I was about 5 years old and I remember talking to my Dad and my brother on the phone with them both excitedly explaining to me that they ‘got the moog’ –

I had no idea what that meant until I arrived at my Dad’s apartment and he unveiled this device with blinking lights, knobs, and switches. There of course was a keyboard attached to this thing and I was handed the headphones while my Dad slowly played the plastic keys and a swelling electronic whoosh filled my ears with something I could never imagine and can barely describe.

He flipped switches and turned wheels and I was amazed. I was given the controls and my brother and I spent hours giggling and wowing at the bleeps and blaps coming out of the headphones.

What an amazing tool!

I did not need to be told what the purpose of this device was, twisting a knob and flicking a switch while my little mind was blown away was all the purpose I needed.

My Dad wanted to get into playing the keyboard, but this thing was so much more than any keyboard. The sounds weren’t anything I thought of as or considered music. I simply considered them amazing.

Years went by and our Moog Opus 3 became a part of the basement, almost forgotten entirely. When I worked at Guitar Center in the mid-nineties analog synths were making a comeback, and the constraints of keyboards with a few buttons and a measly display were scoffed at by the raver and industrial techno punks alike who wandered into the store.

I’d seen vintage guitars come in, a legendary Harley Davidson stratocaster, the coveted Dragon by PRS, and many others be sold for ridiculous sums of money. Twenty five, even fifty thousand dollars.

One Saturday afternoon, a young guy brought in a mini-moog to sell– this was the most vintage of any vintage keyboard our store had ever seen! If you sought the holy Grail of phat, the cous de GRAS of tweakability, this was it.

We huddled around it, awestruck by it’s monophonic glory. Customers came in just to see it, a real honest to god mini-moog!

When the day was through, it sold for it’s asking price, a mere $999.00. Not even a blip on the radar screen in store sales, barely even noticable to whoever the salesman was who even sold it. Hardly anything to blink at for the customer who got to take it home.

Although it may not have much value in a guitar store, it planted sonic inspiration into our minds- a door opened from the past with a wondrous window to the future.

The marvelous mini moog bent the boundaries of what music meant to me. I am forever thankful!

I ran into this yesterday while helping a voiceover actor troubleshoot his setup. He’s using GarageBand and an Apogee duet interface, but this applies to any interface you’d use with the program.

The problem is that GarageBand defaults to stereo INPUT. Even if you select one of their guitar or vocal presets it still sets your track up to record a left and right channel.

Why is that a problem you ask? You say you want your recordings to be of the highest most topmodern quality? You assume that means stereo?

Well yes, of course you want your MIX to be in stereo, and often times you’ll insert an effect which will turn your individual track’s OUTPUT to be stereo- but that still doesn’t change the fact that you’re usually recording a MONO source.

Your guitar (unless it’s being run through a stereo effects processer BEFORE the computer) is a mono output. Your voice coming out of your one mouth is a mono output. Your bass guitar, again a mono output.

So what’s the problem if your computer records it in stereo? Your one guitar or one voice will be all on the left or right channel, with the opposite channel being silent. You’ll see this by seeing what should be a pair of waveforms (for a true stereo source) as one waveform on top with just a straight line on the bottom.

What problems does this cause?

Your voice or guitar is stuck on one side of the mix, and no matter what you do it won’t come over!

Your computer’s processing power is cut in HALF for each track recorded like this. Think about it: twice the data is being processed! So the more you do this the more hiccups and disk too slow errors you get.

You use twice the hard drive space. Again, doubling up on that data really causes a problem!

How do you fix it?

Simply change the recording input from Stereo 1-2 to either Mono Input 1 or Mono Input 2.

It’s easy, your GarageBand will run a lot smoother!

In the 80′s the new hotness for keyboard players was to have a stack of keyboards in front of you, and on the side of you.  That’s how you got all those Flock of Seagulls / Fusion sounds.  Carrying 5 keyboards to a gig got old really quick, and synth modules or “rackmount” synths came into fashion.  All the power of your Kurzweil K2000 in a 3 space rack.

I had my racks filled with synths, as probably most folks did.  Like most users, I found probably about 5 sounds out of the hundreds in each synth that I actually liked, and there was a lot of studio real estate wasted on each of these.  Not to mention the fact that I had to wire in audio and midi from each synth, and make sure it had power.  A big fat hassle!

The year 2000 brought us something new though, not a Y2k bug with planes falling out of the sky- but the advent of the soft-synth, the synth plug-in.

“Laaaaaaaaahh……” and the Heavens opened up.

