Jan 'Yarn' Muths: Welcome to the Production Talk podcast with me, Yarn, of mixartists.com.au. In this podcast series, we celebrate the modern way of producing music. We want to talk about all things related to songwriting, recording at home and music production. So, if you produce your music at home, this is the place to be. Please subscribe and recommend this podcast to all your friends. This is the Production Talk Podcast episode 67. Welcome back to another episode of the Production Talk podcast. At the beginning of this episode, as always, I would like to acknowledge the Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation as the traditional owners and custodians of the country that we live and work here in the Northern Rivers. I'd like to honor the First Nation's people's culture and connection to land, sea, and community, and I would like to pay my respects and express my thanks and gratitude to elders past, present, and emerging. Over the last two episodes, we've shared lots of stories of the recording and the making of the flood songs, project compilation. You've heard from the musicians and of course from myself, from the producers about Hall, how all the recordings. Came to be. As we speak today, the album is still in mastering, so hopefully by the end of the week I have the files and that means I will upload very soon and we'll be able to give you a release date once it's all up in the cloud. So today I would like to dig a little bit deeper and talk about a few things that are very dear to my heart when it comes to recording. And I would like to share some recording secrets with you in the typical style of the Production Talk podcast. The, the. The flat so's compilation was basically produced partially in a high end studio in Mali Babi. Then also in studio, in in students studios at SAE in Byrum Bay. And then of course also in home studios at the producer's places and of course at the musician's places. So basically, Been the entire scale of studio from fairly basic home studios to yeah, the highly professional top end studio that I operate from in Mala Bibi. And I would like to go a little bit deeper now and talk about how. What I would like to talk about what's on my mind when I produce when I decide to, when I record. And hopefully this will be something that is applicable wherever you work whether this be in a professional studio or at home. So what I would like to talk about is the two magic or recording triangles, and that sounds like. Yeah. Crazy stuff at first, but let me please explain a little bit. Let me explain in more detail what I mean. So the two magic recording triangles are basically relations between three elements that Affect one another. And there are two of them. For, the first one has to do with the instrument, the room, and the player. So they are the three corners of this triangle, the instrument of the room and the player. That's the first thing that is on my mind when I set up a recording session wherever this may be. And Yeah, what this in includes is the choice of instrument. So in many situations it is a smart idea to have more than option of more than one option available. So, for example, when bands come into my studio and bring their own drum kits, which is of course, you know a, a good choice if you have your own sound. I still like to experiment and see what happens when we exchange the snare or try different symbols. If we work on the tuning. So it basically means the first corner of that first triangle is paying attention to the instrument itself and making it as good as it can be considering options. Sometimes just hearing different things might open up you know, a new perspective. And that's always good to have. So the first thing. There to really think about, okay, what, what is the right thing to do for this song that we're producing? And sometimes it is as simple as just changing the tuning a little bit, or sometimes it means we exchange a snare or some high hat symbols or little things like Considering the kick paddle and choosing a plastic beater or a felt beater which makes a huge difference in, in sonic quality, So, All of this has to do with a player. Of course, you know, if I play a drum, set a certain way and then a different player comes and hits the same drum set, it already sounds different. So there's an interaction between the instrument and the player. So the way a player hits the drum set makes it sound differently. So that's the next thing we need to consider there. Now what's the player's strength? What's the player's style? How does the player sit comfortably behind the set? , there are lots of things that we want to consider. Ideally I want to set up a drum set so that the player can hit everything perfectly fine with his or her eyes closed every time. So just from my some memory, but at the same time, we need to consider. That the placement of the drums and symbols already has an effect on the sound. And the general rule is that the closer things are to together, you know, cram together in a tight space. The poorer the separation between the, the signals when they're micd up. As a practical example, if there is a microphone on a tom and the crash symbol is placed literally just, you know, two inch above there will always be a lot of bleed from the symbol into the tom. Microphone into the, to microphone. And that eventually leads to a certain negative side effects. So by spacing things out and bringing the symbols up a touch higher, you can immediately get a clearer sound through the microphones. It, it's easier to produce, it sounds better, and therefore it is I guess, A game of of, of trying to see what's possible. No, some drummers set up their instruments perfectly