest of the ‘computerese’ you mention, this is really the province of your dealer. If you are not confident with computers, then you should buy a complete system from a single pro audio dealer, and get them to guarantee that it will work. If it doesn’t, then it’s up to them to solve any problems for you.By the way, if you want to have nightmares as well as headaches, just look at Digidesign’s compatibility info.

This will show very clearly what we don’t like about computer recording…

I hope this helps.

Ron.

Be your own record label.

Ron Leeper — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 01:23:32 +0000

You now can have worldwide distribution of your music into iTunes and more and keep 100% of your royalties. Anyone who makes music can have a career without a record label, you can just “sign” yourself through TuneCore.
Digital stores like iTunes allow all music to be in stock, and have sold over 2 billion songs with more than 1/2 the sales coming from non-major label artists with over 400,000 songs delivered. Over $5 million dollars has been earned by TuneCore customers. Go to: www.tunecore.com for more information.