I was thrilled.  I barely had the computer horsepower to run any at the time, but oh what a dream.  Here is the short list of what synth plug-ins gave us:

• Save settings with song.
• Patch Names in the Computer
• All the processing power and memory of your computer

Let’s look at each of those benefits individually:

• Save settings with song.

WOW.  This was amazing!  I used to have to record the midi of the instrument into the computer, then make sure the program change was also saved into the track (making sure of course that I had the correct bank select message specified for that synth) – if I edited the patch for that track I had to save a new user program in the device with a proper name, and then make sure that I saved all changes as well as double checking the saved program change into the song.

THEN when I opened the song up to play it again I had to make sure that the synth was on and plugged in and routed through the mixer/interface properly, the midi interface was working and that the program changes and edited patches all came through properly.  Of course I had to make sure that the levels hadn’t gotten bumped so my mix wasn’t thrown off.

WOW that was a lot of work, but we DID THAT with every single song.  Now with a soft synth all you have to do is save your song, then re-open it and everything is exactly as you left it.  SOOOOO much easier.

• Patch Names in the Computer

All those thousands of sounds, all littered through my modules across the room while I sit at my desk.  It was a big fat pain to remember patch numbers and or to walk across the room while I was in the heat of melodic inspiration.  Then came what should have been wonderful: the Editor/Librarian.  I had Galaxy Plus editors and then I had Unisyn, and then I had SoundDiver.  They all had their moments of OH YES! IT’S WORKING!! But usually had their moments of “WHY THE F#$K IS’NT THIS SYNTH SUPPORTED?!?!”

What the Editor/Librarians were supposed to do was to call up the names of all the patches in your synth, and place them into your sequencer on your computer so you could simply call them up by name at your desk.  You could also edit your patches, and so forth and in theory they were very cool.  In practice they were a major distraction and totally sucked.

What is beautiful about the soft-synth plug-in is that every patch name & every single thing about the patch is sitting right there in front of you on the screen.  Fantastic editors are graphically displayed and you don’t have to be confined to tiny green display and 4 buttons to edit your sounds.  Now you have the whole visual aspect of the computer.  You folks who just came to the synth party have a lot to be thankful for!

• All the processing power and memory of your computer

This is really the icing on the cake, but becomes the nuts and bolts of the whole matter.  Soft synths are WAY more powerful than our hardware synthesizers ever were before.  You can get inexpensive soft synth plugins these days that are every bit as good as some of the hardware we used to sell for hundreds of dollars.

In particular, I remember there being a big “ooooohhhh” regarding the piano sound of the Alesis QS8.  It featured a whopping 8 mb of piano sample data, and it was a full 6 seconds before the samples looped.  (starts repeating the sound rather than just playing a straight recording)  This was a major big deal back then, as a lot of piano samples were maybe 3mb or less.  That keyboard went for about $2000 and the rack version was about $750.

Well nowadays you can pick up “Ivory,” a soft synth piano for only $320.  It features over 30 GIGABYTES of piano samples.  That is actually 3840 times more data than the QS8.  Dang.  Hard to comprehend something that is 3000 times bigger than anything.  Your ear sure can hear the difference though!  Most folks can hardly tell the difference between that and a “real” piano.  If you didn’t have the huge hard drive on your computer and tons of processing horsepower, you could never do all that!

So anyhow, I hope you enjoyed my walk down synth memory lane.  I’m sure glad we have these modern tools to work with!

So you’ve heard what I like on the front, so let me tell you what I lay on the back of my mixes to really make them sparkle.

I’m sure that you’ve seen pictures of ‘big’ recording studios with giant recording consoles and tons of knobs. They look VERY impressive and people pay a pretty penny to have their music mixed on them.

Why?

Can’t we just do all that in the computer now? I mean come on, we have almost unlimited possibilities in the computer with plugins modeled after the finest equipment known to musicman kind.

True, it’s amazing stuff.

However, John Mayer just recorded his latest record on a giant console that looks like it was manufactured for the Death Star destroyer in Star Wars. What makes these things so great?

A lot of things do, but there is one thing in particular, and that is the way they MIX. I’m not talking about EQ, or compression or anything like that. I’m talking about how they mix many channels down to just two.

Think about it, you’ve got your vocals, backup vocals, guitars, bass, keys, and so on- these all get added together in the ‘mix bus’ and come out as a two channel stereo pair. How do they get combined?