fine and the we nothing to to change, but especially when drummers pack everything super tightly. I first think about or try to negotiate in different placements, see how high we can get the symbol. Before before we record. And you know, obviously it's a give and take. So some players say, Nope that can't be done. It has to be so close that we have to live with that and, and deal with that later, but that's not quite ideal. So yeah, so there's the instrument of the player. The player needs to be comfortable. That's the most important rule. Now. There's really no point getting the symbols up and getting a better sound if the player then misses them when playing the takes. This is a give and take and my job is always to see how, how I can get the most outta the instrument without making the player uncomfortable. The playing strength has a large effect on how, how good drum set sounds and how, how much control a player has over how the symbols. Drums are hit. Again, as a general rule, I would say that experienced studio drummers are known to or are know how to, how to hit, how loud to hit the instruments in certain environments. And I would say that it's a good idea to give the kicks and snares and toms or the drums a good, strong hit. However, it is often a wise idea to hit the crash symbols open high hats, and sometimes also the ride a little bit more piano. So not with full strength because those elements can really overpower everything else volume wise. And that can then make it really hard to produce a really good sound. So in my experience good studio drummers often know how to take back the energy a little bit on crash symbols and open high hats. So if you are a drummer, and if this seems new to you, and if you're not quite sure how that how, how you're doing with that, here's a little trick. Next time you rehearse. Just bring a little microphone, put it on the other end of the room, a couple of meters in a distance. Doesn't really matter what type of microphone it is. Plug it into your computer and hit record. And then later put on headphones and listen back to the recording. And focus on the relative volume of all the drum elements to one another. And if you then hear that the crash symbols really start. Overpower everything. That means you're probably hitting them too hard. So in an idea world, I want a drummer to basically give me a perfectly balanced drum mix through their playing technique. Before you yell out and say, Hey, wait a moment, I'm just the drummer. That's your job as the mix and recording engineer. That's your job. Let me just push back on this a little and say, you know, you'll still play into your overheads. You still play into your room microphones. And while I can adjust the volume between a to and a snare and a kick, of course on the close microphones, What comes through the overheads of the room? Mic fonts is basically the entire drum sound baked together. And if then let's say it's China symbol or so, really dominates and overpowers the other instruments that has a negative effect that. I cannot control to the full extent in, in mixing with digital plugins and so on later. So there's definitely a lot of value in playing the drums so that they actually sound balanced and mixed through a microphone at a distance. Yeah. Another thing to focus on is the volume difference between, let's say the snare back beat, which is often louder, and any ghost notes you may be. So if your microphone at a greater distance picks up the snare really loud, but the ghost notes don't really come through, or the rim clicks. If you play rim clicks, then you may need to consider just yeah, focusing more in, playing on the, the relative volume. And maybe just take it back a little bit on the weight of the back beat, hit and see if you can just push the ghost notes a little bit. A little trick from myself when I play drums for recording. You can also balance out the difference between the back beat and the ghost nodes by where you play them on the snare. So let's ex let me explain this in more detail. So there's typically a microphone on the snare top aiming into the drum hat somewhere. And when I play the back beat, I typically try to hit the center of the snare where I get the chunkies. However, when I play ghost notes in between I just move the stick a little bit out to the side where I get more of the overtone of the sear and less of the funment. And in this case, I just move the stick a little bit closer to the microphone, which automatically makes the ghost notes that I play there a little bit. On the microphone of course which is, I guess I guess in some way. A compression technique, , if you want to call it. So through playing. So the back Pete goes straight under the center of the snare and the ghost notes are play a little bit closer to the drum microphone. When you practice this technique, be very careful not to hit the microphone. Of course, that would not be worth. Okay, so I already spoke about the two. Most important corners of the first recording triangle. It's the instrument and the player. And I could probably go on and on and on. Similar things, of course apply to to guitar players, bass players, keyboard players pretty much everybody who plays singers, of course. Let's add the third corner of this triangle. The last corner of the triangle is the room in which. The instrument is played and where it is played. So while a close microphone on a snare drum or maybe even on a guitar cabinet, might not pick much of the room. Other microphones may. So if you have overheads, if you have room microphones, or if you actually set up a second guitar cabinet microphone at a greater distance, you will definitely get a significant amount