audiot

yeah, i stole this line from Billy Ward, an awesome drummer and producer – go check him out! his stuff’s unreal!

since i’ve just returned from an off-weekend and am already about to record some vocals, i have little time to write. when inspiration hits, you gotta run, so here’s just a quick tip for you guys.

microphones are NOT ears! sounds like a no-brainer, right? but it isn’t. we tend to believe that what gets in (and therefore out) of a microphone is the same as what our ears would hear. but that’s not the case. and i’m not even talking about the fact that lots of mics color the sound, so what goes in is not necessarily what comes out. mics work a lot different than our ears, so don’t be fooled by the fact that both pick up sound. there is a lot of trial-and-error involved before your mic spits out exactly what your ear would pick up – and to make matters worse, to your ear it might sound very unnatural at that moment. i hope i haven’t lost you – it’s a bit difficult to explain. imagine a gun that’s not perfectly “adjusted” and therefore shoots to the right. you could either set it right or aim to the left to hit your target. now, you can’t tweak a mic until it is an ear – but you can change your “aim” until you hit the right sound. and once you have, you might just think “hey, that’s exactly how it should not work at all” – but it does. like aiming to the left and still hit the middle.

so there is logic involved, but then again there isn’t. messing around might be as good as any other approach, but it surely helps to know a bit about mics and placement alternatives – as long as you keep in mind that mics are just stupid. good luck…

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• song no. 7 (audiot.eu)
• song no. 5 (audiot.eu)

this is worth checking out. and not only because this guy is a great player, it’s also a cool song. by the way, the microphone used is a Røde NT-4 (sorry, still no links yet) – for you recording folks out there, it’s worth considering…

enjoy:

yes, i know, i know and i’m really sorry to post another video again but this is just – well, no, i won’t say any more…

hmmm, for some reason it seems to not play the full video each time – so if the punchline’s missing, try watching it again. as someone who is somehow connected with music you should see it right away though. if not, you might consider crawling into a lake and die…

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well, this entry is not meant as a guideline or a review or something similar. it’s more like some thoughts about gear needed to do some decent recording.

when i first got into recording i was somewhere around the age of 15 and a friend of mine asked for my help with some tunes he wanted to do. he was a techno-fan back then (ugh), had lots of equipment from an Atari ST (yay!) to multiple synths and samplers – things that were needed back then. he knew how to use these things but had no idea about music, some kind of techie one might say. so he wanted me to do the other half. anyhoo, today i sometimes think about those ridiculous amounts of gear filling whole rooms and causing nothing but trouble. we usually spent one half hour creating music and 5 hours solving technical problems, what a nightmare.

and nowadays the world is more complex, we’re not far away from fridges that only let us open their door if we haven’t crossed our personal calory-barrier for the day and already use wordprocessing software that patronizes us beyond belief. but who would have thought that recording music would be so much easier almost twenty years later than above mentioned teen-memory. certainly, the need for know-how hasn’t vanished (and in my opinion that’s a good thing), there are however lots of people who underestimate this. probably because the very process of producing music has become so much simpler.

back then, to record a standard band setup, you would have needed lots of microphones, at least one guitar amp, one bass amp, a mixing console, maybe preamps for the mics, compressors, gates, maybe expanders, reverbs, other effects – and i haven’t even talked about the actual recording device yet… today you need a laptop and some software – and if you’re really going at it, two mics, a midi controller and an interface. that’s it. no more need for large spaces, no more need to wait until your neighbors are not home. of course, more gear can be helpful in terms of streamlining or more possibilities, but let’s face it, with a good laptop and a program like Reason, you can achieve results far better than even some professional productions from 10-20 years ago.

so how does my setup look like? right now, it’s much more gear than necessary – simply because i piled up stuff during the last decade when those things were still needed. some of it will have to go, but some items will stay, for i use them not only to record but maybe to play live or for other non-recording-reasons. and i’m afraid i couldn’t even list all of it without doing some archeological excavation first….

but i can list my future setup which will be complete before the end of this year:

1. one of them new aluminium macbooks, yummy
2. Reason 4
3. a Motu 828 audio interface
4. some new Ultrasone headphones
5. and some new nearfield monitors, not sure which ones yet…
6. - 759. all the stuff that’s lying around here and that i use occasionally

but almost all of the work is done with the first two pieces (and some listening-device).

the only question left is what do i do with the extra space?