Mixes option
Sep. 3rd, 2011 07:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillRecording Friday was interesting. I didn't get started as early as I wanted, because when I got there the people who were in charge of the space weren't there and I had to round up a librarian who had a master key, and then her master key wouldn't fit the door, but we rounded up a couple of other librarians and trooped (is a group of librarians a thesaurus?) back up to the top floor and eventually someone had the keys to get me in.
There is also a new feature of the building remodel--it is now impossible to turn off the ventilation to get it quieter. On the bright side, the ventilation grill in the corridor next to the ventilation hole has stopped rattling. Which is good, because the foam plug didn't block the rattle very well. And the ventilation itself makes a low frequency rumble--but it's well below the frequencies of my voice so I can set the graphic EQ to remove a lot of those frequencies and screen it right out. I don't know whether that strategy will work as well with the octave mando but we'll see.
The noise in the rumpus room is higher frequency, and I don't think I can remove it as neatly, so I think I will stick with the booth for now.
I also got closer to the mic than I can conveniently manage in the music nook (mic stand issues) so that lets me turn down the gain which helps reject sounds that are not me. This is fine for vocals, but I think for the mandolins I will want to mic at a greater distance*** so that will be more a matter of luck--happening to get a take when things are quiet.
Despite getting a late start, things went well. I had my projects set up, one per song, with the reference note and the metronome* tracks, so I could get right to recording. Interestingly enough, while my a capella tracks appear to stay on key relative to themselves and their respective harmonies, the set I recorded in the rumpus room were slightly flat compared to the set I recorded in the edit bay, and I have no idea why that is, except that perhaps the reference note being an octave high makes it hard to match 100%? But that makes me a bit nervous about my reference note strategy...
It was helpful to have the vocal tracks I recorded in the rumpus room as a quick refresher on what the harmony was doing, though. Especially since I wrote the harmonies on my morning walks while listening to the Alice Day versions of the songs on my iPod**, so I don't have sheet music of them yet. (Plus I haven't fixed the sheet music for the melody of Hold The Line either. A chance to practice with the new version of PrintMusic, I guess.)
I really like using Reaper in the booth, even though that means having the laptop, and its fan, inside with me. To keep the laptop fan as quiet as possible I put the laptop on the floor (farther from the mic) under the table (so I wouldn't step on it) propped up away from the carpet on four little cassette thingies (let air under the bottom; help keep it cool; fan doesn't run as hard.) I didn't notice any noise from it getting on the takes, so I'm going to call that good. Reaper makes starting and stopping recording, and rewinding to the beginning, very easy. The down side of this arrangement is that my legs are very sore this morning from all the kneeling and standing up again. I suppose they will get stronger.
I did discover how to use Reaper to monitor the sound I'm recording, but there is a bit of delay between singing into the microphone and hearing what I sang, and that just won't do. So I push one earphone off--the easy, low-tech solution to the problem of not being able to hear oneself. Frankly if I made recording headphones there would be a little switch to turn one earphone off and open a vent to the outside to hear through.
I recorded vocals and harmony for Art Feeds Life and for Hold The Line, which was what I had set up for and been practicing, I had about half an hour left over so I moved over to the edit bay with the table space for the laptop and did some mixing in the quiet, then went home, and spent the afternoon mixing (read flipping back and forth between Reaper and its user manual.) I added reverb to get it about like stuff recorded in the rumpus room sounds normally, and did a little EQing (Is this sound warm or boomy? Is this airy, or does it add too much ess? If I use a regular compressor (just a touch) and a multiband compressor set for the high frequencies, is that going to sound artificial? Or just leave the airiness in while rolling off the edges of the esses and tees? Are my ears getting too tired to hear all this? Mixing is insecurity in a box.)
I have Art Feeds Life pretty much ready to go--I think; I want to listen one more time with fresh ears-- but have yet to do anything much on Hold The Line; maybe today.
*Reaper will do a metronome--I found it in the reference manual this afternoon when I was mixing--but it sounds horrible and it looks like there's a way to change that but I haven't figured out how.
**For exercise you're supposed to walk too fast to sing, but I don't think they mean the kind of crooning-broken-by-gasps I'm talking about. It's not anything you'd want to listen to, but it's a way to fit some writing time in without giving up on the exercise.
***Instruments spray out different frequencies in different directions--weird, but true--so they sound different depending on exactly what part of the instrument the mic is pointing at. On the one hand, you can pick your part to get the nicest sound; on the other hand, you have to position yourself, the instrument, and the mic exactly the same way for every take, and this is pretty hard if you have to move across the room to the computer every time you want to stop and start recording. If you mic from about the length of the instrument away these separate sprays overlap and the instrument starts to sound more uniform, so for the sake of takes that sound enough like each other to allow cuts between them, this is what I plan to do. Generally this means picking up more of the room ambiance (the reverb from the walls) which can be a good thing or a bad thing, but is in any case impossible to remove in the mix, but the walls of the booth are covered by foam so it's pretty dead, so the main issue in my case will be that, being three times farther away (roughly) I'll be about a tenth as loud (as you know, Bob, sound drops off as the square of the distance) so I'll have to turn up the gain about 10 dB so any building noises will be 10 dB louder.