To make it overly simple: In an analog mixer you basically have the output of each channel wired in to the stereo bus. (A bus is just the name we give in mixing to sounds that we combine together and handle as their own special channel. Larger mixers have more buses like the famous old ‘Mackie 8-Bus’. That meant that in addition to your stereo mix bus you had 8 additional buses that you could do things like take all your drums and mix them together on buses 1-2. That way when you’ve got all your drums mixed well together and you’re mixing down the whole song and you notice that the drums need to come up in the mix, you could just raise the level of Bus 1-2 without having to raise all the individual drum channels together)

Big fancy mixing desks like the SSL or Neve consoles have a lot of attention paid to how electrically sounds get combined together on the bus. They do special things so that when sounds are panned at different places from left to right they maintain their exact relative loudness in the mix and so forth.

Computers are very very exact. They are very good at math, and what you’re doing basically when you’re adding sounds together is a lot of math. One sound plus another sound is precisely the sum of those two sounds in a computer.

In an analog mixing console, it’s not so exact. To tell you the truth, the big analog consoles in their non-exactness of adding sounds together sound much more natural and spacious. Sounds that are meant to be mono are DEAD center. In mixing this is exactly what you want, and for some reason, computers stink at it.

So this brings me to my back end ‘magic box’. What I use is the Dangerous 2-Bus LT. The way it works is this:

You minimally need to have eight outputs on your interface, and I prefer of course a high end D/A converter like an Apogee. (The Dangerous 2-Bus has 16 total inputs) What you do on the software side is this: you set the output of each channel to be different. Rather than each channel running out the main left and right outputs, you send some channls out 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, and so on. I like to leave one pair for mono, that way my vocal and kick drum can be right dead center where I want them using the mono mode on the 2-Bus.

What is the result?

For me it was like the sound went from just coming out of the two speakers directly to coming out from beyond the speakers. It literally made my old mixes sound like they were done entirely in mono. Wow, tremendously huge difference!

The technical name for what the Dangerous 2 Bus is is called an ‘Analog Summing Device’. It is summing (adding) each channel of your mix together in the analog domain down to 2 buses (left and right). Just like when I first began using the Apogee on the front end, when I started using the 2 Bus on the back end, there was no turning back. The difference was dramatically more natural and spacious.

These two ‘magic boxes’ I’ve described here in these last blog posts are not like your average magic box such as the BBE Sonic Maximizer or the TC Finalizer. Those devices change your sound to something different than what it originally was. What the Apogee A/D converter & the Dangerous 2-Bus do is duplicate and reproduce what your sound was originally: pure and beautiful.

I think that your music from your instruments sound amazing, and I think they should sound that good once they’re recorded and played back for somebody else. Don’t you?

When I first started working with rappers I remember guys saying “man I just run EVERYTHING through this and it makes everything sound sweet!”

At that time it was the BBE sonic maximizer, then there was the aural exciter, the TC Finalizer held that position for many years, and now I’ve lost track of what the “magic box” to run everything through is.

What is the deal with these? What makes them so special? Do they really do what everybody says?

Well they definitely do SOMETHING. In my opinion most of them do one thing VERY well: change everything a LITTLE bit. In some cases (like the finalizer) they change things A LOT.

Think about it, you’ve been listening to your mix for hours and hours, and suddenly you run it through something that mikes it a little brighter, a little louder, and a bit more even. Of COURSE you’ll love that.

Unfortunately what most of these devices do is decrease your dynamics (removes punch) and change in some way the overall curve of your mix. Personally I’ve worked very hard on my mixes and I’ve been somewhat shocked how when I apply some of these ‘magic boxes’ to my mixes they take the life right out of them!

There are however two devices which I personally feel ARE magic and are totally worth running everything through.

The first one is a high end A/D converter.

No matter what, your sound will go through an A/D converter. For most of us we use whatever M-Audio or MOTU converter that is built into our audio interface. These are all fine, and they will pass your sound into the computer decently. However, they lack the fine subtle detail that you get from a higher end converter. They take a pretty accurate picture of your sound, but not down to the last detail.

So what is to be gained from using a high end converter such as an Apogee or Pyramid? Well, have you ever seen a digital picture that’s small blown up too big? It looks ‘pixel-y’. What were nice smooth lines when the picture was small are now harsh and jagged. It’s the same thing with a low end vs. a high end A/D converter.

When you work with your sound in the computer you are blowing it up and changing it in different ways as you increase your volume, add EQ etc. What were nice smooth lines with a standard A/D converter are now ragged and exposed.

A high end A/D converter takes a very detailed and accurate picture of your sound, so when you blow it up it will still sound smooth. And that is why I run EVERYTHING through a high end converter. In my case I use an Apogee, but there are others out there that still sound great.

So the fancy A/D converter is what I run everything through on the front end, stay tuned for part two where I go into what I use on the back end…

When I started producing rap music when I was 19 I was introduced by my rappers into the wonder that is the ‘doubled’ vocal.

