Recording Piano Wrong

September 14, 2021 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, do it yourself recording, home recording, nquit music, piano, piano mics, piano recording, professional audio, professional music, recording, recording magazine

How breaking the rules can transform your piano recordings

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

The piano is an amazing creature. It’s ubiquitous in all kinds of music and its frequency range means it can play any role. It’s also so crazy to record that there are volumes written on how to record it right, including my piece “Caging the Beast” from May 2016’s Recording. Since that’s been done, let’s talk about the “wrong” way; nutso things you can do with piano recording that may yield something new.

Oddball Placements

A piano is huge, and there are a million “good” ways to mic it, including close miking, room miking, spaced pairs, mid-side pairs and so on. There are, however, several places considered not great, at least for capturing a traditional piano sound.

The Hole

Try a large diaphragm condenser like an AKG 414 placed right above one of rear holes. It turns out this might sound nice and can help isolate the piano in an ensemble. A dynamic like an SM57 pointed straight into the hole is a recipe for weird and muddy, but that may be perfect in the right context.

Under The Piano

There’s a whole world of tone under the piano that may not be considered normal, including a wealth of low frequencies that might even help a traditional mix. Try an omni-directional under the middle of the case and see what happens. Or try a ribbon mic to capture the movement of the pedal. Often that movement coincides with the rhythm of the tune, so there may be a rhythm track there.

The Foot

Nathan Rosenberg reminds us in his November 2004 Recording piece that “there is a wonderful place at the tail, just about where the back leg is, or often just outside the case. Here, the various registers tend to project in a surprisingly uniform manner.” This is a great place to place a stereo pair or even a single mic for mono capture. This isn’t particularly crazy, but it’s worth trying.

Wrong Mics

Tradition holds that the best microphone for piano is a condenser or ribbon. There’s good reason for this, as condensers and ribbons are good at capturing high-end detail. Mics like the AKG 414, the Neumann U87 and even the Rode NT1-A are common.

That leaves out dynamics, which are generally too sluggish to capture the detail a ribbon or condenser could. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying! As mentioned, an SM57 in a sound hole can result in something weird, especially if you were to, say, amp that signal?

Also mentioned before, the underside of a grand piano can be a treasure-trove of low frequencies. Maybe try something like an AKG D112 underneath and see what happens.

For that matter, what would happen if you placed that D112 above the low strings? As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what Recording contributor Jon Bare did on one location recording, and it made a baby grand sound like a 9-foot concert grand (see his article “Miking The Not So Great Piano” on Recording’s website).

Perhaps you could try that crappy vocal mic from your dad’s 1970’s live rig placed smack dab on top of the keys, or 17 omni-directional condensers under a closed lid, specifically placed to create phase problems. What if you taped a lavalier to the inside of the shell? The possibilities are endless.

Mess With the Piano

Next let’s try the instrument itself. There are tons of ways you can cause a piano to sound abnormal. Recently I put a sweatshirt on the strings to create a muted sound that proved useful for rhythms. Some avant-garde pianists spend hours before a gig preparing the piano contraptions placed on the strings, hammers and soundboards.

“Tack” pianos are made by sticking thumbtacks in the hammers so they make a tacky sound when striking the strings. (Beware: this is permanent, as it damages the felt.) Or what if the hammers were softer than normal?

You could prepare the innards of the piano, or you could mess with the outside. Try closing the lid, draping a storage blanket over it, and miking from above. You’ll probably get a dull sound, but what if you were to hold down the sustain pedal and let a ton of notes build up on top of each other?

For that matter, you could remove the lid entirely. In fact, that technique, which Elton John producer Gus Dudgeon was fond of, isn’t even rare.

Let’s not forget we’ve been talking about grand pianos this whole time. Uprights and spinets are a whole different world, and while there are “right” ways to capture them, there are also crazy ways. Most importantly, consider a bad upright. Perhaps you have an antique which can’t be tuned and has strings missing. Maybe there’s an opportunity for some interesting stuff by finding the worst sound it can make and recording that. This kind of buzzy, crackling thing can be great for creating interesting rhythm tracks, for example.

Play With the Playing

By now we’re placing wrong mics in wrong holes on wrong instruments. Awesome!

Now let’s play with the playing. There’s an incredible variety of playing styles available to the piano. Super staccato, flowing legato, damper pedals, low registers, glissandos and tigers and bears, oh my! Even staying at the keyboard, you can probably think of a hundred ways to break out of the box. How about using the lowest two octaves to create a bassline, replacing a bassist? What about recording the same riff 7 separate times in all the octaves?

Beyond the keyboard itself, a piano can make a lot of sounds we don’t normally think of. Check out The Piano Guys for a litany of examples, from plucking and poking strings to hand drumming on the soundboard to threading a frayed violin bow through the strings.

The cool thing here is breaking these rules doesn’t lead to any particular genre. You could end up doing pop covers like The Piano Guys, avant-garde craziness ala The Mars Volta, or even create hip-hop track.

There Are No Rules

Just like music in general, there are no rules with the piano (as long as you don’t destroy a piano that’s not yours!) You can stick with the tried and true and there’s a world of creativity to be had with such a versatile instrument, but if you get bored, run out of ideas or have a sticky problem you can’t solve, it may be time to do things a little wrong. You never know what might come of it!

—–

I‘m a singer, rapper and writer who uses the piano in a fashion that’s not always right. You can talk to me on social media @AaronJTrumm

Art vs. Science in Mixing – and Life?

August 31, 2021 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, acoustics, do it yourself recording, home recording, mixing, music mixing, nquit music, professional audio, professional music, recording, recording magazine, rob chiarelli

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

If you haven’t read a book called “Zen and the Art of Mixing”, stop now, order it, and then continue reading this.

Now that you’ve done that, I’ll tell you a story. One day not long ago I was sitting in a plush lecture hall in the Westin hotel in Los Angeles, listening to a workshop on mixing by Rob Chiarelli. If you don’t already know, Rob is a Grammy winning producer and mixer, known for working with such acts as Will Smith, Christina Aguilera, Pink, LeAnn Rimes, Janet Jackson, Stevie Wonder…and on and on and on.

Needless to say, we were all excited to hear what Rob had to say, and there were many enthusiastic mixers ready with a host of questions. As you might imagine, some of those questions were quite technical, and I remember early on somebody in the back asked something I thought of as – well – a little nit-picky. LUFS on pre-master mix buss, or something along those lines. Something that although I have the capacity to understand, would never have crossed my mind to ask, in 25 years of making records. Naturally I felt stupid.

I was prepared for embarrassment, feeling sure that Rob would pontificate in great detail on the proper way to handle whatever it was, but was pleasantly surprised when Rob scoffed. I don’t want to say he called it a stupid question (he was very magnanimous) – but kinda.

Rob’s answer was basically this: does it sound good? Does it feel good? He did talk for some time in response to that question, but the lecture was about what matters in a mix, and that’s the song. If the thing feels great, it feels great. If it sounds great, it sounds great, and if you get so caught up in the technical mumbo-jumbo and fail to pay attention to the feel of the mix, you’ll probably mess it up.

That was a great relief, but in the next few minutes, Rob did talk about some very technical points, and he did end up addressing the question in some detail. What struck me was the deep understanding he had about the science of audio, as well as the overall goal. Here was a guy who has a grasp of the balance between art and science. He hadn’t scoffed at this question because he was stumped. Not at all.

It seems this is a pretty fitting analogy for life in general. We need to understand the details, and science has the been the way we’ve achieved most of what we take for granted now. It was a physicist (Loud Tommy Dowd) who gave us multi-track recording and the fader. An electrical engineer (Max Mathews) brought us digital audio. But when we get caught in the details and forget the reason for them, we risk losing the art entirely.

We’re seeing that battle a lot lately, not just in music. Science is being thrown away when it shouldn’t be, but so is its counterpart, faith. This is a dilemma as old as history. In college lectures on medieval history, we called it the battle of faith vs. reason. In every era one trumps the other and there are always consequences.

Perhaps this is what’s so magical about music and mixing. You really can’t get it right without both. Fail to understand the science and you’re left guessing, bumbling, and making mixes that sound like cats fighting or elephants dying. Skip the crucial details and you could find yourself overloading a speaker, losing a job, or recording silence at a once in lifetime performance.

Still, if you can’t step back and feel the music, let it tell you what it needs, and worry less about technical terms, peak meters and the next fancy plugin, you could end up making cold, dreary mixes that move no one. In fact, too much emphasis on the technical and you could end up with the same muddy, screechy mix as your head-in-the-clouds counterpart.

There are two abilities that set great mixers apart from mediocre ones. One is the ability to hear details – pick out the high-hat and hear that slight 3k resonance or hear the kick phasing just slightly with the bass. The other is to turn that type of listening off and hear the big picture. Listen to the way the mix grooves as a whole unit. Turn off the brain, notice the goosebumps, and feel your head nodding. The ability to be both analytical and emotional – sometimes simultaneously – is what makes a mixer truly amazing. It may even be what music is for.

