Brian’s Bedroom

As Mike said in the previous post, things have been a little hairy on this side, so I must apologise for the lack of new content over the last few weeks. With the formalities out of the way, let’s get started with the good stuff…

When recording acoustic guitars, it is typically best to use a microphone rather than its built in pickup. The reason for this is that an acoustic guitar is known for its acoustic sound (i.e. the “natural” sound it makes in a room) rather than for the electronically reproduced sound its pickup would create. However, the quality of the recording is also highly dependent on the quality of the mic. So, this leaves you with two options: either buy a decent mic (preferably a condenser mic), or use the built-in pickup if it sounds better than your cheap mic.

Okay, so I’ve now convinced you to get a decent mic, and you probably think that it makes no difference where the mic is placed, as long as it’s fairly close to the guitar. Well, that’s simply not true, your mic placement is extremely important. Let me explain…

If you place the mic far from the guitar you will get more of a room sound than a defined guitar sound. In other words, your guitar track will sound quite spacious, as if there was a reverb effect on it. On the other hand, if you place your mic close to the guitar, you will get more guitar sound than room sound. This seems pretty obvious, and it is… but sometimes it’s good to hear the basics. I can see you’re a bit disappointed, so let’s go a little deeper…

If you place your mic close to the bridge, you will get a very twangy sound (i.e. loud mid to high frequencies with little bass) and you will also hear the pick hitting the strings. However, if you place the mic close to the bottom of the neck, you will get a bassier/warmer sound. The reason for this is that the strings have more room to move on here than they would at the bridge, meaning that the higher frequencies of the note are produced where the string is tight and the lower frequencies are produced where the strings are loose. You may not want to place your mic right by the sound hole because it is typically too bassy and loud there, so your mic will start clipping.

You can see from the pictures below, that I like to place my mic by the bottom of the bridge, but aimed towards my strumming hand. By placing my mic here, I will get a warm mix (meaning a mix with a fair amount of bass but still with a defined mid and high tone). By aiming the mic towards the strumming hand, the sound of the pick hitting the strings will become clearer, which most artists consider to be a good thing because it adds definition. The nice thing about this setup is that if you want to remove bass later, it is simple to add a high-pass filter in Ardour (or any other DAW) to get a thinner and clearer mix.

I have recorded the sound of the guitar whilst moving the mic from the nut to the bridge and whilst moving closer to and further away from the guitar. Once you hear this, you will understand completely what I’ve been trying to get down in writing. The MP3 is available from the link below:

AcousticMicing.MP3 (1,619 kB)

Other posts you might find interesting:
What Gives a Guitar its Tone?
Microphone Review: Shure’s SM57
Sound Proofing and Room Acoustic Basics
Sound Mixing Tips: EQ vs Volume
Stereo Panning Tips: Panning for Gold

Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. Brian and I have been insanely busy with work.

One of the biggest problems with using Ardour is the ridiculous number of LADSPA effects plugins that are available. It’s not easy to find a good plugin and you end up wasting a lot of time trying all the different compressors, reverbs and EQ’s.

To help you out, Ardour has posted a new page on plugins with recommended EQ, dynamics, reverbs and other plugins. It also tells you where to get more plugins if you’re collecting them:)
If you want to recommend a plugin to Ardour, you can comment on the original plugin page annoucement.

Other posts you might find interesting:
My Favourite Linux Audio Effects
Using a Bus to Route Effects in Ardour
Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 3: Adding Effects to the Ardour Drumtrack
An Overview of Compression
Sound Mixing Tips: EQ vs Volume

When using computer audio effects, one must always bear in mind that your poor computer has to calculate the effect output everytime you play back your tracks. So when you go too crazy with effects, your computer will probably seize up, roll-over and die! To save your computer, it is important to use buses to route repeated effects in Ardour.

Okay, maybe that sounds like complete gibberish… but please bear with me and you’ll soon understand what I mean. Let’s take an example of a multichannel recording of a drumbeat in Ardour (i.e. one channel for snare, one for the kick drum, etc.). For each drum, you would want to add certain effects like an EQ, reverb, and compressor. One way to do this is to add the effects to each channel like in the figure below.

Since you would want the same sounding reverb on each drum, your poor computer has to calculate the same thing multiple times. This is unnecessary because you can create a bus and route all the drum channels to it and then only put one reverb on the bus. This method achieves the same sound whilst your computer does less. You can do this by following the steps below:

Firstly, you need to create a new bus. Go to Session, and click on Add Track/Bus. Configure the window that appears to look like the one shown below. i.e. select Busses and Stereo.

