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[alexkernsaudio]

It’s nearing the end of the semester here at Capital University, and I’ve just finished my latest project. I’ve had the great pleasure of recording a fabulous artist from Columbus, Ohio, Paisha Thomas. I had to contact over 20 musicians before I came in contact with Paisha who was willing to do some tracking with me.  An enormous amount of weight was lifted off my shoulders at that point, and I feel that the project turned out nicely. Above, you can listen to my finished mix using the embedded SoundCloud player.

Here’s Paisha in the live room. In this project, I decided some background vocals recorded into an omnidirectional room mic would fit with the song and I would say it turned out well! The room mic I chose to use was an SE tube mic, which had a really great sound to use specifically as a tube mic in my opinion.

Here’s the drummer, Troy. He had a lot of fun laying down the drums for this track. I’m really happy with the sound I got out of this drum miking technique. Before this session, I referred back to my textbook from intro to recording, and reviewing the material from that helped me formulate how I wanted to mic the drums in this session. The way I miked the cymbals/overheads was different this time than I usually do, and I can say I’m much happier with the way this technique sounds rather than my old ways of doing it.

This is Paisha in the vocal booth. It’s really hard to take good pictures in the studio since all the windows are tilted all different angles to help with isolation, which creates a lot of glare off the window. You can see I had a Shure SM7B and a Neumann U87 microphone set up in the vocal booth. This is because I wanted to have Paisha test out her voice on both mics to see which one we liked best. Once we made a decision, we just kept it plugged in, and rolled the session. We ended up like the Neumann more than the Shure, because Paisha’s voice sounds phenomenal and full, and the U87 tends to capture all that fullness and natural clarity from a vocalist.

Stan Smith, one of the most popular guitarists in central Ohio, is a friend of Paisha’s and came in on a different day and in a different studio to record some guitar for her. I let Stan choose how he wanted his guitar to be recorded, because he’s somewhat particular about his guitar sound. I was surprised when he told me he wanted to record via DI. I ran the DI into a Neve Portico preamp, which also had a compressor in it, and I used that compressor very slightly to help the guitar be more up-front in the mix. After a few takes, Stan had nailed it, and we had a really good sounding track already.

Since we booked a second studio session, Paisha came in the studio with Stan and I to essentially produce the guitar parts that Stan was adding to her track. While she was there, she wanted to add some more background vocals. The way Paisha records, she rarely needs more than one or two takes. She’s quite a talented vocalist, and she knocks it out of the park.

Now for the worst picture from the sessions, here’s Paisha playing some keyboard. Recording keyboard for this track was a fiasco, because Paisha brought her own keyboard and was going to play it herself, despite usually having a keyboardist do it. Sadly, when she brought her keyboard in, she realized she left the power cable to the keyboard at her house and could not use it. The studios at capital do not have keyboards in them, so I had to think of a solution. In order to get some sort of keys down on this track, I ran back to my apartment and grabbed my crappy Yamaha beginner keyboard, which only has a 1/4 inch stereo output. It just so happens that there are no 1/4 inch stereo splitter cables in the studios, so I had made the executive decision to just mic up the crappy keyboard. In order to take the brash high end of the keyboard’s speakers, I set up two Royer ribbon microphones for each speaker to track the keyboard. Miking a keyboard like this is not a technique I had ever learned throughout my time here at Capital, but I really had no other choice. My perceived outcome of the keyboard was that it would sound horrible, like a bad-sounding midi keyboard (which it is), but somehow in post-processing, I was able to make the sound a bit more convincing. The whole keyboard experience was honestly a really important lesson for me.

Here’s the patchbay for this project. It looks a little daunting, but it was all quite organized! Now that I’ve finished this project, I feel like I’ve learned a lot from it, and made some good recording connections on the way. Recording local artists feels nice to me, as if I’m being productive for my city’s local art scene. Continuing on to earn my degree, I’d like to collaborate with some of the bigger and more prominent local artists in central Columbus, and lucky for me, a lot of them are here at Capital!

I hope you enjoyed this post, and thanks for reading and listening! Until next time!

