Some basic, but valuable audio concepts that is guaranteed to improve your recordings.

Ok, I have recently been given total power of my blog information. What does this mean to you? Well, this blog is more of “me” than any of the previous ones. Thank you for being patient and continuing to follow The Summing Amp. Something I find extremely fascinating is sound wave propagation. It grabs me because of the enormous effect this information has on my recordings. Recently I spoke of using your ears and how important it is to really know sound, to use the room as a tool and shy away from the saturation of plug-ins and I stand behind every word. However, there is a never-ending fountain of information about audio capture and vessel of knowledge that can never be filled. Most of us know about different mic placements and even digging into that bag of ingenuity to invent weird ways to capture audio, but sometimes overlooked is the use of multiple mics to capture audio sources. Again, if the information I am giving is old to you I apologize. Sometimes starting at the very beginning, regardless of how many years you have been engineering, is the best way to gain proper support for more advanced techniques. Ok, I am off my soapbox now. The 3:1 rule of mic placement states; when you are using two mics to capture a source, you should place the second mic three times the distance away from the source as the first mic. In an easy to understand example, if your first mic is one foot away from the source your second mic should be three feet from the source. Easy enough, right? To go a bit deeper down the rabbit hole, monitoring the audio you have captured is just as important as capturing the audio. There is the concept of 1/8 space which states; when a speaker or sound source is placed in a corner, near three surfaces like the junction of the two walls and the floor, the source is said to be in 1/8th space. Taking the same concept, a source against one wall is in half space and a source between two walls in quarter space. When a source is near a wall or solid reflective obstruction, the sources spherical propagation quickly arrives at the obstruction and leaves generating more energy forward. Think of a splashing pool of water against a retaining wall or a dock pillar. When the water hits the wall, it splashes and makes waves in the opposite direction and sound is closely related. When the source is in 1/8th space for example, it yields an increase of approximately 3dB more than quarter space, and 6dB more than half space. Take this concept into consideration when you are setting up your listening environment. I would strongly suggest researching any books or articles on acoustics, critical listening, and sound propagation for a deeper look at the endless amounts of information on the subject. Staying within our sound environment, there is another rule called the 2:1 rule of ambience. Now check this out, to capture an equal amount of room ambience, a Cardioid mic must be placed twice as far away from a sound source as an Omni directional mic. Keep this in mind when you are trying to capture a sweet sounding room’s natural sound to mix in later. These are just a few, and very basic concepts and rules for properly capturing sound. I urge you to do your own research, along with following The Summing Amp, to further your knowledge of audio and to greatly improve the quality of your recordings. I promise, each blog and the blog site will improve with each post from now on. Thanks Ron, and thanks to Todd Childress and many others for my invaluable knowledge of audio. I am forever changed…

Don't Forget About Your Ears!

I stumbled upon this YouTube video of famed mix engineer Eric “ET” Thorngren talking about recording and some of the ways he goes about capturing audio. Eric has mixed tracks for Bob Marley, The Talking Heads, Joe Strummer, and Robert Palmer just to name a few. I enjoyed him because of his extremely charismatic way of painting his verbal pictures, and in this way he supported his ears over making audio mixing an exact science. I know what some of you are saying, duh! Really, how many times have you caught yourself with a measuring tape and a calculator trying to capture the best audio possible? I know many times I am guilty of just that. Lately, I have been researching any source I can find to try and expand my mental boundaries with the whole recording process. I have noticed as of late, my mixes are really sounding at least eighty percent better than they were and it made me wonder what I had done differently. I will tell you what it was, the way I was capturing the audio in the beginning. Simple things like gain staging and input levels; along with trusting my ears have made a noticeable improvement in my mixes. It is true that the most important step in recording is the capturing of audio, that is the foundation for your future mix. I started researching older engineers and the techniques they used on the classic albums before and during my youth. The Beach Boys, Robert Palmer, Kenny Loggins, Motown, and all the 50’s and 60’s bands were the sounds that surrounded Mike the kid. All of that older class and great music mixed with my love of the 80’s bands that were closer to my generational taste have produced my personal musical pallet. It surprises me that even with the ease and comfort of recording and mixing in the digital realm, the newer engineers in the industry don’t employee the older techniques more. That long story brings me to the present; I took this though process and started analyzing the rooms I was recording in to optimize captured audio according to the frequency response in different areas of the room. I focused on the frequency diagrams of the microphones I have at my disposal. Recently, I have been recording a lot of voice-overs and radio spots and I used an AT2020 with two Sampson CO2 pencil condensors to pick up sweet spots in the room. I haven’t used more than a peppering of a plug-in style reverb unit in weeks, the room will provide all the reverb you need. These older analogue techniques along with using my ears to do more than numbers and formulas have worked out in spades. However, I agree with what Frank Zappa said, “You must first know the rules before you can break the rules.” I think you should know the ways audio reacts with our environment to be able to make the decisions about the room you will need to make. In the case of Mr. Thorngren, I think sometime the question is best answered by tuning in with your ears, even if you can’t quite explain it in words. Hope you enjoyed this blog, I have grown as an audio engineer by thinking more about this and the way it affects my work. Until next time…