of the room. Of the room sound. And therefore it is really important to consider where you record and how the room sounds and you will probably be able to hear the difference very clearly just by taking a microphone added. Place it a meter from your instruments play for a moment and, and hit record and see what happens. There is a very good chance that if you then move your instrument in the room, you can also find certain spots where it sounds thinner or a bit flat or weightier or more alive. And those things are very subjective of course. So a little tip that I often use to figure out what's going on is to. Basically take a tom often the, the floor Tom before I set the, set up the drums and just literally take it for a walk and hit it while a walk through the room. And depending on the size of your room, you may not find that it doesn't seem to make any difference at all. In this case, it really doesn't matter where you place a place, your instrument and just start and, you know, start some. But in most cases I find that it does make a bit of a difference. And then I basically like to find the place in the room where I enjoy listening to the Drum most. And that's typically where it sounds weighty, where it sounds balanced, where I get, you know, a bit of the room, not too much. Where yeah, it just feels good. Don't think about it too hard. It's not something that I would recommend thinking and analyzing too much. Just trust your gut feeling. Just take your instrument and move it around and see what happens. The same of course applies for guitar cabinets and base covenants. However, it might be a little bit trickier to move, you know, Marsh full stack around. Also with guitar amplifiers. If it's Ave Amp, be very careful moving those when they're running and warm. But I know that some guitar cabinets or some guitar players have their own road cases and road cases sometimes come on a base on wheels. So if that's the case, you may be able to just roll the guitar through the. And try different places and you'll be surprised. It actually makes a difference sometimes just leaving it, leaving it in the same place and just turning it sideways one way or the other, might make a difference. When I listen to guitar cabinets, I often think about the weight and chunk the, the bottom end of the guitar, the weightiness as one of the most important elements. We could get technical here. That is often affected by what we call remotes, also known as standing waves inside rooms. And there are definitely, yeah, to cut it really short, what, what that means is that there are spots in the room where certain frequencies are stronger or weaker. And if you place. Let's say the cabinet in a place where, you know, lots of the standing waves not out you will typically get a sound that is too thin or the opposite may apply if you back it right against the wall or into the corner. Where most of the standing waves are active, that often leads to a boomie, chunky, undefined sound. Chunky is in this context, is actually not a positive thing, although I usually like the word chunky as a positive. But in this case, I mean, you know, it gets boomy. It gets undefined. So finding the right place is something that is worth considering and experimenting with. So back to the triangle we had the, in. The player, another room. These three things need to be considered, and this is pretty much the musician's responsibility in the first place. My job as the recording engineer is to help the musicians and make sure they, you know, do all of these things and consider all of these three elements the instrument, the player, and the room. Good. Let's assume we've gone through this Player is really comfortable in the room. The instrument sounds as good as it can. We've tuned it up. We worked on the drum hats. We worked on the guitar strings. Now the guitars are set up correctly Now that's a good string action happening. Everything is in tune. The emps are warmed up. We're ready to go. Now it comes. Now we move from the first triangle into the second recording triangle. And again, there are three different elements that now come into place and this time the responsibility is definitely with the recording engine near more than with the musician. The first corner of the second recording triangle is the micro. Choice. So which type of microphone are we going to use here? We could also talk about the number of microphones. Is one sufficient? Do we need more microphones? That obviously depends very strongly on the signal, the instrument, and what we're trying to achieve. But I would say that experienced recording engineers typically have a range of microphones to choose from, and in their mind, they sort of have like a map of how they each sound, of what their strength and weaknesses are and how to make good choices there. So choosing the right microphone is not necessarily something that you can read up on and then, you know it's probably somewhere between a science and an art form because it's also very, very subjective. So I know some people who choose microphones that I personally don't like, and I sometimes choose microphones that are uncommon in other studios as well. So, personal choice is definitely something very worth considering. So if you would like to know more about that, I would like to invite you to go back to the very beginning of this podcast series to. Two where yeah, I spoke about your microphone locker and how you can spec up a really good co collection of microphones small, but an effective collection that basically covers it all. So when it comes to the choice of microphone, I often think about the microphones. They're basically all paintbrush, you know, So while an artist, a