[alexkernsaudio]

AutoTune was an unexplored concept to me until now. I finally got my hands on the plugin to see how it really works. I did my best to listen critically to what the ideal performance was supposed to sound like, and I think I did alright. Looking back, my biggest issue might’ve been the retune speed, and wrong notes at the beginning of the chorus. The ‘make notes’ function in Anteres AutoTune gave me the note that you hear in the track which is why I went with it, but I wish I would have also made a version with the note I would have expected to be right. I had a fun time tracing the notes for each vocal track. It felt like an expensive adult connect-the-dots. When I was retuning, I found myself using the function where you can click and hold on a created note to hear the pitch it resembles. That function turned out to be really useful, because while I was working on tracing the tuning for the vocal, I would have the end result in my head, and hearing that tone would let me know if the pitch was correct or not. On another note, I had some fun with the mix on this project. I tried out some very heavy compression on the lead vocals and a bus for the drums. For the guitar and lead vocals, I incorporated a slapback delay to give a club performance-like feel to the tune. I also added some chorus on the vocal harmonies to spice it up a bit. When we’re artificially changing the pitch which sounds unnatural, why not add to the effect so you make it clear that you intended for it to sound that way. The last thing I should mention about this project is that I had a lot of trouble when I tried to work on the project on another computer. Sitting down at my session in a different room and pressing play to hear that all your vocal harmonies are gone is not a pleasant feeling whatsoever. I discovered that when you track time and pitch in AutoTune, the files are not stored within your ProTools folder. In my instance, I found them in the directory Users>Me>Library>Application Support>Anteres. To this moment, I still don’t know why they made the files so hard to find, let alone why they don’t just save directly in your project folder as “Plugin Files” or something like that. Nevertheless, my original files were deleted before I could retrieve them, so I had to redo the AutoTuning process all over again, and this time I made sure to make the folder directory point to my project folder instead. Having completed this assignment, I feel quite accomplished and I learned a lot. There are people who have a job doing only this, I hear, and I think I would enjoy that, seeing as how much fun I had with this project.

Thanks for reading! Keep posted for more projects.

-Alex

[alexkernsaudio]

In this project, I did a second shootout in the studio, but this time, I decided to shootout some mic preamps. The preamps I used were a Focusrite ISA828, Manley Force, Neve Portico 911, and UA 4-710D. The microphone I used to record into all these preamps was a Neumann U87. I’ll be describing my experiences recording, as well as my opinions on each preamp and some of the ways I went about this project.

As you’ll hear in the attached examples, I chose to record a rap verse and a vocal percussion verse through each preamp. In my research, I tried to find an article for both, but in the end, I felt as though a more broad approach would prove more useful. To show you what I mean, I found an article here on the website of Universal Audio which explains how the professionals decide which preamp they want to use. After reading this article, one of the biggest things I pulled away from it was that there are several stages of when and how to change your sound. The first stage is the musician. They are the one orchestrating the sound, so they are the foremost in charge of the sound. Second would be the instrument. If your instrument doesn’t sound good to the human ear, it won’t sound good through speakers. Third would be the microphone you choose. Microphones vary drastically in color and frequency response, which is what makes them third important. And finally, the fourth important aspect to your sound is the preamp you use. One of the engineers which commented in this article mentioned that the amount of change your sound goes through when it is amplified from mic level to line level is what makes having a good preamp so important. Without a decent preamp, you will be amplifying with a poor sound, which is exactly what no engineer ever wants. I kept this in mind while doing this project, so I made sure to think about what preamps I chose to use for the project. Although there is plenty information of preamps in general on the internet, when I was searching for an article about recording beatboxing, there wasn’t much information about preamps and vocal percussion. Primarily what I found was along the lines of what was said in this article. Essentially, just use a dynamic mic, put a pop filter in front of it for plosives, EQ a lot, and essentially do whatever you need to make it sound as close to a real drum kit as possible. Maybe this project will give us more insight to what kind of preamps might be better for recording beatboxing.

The first piece of gear, The Focusrite ISA828, I had heard before I started this project is a quite vanilla and accurate-sounding preamp to use on anything. I chose this preamp for the project expecting that it might show some of those traits against the other three choices. The second preamp used is the Manley Force. I can’t say I’ve used this preamp much before, as it looks a lot like a poorly-designed kid’s toy. From my experience, the Manley is not really a go-to preamp for the music tech students, but to each their own. That’s what this project is all about. Next in the lineup, we have the Neve Portico 911. Throughout my experience at Capital so far studying recording technologies, I have heard nothing but good things about Rupert Neve designs and Portico equipment. Even the engineer we talked to on a trip to Nashville wouldn’t shut up about his beloved portico. But what’s so special about them? Hopefully we’ll see. Last but not least, we have the UA 4-710D. My personal favorite of the four, I’ve used the UAs on many of my projects in the past, as they haven’t done me any wrong so far. They’re quite reliable sound-wise, and most other preamps don’t have bot input-output knobs, which adds a new realm of sonic properties to the preamp. We’ll see how my preferred piece of gear holds up to the others. Here are the settings I used for each of my preamps:

