In other news, Amati, the recording agency has signed SoundShift as one of it’s premier mid-sized studios. The company has launched this month, here follows a welcome letter from the MD.

Hello, I’m Graeme Allen, director of Amati Studios. I’d like to introduce you to our new company and explain a little about what we do.

As is the case with all sectors, the music industry has been seeing some big changes recently, and the recording studio sector certainly has as well. No longer do you require the services of a big professional studio in order to get your songs recorded. Technology now permits the full production of decent sounding songs from your own bedroom, and the recording industry has taken somewhat of a blow as a result.

But, there are still so many benefits of using a professional studio. For example, you may know all the shortcuts on ProTools but you most likely won’t have the many years of experience over a huge range of genres that a professional sound engineer will have. You probably don’t have a range of custom designed recording spaces either, or a collection of microphones built up over years of working in studios. These things make a real difference, and that’s why a professional studio is still needed to give you truly great recordings that can compete with industry-leading artists.

However, studios cost money, and some can cost hundreds of pounds a day before you’ve even hired the sound engineer. So that’s where we come in. I’ve spent the last few months travelling the country and visiting several mid-sized recording studios and chatting with their owners and engineers. I’ve gathered the five best studios together and included them on our roster. Unlike a lot of their competitors, all of their prices include VAT and a sound engineer, and with day rates ranging from £200-£250 professional recording has just become available to everybody.

Keep your eyes on the blog, we’ll have various features and series that’ll be popping up including guides to the best venues, producer bios, music tech tips and the like. If you want any more information about our studios send an e-mail to info@amatistudios.co.uk.

Graeme.

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Amati is a new company that deals in studio management and bookings, and SoundShift are pleased to announce their addition to Amati’s roster of studios.

Amati launch their new site in the middle of January 2010, so if you’ve come here looking for them (through amati.org.uk) you won’t be able to access their full site for another month. The URL for their e-mail services is being hosted on this server, as Graeme Allen (Amati’s MD) was the original creator of this website during his days managing SoundShift.

You can check Amati’s twitter page for updates while their new site is developed.

E-mail graeme.allen@amati.org.uk for any further enquiries.

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You can buy one, two or three-song gift vouchers at very reasonable prices. View our services for more details to follow soon, and get in touch if you’re interested.

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1. Make your singer comfortable

There’s only so much your equipment can do when it comes to getting a great vocal recording. The performance needs to be the best your singer can deliver, so first and foremost you need to take care of them. Make sure they’re relaxed and have been offered plenty of cups of tea. Keep checking every few takes if their voice is getting tired and make sure they have a glass of water on hand to keep their throat lubricated. A good way to give them 10 minute breaks every so often is to ask them in to the control room for a listen.

2. Use the right mic

I usually go for the best mic in the house for recording the vocals. It’s going to be a large diaphragm condenser, preferably valve powered. The best thing to do is to audition a few to see which sounds best with your singer. So set up two or three good mics, put them all next to each other in your live room or vocal booth and get your singer to sing a few lines into each. Choose whichever mic is sounding best at the time (it’s not always necessarily the most expensive one). Position the mic about 6 inches away from the mouth, and use a pop shield.

3. Choose your method

Depending on what the singer is most comfortable, I usually use the comping method when it comes to vocals. Comping involves recording several takes (4-5 typically for me) and then auditioning each line, or even word in the song from each take. You then cut out the best sounding words or phrases from each take and put them onto a new track. The result is one track with all the best bits out of the takes you have recorded. It’ll take quite a bit of editing to get everything to fade together and fit just right, but the final result should be the best take possible. One downside to this method is that as it is made up of 4 or more different takes, the final take might not sound as natural or continuous as just using one take. 

4. Use automation

Once your happy with the take and the track is complete, it’s time for mixing. I can’t stress enough how important using volume automation on your vocal tracks is. Bring down the loud parts and boost the quiet parts and you’ll get a much smoother and consistent sound. It kind of does the job of a compressor, but you have far more control over it and it does not colour the sound at all.