It’s hard to be two opposite things at once, or at least we’re led to believe that. But I think in mixing, as in life, the great goal is balance. I think and I feel, therefore I am a musician.

So, if you ask me whether art or science is king in mixing, I’d say they share the throne. Whichever side you tend to lean toward, I encourage you to lean the other way sometimes. See what you can find by valuing both. Maybe you’ll be able to mix art and science a little better (pun fully intended). Either way, keep doing what you do.

—–

I’m always trying to learn more about balance, art, science and sound. If you want talk about it with me, find me on Facebook @AaronJTrumm

Signal Flow Part 1

July 1, 2021 by Aaron

aaron trumm, audio basics, carvin amps and audio, home recording fundamentals, nquit music, recording basics, signal flow

This article was written orginally for the blog at Carvin Amps and Audio. I repost it here, and encourage you to check out Carvin’s amazing line of products!

Signal flow – the direction audio signal “travels” in a live or recording setup – is the most fundamental concept in audio, and understanding it is a prerequisite to understanding anything else in audio.

Still, there are places even veterans can get tripped up, so here we’ll get back to basics and discuss signal flow from a true beginner’s perspective. We’ll start in the recording studio to get a solid foundation.

Signal flow fundamentals

When it comes to studios, many setups these days are minimal when it comes to actual, physical audio connections. Still, understanding signal flow at its most basic is the quickest way to understanding the complexities in digital audio workstations (DAWs) and other audio software.

In addition, live sound setups are still physical entities, and in that setting, certain concepts such as feedback are crucial to understand.

So, to begin with, we can easily understand signal flow if we think of sound itself as directional. As we all know, sound is simply a phenomenon of air molecules being “pushed” out by something – a voice, a drum, whatever. We “hear” sound by detecting variances in how those molecules propagate through the air and arrive in our ear.

Sound actually radiates in all directions, but to understand signal flow, we can temporarily think of sound as going in one direction – from the source to the receiver.

A source creates sound. A drum is a source. A receiver receives sound. Your ear is a receiver.

Everything else in signal flow follows from here.

In audio, we need to turn sound into an electrical signal before it can be amplified or recorded, but once we do that, the concept is the same. Audio “travels” in one direction – from source to receiver.

This fundamental understanding will make the rest much easier.

Typical scenarios

Let’s look at two simple, typical situations, both involving a singer.

Situation 1: Singer sings into a microphone which is recorded to a recording device (doesn’t matter what kind). First the sound wave travels from singer to microphone. Then it’s converted to signal and it travels from the microphone to a preamp, then into the recorder. This is the signal flow:

Singer
Mic
Pre-amp
Recording device input

Situation 2: Singer listens back to recording. First the recorder plays back an audio signal, which travels to an amplifier, then to a speaker. The speaker converts the audio signal back into a sound wave, which travels to the singer’s ears. Here is the signal flow:

Recording device output
Amplifier
Speaker
Ears

Signal flow is really that simple! But let’s make it slightly more complicated, so we’re never confused by the audio gear itself. Revisiting our two scenarios, we actually have:

Situation 1 – Singer records some singing:

Singer output (aka mouth) to
Mic input (mic itself) to
Mic output (XLR plug and cable) to
Pre-amp input to
Pre-amp output to
Recording device input to
Recording media (tape, hard drive, etc)

Situation 2: Singer listens to recording

Recording device output to
Amplifier input to
Amplifier output to
Speaker input
Speaker output (aka actual speaker moving air)
Human input (aka ears)

The reason to understand it this way is to understand that every audio device has an input and an output. Signal always flows from the “output” of one device to the “input” of another, and then to the “output” of the second device, and so on:

Output->input->output->input->output…

It doesn’t matter how many devices there are, this is always how signal flows.

Mixers

The real world is obviously more complicated than the situations above, but once you understand that signal simply goes in one direction, everything follows. In situation 2 above, it would be more likely that the signal goes through another step before the amplifier – a mixer.

A big 56 channel monster console looks intimidating with its hundreds of knobs and buttons, but it’s actually just the same thing – a channel strip – repeated over and over. And there’s an easy way to remember which way signal flows in a channel strip. Think of tipping the mixer toward you so that it sits vertically. Signal flows from top to bottom. Let’s pick a random channel…say 12, on a typical analog console. Signal flow on channel twelve is:

Channel 12 input
Channel 12 gain
Channel 12 EQ section
Channel 12 pan
Channel 12 fader

After the channel fader, audio goes to the master fader and then to the mixer’s outputs, and finally to the amplifier and speakers.

That’s it. Channels 1-11 and 13-whatever all work the same way.

Digital recording

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork, we know that signal flows the same way in a digital world as it does in the analog audio world. There are complications, but few that aren’t also available in analog audio. We’ll get into some of those more advanced topics in an upcoming article.

For now, we can think of the digital audio workstation (DAW) as a fancy recording device and mixer in one. In digital recording, the basic signal chain described above is the same, with the addition of an audio interface and/or audio to digital convertor (ADC), to turn analog audio signal into digital information:

Singer
Mic
Pre-amp
Audio interface/ADC*
Computer
Software

* ADCs, DACs (digital to audio converters) and audio interfaces are two separate entities, but they’re typically combined in one device.

To listen back, the chain would employ a DAC and the flow would look like this:

Software
DAC/Audio interface
Amplifier
Speaker
Ears

As mentioned above, you might include a mixer in that series – or not. And to make things more complicated, DAWs have their own internal mixers (usually). As you might expect, signal flow in a DAW works similarly to a mixer – but because you’re in a digital domain, there are many more options.

In part 2, we’ll cover those options and a host of real-world signal flow issues such as splitting, inserts, sends, bussing, monitoring, plugins, and live audio considerations like feedback.

If you have questions or want to talk, just hit me up on Facebook @AaronJTrumm – or email me aaron @ aarontrumm.com

Feeding Back

June 8, 2021 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, do it yourself recording, get better at making music, improve my music, music critique, nquit music, recording magazine

Improving your tracks by soliciting critique

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

Normally in the audio world we try to eliminate feedback. Nobody wants that high-pitched caterwauling ruining an otherwise perfect performance. That may also be how you feel about listening to someone’s opinion about your music, but the truth is outside opinions can be incredibly helpful.

Even if your goal isn’t a wildly successful professional career, getting an outside opinion or five can help you see what you’re missing in a way that time away from a track cannot. If you’re willing to take on the challenge, you can use these other opinions to dramatically improve your work. Just like a writer rarely submits a first draft to a publisher, a great song is hardly ever the first version. In fact, most great productions go through multiple iterations and some final versions are barely recognizable as the same song as version one.

That all said, there’s an art to soliciting feedback and using it wisely to improve a track. But done right, the circle of feedback, revision, feedback, revision is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal in the never-ending quest to sound better.

An Ever-Widening Circle

The first question that’ll come up when you’re ready to get critique is who to ask. Sure, you can ask just about anyone and if you know how to listen, every opinion will have value. But in practice you’ll probably want to strategize, both for time’s sake and for your own sanity. A good plan of action employed by many is the ever-widening circle approach.

The Inner Sanctum

Start with your closest and most trusted associates; the people who already believe in you, think you’re great, and you feel safe showing bad work to. This group may be the four or five members of your band, it may be the 2 collaborators on a long-distance project, or it may be your mother and your girlfriend.

This is the group you can show sketches to, to start to get an idea if a song is even worth your time to produce. This group is also well situated to feedback on multiple versions of a song and help as the song grows from an itty-bitty baby mp3 demo into a full-fledged mix. It’s helpful if one of this inner circle is an expert, but it’s equally helpful if at least one is not. Most important, they should understand you and your goals, and they should feel safe to be honest. This should not be a group that will say everything you do is great. That’s not helpful. They should, rather, know how great you CAN be, and hold you to that standard.

First Steps Into The World

Once your track starts to grow legs, you should start widening your circle. Seek out trusted industry contacts, other musicians and strangers who aren’t the general public. A good place to find new people at this stage are Facebook groups meant for production feedback. It’s helpful to be part of a few semi-private industry groups like MixMe where people bounce ideas and learn from each other.

The key at this stage is to present as finished a mix as you can, and then be willing to go back and change it. Luckily, these are not the days of 12-hour analog mix sessions that can never be recreated. Do a “save as” and create a new DAW file so you can implement changes without losing the older versions. If you ARE working in an all analog environment, you may consider having more people involved earlier in the process, and more people in the building when you mix.

It can be a hard pill to swallow to work hard on getting something to “finished” and then soliciting feedback, but once you start to involve strangers you want to put your best foot forward.

At this point, you’re still probably looking for general feedback, but you may start focusing down, maybe by seeking feedback from mix engineers on the mix, and songwriting experts on the song writing. Make sure to take notes on everything you hear good and bad, and don’t put your own filter on. If possible, try to implement every piece of feedback you get unless two people directly contradict each other. In that case, you’re the boss so use your veto power.