To preface my scientific approach to this project, I did not use any EQ or compression on these tracks. What you hear is the raw signal straight from microphone through the preamp and bounced. To start off, you can find all the examples I’m about to discuss embedded at the top of this post. First up is the Focusrite. Listening to this preamp, I immediately like it more than I was expecting to. It sounds quite pleasant; not sharp or pointy, but smooth and clean. A great choice for this voice in particular. Manley Force is up next, and it seems like the Manley is a bit less high-frequency intensive as the Focusrite. In my opinion, it’s a good difference that sounds natural to male rap vocals. Third is the Neve Portico. Here’s the hard one for me to judge, because it just sounds brash to me, and the performance was a tad sub-par, but we’ll make do. Although the sound is a bit abrasive to me, I can hear a good spectrum of frequency that the first two preamps haven’t had to this extent. Our UA plays the caboose, starting off a little aggressive, but later on, it ends up sounding quite natural and clean to me. I like the warmth and tube-like quality to it, and there’s not really any issues or abrasive frequencies that stick out.

To conclude this post, I’ve ranked these four preamps from best to worst (in my opinion of course). Here’s what I came up with:

1. UA

2. Focusrite

3. Manley

4. Neve

My outcome of this project may be surprising to you, but I have an explanation. The clip of the UA does start out a little gross, but I think that’s because of the performance, not the preamp. Listening late on, you’ll hear a very clear representation of the rapper’s voice, that is easy to listen to. Don’t get mad at me Neve fans, because I have a reason for Neve’s last place decision as well. There’s just something about the Neve that makes the vocalist sound nasally, boxy, and growly. It’s just naturally hard on the ears. But I should mention that this may only be because it’s being used on a male rapper. It could have a completely different outcome on any other type of performer.

Thank you for reading my blog and listen to my project. I hope you enjoyed it!

-Alex

[alexkernsaudio]

After several hours of mixing, I am proud to present the final product of my recent project, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness Pt. II by Wasp Factory. I feel as though my initial mix was strong, but it still had some changes to be made. Some Changes I had emphasized were along the lines of making the lead vocals less pointy, bringing the background vocals more up front, bringing the guitar up a bit, and making the drums less ambient. I think i did a decent job at fixing these issues, and I hope you can see what I mean when you listen to the final mix.

Apart from changes I had to make to the initial mix, I’ll also talk about how I got my mix to sound this way in general. First of all, when I mix, one of the very first things I do is slap a 7-band EQ on almost everything in the track. Then, I go through and begin EQ-ing out all the ‘bad’ frequencies in each instrument. If possible, I also try to eliminate extra noise and muddiness to make room for more instruments.

When I was in Nashville recently, I learned that most engineers will EQ before they use compression, because you don’t want to compress a bad signal from the beginning. So that’s exactly what I did. In my initial mix, you may notice that my drums don’t sound very punchy, and they seem to be in the back of the mix. Getting around to refining the mix led me to discover that all my compressors were set to a very fast attack. The attack of a compressor determines how fast a compressor reacts to an incoming signal, so my super fast compressors were smashing the signal far before the meatiness of the transients. Once I slowed all the attacks, the drums popped right out like I wanted them to.

Finally, another important change I made had to do with the pointiness of the lead vocals. This track is sort of punk-rock, so I wanted to do everything I could to make it sound like a punk-rock track, which is why i made a telephone effect for the lead vocals. The way you do this is by putting high- and low-cut filters on your vocal, and dial them in so most of the band is between 500-10k Hz. Sadly, I boosted some frequencies which gave the vocals a sharp sound, so I got rid of those boosts and instead widened the range of the filters a bit, and mixed in a bit of the dry vocal along with the telephone vocal. This method proved effective, because it lessened the sharp, annoying effect, and it made the words a bit easier to understand.

I hope you enjoy listening to my final mix of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness by Wasp Factory!

[alexkernsaudio]

This is a tracking project I had where I recorded Wasp Factory at Capital University. This is the raw unmixed bounce of the tracking session.

As I advance in my recording endeavors, I had an opportunity to record a punk band called Wasp Factory with one of my classmates. I myself am not a big fan of punk rock, but I never complain about the opportunity to record a full band. This session was done solely in Studio F here at Capital University, within the studio reservation span of four hours. Here’s how the session went and some of the things I learned during it.