I came from a world of rock music, where one Robert Plant was all you needed. What’s this deal with the doubled vocal?

It only took one track (well two really) for me to see the light. Why did TuPac sound so huge? How come Biggie Smalls never sounded small?

The unison doubled vocal was the key. Usually both panned center, for some reason having two of the same guy rapping the same thing added authority to the sound, made it not only bigger but more established.

I kind of forgot about it in the years that passed until a few years ago when I was recording a theme song I wrote for a cartoon. The producers wanted a pop sound, and without even thinking I had my wife sing the lead twice and BAM! Instant pop.

When you double vocals in unison it helps a lot if your singer can duplicate their timing and pitch well enoughto make it work. When you do it sounds like your fave Miley Cyrus or Britney track.

When you don’t do it as tightly it still sounds great, but comes off sounding more like Crosby Stills and Nash than Christina Aguilara. If you want to hear an excellent example of this check out Jose Gonzales singing ‘Crosses’ or ‘Futures’ from the album ‘The Garden’ by Zero 7. It sounds great and very homey, I love it!

A great variable you have when you record a unison doubled vocal is where you pan the recordings in the mix. The wider left and right the larger the sound. You can really play with this- maybe your lead vocal is just one voice but maybe you have a few words out of the chorus which are a doubled harmony, or maybe you want to double an octave and lay the high octave way back in the mix to create an angelic, ethereal sound.

It is SO much fun to experiment with. All I can say is start recording, and record it twice. You’ll have a blast!

Why do so-and-so’s mixes sound so fantastic? Well to tell you the truth I’ve never even heard of so-and-so, but here is what I do:

1. Record it right to begin with

If your guitar has a hum in it, or you left the air conditioner on while you were recoding your vocals- there is no easy way to get rid of that stuff without destroying your sound once your sound is recorded.

Pay attention when you record to make sure things are right. NEVER plan to ‘fix it in the mix’. Flourescent lights on where you record your electric guitar should be turned off, air conditioners and heaters should be off when you’re using a mic, etc.

Before you put all your effort into getting that ONE unbelievable take, make sure you’re happy with the sound!

2. Get things out of the middle.

Today almost every keyboard, guitar effects box, drum machine and you name it have stereo outputs. The manufacturers usually design those sounds so they sound ‘great’ which usually means taking up a ton of space left to right.

I’ve seen a lot of folks record all there stuff in stereo and then leave it all balanced in the center. Boring! Not to mention everything gets lost when it’s all on top of each other!

If you take a guitar and lean it to the left whil your keys lean to the right whil your vocals and leads are right down the middle, suddenly your mix becomes quite interesting. And
I’m not talking about 30% to the left or right, I mean 50-80% to the left or right.

You’ll be surprised how much your parts come out. I’ve seen a lot of ‘can’t hear the drums now because the guitar is covering them up’ handle simply with panning, not volume or compression. You’ll be surprised!

The rule I use is ryhthm. Parts that are similar rhythmically I pan together and then put parts that compliment that rhythm panned opposite. I find when I do this it creates space and movement in the mix.

3. Only effect what you need to

If you recorded it right to begin with, you won’t need to add as many effects in the mix to get it to sound right, because it already sounds right!

Listen to your whole mix now that you’ve got it panned out and can hear the different parts. Is there something you want to hear more of? Is something dominating the mix that shouldn’t be?

Find ONE aspect to fix and fix that with a plugin- eq or whatever is needed. Now listen again to your mix with what you changed. Take it easy and don’t go for broke adding plugins upon plugins to things just because they are available to you.

Listen to your mix as an outside observer listening for the very first time. Is there something missing? Fix that ONE thing. It’s easy with all the tools available to go and fix twelve things at once; but when you do that you lose clarity of sound and things get changed that don’t need to be changed.

Example: the drums lack low punch, and the bass is too loud. You could add eq to the drums and add compression to the bass. OR you could just take an eq on that bass and lower the frequency where the drums should have their punch. BAM! Problem solved. Your sound will be cleaner and more dynamic because the instruments had natural dynamics and were clean when you recorded them!

Mixes are very simple things, they become complicated only when you add a bunch of things ‘you’ heard ‘they’ say you should add to them.

Listen with your own ears right now all the way. I promise you’ll make it sound the way you like, and other people will like the way it sounds!

I was working with a client yesterday who upgraded his computer from an old dual G5 Mac to a Quad Core Intel Mac Pro.

He works heavily with soft synths and has well over 15 major plugins. If you’ve ever installed a soft synth I’m sure you’re familiar with the minor hassle of authorizing your computer to use it. Some use an ilok, others use challenge/response, some just need a serial number, others are more involved.