Going Semi-Public

Once you’ve solicited feedback from some fellow producers and extra friends and done a few more iterations, you’re probably feeling confident about the track. Now’s the time to get a little more public, and you can do this in a number of ways.

You could share the track on social media and wait for feedback. If you do it this way, it’s unlikely anyone will say anything bad to you, but you’ll be able to gauge how well the track is moving people by how extreme their responses are. If you get 3 comments on a Facebook post that say “neat. Great track, man,” that’s not a great response. It means people are being polite. If you get 43 comments that say “holy CRAP I love this SOOOOO much where can I download it PLEASE?” that’s a great response.

That’s a decent way to go about it, but in truth, it’s hard to get people to listen to songs on social media (a subject for a whole other article). If you’re really looking to test the track’s mettle, you may start reaching out to gatekeepers or professionals whose job is to critique songs. If you’re a Taxi member you can submit for feedback or find a listing to submit to and see what the screener says about the track. If the track gets accepted great, but you don’t really care yet, you’re just looking for feedback.

Another option is to submit your track to a service like Audiu, AudioKite (now a part of ReverbNation) or Fluence and read the reports. The feedback may or may not be specific enough for you, and your skin needs to be thick at this point, but the powerful part is these are not people that are trying to please you, and they’re anonymous.

At this point, it may be even harder than before to want to change things, because you’ll have worked hard, but if you’re willing, you can make your track just that much better. Just beware of one thing: context is decisive. That means that inside the context of you seeking “coaching”, you will probably never impress these people. Their job is to look for what’s wrong, so simply use what they say to polish up the track, and leave the accolades to your fans.

The Art Of Solicitation

Once you have an idea about who to ask, how do you ask? As is usual in any business interaction, the first rule is be civil, polite and humble. Be specific about what you need feedback on, and never ever answer back. When receiving feedback, especially face to face, it’s never helpful to defend a decision. This leaves people feeling unsafe to really open up, which will leave you in the dark about what they really think. Instead, simply nod, write down the note, and say thank you.

If you’re simply looking for people’s first responses, then you can simply ask “what do you think of this”, but as you move forward, you’ll probably have specific questions, like whether the mix is translating or if the lyrics seem trite. It’s good to let people know if the mix is just a rough and you’re looking for songwriting, or if the arrangement is set in stone, and you’re just looking for opinions on the bass. Whatever it is, being specific helps people narrow in on what you need and saves time and energy.

That said, it can be quite telling to NOT mention a particular problem you’re worried about. See if people notice it without you mentioning it. That’s a tell tale sign that your instinct was right and you need a change.

Of course, if you’re asking other musicians for feedback, be sure to be willing to help them on their tracks too! On most Facebook groups, the common etiquette is to feedback on other people’s work for a while before making your ask. People will be more familiar with you and feel more comfortable helping you.

Above all, be great with people, and receive all criticism with gratitude.

Giving Feedback

Since you’ll be reciprocating by helping people, you may want to think about how to give feedback in a way that creates a good relationship while still actually helping your fellow musicians grow.

The same basic rules apply. Be kind and courteous, and treat people with respect, even if they are brand new. Never pan work outright, and never criticize the person. A good rule of thumb when giving feedback is to assume everyone is a professional who knows what they’re doing. This means only providing feedback when asked, sticking to what’s asked for, and never talking down to people, even if they’re way newer than you.

You also don’t want to blow smoke. Just as with your work, it’s patronizing and unhelpful to simply say “yeah! Great stuff!” unless your mind is so blown that you can find nothing to improve. In that case, you will probably come up with something more anyway. By the same token, focusing entirely on a plethora of mistakes can be damaging and equally unhelpful.

So a good method to use is what management technique calls “the sandwich method”. This method is normally used to surreptitiously give negative feedback to employees, but when critiquing music can be the perfect approach. It goes like this: start with something positive, lead to something that could be improved, and end with something positive.

The key to the sandwich method NOT being disingenuous and manipulating is to really MEAN the positive parts. Find something that you truly like or love about the song, and lead with that. From there, move into the thing that you noticed that you think could be improved. Be specific, and offer an idea for something else to do. Then end with more positivity. That could be “great work!” or “can’t wait to hear the next version”, or even another specific thing.

For example, maybe your friend Joe asks you for general feedback on a song and the first thing you notice is a very muddy low end. Since that’s the first thing you noticed, you should listen again, and look for what you like. On second listen, you notice how great the songwriting is. So your feedback might go something like:

“Hey Joe! Wow this song is so well written. Amazing lyrics! I’m hearing some mud in the low end which obscures a couple lyrics, so I might try to carve out some 100hz in the bass and kick drum, and maybe look for other cuts in some of the ‘mud’ frequencies like 200 and 400-500hz. I’d love to hear it at that point. Really digging this one, can’t wait for the finished master!”

The best part about establishing this method of feedback is that if you boost people up while still actually helping them improve, they’ll do the same for you!

Go Around Again

Once you’ve got some good critique and a bunch of notes, obviously you’ll want to implement it. You’ll probably want to save a new DAW session file, and you may even want to make a couple of different versions at this point. Perhaps you’re not decided between one person’s idea that you make a song longer and another that you make it shorter. You can do a couple of versions and let them shoot it out. Or you may just make that executive decision. Either way, once you’ve implemented as much of the feedback as you can, go back around the ever-widening circle until you’re getting very little critique, and most importantly you feel satisfied and confident.

When you’re at that point, it’s time to put the song into the world, and after that don’t ask for feedback, because that sets up the context that the song is not finished. When you release to the general public simply project confidence and excitement. You’ll still get some unsolicited critique, and that’s ok. Carry that feedback forward and let it inform your next productions, and where and who you market the finished song to.

Wherever that leads you, you will find that vetting your work will give you confidence, better tracks and a lot more opportunity to interact with and work with people of like mind.

Here’s to feedback we want, and may you never hear the other kind of dreaded squeal again.

I’m a producer, singer and emcee who could have used some more vetting early on. Nevertheless, I’m now open to conversation on social media @AaronJTrumm.

Could It Be The Drums?

May 18, 2021 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, do it yourself drums, do it yourself recording, drums, home drum recording, home recording, nquit music, recording magazine

Modern use of drums is different now

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

There’s just something about a live drummer. I’ve said this hundreds of times. Two records ago, I insisted on using a live drummer for every track. This was not easy to accomplish. In fact, I had to rebuild my home studio AND the drummer’s to finally get what we wanted. The result was of course dynamic, awesome, difficult to record and hard to mix, but ultimately super satisfying.

When I went to do the next record, I was really going for modern, and I wanted tracks that would work well for licensing, where new and hip is everything. When we listened to the previous record, one thing jumped out at us: It sounded a bit dated. “What could it be?”, I wondered. Oh my god, could it be the drums?

You may have read something very similar in my article “Changing Of The (Pick) Guard” last year in Recording. It seems that my love for real guitars, real drums and real bass led to a place of sounding old.

That’s a bit disturbing, seeing as how we often lament a declining use of live musicians. So I looked deeper, and the news is encouraging. Let’s dive into how (and a little of why) drums have changed, so that you’re equipped to stay fresh.

It’s Not Just The Instrument

There are a million ways to hit a drum or make a rhythm. Even the standard trap kit came about as a result of tampering with the known. So it stands to reason that HOW drums are used, regardless of the kind of drum or whether it’s played by a person, will evolve. Of course, the opposite is also true. As tools change, so does the music made with them. When it comes to drums, or more broadly, rhythm, there has been a lot of evolution.

With the trap kit came a style of play that lent itself to the way the kit was built. That, in turn, grew and spread, until many different styles of play emerged. In Jazz especially, virtuosity has battled with emotional impact for top priority for decades, and there are easily discernable eras where each ethos has come out on top.

Similarly in rock, hip-hop, indie rock, pop and any other rhythm-based music, trends tend to oscillate, and there’s a real tendency for some genres to emphasize the skill of the drummer, while others strip down. Rock has mainly turned into “indie” or “alternative”, and rhythms have simplified, even when there’s a live drummer on board. Metal, on the other hand, has remained metal to the core, and intricacy is key there. In fact, metal drums, characterized by the blast beat, are more intricate, full and detailed than ever.

In pop, drums are often de-emphasized as pop productions seek to stand out from the crowd. In the face of a thousand big monster tracks, pop producers are now trending toward sparse tracks. The R&B /hip-hop track on the stereo in this coffee shop, for example, consists entirely of an 808 kick drum and a kind of bell click that replaces a snare. There are no cymbals, no hi-hat, and no other percussion elements. Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You” de-emphasizes drums as the main focus, instead opting for a similar 808 kick that appears in the chorus. Over the course of the song, other 808 elements are added that add to the emotional build of the song, but on a conscious level are barely noticeable. Drums in that song are cool, but they don’t define the rhythm. An acoustic guitar does that.