painter has a different selection of different paint brushes to, to choose from as a recording artist we have our microphones to choose from to paint different sonic colors. Just to give you an example, going back to the flood songs compilation again, . I hope you're not sick of me talking about it yet because there will be heaps motor camp. But anyway, back to the microphone show is when I recorded Shane Murphy's song, Same side. We had three vocalists around a piano, and I decided to use dynamic microphones in this case for all three singers. And I had three different choices. See if I can recollect those. There was an SM seven B, if I'm not mistaken, for Shane, for Pete. I actually can't remember what I used. It might get back to me later. But then for for Kelly, the female singer, we used an m a D eight. And this was something where I first started playing with the different microphones and wanted to hear now different voices through each. But I knew pretty quickly that now Kelly, having the. Brightest voice. I, I wanted a microphone that sort of counterbalanced the natural tone of her voice. So I picked the M 88, which is a microphone with a particularly unique base response, which just added a certain fullness to her voice that would've been difficult to achieve otherwise. So there's just one example where I basically picked a micro. And I often go by the concept of, of opposites attract. So that's an underlying concept here. Opposites attract. Now, if you have a bright sound source, do not use a bright microphone because bright multiplied by bright becomes too bright when it's recorded, and that's just a real pain to, to deal with later. So generally speaking for a bright signal, I use darker microphone and vice versa. Of course, there are also exceptions. Good. So that's the first corner of the second triangle, the microphone choice. That can be one that can be many. We think about the microphone types, dynamic condenser ribbon. We talk about we think about whether it's one or many. And yeah. Then we move onto the second corner, which is the microphone placement. So, When learning the sound of microphones, it is important not only to throw a couple of microphones into the room and put 'em next to each other and to make final judgments and say, Okay, I like this, but I hate that because each microphone sounds only as good as its placement is. So what I'm saying is that even if you place a microphone somewhere and it doesn't sound good you might not see the full picture yet. Maybe the microphone is just placed in a spot of air where it's not really capturing what you want to hear. So my suggestion is to Put a microphone in front of his signal. If you can put on headphones and adjust the volume very carefully. Keep it a bit on the loud side, but obviously don't blow your ears away, but you want to hear what the microphone hears fairly prominent in your, in your cans. And then simply grab the microphone and move it around and place it a little bit differently. Tilt it a bit sideways, upwards, downwards, increased distance, decrease distance, aim the microphone at different places of the sound source, and you will hear how the microphone changes. It's, it's sound very significantly so, yeah. What I'm trying to say is that if a microphone. Let's say picks up too much base on a guitar cabinet. You may be able to just increase distance a little bit, and you might find that no, the, the bottom hand becomes more balanced rather than being overpowering just by taking it further away. Or you may wanna aim it a bit closer to the center of the corn rather than towards the edge of, or the surround of the cone. We often get a bit of a darker sound, so the microphone placement by itself is definitely not a science. That is what I would call art because it only depends on the subjective opinion. Or if the person placing the microphones. And there is a lot that can be done. So even if you don't have a fully speced microphone locker with a large collection of microphones, even if you just have a handful, just a 57 and maybe a pencil condenser or so, then with, you know, very few microphones. And care for placement, you can probably get a really good result. So again, the idea is that opposites attract. If your microphone sounds, let's say a little bit too thin now, get it find, find a spot of air where it captures more base. If it sounds too dark, if find a different spot of air where you get a more balanced sound through the microphone. You can basically imagine the air being like a three dimensional space full of different colored sound spots. Each one has a different quality, a different tone, and finding the right one that matches the tone of the microphone is, is the key. Good. All right. A couple of things to, to practice. I would say on a guitar cabinet, just take a 57 if you have something or similar, and then while a guitar player plays something rather consistent long notes long sustained courts work really well. Take the microphone and pan it from the left side across the perone, from the surround through the center back to the other side of the cone, and observe what, what a so sonic difference it makes. That's a really good thing to practice. You could also look at the cabinet and find out which of the drivers sounds best or also an interesting thing to. And then of course, play with distance. Get the microphone really close. No bring it backwards. You will then also find that that of course affects the level. The further away you are, the quieter it gets. That is no surprise, I'm sure. Good microphone. Choice was the first corner. Microphone placement was the second corner of this triangle. Let's talk about the final one. The third corner