The first thing that’s required of the engineer at the beginning of every session is always to set up the microphones, mic stands, headphones, plug the mics in, test for signal, and create an input list. Out of the entire session, this part took the most time and was the most annoying in my opinion. Especially when you have the band come in and set up at the same time. Once we got all that figured out, almost an hour had gone by. It’s crazy to think that people in Nashville are able to get all that stuff done in about 15 minutes. Nevertheless, we moved on to the tracking portion, which is where the real fun begins. Wasp Factory has three members: lead guitar/background vocals, bass/lead vocals, and a drummer. I made the decision to have the drummer in the live room, and the guitarist and bassist in their own respective isolation booths. We also set up talkback mics for each of them, so we could all communicate when they weren’t recording.

After we got a good full take of the song, we did vocal overdubs and auxiliary percussion, which were both pieces of cake, but for the first few vocal overdub takes, I ended up realizing I had set the backup vocalist’s preamp input way too high, which made her first few takes sound distorted. I kind of liked the sound of it after listening to it a couple times, but just for good measure, I decided to reset the preamp settings to sound a bit better, then have her do the take one more time. Lastly, auxiliary percussion was required for this project, so we couldn’t really think of what to add to the song. So as a means of appeasing our professor, we added some girly-pop-like tambourine hits to the track, which I hope to find a way to use, maybe by adding some distortion or crazy chorus to mix with the rest of the grimy sound.

Here are a few photos from the session, a video, and the initial tracking mix that we ended up with. I hope you enjoy it!

[alexkernsaudio]

Slate Trigger 2!

The Slate Trigger 2 plugin is a new discovery of mine, which turned out to be lots of fun to use. This plugin allows the user to set a threshold for an audio track, and whenever the amplitude of the track rises above the set threshold, any sound samples loaded into the plugin will be triggered. You may load several samples into the plugin, and each sample may be panned and mixed independent of each other. The Slate Trigger 2 plugin proves extremely useful when you want to replace a particular recurring sound that isn’t very dynamically consistent. An important tip when you use this plugin is to make sure you go into the settings and declare what the sample folder directory will be. Without doing this, you may not find your samples very easily. Here are the settings I used for my kick and snare in my most recent mix, Tying the Noose:

[alexkernsaudio]

Elastic Audio!

Elastic audio in ProTools: One of the most important abilities an engineer should be aware of when editing drums. Elastic audio is an ability which allows a ProTools user to essentially move parts of an audio track to a new, nearby location, without severely affecting audio quality. All you have to do is set your track’s elastic audio algorithm, then change your track view to ‘warp’ and voila! You are ready to use elastic audio. From this point of view, the easiest way to just get started is to shift-click any of the vertical lines which pop up at the beginning of the transients in your audio clip. This will create parameters around one of the transients, allowing you to move one transient and keep the outer transients in place. The biggest piece of advice I can give for using elastic audio is don’t get upset if you seemingly screwed up your track by putting an elastic audio warp marker in the wrong spot. Mistakes are surprisingly easy to fix, since the ‘remove warp marker’ option will snap the edited transient back to its original location. Here is a before and after of the kick track in my most recent project I’ve worked on, Tying the Noose:

You might be able to see that the second picture, after elastic audio, looks much more consistent. This is what makes elastic audio so useful.

[alexkernsaudio]

Here’s my most recent project I’ve worked on. The goal was to use elastic audio to best represent a good performance by the drummer. I also used the Slate Trigger 2 plugin in order to replace the kick and snare with samples. Give it a listen!

[alexkernsaudio]

My most recent project completed was a microphone shootout using female vocals. I’m going to describe some things I discovered, how I went about this project, and how I would personally rank the four microphones I used. Before I get to that, I should extend an important thank you to Audrey Watkins, my participant who was willing to sing a few bars for me to record. Now here’s what I found by pursuing this project:

By doing some research online, I discovered this article, in which the author shares their top 9 microphones to record female vocals, and as to be expected, the Neumann U87 is on the list. But the important thing to note is the author had this to say about the mic: “To best describe the Neumann U87 Ai sound quality without using the word professional is best described as ‘authoritative clarity.’ It captures the most identical sound to the singer’s voice of every microphone I have ever heard in my career.” This is an important thing to note about this microphone, because I’ll get to formulate my own opinion on the same microphone in a little bit. Another piece of research which I consider important is this vocal mic shootout I found on YouTube. In the video, you’ll see that the engineers have each microphone lined up, but a foot or two away from each other. I didn’t really like this setup, because this means the vocalist has to do a different performance for each microphone. So the idea I came up with to differ from this type of setup is putting all four microphones in a formation in which the capsules are as close together as possible, and the same distance from the performer. That way, you can have one take which is an identical take for each microphone, so you can hear the most subtle nuances between the microphones which you may not be able to hear if you record each microphone separately. 