The buildup over time of a track is common in pop now, and that’s a big change from a more traditional approach, where the drums are the solid, predictable element in a song. So, for pop or pop-like productions, sparseness and change over time seem to be the order of the day (for now).

In alternative rock (which often doesn’t sound like rock to a 90’s kid) very simple four on the floor beats or straight 8s are more common than funky grooves, and although there are live drummers in these bands, fills and big cymbals are less common, at least on the records. Listen to Muse’s “Uprising” or “Wish I Knew You” by The Revivalists for examples. Contrast those tracks to older rock tracks like Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” or “I Don’t Care No More” by Phil Collins. One could say that this indicates a lack of mastery on the part of modern bands, but I think it may have more to do with an attempt to get musicianship out of the way of the emotional message. It’s also a heck of a lot easier to mix a record that has a simple drum track.

In electronica, beats have gotten more complex rhythmically, while (at times) remaining more sparse timbrally. Half-timing and syncopation are more common. Double-timed drum tracks as in drum-n-bass are so 2001. Think about a track like Clams Casino’s “I’m The Devil”. Of course, there’s a huge crossover between hip-hop and electronica, and in that realm, there’s a return to the classic TR-808 and 909 sounds. In this world, live drummers have never been common, and the attempt to fake a real drum sound usually fails, so producers go all in on samples and strange timbres, making no attempt to sound “real”. Or they throw back to big samples or the 808 kick/snare. This has always been the case in these genres, but now it’s easier than ever to come up with an interesting new sound or conjure up a well done 808 sample. Still, while basic rhythms may be more complex, there are fewer rhythmic accoutrement like quick fills, flams or 32^nd and 64^th note craziness.

It COULD Be The Instrument

Above, we talked about changes to how rhythm tracks are designed musically, but there’s also plenty of evolution in the realm of timbre choice, and what instrument is being used to create rhythms. Obviously it’s not always a live drummer, but even when it is, different timbral and mix decisions are made nowadays. There’s a lot of throwback going on in this area. Gated snares are making a comeback in alternative rock and even in electronic genres, and as I mentioned above, the 808 snare has returned in a big way (808 kick drum sounds have remained a staple ongoingly). The TR-909 isn’t far behind in usage, but these two classics aren’t always being used to create a retro vibe. Instead, they’re often part of a lush, more legato landscape accompanying highly autotuned R&B or half-timed rap.

In the “rock” type genres, much use is now made of epic tom sounds and big reverb, but sparingly as opposed to throughout songs. Refer back to the fills that do occur in Uprising, or in many Imagine Dragons songs.

Not surprisingly, in electronica genres that aren’t hip-hop or R&B, there’s a wealth of creativity, especially when it comes to snare drums. Stereo spread sounds are common, and the use of claps and snaps on the basic 2 and 4 instead of snare is common. Snare sounds sometimes play support roles, and it’s not uncommon to see an instrument change over time or in choruses. Big snappy snares show up in boom-bap type tracks like “Shine On” by SomeOthaShip, accompanied by old school rap with some twist on the use of classic synths. While we’re on that subject, the “analog” or “8-bit” sound is all the rage in some circles. Check out Suzi Analogue’s “NRG NRG” for a great example of a NOT sparse rhythm track, using throwback sounds, multiple snares, and a completely out of this world and totally modern take on the use of “8-bit” synths.

Outside of metal, cymbals are often de-emphasized, and from a mix-engineer’s point of view, that’s not surprising. Cymbals are very noisy at high frequencies, and it can be difficult to mix them, especially if you’re new or less well equipped, which more and more producers and engineers are. In metal, though, the drummer’s ability to wreak havoc with steel is crucial!

It Could Be Both

I mentioned earlier that the tools often influence the music itself, and of course this is true for drums. It’s common knowledge that access to resources (or the lack thereof) plays a big role in how the newest music sounds, and lack of certain resources can create a world of creativity. Fewer young people have access to traditional music training now, and access to great “real” instruments and recording technology has always been rare. But most everyone has a laptop, and because speed and space is now enough, some interesting and surprising things have happened. Now you CAN access a real recording of a real drummer on a real kit in a real studio, recorded separately and correctly. Packs like Loop Loft or Drums On Demand can give an average Joe access to world class real drums, and of course some people still actually record them.

The point is, there’s no longer a question of whether the drums on a song are made by a real drummer or a drum machine. It’s very often both. This isn’t a new concept, as drum replacement plugins have been around for a long time now, and before that triggers allowed replacements to be made from old school drum machines like the Alesis D4 of old. Now, though, it’s common to see layers and combos. A trained ear can usually still hear when the track is truly just a drummer in a room banging away, but the line has been seriously blurred, and it’s not always clear who did what.

Some common occurrences are the combo of an electronic kick sound like a 909 or 808 with real snare, live drums appearing in choruses, use of programmed hi-hats to tighten up live tracks, layering snares and kicks, and augmenting sampled drum loops or programmed tracks with sparse real cymbal crashes in strategic spots. Combining modalities isn’t necessarily new, but it’s certainly an easier thing to do now, and thus, it’s done a lot more (even in metal).

It Could Be The Mix

It’s not just the method of capture or creation that changes how a drum track sounds and feels. That is probably a no-brainer, but it’s still worth mentioning. How drums are mixed in modern songs is also something of an evolving process. First of all in many genres, especially electronica, the mix develops along with the production. It’s not uncommon for the entire mixdown of a song to be done in Ableton or another creative DAW on the fly, and this means how drums and other instruments are emphasized can be more intimately woven into the fabric of the song itself than in a traditional setting, where a group is recorded and then mixed later. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything in particular, but it seems that this process can cause a de-emphasis on things (like cymbals) that might be harder to integrate into a mix.

Even in traditional mixdown situations, what we do with the drums can be incredibly variable. Early on the days of stereo, it was common to put the entire kit in one speaker (think Beatles). Low end elements like kick drums played a crucial role, but not the boom that we use them for now. This was mainly due to the limitation of vinyl. On a vinyl record, low frequencies take up more physical space, allowing for less play time and in extreme cases, a big boomy note can cause the needle to skip. Now that’s not an issue, so we can do (mostly) what we want with the low end. So, recordings after the days of vinyl tend to boom of more. As time has gone by, this has become more and more true. Even when mixing real drums, kick drums tend to be severely manipulated with cuts to mid and high frequencies, emphasis on the lows, compression, and a “rounding” of the sound. This isn’t particularly new either, but it’s still common.

Snare sounds have tended toward the throw back in the past few years, with more and more gating and softening of the high-end snap, and emphasis on the heavy thump around 200 khz or so. If not that, we see the exact opposite. In hip-hop and R&B it’s more and more common to use a very thin snare sound (which is easy to do with an 808 snare). Of course, we still see some cracky snappy snares, usually in throwback hip-hop tracks or in electronica.

In general, drums are mixed cleaner, tighter, more compressed these days, and in pop genres, less emphasis is placed on hugeness, and more on clean support of the vocal message. There’s far less use of long reverbs, and while drum sounds aren’t necessarily totally dry, they’re definitely more forward and present, even when they’re quieter in the mix. Harsher high frequencies are emphasized less, and in general drum mixes have more space. Even some classic songs have been redone with a subtle but noticeable change in the amount of space the drums leave for other elements.

It Could Be Everything

In the end, all of the elements of modern recording and production have evolved and changed. The process of writing we use, the instruments and sounds available, the way we capture, the way we mix and even the REASON we do it have all morphed, shifted and continue to change. Drums have always been the biggest challenge in production, and they’re often the main thing that makes a track either super cheesy or really fresh. They’re almost always the element I point to when a track just doesn’t work for me or sounds amateur or dated. Creativity and innovation in this area is a major indicator of awesomeness, so it’s not surprising how much drum tracks have changed in the last few years.

So, it really is everything! There are a million variables involved, and there are really no rules, so how you approach your rhythm track is up to you. If you want more ideas, you can check the Recording archives for my articles “Keeping The Rhythm” parts 1 and 2 (acoustic and programmed, respectively).

Hopefully, this brief and informal discussion of the ever-changing rhythm track combined with those pieces will help you in your next project! Go forth and make rhythm!

I play Chinese drums, produce records and pet cats. Talk to me on social media (aka Facebook) @AaronJTrumm.

Stretching The Budget

April 5, 2021 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, home recording, independent music, music business, nquit music, recording magazine, recording on a budget, save money on recording

How to get the biggest bang for your recording studio buck

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

Not so long ago, a recording project required a full-fledged studio. Things have changed now, and many projects are done entirely at home. But there’s still a place for a dyed-in-the-wool recording studio, and still plenty of reason you may need one.

This means money. No one’s recording budget is unlimited, so let’s talk about how to make that budget go as far as it can, without sacrificing quality.

Pre-Production

You can save money at every stage of the production process, but the preparation stage, or pre-production, is your best opportunity to save money in the long run.