You now need to route all your drum channels to the bus (I have renamed mine to be DrumBus). You do this by right-clicking on the black rectangle below the volume fader (this is called the “post effects” for the track). A menu should appear and you must select New Send… Configure yours to look like the one shown below. You do this by firstly adding an output (click the Add Output button) and then selecting where you want the output to go. In this case you choose DrumBus/in1 and DrumBus/in2 from the Ardour tab on the right of the window.

Since you have rerouted the output of the each drum track, it no longer needs to be connected to the Master Bus. So disconnect it by clicking on the Output button (just above the Comments button) at the bottm of each drum channel and select Disconnect. Your drums should all be sounding through your Drum bus. This means that if you adjust the DrumBus volume, all the drums’ volumes should change. It also means that any effects you use on the drum bus will be applied over the whole drum kit. The figure below shows how the bus greatly reduces the amount of reverb effects used.

Note that I have left the EQs and Compressors in each channel and not on the bus. This is done because the EQs and Compressors are set differently on each drum and thus cannot be applied to the whole kit via the bus. I hope you found this tip useful, and that your computer will also appreciate it :). A special thanks goes out to Jakob Lund for suggesting this method of adding multiple effects.

Other posts you might find interesting:
Audio Recording in Ubuntu Studio - Part 3: Adding Effects to the Ardour Drumtrack
My Favourite Linux Audio Effects
An Overview of Compression
Panning for Gold : How to Pan Tracks
Mastering Tips: A Picture Says a Thousand Words

What are the last words a drummer says in a band?

…”Hey guys, why don’t we try one of my songs?”

As you should know if you read my previous beat templates post, Hydrogen Drumbeat Templates - A Non-drummer’s Best Friend, I have been creating beat templates in order to help non-drummers write better songs in Hydrogen. The basic idea is that you download the Hydrogen song which has many different patterns in it and rearrange these patterns until it suits your song.

In this post I present you with my second ever beat template which focuses around the funk genre. These beats, however, can be used in most genres such as rock, hip-hop, pop and even metal at times. You can download this template from the link below.

The actual template: BriansBeatsFUNK.h2song (235 kB)
Note: These songs require the YamahaVintageKit available for download from here.

A MP3 sample of the template: FUNKBeatsExample.mp3 (837 kB)
The Hydrogen song of the MP3: FUNKBeatsExample.h2song (235 kB)

Once again, I have only used a closed hi-hat for the right-hand rhythm, however it is easy enough to interchange this with whatever suits you, like the ride, open hats, or crash. Just copy the same pattern on the ride, or crash and then delete the notes from the hi-hat. I hope you enjoy creating new beats!

Other posts you might find interesting:
Hydrogen Drumkits
My Attempt at a Hydrogen Drumkit
Pimp my Hydrogen Beats
Making a Roll Sound Realistic
Sunday Bloody Sunday Hydrogen Beat

It is quite obvious that the better the equipment you use, the better your recordings will sound. However, as you all know, I’m a cheapo and try to focus on doing things cheaply with the best results.

The first proper pieces of equipment you should look at buying are decent microphones. This will improve your sound drastically. Different microphones have different applications, but for a cheap home setup the most important aspect to look at is versatility. You will want two types of mics: a decent instrument mic like the SM57 and then a decent condenser mic for practically everything else. A dynamic mic uses a diaphragm and an electromagnetic coil to induce a voltage signal, whereas a condenser mic uses a diaphragm and an electrostatic plate (capacitive effect). If that confused you, don’t worry it’s not too important - it just means that dynamic and condenser mics record sound differently and will thus have different sounding outputs.

The first decent microphone I ever bought was Shure’s SM57 instrument/vocal mic and it has served me well. The picture below shows what it looks like:

The SM57 is said to be one of the best mics for use on guitar amps, drums, wind instruments and is therefore very versatile. You can see from its frequency spectrum below, that it has an excellent mid-frequency response which gets a little wobbly towards the high-end. This explains its claim to fame, because electric guitars and drums dominate the mid-range. The SM57 is actually the exact same mic as the common SM58 vocal mic, it just doesn’t have a pop filter. It can therefore be used, with quite nice results, as a live vocal mic as well. For studio vocals, a condenser mic is better as it has a flatter high-range, but as a cheapo, this mic will work there too.

Another cool aspect of this mic is what Shure calls the “proximity effect“. This suggests that the closer the sound source is to the mic, the louder the bass response, meaning you can get some serious punch out of your mic. I highly recommend that you check this mic out if you are looking to improve your sound with equipment. For more information you can check out the Shure website.

Other posts you might find interesting:
Firewire Audio Recording Devices
Sound Proofing and Room Acoustics Basics
Monitor/Speaker Placement
What Gives a Guitar its Tone?
Sound Mixing Tips: High There?!