5. Parallel compression

There is an awful lot that can go in to mixing a good vocal track, so I’ll just talk about one tip here. I like to use a nice, smooth sounding valve compressor on the vocal track, used fairly subtly just to polish to sound and give it some valve warmth. But then to really smooth out the dynamics I use another compressor on a separate channel to pull up the lower volumes. The result is a really smooth vocal sound that can sit really nicely into a mix that has a lot of other tracks going on.

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To get your free samples click here.

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When starting out with your home recording setup it’s tempting just to cover every track with reverb. I’d be a bit wary of this: try listening to some of your favourite records of the last 10 years or so and you might be surprised at how little obvious reverb there is on there. Experiment with short reverb times, making your tracks sound a bit more ‘live’ without sounding like they’re being performed in a stadium, a cave or Westminster Abbey. Try using more than one reverb at once, especially on vocals. If your software has the capability, always put your reverbs on what’s known as an auxiliary track (you won’t manage this with Garageband). This is a separate track with its own volume control, that you send whatever you want reverb on to. So you can control the volume of your original track, and the reverb. Try having the reverb quite quiet, giving a more subtle effect.

I’m a fan of subtlety when it comes to delay as well. I remember when I got my first delay pedal (a Boss DD3) and played my guitar through it, I was thoroughly amazed at the almost infinite delays and massive washes of sound it could produce. This, however, is more of a one-off effect. Try using a bit of slap-back delay (just one repeat) or short delay times. Here’s an example of what a bit of slap-back can do to a guitar part.

Before:

Guitar without slap-back

After:

Guitar with slap-back

As is the case with most effects, just experiment. But personally I find subtlety to be the key when it comes to reverbs and delays.

And finally…

In general, I would advise that you just mess around with all the effects, and try to ignore what you think is the “right” thing to do. If you reckon big reverbs are what will make your track sound good, give it a go with small ones. If you think certain things need to be panned to the centre, try the opposite. It’s just a matter of trying everything out and getting lots of practice in. Eventually you’ll stumble across some favourite little techniques that can help develop your signature sound.

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I like to do this with electric guitars mainly, with one track panned completely left and the other completely right. It’s also a great way to get your vocals sounding a bit tidier. For vocals I keep both tracks panned to the centre, with one slightly quieter. Double tracking vocals throughout your entire song can get a bit boring, but it’s a great way of emphasising your choruses.

Here is a guitar part before double tracking:

single tracked

And after:

double tracked

The key thing is to get your first part sounding great – if you recording at home and not constrained by studio time, do as many takes as it needs. Then use this first take as a reference for your second. You want to get the double track sounding as close to the first as possible, really, otherwise it can all get a bit messy.

I wouldn’t recommend doing this for complicated parts like guitar solos or drums. It works best with simple rhythmic lines or with vocals, just to beef them out and give them a bit more stereo interest.

Can’t I just duplicate what I’ve already recorded?

Sadly, no. If you have the exact same audio playing in both speakers at the same time, it’ll just sound like it’s coming from the centre. It’s the subtle differences between each track that make them unique, thus creating an effective double track.

One little trick you could use is simply to duplicate your track then move it a tiny bit. As it won’t be playing at exactly the same time as the original, it won’t just sound like it’s coming from the centre (the parts will be ‘out of phase’, for all you physics enthusiasts). The method is…

1. Record your track
2. Duplicate it, so you have two tracks with the same material
3. Move one of the recordings a tiny bit, so it’s not in the exact same position as the original, time-wise
4. Pan the first completely left and the second completely right

Here’s what it sounds like. Before:

Vocals before

And after:

Vocals after

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Remixing is a lot of fun, and is in fact quite a lucrative industry – but an extremely competitive one, too. Before you start making money from your sounds (if you ever do) you need to know how to create a remix – so I’m going to show you how. To remix music all you really need is a digital audio workstation (DAW) such as Cubase, Garageband or Logic, plus a bit of time and willingness to experiment.

Creating a remix is a very individualistic business. Everyone has their own approach, and I’m going to show you some of the remixing methods I use. Hopefully this will at least get you started.

If you do want to know more about the commercial side of this kind of music making, Sound On Sound magazine did an excellent article a couple of months ago. Definitely worth a read.