Rehearsal

Recording sessions are usually charged hourly. Nothing makes a session take longer than doing take after take because the artist isn’t ready to rock n roll. It’s even longer if you never get a whole take and have to comp them together, and that’s seriously compounded if those comps have fluctuating tempos.

So, first and foremost, rehearse. Whether you’re a band or a solo artist, tracking sessions can be incredibly efficient if you’re well-rehearsed. Some things to do in rehearsals:

Practice with a click – You’ll be asked to sync to one in the studio, and if you’re not used to it, it can be difficult to say the least.
Practice in public – Preferably, you’re recording songs you’re already killing with on stage. In the studio strangers will be watching and when tape rolls, nerves can be a factor. Plus, if you’re recording well-vetted material, you’ll have fewer decisions to make later
Practice as a group – If you’re a group, you probably want to record as a group, at least to begin with, so obviously you should practice together.
Practice alone – The tape never lies. In the studio, you can’t hide behind the group, the crowd and the fleeting moments like you can on stage. So put your parts out there where you can scrutinize and perfect them.
Practice recording – Even if all you have is the voice recorder on your phone, practice recording however you can. Roll on rehearsals and listen back, making notes and practicing the little things you wouldn’t have noticed.

Writing And Arranging

Even if you’re cutting new material, you should still be rehearsing and finishing songs ahead of time. Writing songs in the studio is a huge money waster.

Lyrics, song, and arrangments should be completely finished. Get feedback and edit songs in pre-production. Don’t pay money to send rough mixes to find out you should have sung “I love your mom” instead of “I love your man”. You can find that out with an acoustic scratch track or a lyric email.

The same holds for melodies, chord progressions, breaks, fills, everything musical. If you’re a band, work as much of the cool production stuff out live as you can. Bring your producer to rehearsal and implement their ideas. You’ll wildly improve your live act while you’re at it.

If your music is more sequencer based, you should be arranging everything at home. Get feedback on your home versions first, before going in the studio.

Session Planning

Once you’ve finished your songs, plan the sessions. Communicate with the studio ahead of time. Share your tech rider with the engineer and discuss mic choices, physical arrangement, song order, headphones mixes, everything. Anything you can figure out ahead of time when the clock isn’t running will make sessions faster.

If you can visit the studio beforehand so you know what they have, what you’ll need to bring, and who will be working on the project, do it! If you can have a pre-production meeting with your engineers, even better. You can even plan how many tracks you’ll need and what to overdub.

In any case, communicate everything you can with the studio, so they can be ready for you.

Tracking

When the day comes to start work, there’s still plenty you can do to maximize your budget.

Use The Right Room

In pre-production, you should outline what you’ll record in the main studio and what you’ll do at home or in a cheaper studio. Higher-end facilities often have multiple recording rooms, and studio B or C might be cheaper than studio A.

Also consider booking time in different studios. You may be able to track a bunch of vocals in a small project studio that costs half the big studio, for example. Save the expensive rooms for work that can only be done there. Grand piano, full orchestras, or full band captures, for example.

You may be also able to do some work at home. If your music is sequenced, you’ll certainly do that work at home, but you may be able to do more. If you’ve got a simple interface and there are guitar overdubs that would work with a direct input, plan to do that at home. You may even be able to grab backing vocals at home, or keyboard parts. These audio files can be integrated into the main DAW project. You may even have enough home studio to track everything at home and save money for mixing and mastering.

Also ask about intern engineers. Studios often let the new guy record on off hours at significantly discounted rates. Just remember that the engineer is bearing the brunt of that discount, so be nice!

Finally, you may be able to save some money overall by booking a day or week-long lockout. That won’t be cheap, but it will remove the pressure of the clock.

Gear Maintenance

Prep your equipment ahead of the session. Make sure strings are new, drum heads are in good shape, fingers and vocal chords are fresh, and anything else you need is ready to go. The clock doesn’t stop if you break a string, so be as ready as possible before you get to the studio.

Of course, your body is equipment too. Sleep well, eat right, and come to the session fresh and ready to go. The fresher you are, the fewer mistakes you make, which makes everything more efficient. And it should go without saying but being snot-slinging drunk will not get you your best performance.

Studio Day

Just a few things to note when you get to the studio:

Be early – Arrive at least 15 minutes early to the session. Once your booked time begins, small talk and intros cost money, so create relationships before and after the session.
Be even earlier (and organized) – Next, be organized when you arrive and leave extra time for load in. If you can bring help to carry gear, that will make things quicker and leave the engineer free to set up. Aim for being in the room fully set up 5-10 minutes before the session start time, if possible. Many engineers won’t start setup until the clock starts, but if you can do anything to facilitate pre-session preparation, great. Just remember to be respectful of the studio’s time too.
Warm up – You’ll be glad if you warm up before the session rather than on paid time. Run through scales or vocal drills at home, and then quickly when you’re waiting for the session to start.
Bring documentation – Bring anything you wrote during pre-production like set lists, tracking plan, “stage” plot and the like and be sure the engineer gets copies. Give the engineer lyric sheets, too, with enough space for notes.
Keep it professional – Just like in rehearsal, the more you jabber, the more time things take. But beware, being too tight makes performances rigid and leads to mistakes. So, keep yourself in the sweet spot between fun and focused. Say stuff, laugh, be creative – and be ready and able to shut it at a moment’s notice. You’d be surprised how much time this habit can save.
Take breaks – Recording sessions can get grueling. It’s not uncommon for a session to drone on for 12 hours. Don’t do this. Break every two hours, eat a meal every four, and unless you’re trying to maximize a lockout, keep days to eight hours. You’ll stay fresher over the duration of the project, which will lead to better efficiency.

Mixing

Oh happy day! You’ve finished tracking. Hopefully you’ve sought feedback on rough mixes, and you’ve been careful to throw away advice you can no longer implement (that lyric should have been edited in pre-pro, remember?).

Now you need a mix. Every studio on Earth will try to convince you that you need to mix at their studio, since you tracked there. Poppycock. That studio may be the best place to mix, and it may not.

In either case, we’re thinking about the money here, so you want to consider a few things to help you maximize the mix budget:

Pay per song – Mixing can be involved and unpredictable, and it’s in your best interest NOT to pay an hourly rate. It just so happens that dedicated mix engineers prefer it this way too.
Provide references – If you’re going for a certain sound, provide references to the mixer.
Organize tracks – This is really the tracking engineer’s job, but don’t leave it to chance. Make sure the mixer gets well organized, properly labeled tracks. There shouldn’t be 34 guitar tracks labeled “eric” or “rickenbacker 45000 uptown one chicken fried awesome track”. Edit and comp tracks and label them plainly, ie: “electric guitar”.
Pick a leader – The whole group should get to feedback, but one person should have final veto power. Otherwise things may never get done. If you have a producer, this is their job.
Limit revisions – Most mix engineers (especially with a per song fee) will do this for you, but you should make sure there are only one or two revisions. You can tweak forever and never get done, and if you’re paying hourly, this will cost you severely.

Mastering

If you’re on a budget, you may not be thinking about sending mastering out to yet another studio/engineer. This is ok. You can have your mix engineer put together a master, and that mix engineer might very well be the same person who tracked you. Maybe this isn’t the aural ideal, but It’s no crime.

If you do have a mastering budget, some guidelines apply:

Don’t fix it in mastering – Never leave anything wrong with a mix for mastering to fix. If it can be done in mixing, do it.
Organize songs – Similar to sending a mixer well organized tracks, the mastering engineer needs clean, well-documented material. Make clear filenames and include notes telling the engineer what’s where.
Clear deliverables – Be very clear ahead of time what deliverables you need. Do you want CD quality files? A CD master? Streaming-ready MP3s? Provide a detailed list of deliverables so there’s no back and forth.
Limit revisions – What’s true in mixing is true in mastering too. Keep the tweaking to a minimum.

The After Party

As you can see, maximizing your recording budget is often done in increments. Each time you add efficiency or cut something unnecessary, you stretch the budget. Yes, you can cut your budget to nothing by setting up your phone recorder and jamming out some tunes (call it lo-fi, it’ll work!), but what you’re really trying to do is create something awesome.

If you’re efficient, you can actually improve the quality of your recording, because you won’t have to cut corners after wasting a bunch of money – for example – drunkenly re-writing a song in the $250/hr main room at Ocean Way.

And if you do it right, you’ll have just enough left over for a few beers at your fabulous post-recording party!

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I like to think of myself as the McGiver of recording. I “funded” my first CD by rebuilding a boneyard at the University Of New Mexico, dragging 80 pounds of gear there every Saturday, and re-tarring the roof of my mentor’s studio to earn mix time. Ask me about it on Facebook @AaronJTrumm – or email me aaron @ aarontrumm.com

Master Your Own Domain

March 29, 2021 by Aaron

aaron trumm, audio mastering, can you master your own music, do it yourself mastering, home mastering, mastering, music mastering, nquit music, recording magazine

When (and how) to master your own mixes

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

Conventional wisdom says you should never master your own mixes. Conventional also wisdom says you should never mix your own song, or produce your own music, or become a Grammy winner as an indie (*cough* Chance The Rapper *cough*).