So, TL;DR the upshot is that recording went pretty well yesterday and when I have the mixing done, probably in a day or two, are people interested in listening to the mixes and letting me know if they like the reverb and eq and so on?
There is also a new feature of the building remodel--it is now impossible to turn off the ventilation to get it quieter. On the bright side, the ventilation grill in the corridor next to the ventilation hole has stopped rattling. Which is good, because the foam plug didn't block the rattle very well. And the ventilation itself makes a low frequency rumble--but it's well below the frequencies of my voice so I can set the graphic EQ to remove a lot of those frequencies and screen it right out. I don't know whether that strategy will work as well with the octave mando but we'll see.
The noise in the rumpus room is higher frequency, and I don't think I can remove it as neatly, so I think I will stick with the booth for now.
I also got closer to the mic than I can conveniently manage in the music nook (mic stand issues) so that lets me turn down the gain which helps reject sounds that are not me. This is fine for vocals, but I think for the mandolins I will want to mic at a greater distance*** so that will be more a matter of luck--happening to get a take when things are quiet.
Despite getting a late start, things went well. I had my projects set up, one per song, with the reference note and the metronome* tracks, so I could get right to recording. Interestingly enough, while my a capella tracks appear to stay on key relative to themselves and their respective harmonies, the set I recorded in the rumpus room were slightly flat compared to the set I recorded in the edit bay, and I have no idea why that is, except that perhaps the reference note being an octave high makes it hard to match 100%? But that makes me a bit nervous about my reference note strategy...
It was helpful to have the vocal tracks I recorded in the rumpus room as a quick refresher on what the harmony was doing, though. Especially since I wrote the harmonies on my morning walks while listening to the Alice Day versions of the songs on my iPod**, so I don't have sheet music of them yet. (Plus I haven't fixed the sheet music for the melody of Hold The Line either. A chance to practice with the new version of PrintMusic, I guess.)
I really like using Reaper in the booth, even though that means having the laptop, and its fan, inside with me. To keep the laptop fan as quiet as possible I put the laptop on the floor (farther from the mic) under the table (so I wouldn't step on it) propped up away from the carpet on four little cassette thingies (let air under the bottom; help keep it cool; fan doesn't run as hard.) I didn't notice any noise from it getting on the takes, so I'm going to call that good. Reaper makes starting and stopping recording, and rewinding to the beginning, very easy. The down side of this arrangement is that my legs are very sore this morning from all the kneeling and standing up again. I suppose they will get stronger.
I did discover how to use Reaper to monitor the sound I'm recording, but there is a bit of delay between singing into the microphone and hearing what I sang, and that just won't do. So I push one earphone off--the easy, low-tech solution to the problem of not being able to hear oneself. Frankly if I made recording headphones there would be a little switch to turn one earphone off and open a vent to the outside to hear through.
I recorded vocals and harmony for Art Feeds Life and for Hold The Line, which was what I had set up for and been practicing, I had about half an hour left over so I moved over to the edit bay with the table space for the laptop and did some mixing in the quiet, then went home, and spent the afternoon mixing (read flipping back and forth between Reaper and its user manual.) I added reverb to get it about like stuff recorded in the rumpus room sounds normally, and did a little EQing (Is this sound warm or boomy? Is this airy, or does it add too much ess? If I use a regular compressor (just a touch) and a multiband compressor set for the high frequencies, is that going to sound artificial? Or just leave the airiness in while rolling off the edges of the esses and tees? Are my ears getting too tired to hear all this? Mixing is insecurity in a box.)
I have Art Feeds Life pretty much ready to go--I think; I want to listen one more time with fresh ears-- but have yet to do anything much on Hold The Line; maybe today.
*Reaper will do a metronome--I found it in the reference manual this afternoon when I was mixing--but it sounds horrible and it looks like there's a way to change that but I haven't figured out how.
**For exercise you're supposed to walk too fast to sing, but I don't think they mean the kind of crooning-broken-by-gasps I'm talking about. It's not anything you'd want to listen to, but it's a way to fit some writing time in without giving up on the exercise.
***Instruments spray out different frequencies in different directions--weird, but true--so they sound different depending on exactly what part of the instrument the mic is pointing at. On the one hand, you can pick your part to get the nicest sound; on the other hand, you have to position yourself, the instrument, and the mic exactly the same way for every take, and this is pretty hard if you have to move across the room to the computer every time you want to stop and start recording. If you mic from about the length of the instrument away these separate sprays overlap and the instrument starts to sound more uniform, so for the sake of takes that sound enough like each other to allow cuts between them, this is what I plan to do. Generally this means picking up more of the room ambiance (the reverb from the walls) which can be a good thing or a bad thing, but is in any case impossible to remove in the mix, but the walls of the booth are covered by foam so it's pretty dead, so the main issue in my case will be that, being three times farther away (roughly) I'll be about a tenth as loud (as you know, Bob, sound drops off as the square of the distance) so I'll have to turn up the gain about 10 dB so any building noises will be 10 dB louder.
So, TL;DR the upshot is that recording went pretty well yesterday and when I have the mixing done, probably in a day or two, are people interested in listening to the mixes and letting me know if they like the reverb and eq and so on?
