Cheap Advice On Music

If you have a set of electronic drums, you know how many sounds there are available for each kind of drum. My Yamaha DTX system has dozens of options each for the snare, the cymbals, the high-hat (open hit, closed hit, and pedal closure), and so on. The thing is, there is no limit on which sound can be mapped to which pad, meaning that you don’t have to assign snare sounds to the snare pad, tom sounds to the tom pads, etc. Anything can be anything!

One song I wrote preceded each verse with a snappy “ba-da-BAP” fill, with the “BAP” on the 4-beat just before the verse started. The “ba-da” was to be sixteenth notes on the kick. Um, sorry, I just can’t reliably hit the kick that fast in time. Now what? Once I realized I wasn’t using the floor tom pad anywhere in the song, I remapped it to the same sound and settings as the kick pad. Then I simply played the tricky fill with sticks on the floor tom and snare pads. But it sounds like I’m really fast on the kick!

[A longer version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Home Recording.]

Those of us who record and mix music in our home studios have become quite familiar with the use of effects like reverb and delay, usually applied during mixing, to enhance the sound of the basic recorded tracks and to help the pieces of the mix “fit together” properly. But what if the band is playing live, using a PA system, instead of laying down tracks in the studio? Do we really need to bring along our whole arsenal of studio effects?

A key difference between the live situation and the studio situation is that a PA system, where the live effects would be added, is generally used mostly or entirely for vocals (see my article Using Onstage Amps vs. Playing Through the PA for some thoughts about using the PA for instruments as well as vocals), whereas in the studio, every instrument and vocal, even the drums, can have effects added.

Another reason to focus primarily on vocal effects in a live situation is that the instruments typically have effects added to them before they get to the PA. I am thinking of the “stomp boxes” or multi-effect units that guitarists often insert between the guitar and the amp, and the built-in effects that most keyboards make available. All this means that when we talk about PA effects, we are basically talking about vocal effects.

Read the rest…

When you are setting up a PA system for use at live shows, an important general rule is to minimize the number of onstage microphones. There are two reasons for this, both having to do with feedback between the microphones and the main or monitor speakers.

The first reason to minimize the number of microphones is to avoid unnecessary sources of feedback. Every “live” microphone onstage has the potential to cause feedback, the scourge of the sound man. (The audience won’t notice if the vocal balance is a tad off. They will notice feedback.) If you can replace just one instrument microphone with some kind of direct connection, that will eliminate one more potential source of feedback!

The second reason that fewer microphones are better is that you can apply more gain to each one before feedback begins to occur. Every microphone onstage will feed back if you turn its gain up high enough. The gain applied to each microphone contributes its own small part to bringing the whole system closer to the inevitable feedback point. If fewer microphones are involved, more of the potential gain-before-feedback is available for each, allowing them to be louder.

So how do you go about limiting the microphone count? Obviously, the main vocalist(s) will each need their own mikes, and there’s nothing you can do about that. If there happens to be a group of two or three backup singers, they might be able to share a mike instead of each having their own, but in general you are kind of stuck with “one microphone per vocal.”

If you are miking a drum set, which is somewhat uncommon in smallish venues, you could think about reducing the number of mikes here too, although the loudness of the drums means that the contribution of these mikes to overall system gain is likely to be relatively small anyway. (Overheads will probably end up contributing the most.)

Read the rest…

Many new bands want to know, can we just run our vocals through a spare input in one of our instrument amps when we play out, instead of buying and setting up a whole fancy-schmancy PA system? Well, my answer to this question is no, yes, and kind of. (How’s that for razor-sharp clarity?)

1. No

Most of the time, when we think about a high-powered onstage amplifier, we think about the guitar player’s amp. The thing’s huge! Why don’t we just run the vocals through that along with the guitar?

The main problem with this is that guitar amplifiers are purposely designed to not have a flat frequency response. If they did, they’d all sound the same! And yet we know that there is a “Marshall sound,” a “Fender sound,” and so on. It stands to reason that your vocals would sound markedly different if run through different guitar amps, and that can’t be good.

The electric guitar and its amplifier are best thought of as a single instrument. After all, an electric guitar makes very little sound without an amp! The frequency response and other sonic characteristics of the amp combine with those of a specific guitar to create a sound unique to that combination. This makes guitar amps great for guitarists, but not so good for vocalists.

Read the rest…

There comes a time in the life of every band when someone wants them to actually play somewhere. (Somewhere that isn’t the drummer’s basement, I mean.) Up until now, the singers have been using a microphone plugged into the keyboard amp, but is that going to be enough when we play at a restaurant (or a barn, or a patio)? The truth dawns: we need a PA system of some kind for the vocals. But what kind?

There are several factors you need to consider and a number of pitfalls you must avoid. I’ll just hit the high points here, outlining the key decisions you and your band need to make to be sure you get the right system for your hard-earned cash. Since I’ve only worked extensively with a couple of systems myself, I won’t recommend specific brands or models here. But I’ll give you some points to ponder as you sort through the available systems.

Read the rest…

Back in the 60s, when I first got interested in audio gear, home audio systems that were considered to be “hi-fi” (high fidelity) typically had total distortion values of around 0.1%. This was considered to be an inaudible level, especially in the light of research showing that distortion had to rise to 1% or more before most people would begin to notice it. So 0.1% distortion sounded “perfect.”

Despite this, improvements in electronic components and circuitry brought ever-decreasing distortion specs of 0.01%, .005%, .001%, and so on. Although nobody would complain about improved specs, we were pretty clearly past the point where any normal person could detect the results of still further improvement in the sound. It didn’t get “more perfect.”

It seems to me that something like this has happened to modern recording, even on a hobby level. Digital recording and processing gives us a 90 dB dynamic range. We record our tracks at 24 bits with a 96 kHz sampling rate. The frequency response is virtually infinite. And the distortion? Jeez, it must be down to 0.0000001% by now! Everything sounds perfect.

Then what do people do with our perfectly recorded songs? They download them as mp3 files and listen with earbuds. They play the CD in the car while driving and talking to friends. They listen on the computer. They listen while they run on a treadmill. What they don’t do is sit quietly and listen to the music on a “hi-fi” system while thinking “My goodness, this song has very low distortion.” Read the rest…