Then again, conventional wisdom doesn’t have a laptop capable of landing a human being on Mars and a $100 album budget.

So there may actually be a reason (and a way) to successfully master your own.

But Wait!

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though. First we should understand why conventional wisdom says what it says. After all, it may have a point. It has, after all, been in the business a long time. Here are the basic reasons not to master your own mixes, and it turns out they are good reasons:

Another set of ears – When you’re trying to finish up a track and make it the best it can be, it really is helpful to have someone new take a listen. With a different perspective (especially an expert one), they may see the very thing you can’t, and that can push the song over the edge.
A different room – It’s also a fact that a mastering room is a very different animal than a mix room. It’s not just “better”. It’s built specifically for the job of finishing off mixes, not the job of tracking, writing or mixing. Monitors are incredibly accurate, limiters are incredibly expensive, EQ’s are built specifically for mastering, and the room itself is built for only this purpose. Not being built to serve multiple purposes, a true mastering room is much better situated for critical listening.
A different mindset – A true mastering engineer is a very different type of professional than a mix or recording engineer. They know their gear and the process of mastering intimately, and their ears are tuned almost entirely to listen to the technical aspects of a track. Mix engineers, by contrast, need to cultivate a balance of technical knowledge and creative intuition. Think of a spectrum between Spock (logic and science) on the left and Bones (raw emotion and creative energy) on the right. Divas float about on the right. Mix engineers sit in the middle. Mastering engineers sit way over to the left.

That’s Great But…

All these reasons are well and good, and really if you can, you should probably heed them and hire a mastering engineer. But mastering engineers are expensive, and they take time. If your budget is low, time is tight (single day turn-arounds are common in licensing, for example), or if you just need a client mix that’s loud enough to impress, hiring out may not be an option.

Or, you may be trying to crank out two tracks a week for sync opportunities and the sheer volume (pun intended) of tracks would mean even the cheapest mastering house would break the bank.

These situations may not be ideal, but you’re not lost. While we’re not covering mastering in great depth here, we can offer a few tips to help you lay a decent foundation on which to finish your tracks.

New Ground Rules

First off, we can mimic some of what you get with a mastering engineer by modifying conventional wisdom a bit.

Get more ears – You’re probably already letting other people listen to your mixes to get feedback. If so, great! Now get a few more fresh ears on the mix. Let them know you’re not making creative changes like rearranging or re-performing. Some of what you find out may actually be things to fix in the mix, but that’s ok, it’s your mix!
Listen elsewhere – Again, you’ve probably done a bunch of this in the mix phase, but getting some more listens on a variety of devices in a variety of environments at a variety of times will help. This is the time to listen on “bad” devices, like a phone or a pillow speaker.
Get the mix right – This is true when you’re hiring out too, but especially when you’re self-mastering, get your mix as close to perfect as possible before mastering. A good mix should sound like the record, just perhaps a bit quieter due to not over compressing and giving the mastering engineer (or you) headroom to work. Don’t rely on mastering to fix imbalances or make the mix sound generally “better”. If you get the mix right, mastering is a simple matter of polish and finish. On some great mixes, world class mastering engineers have reported doing next to nothing!
Start fresh – Don’t just throw a few mastering plugins on the master buss in your mix session. Instead, export your finished mix at the same resolution (don’t dither or down sample) and prepare each version as stereo files, just like you would if you were sending them out. Start a brand new DAW session for mastering and import your mix. This will help you get into a different mindset, and keep you from making mix decisions when you should be making mastering decisions. It will also give you more processing headroom and be less confusing later.
Don’t just slap up a fancy plugin – Speaking of plugins, here are some really ones out there nowadays. It’s certainly ok to let a plugin help your efficiency, but use your own knowledge and ears. Trust that you are the one, not the computer, that knows what the final master should sound like.
Be a new you – Don’t master the same day as mixing. In fact, the more time you can put in between the sessions the better. If you can wait a month, great. But if you really are on a one day deadline, at least take a lunch break, leave the room, and maybe even recalibrate your ears by listening to a few similar tracks before you start again.
Be subtle – If your song were a sculpture, tracking would be the big cuts. You might be working with a chainsaw or a sledgehammer. Mixing is the stage where you switch to chisels, maybe small hammers. The moves are smaller, but still enough to make real, fundamental change. By the end of mixing, the piece is fully formed, looks great, and in a pinch could be shown to some art snobs. Mastering is the final shine. At this point, you’re using a rag, some fine polish, and in the worst case, a little sandpaper. If you find yourself trying to alter individual tracks, change the balance or nature of the track, or otherwise pick up actual “tools”, you should go back to the mix itself. Again, it may be tempting to do your mastering in the same DAW session as the mix to make this convenient, but you’ll get a lot more out of keeping them separate.

Study The Game

Mastering is a funny thing. It’s highly technical, it’s the stage where you do the boring stuff like meta-tagging and file organizing, and it’s the most subtle stage. Yet, there’s more to mastering than meets the eye. The subtleties of file types, dithering, loudness, compression, limiting and mix-wide EQ are amazing and deep. It’s no wonder there are still professionals dedicated to the craft. You can do yourself a world of good by learning from those pros, so we’ve put together a few resources so you can get started. You can find them in the “resources” sidebar.

Finish Strong

The main thing to remember about mastering is that the tools available now and the knowledge you can gather CAN empower you to put a professional polish on your work, if you’re willing to put in some effort. And if you find you don’t take to it and you have the money, by all means return to conventional wisdom. It’s not wrong, it’s just old!

In either case, may your masters shimmer and your listeners be impressed.

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I master most of my own stuff – shocking! I have used a mastering engineer and it was fun and awesome – but expensive. We can talk about it though – email me aaron @ aarontrumm.com or Facebook me @AaronJTrumm.

It’s A Small World, After All

March 22, 2021 by Aaron

aaron trumm, audio collaboration, modern music production, music collaboration, music production, recording magazine, remote collaboration, remote music collaboration

These days, you can collaborate with anyone, anywhere

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

The other day, I sent a PayPal payment to my friend Javier for his half of a licensing fee, after our song was used in an MTV reality show. Javier has been a joy to work with. He’s super talented, easy going, and I can count on him for quality. I’ve also never met him.

I live in Albuquerque, NM and he lives in Corpus Christi, TX. We met on a Facebook group and we collaborate entirely remotely. As it turns out, I have collaborations with people from Texas, Canada, Australia…you get the picture. I even have collaborations with local people that weren’t done in person.

It seems remote collaboration is the new world order, and it makes sense. Digital audio and quick internet make it possible to meet and work with anyone who’s willing, and that means doors that were previously locked are now wide open.

Not Really New

In truth, remote collaboration isn’t entirely new. In fact, ISDN technology, which is a system of digital telephone connections that allow recording between far-away studios, has been in use since the 80’s, mostly in the broadcast and voiceover worlds. ISDN allows talent to perform in a studio or even in their home on one coast and have the receiving studio on the other coast record the signal in real time. It’s incredibly useful for voice and broadcast work, but it would be hard to perform against a music track that way, as the delay would be prohibitive (more on that in a bit).

What is (sort of) new is the sheer number of ways you can collaborate on recording projects from lands afar, using either normal internet resources, or purpose-built solutions designed specifically for music.

Many Ways

Assuming you’ve got a partner somewhere else and you want to do a project, you’ve got a number of options for how you might collaborate. What tools you use depends on the general method, and there are basically three categories of remote collaboration.

“Offline” Sharing

Probably the most widely used method, “offline” simply means that collaborators use their own tools on their own time and use normal file sharing and communication tools to share tracks and talk about projects. This method comes with its share of potential issues, but is probably the easiest way to start, and offers the greatest flexibility as far as tools used and scheduling.

When simply sharing files, each of you can work in your DAW of choice which is great if you like different systems, because you don’t have to worry about a learning curve. There are some things to take special care about, though, when going back and forth between DAWs.

First off, if you have different DAWs you can’t just share projects back and forth, and you can’t just grab the audio folder and give it to your partner. You’re going to have to export tracks and send them via some file sharing method like Dropbox, Box or Google Drive. This will take some extra time, so plan accordingly. It’s often a good idea to zip files before uploading, especially if there are a lot of them.

You’ll need to coordinate the sample rate and bit depth you’re working on (best to agree on that ahead of time), and what file format you each prefer. What tracks you send to your partner depends a lot on what each of your roles is. Perhaps you’re producing a track and you’ve hired a session vocalist to track a lead vocal. That vocalist might just need an instrumental mix that they can sing against, or they might want you to separate drums, guitars and pianos.