When my client built his system over the years, installing each of these plugins one at a time was really no big deal. However, years later now trying to install all of these at once it’s a MAJOR undertaking.

Why?

Who knows what authorization method each used! Some manufacturers actually use different methods between their plugins which makes things even more exciting. My client even meticulously saved each and every box/manual, everything. The problem is, software gets upgraded after you install it, authorization codes are emailed, email gets lost or or hard to find, time passes and when your software is just running fine, it’s easy to forget about this authorization nonsense!

To keep things as easy and simple as possible, I recommend you keep a spreadsheet with the following columns:

Manufacturer
Plugin name
Version number
Serial number
Authorization method (ilok, challenge response, other dongle, (?) serial #)
website
Your username for their site
Your password for their site
The email address you registered with their site

Having all this data it takes a lot less time to pull things together and get authorized.

The last and probably most frustrating detail on all of this, sometimes older plugins don’t work on newer computers and operating systems.

This was sadly the case with my client. As I said, he had a G5 and it was running OS 10.4. Nowadays we all use the much faster Intel chips on OS 10.6. The problem here is that the older plugins were written for the PowerPC and not the Intel architecture.

Some plugin manufacturers jump to offer free updates to their plugins so you don’t lose your investment. Sadly, other plugin manufacturers take this opportunity to force you to re-invest. Waves wanted $200 to upgrade the plugins he already spent $800 on, the symphonic plugin he uses also demanded over a hundred dollars, and one of the GForce plugins demanded just $20.

After you spend $4000 on the fastest new computer to run all the plugins you own, the last thing you want to do is spend another $1000 just to re-buy some of those plugins!

So, when you’re upgrading your computer be sure to check out your TOTAL upgrade cost in software as well as the hardware. You might need to save up just a bit more!

The other night while waiting for Zero 7 to come on at the Metro in Chicago, something very cool happened.

I was there early and made my way right to the front. The hall was basically empty and some pretty cool music was playing through the house system. The system had INCREDIBLE smooth yet loud bass, which I felt through my entire body.

More and more people arrived and the hall filled up with happy chatty concert-goers. I was at the show alone (which was a first for me) so had nobody to talk with and was forced to just sit and listen.

I’m glad I did, because what blossomed between the rhythmic pulsating speakers and the light chattering people was literally music to my ears!

You see sound is just simply moving air. That’s all it is. Big fat bass is then a big powerful whoosh of air. Like I said, this bass was so powerful I could feel it through my entire body.

Chattering people is a much higher and less powerful movement of air than this bass. The chattering people was a constant random combination of pitches and volumes as such a cacophony usually is.

The bass is a very scripted rhythm with subtle detailed fluctuations in pitch and volume.

When you combine these two, because of the sheer power of the bass it cancels out and literally silences the sound of the chatter. As the rhythm plays it fluctuates in a melodic pattern, and the chatter decreases in an exact opposite and RELATIVE PATTERN!

So the result was the chatter which was a constant random chaos without the bass became a PATTERNED RHYTHMIC sound with a subtly random pitch!!!

At first when I noticed it I thought “NO WAY! how on earth did they sample the sound of the audience talking and turn it into a complimentary melody to the sound of the music?!?!?!”

Then when I figured out acoustically what was goin on I was just ecstatic. How friggin random and cool!

Had the music not been so sparse and bass heavy, and had I not been alone without trying to socialize I never would have noticed it.

It was a pleasant and natural surprise!

God do I hate tape.

I am so happy not to have to deal with it anymore. I’m a spoiled brat when it comes to recording. My experience with analog was from age 15-18 with my Tascam 464 portastudio 4 track.

I quickly moved to digital hard disk based recording at that point with a very short stint using 2 inch tape at ‘the big studio’

Why do I hate tape? Because of time. You can’t move from one spot in time to another spot in time very easily with tape. Everything is linear- one straight line from beginning to end.

Clearly for many very successful people and for those who charted the way for multitrack recording, tape was king. Thank you Les Paul and George Martin for showing us what could be done!

Tape is great if you think in separate long strips from beginning to end about your music. I don’t think that way at all. I think in terms of parts and sections. Maybe things repeat, maybe they don’t. Maybe they come back to this section, maybe the whole thing gets faster here.

The point is, when I start laying my ideas into the physical universe I like clay. I like being able to mold and reshape after I can see little bits of what I’ve created begin to take form.

The beauty of working with a hard disk vs. working with tape is that hard disks let you mold and reshape as you go. With tape it’s one long stream of consciousness. Of course you can punch-in etc. with tape too, but once you’ve tried it with a hard disk, there is no comparison to the struggle these things take with tape!