is the preamp, and the preamp choice and the gain you set. In most home studios, that is basically given, because all interfaces typically have one type of preamp. So that's the logical choice. There might not be alternatives, and the gain you apply is how to far you turn it up. So again, this can be a very simple thing when it comes to gain staging. The only firm rule is that if it clipped in your recording software, then you should probably redo the take. After lowering the gain a little bit, but assuming that you didn't clip your recording, you could still argue that there is different opinions to be heard about how far or how, how low the gain should be. And of course that is a very subjective thing yet. In a professional studio chances are there are choices of preamps. So you can choose to either use, let's say the consoles, preamp, or external preamps, and an experienced recording engineer should know about the tone and pros and cons, qualities of their preamps in the studio. So, To give you an example again some of the preamps that I own are known to be a bit how do I say this or richer or warmer, wooly in tone. Those are typical, typically the preamp that I would call colorful. In many situations, they use vintage technologies such as tubes, for example, or transformers. Transformers are not cheap and therefore those types of preamps are often a little bit dear. In most audio interfaces, the inbuilt pre EMS are of different build type. They typically use solid state technology, which is known to be very clean, pristine but also not colorful. So there's nothing wrong about that, of course, because color can be added later. But when I choose my preamp the coloration that a preamp adds is definitely on my mind. It sort of sets the direction in which you shape the sound to, to a significant. So again in my mind I have a map of the tone of each preamp, the pros and cons qualities, and I try to match them. The sound source as it comes through the microphone, and I also try to match it to the sound that we envision. So for, let's say a metal production my preamp choices might be different than for a jazz production. Good. The amount of gain that a preamp can supply of course also very important consideration and For loud signals, that's usually not a problem. Because you can always just turn your preamp down a little bit. And I would say that with a gain relatively low, all preamps that I am aware of these days typically perform pretty well. It's when you push a preamp to it's maximum that you really find its strength or weaknesses. And that often means in situations where the gain is pretty much close to the maximum position, that's typically where a find that a preamp is not performing too well or might be, you know, pushed to its limits. Warning signs to, to look out for when you turn a preamp up to the absolute maximum. How much louder did the signal get and do you hear more or less noise than before? I find that a lot of preamps if you just can 'em up the last couple of clicks, again, of course more level gain but the noise that is added often raise disproportionately large on the last couple of clicks. That is not always the case. Of course, that really depends on the preamp, but especially the cheaper ones yeah, they often don't perform too well when max'd out. So. In a case like this, I would like to choose definitely a quality preamp one that I used just yesterday in a recording session. One that I really love is my focusrite ISA. I've got a stereo unit and I find that when I have to record a really quiet signal when I need heaps and heaps of heaps of gain, that's a preamp that actually behaves really well, even pushed to fairly extreme settings. Well other preamps start to break up and show their ugly side, so to speak. Good. So yeah. What can you do if you find that your preamp gain is in an uncomfortable spot? And it's not sounding very good right now. You need to go back to the other two corners of your Recording triangle, the microphone choice and the placement. So the option one could be turn your preamp gain back down and get your microphone closer to the sound source which means the microphone will capture louder signal. The microphone will therefore produce a louder output, more voltage coming through the microphone cable, and therefore it might bring your preamp gain back into a place where the preamp is happier. And you may, you may get a better sound. But the nature of these triangles that I'm discussing today is that every corner when you play with it affects the other ones. So as you change the microphone placement, you obviously change the sound that you capture. So maybe by getting it closer, you might get now too much proximity, or you no longer have the room you want it. So if that's not working for you, then you just need to replace the microphone with another one and see if that leads to a better. Again, in episode number two, we spoke about microphone choices already and touched on the subject of microphone sensitivity. Microphone sensitivity is basically a measure of how much voltage microphone produces on its output, giving standardized input. Cigna and some microphones are hot. More sensitive than others. So the typical example of a sensitive microphone is a large diaphragm condenser. They're usually fairly strong in output. Well, another example, let's say a microphone that has a low sensitivity, therefore produces just a little bit of voltage on the output. Could be, let's say, kick micro. So kick microphones or drum microphone in general are typically designed with a lower sensitivity so they can handle loud sound, so loud, sound sources without. I'm producing too much voltage for the preamp to handle. So