In any case, you’ll want to send them direct exports, and NOT edit the front. Make sure what you send and what they send back start from true zero, and make sure each of you is using the same tempo in your DAW. Let your partner know if there’s a pre-roll (space on the track before the song actually starts) and at what measure to expect the song to come in.

In the previous example, your vocalist would end up sending back a lead vocal track, also exported from zero. If you’re in that position, don’t chop off your track to save file space. Send the full-length version, even if there’s a minute of silence before your part comes in.

If you’ve got tempo or time signature changes, be sure to set that map up properly in both DAWs so you don’t end up in trouble.

If you happen to be using ProTools and you do want to save time by not recording from zero every time and not exporting the whole track audio folder, here’s a slick trick:

Go forward in the song to a couple measures before where you want to come in.
Set the playback head to an exact measure, eg: measure 55.
Rename the track with the measure in it, eg: “lead vox meas 55”.
Record, and then find the clip in the audio folder named “lead vox meas 55”.
Send that a long with a note. When your partner imports it, it will be in the wrong spot at the beginning of the file. They can move it to exactly measure 55 and voila.

Note: Not all DAWs name clips this way, but if you know how your DAW names clips, you can manipulate it in similar ways. When in doubt, though, just export your tracks full length.

All in all, there’s a reason simple file-sharing is still the most widely used method of collaborating. It really gives you and your partners the most flexibility, and keeps you working in the environment you’re most comfortable with.

Cloud Based Session Sharing

A hybrid option between extremes, cloud-based session sharing, where collaborators work on the same session online but at different times, is getting more and more popular. This option offers a lot of convenience, and with some tools, the added benefit of social-media style open collaboration.

There are actually quite a few cloud-based solutions. For cloud collaboration using existing DAWs, ProTools now has Avid Cloud Collaboration, Cubase has VST Connect (which also has some real-time capability) and uploading directly to your BandLab account is now built into Cakewalk.

Other tools, like Splice, Bandlab or Soundtrap, are their own DAWs that run online or can be downloaded. Some of these tools offer a unique opportunity to open projects for contribution by anyone in the community. Of course, if you do this be aware of the legal ramifications and communicate clearly.

Splice is like Facebook meets Soundcloud, with an app to download for cloud backup, a web based pseudo-DAW which can create projects and edit in popular DAW formats (like Ableton or Logic), and a lot of options for meeting new collaborators, sharing work, and hearing new music. For a fee, you can also get access to samples, loops, effects and presets, and even rent-to-own popular plugins.

BandLab has a similar social media vibe, and the option to work in an online DAW which includes a bunch of handy (if odd) presets for getting started quickly, like a one button drum machine. And since BandLab recently bought and resurrected Cakewalk, there’s cloud collaboration integrated into that software too.

Cloud collaboration is a great option for working with people across the globe who have vastly different schedules, for keeping things organized, and for opening up a world of new collaborative possibilities.

Fully Real Time

It is possible with the right software and good enough internet on both ends to do a recording session in real time, as if you were sitting in the room together. This is the hardest option to implement, but productions take a lot less time when you can sit together at the same time, and you get the benefit of almost real human interaction.

A surprising number of tools exist to accomplish this, among them the aforementioned VST Connect by Steinberg, Source Elements Source Connect and OhmForce OhmStudio, to name a few. The thing to remember with real-time tools is that both parties’ internet connections need to be fast and reliable enough. For example, Source Connect requires 300kbps upload AND download streams, and VST Connect requires 256kbps upload speed.

For real-time to really work, you’ll want to connect to your router at the fastest possible speed (preferably using Gigabit Ethernet), and if possible, connect using wired ethernet rather than WiFi. Check into your upload speed as well as your download speed. You should try for at least 20Mbps download and 10Mbps upload speeds.

Try also to minimize the amount of other activity using bandwidth, such as browsers, Skype or other internet connecting software. If you’re in a home studio, you might also need to minimize the amount of other internet activity going on in the house, such as streaming videos or downloading music.

Once your internet is humming right, you’ll have to coordinate which software to use. Source Connect runs as an app which allows you to route audio from whatever DAW you prefer to your partner’s DAW. With VST Connect Pro, one person can run the main DAW (Cubase 7 or above) and a performer on the other end can run VST Connect Performer, which is free to download.

Other packages like OhmStudio can be used real-time or asynchronously and have the added bonus of opening up projects to community members who are signed up for the service. OhmStudio is also a standalone DAW.

One thing to note: In almost all cases having more than two parties in the “room” is either impossible or unrealistic. And of course, you’ll have to schedule sessions like you would in person, which may be difficult if you’re in vastly different time zones.

Pitfalls aside, it can be a pretty cool thing to get back to real-time communication, making changes together on the spot, and being in engaged with a real live human being. And when it works, this method is certainly faster than others. It’s worth giving a try if your gear is right.

Actual Jamming?

To dovetail a bit from the section above, what if you want to play together with a group of people? Maybe you like that vibe, or you want to rehearse, or for whatever reason you’d like to sync up like musicians tend to do, but from across the world.

This is technically possible, and a few real-time collaboration tools allow it, if your connections and computers are robust enough. Contrary to what seems intuitive, you can’t jam together over something like Skype or Zoom (you could do a simple writing session that way though). The latency in normal communication apps is too great, and you won’t be able to sync up. You certainly can’t record together that way.

Still, there are tools cropping up for online jamming. Jammr (jammr.net) is in beta testing as of this writing, and JamKazam (jamkazam.com) has been around for a few years now.

If you want to learn the real nitty gritty on this topic, there’s a free online course offered by Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music And Acoustics (CCRMA) which will teach you how to set up online jamming using open source tools. Learning these techniques will give you a deep understanding of the process and problems of online sync, and really deepen your knowledge of issues like latency and audio related networking. You can find the course by navigating to this address: https://tinyurl.com/y6ecz66r.

Finding New Collaborators

You may be collaborating long-distance because your favorite guitar player moved to Tallahassee, or you may even be doing remote collaborations because your drummer had a baby and can only record at his house while you’re at work, but more than likely, you’re looking to branch out and find new people to work with.

There are as many ways to find new partners as there are new partners, but there are some tried and true methods. First, you can meet people when you’re out in the world at a conference, or touring with your metal cello quartet, or whatever it is you do.

You might also meet people on Facebook groups. There are hundreds of Facebook groups dedicated to production. You might also find new people on LinkedIn, Twitter or other social networks. And of course, you may find new collaborators by opening up your projects to others as mentioned above.

Another option is to search for players on platforms like SoundBetter.com or even Fiverr or UpWork. There’s even a cool service called Audio Hunt (theaudiohunt.com) which can pair you up with gear owners so you can run your tracks through that coveted analog compressor or tube preamp you just can’t afford.

The thing to remember in all these cases is that you want to vet people and make sure the working relationship will be good. It may be a good idea to get to know a person for a while, check out their work, interact with them in a public forum like a Facebook group, and maybe even meet them in real life at a conference before you decide to work together.

Even you don’t take a bunch of time, you want to talk business first, or at least very early in the process. Make sure everything is clear up front and you’re on the same page about the project. Is it your act? Theirs? A duet? Who will be allowed to pitch the track, and who will control distribution? What are the master rights splits and what are the songwriting splits? How do you want to handle a third party who may come in to contribute? Define everyone’s rights and responsibilities ahead of time so that there are no surprises and put it in writing.

Music may be just a hobby to some of your partners (or to you), but it’s also a business, and though it may be tedious, getting the paperwork out of the way ahead of time will save you a lot of trouble in the long run. Plus, talking business first can help weed out shady people before you go too far down the road. Once that’s out of the way, you can let the creative juices flow, and being open-minded about your partner’s contribution is usually the best way to go about things.

A Small World

It really is a small, connected world. Before writing this, I sat on my back patio looking at flowers, cats and bees, relaxing back while I nonchalantly discussed arrangement changes to a new song over Facebook Messenger with a collaborator who is 1000 miles away. Using my phone, I was able to send him a rough mix through Box.com and without breaking a sweat or leaving my lunch, I had all his notes and ideas, ready for the afternoon session.

Working remotely will never replace the vibe of multiple people creating together in the studio, and it doesn’t have to. But it’s a great way to open new options, keep connected to great partners who travel or move, and in general just add a whole new flavor to the process of making tracks. Perhaps you’ll be my next collaborator!

———————————————

I live in Albuquerque, NM, but it doesn’t matter. I use Cakewalk, MixBus and Ableton but that doesn’t matter either. Find me to present a collaborative idea at aaron @ aarontrumm.com or on Facebook @AaronJTrumm.

Turn It Down, Sonny!

March 15, 2021 by Aaron

audio volume, home recording, listening level, nquit music, recording magazine, sound, turn it down sonny

Listening at the right volume levels

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

I’m 42 (45 now but I think I’ll stop updating this) years old, and although that’s not old, I admit to being a little crotchety (aka sensical) about certain things. Listening level is one of them. Turn it down! You’re too loud! Get off my lawn!