Now for the microphones I used. As I mentioned earlier, I chose four different microphones to use in my shootout:

Royer 122

Neumann U87

Shure SM57

SE Z5600a

The Royer 122 is a ribbon microphone which requires phantom power. The Neumann U87 is an industry standard large diaphragm condenser microphone. Most audio engineers are familiar with the Shure SM57; a dynamic $99 workhorse that you can use on almost anything. Lastly, the SE Z5600a is a tube microphone, plain and simple. I ran all these microphones as cardioid (with the exception of the Royer ribbon) through a UA 4-710d preamp with settings that produced an as-close-as-possible input volume into ProTools.

https://soundcloud.com/user-465745228/royer-vocal

Here’s what the performance sounded like through the Royer. With a critical ear, you’ll notice the sound of the vocalist’s voice is very warm, yet crisp. Ribbon microphones are known to have an exceptionally warm tone to them, but there’s something about the Royer which makes the sound extra clear. But the one thing I don’t like about the Royer is how it brings out some specific frequencies which make the vocalist sound a bit nasally, and the word nasal is never one you want to hear in the studio.

https://soundcloud.com/user-465745228/neumann-vocal

The second microphone, the Neumann U87, produced a fantastic raw image of the vocalist’s take. The clarity was basically immaculate, with a very flat frequency response. Accuracy is key in the studio, and listening to this microphone sounds almost exactly like the take in real life. It’s these characteristics which make the U87 so audibly pleasing.

https://soundcloud.com/user-465745228/shure-vocal

Next we have the Shure SM57, a live sound staple. Listening to the take, you’ll hear some humming on the track. This is not from the studio equipment, but from the mic. I’m not sure (haha) if all SM57s do this, but this particular microphone had some ground shortage noise which immediately took away from the pure sound. On top of that flaw, once you start to pay attention to the vocals, you’ll hear how boxy the microphone truly is. It doesn’t sound like a studio quality microphone at all, but I think that’s mostly because we’re using it on female vocals, which is one of the most nuanced things to record to begin with. And not to rub salt in the wound, but overall the mic just has a weak sound.

https://soundcloud.com/user-465745228/se-vocal

Our last competitor is the SE Z5600a. This tube microphone showed an immediate issue similar to the SM57; it has a noise issue. I know that this particular microphone has a tube amp which needs to be plugged into the wall, and that’s most likely where all the noise is coming from, but it’s just unprofessional to have noise in your recordings. But if you look the hum, you can hear that the microphone is actually quite clear. It shows a strong midrange response and the fricatives are very pleasant and not overwhelming. Overall, this mic captures the full range of the voice quite well, but the noise takes away from a lot of its potential.

Now that we’ve looked over all four microphones, I have come up with a personal ranking on our four microphones from best to worst. In my opinion, I think the Neumann U87 hit it out of the park. Now I know it might seem like I’m a little biased having been a U87 fan before I started the project and after reading that article from earlier, but I truly think the Neumann would be my go-to microphone for recording female vocals in a professional studio setting. There just seemed to be nothing wrong with it.

For second place, I would put the Royer ribbon microphone. I love the way the Royer sounds on female vocals especially because the warmer tone brings out the quieter low tones in a female voice. Sadly, since this microphone sounds a bit nasally, I’m going to put it below the U87.

Our third place winner is the SE tube microphone. I know the noise is extremely annoying, and it is definitely noticeable, but the great sound almost makes up for it. The mic gives a full tone and wide frequency response with exceptional clarity and that’s why I have it at third place and not last.

To finalize this project, the Shure SM57 comes in last place. When used on female vocals, the hum can get a little obnoxious, but when paired with a boxy and weak sound and very unpredictable proximity effect, this microphone just shouldn’t be used on female vocals unless you’re in a pinch. I know the other microphones are around 20X more expensive than this one, but if you want a good vocal recording that’s not weak and shrill, then consider using a microphone other than the SM57.

Thanks for reading and listening to my female vocal microphone shootout. Stay tuned for more intriguing projects and experiments in the future!

-Alex

[alexkernsaudio]

I am Dante certified! Audinate’s Dante solution is mind-blowing once you learn about it. It can handle 512 bi-directional audio channels with around 1 ms of latency. That’s nuts! Not to mention all those channels if audio are running at 44.1kHz/24bit! Having finished my certification, I know much more about how Dante technology works and how I can apply it in the studio.