a bad example would be using a kick mark phone to record a, a quiet whistle at two meters distance. Now we have a very quiet sound source a. Plus a microphone that by nature produces a very low output. And combined together low signal quality microphone of less sensitivity means your preamp has to do all the heavy list lifting and get this tiny amount of voltage up to line level. And that would typically push most PMs out of their comfort zone into the extremes where they probably misbehaved pretty badly. So that's an example where things don't work too well. So if you want to record a quiet whistle of course you first need a quiet room, of course ambient noise will become an issue. Whenever you record something quiet. But in a case like this, I would definitely choose a more sensitive microphone, like my large diaphragm condensers. And no, they then produce a higher or healthier signal at the output, which is easier for the preamp to gain up to level. So the underlying principle is there, take a loud sound source. And pair it with a microphone of a lower sensitivity, or take a quiet sound source and pair it with a more sensitive microphone. This underlying principle sort of keeps your pre, keeps your prams in their comfort zone, and you probably will not end up using the extremes. Extreme, extreme low or extreme high settings. One thing that I haven't touched on yet, and we should also mention this quickly, if we had a loud sound source and a sensitive microphone let me just come up with an example. That could be, let's say guitar coming. They can get really loud or a kick drum or horns like trombone. They can produce a, a fair bit of sound pressure level. If you now have a sensitive microphone at a close distance the output of the microphone might be too hot for the preamp to handle means that the preamp gain may still be all the way down and it's already clipping. So in a case like this you could not back off the microphone, increase the distance, which will then also sound room. But there's another option that we typically can rely on. Most prams have what we call a pad. Sometimes it's called negative 10 button or negative 20, or negative 15. So something like that. And also some microphones especially condenser microphones, may have a pad built. If I have both available, a pad on the mic and on the preamp, I typically start with the preamp first. That's a personal choice. Others may disagree, but yeah, that's usually where I start. And if the signal is still too hot, I then move on and also engage the pad on the microphone. So those are now different concepts to pre pretty much gain stage the signal, the signals volume and the microphone and the preamp, and keep everything in a comfort zone. So the most important thing is to capture healthy levels without pushing your preamps into the extremes. That's, that's the underlying concept here. And if you have a chance to choose or try different PREMs, it's definitely worth checking. If you can't hear a difference don't worry about it too much. Just move on and go on with your life. Get the recording done. In many situations when we talk about audio interfaces, the pre EMS don't, they're not designed to have a, a a noticeable color in sound. It's often the outboard pre ems that add a certain color more than the ones built into interface. I should wave a little flag. There are exceptions, of course. Okay, so let's just sum it up one more time. Two different triangles were discussed today. The first recording triangle was all on the musician side with the three Corners instrument player and room. All of 'em affect one another and well considered well specked out this triangle can yeah, really change the way you capture your sound. And if something is out of whack here, you probably fight an uphill battle from that moment on. And the second one was the recording triangle . Well, it's more the recording engineer's triangle to consider the microphone choice, the microphone placement, and then the preamp choice and the suitable gain. Good. Yeah, I hope this is useful to you. Just trying to share all my insight on how I set up recording sessions. As always, I'm pretty sure there are some people who say, Nope, it's all different. I perceive this differently and that's all a lie. That's fine with me. Have your own opinion on these things. That's a good thing in my books, but today I shared what I do and how I like it and what's on my mind when I set up recording sessions in professional studio environments. Okay, I hope this was useful to you. If you disagree, please let me know. There is of course the Production Talk podcast community page on Facebook where things can be discussed. So if you believe I missed something important or if you have a very different opinion please feel free to post there and let's discuss it. If you want to reach out to me, you can of course do so via my website, a mix artist.com. Do IU where you will find a studio recording services in the northern rivers in on the east coast of Australia. We basically service a range basically from Brisbane down all the way to Grafton and Kas Harbor. And in between, of course, and on my website, you can also find a page for professional mixed down services. Which is available to everybody worldwide. So that's called remote mixing. Somebody sends me files and we'll have a chat about what you want and how you want it to sound, and then you'll get a finished mix back. And of course if you want to just talk and chat, you can also reach out to me on my website. There's a contact form and I'm looking forward to hearing from. That's all for today. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I shall speak to you again next week. Bye for now.