It’s a topic oft-covered, especially if you read or take a course about mixing, but it bears repeating, since we’ve been talking about monitors and acoustics this month. The question is, how loud is too loud, and why? After all, aren’t listeners generally listening to the final product loudly?

Well, actually no. Not as loud as you. And if you watch life go by, you’ll notice a whole lot of music being played at low levels so that people can still talk to each other, so your mix needs to sound good at that level.

Partially to that end, it’s common (and good) advice to mix at a low enough level that you can still hold a conversation. Said with numbers, that might be around 75-80db in a small room, and maybe about 85db in a larger control room (ie: sitting farther back). There are actually several reasons for this:

Fatigue. Your ears and also your whole body tire quickly when listening at high volumes. Your length of session and effectiveness thus decreases. Bad decisions get made earlier.
Long term hearing damage. You want your hearing to stay with you as long as possible. Very loud listening is damaging over time. We tend to lose high frequencies as we age anyway. You don’t need to speed this process up.
SHORT term hearing damage. Listen loud enough, and you could actually damage your hearing NOW. That’s hard to fix, and it can cut your musical career short.
The Fletcher-Munson curve. Basically, this curve describes a phenomenon of human hearing where perceived loudness changes per frequency as volume changes. That means that the balance of a mix sounds different at different volumes. In practice what this ACTUALLY means is that if you achieve good balance at a low to moderate volume, your mix will continue to sound balanced as it’s turned up, but the reverse is not true. If you achieve balance at a high volume, your mix will tend to fall apart at lower volumes.
Monitors can be damaged at very high volumes. This is expensive and time consuming.

Now you do need to check at various levels. Personally, I mix mostly at a low volume, one where I can still converse. Early on, I crank it up for very short periods of time to get the subwoofer pushing so I can really understand what’s happening with the bass. It IS actually easier to hear problems with low end mud at a higher level. Then I turn it down again. Late in the mix, I turn it up again for a short bit to check for harshness that would annoy or hurt a listener who wants to crank it up (this often appears somewhere between 2 and 5k). Then I turn it down again. Then at the end, I listen loud once through the whole song, just to get happy and have fun.

Of course mixing isn’t the only place where this comes into play, and I get even more persnickety in a live scenario. Guitarists, I love you, but turn your amps down. Yes, as your amp gets cranked up, it has a moderately different tonal character. However, that character difference isn’t worth the sacrifice in mix quality in a room that’s properly manned by a front of house engineer. If you turn it down, she can control it in the mix, make your vocal shine, give each player exactly what they need in their monitors, and actually make your band sound good. Otherwise everyone keeps saying “I can’t hear the vocal! Where are we in the song?”, and your audience thinks you’re mediocre, which is wrong, because you REALLY ROCK. Right? Turning your guitar amps down is the number one way you can help the sound person help you.

Ok, now that you’re off my lawn, I will admit that cranking a great tune is about the quickest way I know to get to musical euphoria, so I get it if you want to give it a crank every once in a while. I do. Every mix, at the end, when I’m done making decisions, and often in the car. But as a professional who relies on his ears, I keep it below the pain threshold – ALWAYS. And when I’m working, I’m working, so I keep it where it needs to be for me to make the best decisions, achieve the most sonic control, and have the most energy at the end of the day. I also take earplugs with me everywhere just in case, especially for concerts, which are pretty much always too loud.

Thanks for reading. I’ll go back outside to my rocking chair now.

If you want to talk to me about this – well find me on Facebook @AaronJTrumm! 🙂

Listen Different

August 6, 2020 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, audio monitors, audio recording, home recording studio, home studio, listen different, listen differently, monitor speakers, music, music recording, nquit, nquit music, recording, recording magazine, recording studio, speakers

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

There’s nothing in the world like a great pair of…monitor speakers. It’s true. Whether you’re into Adam, Genelec, K-Rok, Events or Mackie, even if you’re old school and can’t get by without your trusty NS-10s, whether sub or no sub, there’s nothing like a beautiful set of monitors (in a properly treated room!) with an incredibly clean, accurate sound to not only get you in the mood, but make that mood shine through when other people hear your brilliant opus. You need that accuracy, and you need to be used to your go-to monitors. You need to know their ins and outs, their strengths and weaknesses, and what tends to happen to a mix when you use them. You need to be loyal enough for long enough so that you really feel comfortable and master your monitors.

But comfort can be a dangerous thing, and no one, not even your mom, will ever listen to your mixes on your monitors in your room. Maybe not even your client. So your loyalty, while strong, should flex. You may need, as they say, to have an open relationship with your monitors. In fact, in order to really get your mix right, you might need to be rather promiscuous with your listening. Of course that includes the obvious: if you’re in a big studio, you’ll have loud speakers, mid fields, near fields and great headphones to check mixes against. But don’t stop there. If possible, how about another set of nearfields, maybe an alternate pair of mid fields?

Of course, that kind of buying power is rare, and in reality, you might have to settle for one set of really great, perfect-for-you monitors. That’s ok, because there’s more to do anyway. Check the mix on your go to headphones. Check on it $10 computer speakers. Check on the laptop speakers. Download an mp3 to your phone and listen with earbuds, then listen without. Does it still sound like a record? Listen on a boom box – a crappy one. A famous studio/label who shall remain nameless is said to have had a small broadcast station, which they would tune in to while sitting in an old truck in the front. Listen in mono. Get a cheap “pillow” speaker and try that out. DEFINITELY listen in your car. Listen a LOT in a LOT of cars. Make a CD and take it to every boom box in every department store in town.

When you’re not in the studio, make a lot of notes. When you are, make small tweaks. Return to your favorite monitors and check to see that your adjustment didn’t throw things out of whack there. Usually you can find a balance between disparate systems with small tweaks, but be careful of chasing your tail. Just check and check and check, and at some point, stop.

This advice is especially for those self-mixed musicians, producers and dreamers who don’t have access to the Bob Clearmountains and Chris Lord-Alges of the world (or their gear). Your lack of the absolute BEST resources need not stop you from achieving great and translatable mixes, and where that begins is with multiple listening environments.

While you’re at it, go ahead and get multiple ears on the mix too. E-Mail an mp3 link to some people who will listen differently than you. If you can stand it, bring somebody into the studio who is NOT an expert. Yes, bring the lay people in on it! Let your kids, your mom, your dog and your neighbor’s best friend’s plumber in on the fun. Don’t try to get technical terms out of them, just listen for their reactions. They won’t say “the vocal is a bit muddy, can you trim 100 HZ a bit?” They’ll say something like “what’d she say?”

That’s not to say you should leave your expert friends out. Don’t be afraid to send the mix all around, including to feedback groups you trust out in the social media world. Just make sure you make small tweaks, and remember that you may not be able to please EVERYBODY. But try. And listen, listen, listen.

Oh, and that means listening to other music. That’s obvious, right? Certainly you tune your ears a bit with known tracks before starting a mix session. But have you been listening to those tracks on those other systems too, learning what the mixes you like do in those situations? That can be quite enlightening and pretty encouraging too, because no, the great mixers’ stuff doesn’t necessarily sound that great on a pillow speaker! If it sounds better than yours though, think about why. What do you hear, and how can you get it?

This kind of critical listening is just that – critical – and you will be glad you upped the ante on perspective. There is a limit, and at some point you need to go ahead and finish and move on, but there’s great value in listening around, as it were. Try it, you’ll like it!

I’m a producer, vocalist, pianist and listen differenter. Look for me on Twitter or Facebook at @AaronJTrumm.

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Audio Instruction

Recording Piano Wrong

How breaking the rules can transform your piano recordings

Oddball Placements

The Hole

Under The Piano

The Foot

Wrong Mics

Mess With the Piano

Play With the Playing

There Are No Rules

Art vs. Science in Mixing – and Life?

Signal Flow Part 1

Signal flow fundamentals

Typical scenarios

Mixers

Digital recording

Feeding Back

Improving your tracks by soliciting critique

An Ever-Widening Circle

The Inner Sanctum

First Steps Into The World

Going Semi-Public

The Art Of Solicitation

Giving Feedback

Go Around Again

Could It Be The Drums?

Modern use of drums is different now

It’s Not Just The Instrument

It COULD Be The Instrument

It Could Be Both

It Could Be The Mix

It Could Be Everything

Stretching The Budget

How to get the biggest bang for your recording studio buck

Pre-Production

Rehearsal

Writing And Arranging

Session Planning

Use The Right Room

Gear Maintenance

Studio Day

Mixing

Mastering

The After Party

Master Your Own Domain

When (and how) to master your own mixes

But Wait!

That’s Great But…

New Ground Rules

Study The Game

Finish Strong

It’s A Small World, After All

These days, you can collaborate with anyone, anywhere

Not Really New

Many Ways

“Offline” Sharing

Cloud Based Session Sharing

Fully Real Time

Actual Jamming?

Finding New Collaborators

A Small World

Turn It Down, Sonny!

Listening at the right volume levels

Listen Different