I am a big fan of remixing: I find it a lot less hassle to get creative and have a lot of fun with music if I already have a bit of material to start with. Remixing is basically about taking an original song, then making your own version of it by adding parts, taking parts away, chopping bits up or doing a whole bunch of other things.

I like to change the style and feel of a song completely; it’s always interesting what can of musical styles or alternative chord progressions you can extract from an existing track. It is also important to retain some elements of the original track, though. A successful remix is a balance between new and original material.

So how do you separate all the parts in the song I’m remixing?

Unfortunately you don’t. It is very rare that you can get hold of the original multi-track of a song, i.e. all the individual parts for drums, guitars, vocals etc. However, it’s pretty easy to get hold of just the vocals; tracks consisting of just the vocal line of a song are known as acapellas, and can be found all over the internet. Try acapellas4u.co.uk as a start. If you don’t fancy having to pay for an acapella (as you most often do) then just stick the original stereo file in your DAW and see what you can come up with.

It’s also possible to download a MIDI version of most commercial releases from sites like www.freemidi.org and www.mididb.com. This will basically give you MIDI versions of all the parts of the song. All you need to do is use whatever virtual instrument to play the parts and voila – a song. It’s then really simple to cut up the parts and mix up the structure of the original song, adding whatever parts you like as you go along.

So, to get stuck in with remixing, do the following:

1. Google for acapellas
2. Google for the MIDI file of your song
3. Stick them both in your DAW
4. Assign the MIDI parts to an instrument of your choosing
5. Chop and change as you please
6. Add any extra parts

And there you should have a fairly simple remix! Here’s an example of a remix using an acapella, with all the other parts created from scratch using a mixture of VST instruments, samples and a hardware synth.

Acappella remix example

Using the original song instead of acapellas

I actually quite like this method. It’s a lot simpler, but forces you to think a bit more creatively otherwise you’ll end up with quite an amateur end result. With no MIDI parts involved you’ll have to work out the tempo of the song yourself. Most DAWs have a tap-tempo feature, which will allow you to click along with the song and the computer will work out its tempo. If the song was not done to a click this will not work, and time-aligning is needed. I would imagine that if this is your first venture into remixing, you won’t be particularly interested in the very laborious and dull activity of time-aligning. If you are though, leave a comment on this blog and I’ll go through it all.

Right, so once you have your song and the right tempo set-up in your DAW it’s time to get remixing! It’s always best to have a plan, or at least an idea of a genre for your remix. It doesn’t necessarily have to be house or dance music, like 99% of remixes out there! I’m going to use the following as an example, which is a remix of the Radiohead song Videotape.

Videotape Remix

Have a listen to the original on YouTube for comparison.

Now as far as remixes go, this one’s pretty weird. All the methods and ideas used here can be applied to a more commercial song though. First off, the aims of this remix were to be a dark, electro version of the original, accentuating the musical climaxes and instrumental sections whilst retaining its musical structure. So basically to keep it all in the same order but make the instrumental bits a bit more interesting, and the climactic bits more climactic, so to speak.

Using the original track

The original song plays pretty much all the way through. However, it goes through a filter which is fiddled with throughout, making it much less obvious as the original track. The volume of it is automated, so in parts where I want the original to be a bit more obvious I bring up its volume. For other parts it sits back and lets the new material cut through.

I also used bits of the original piano at the start. All I did was cut out the chords that play on their own at the start of the piece, reverse them, then play them in the right order under the synth part at the beginning. The original rhythms of the hi-hats were also retained, playing in the background at various points.

Adding new parts

I pretty much just went to town with an analogue synth. I started with the basic arpeggio synth figure that follows the chord structure throughout the whole piece. Next I just added a bass line, which again just follows the chord structure. Then I made a nice, heavy kick drum sample with the synthesiser, and stuck that in at the start of every bar.

Once these basics were down, it was time to think about all the interesting bits on the top. First I tried to mimic the “Oohs” sung after the first verse using the synth, and ended up making them a bit higher and changing some of the notes. To add a bit more interest I stuck a new synth line over the top of that, too. Once the second verse had been sung it was time for the big finale – I spent quite a while thinking up ways to get a big drum beat into the ending, and programmed quite a few unsuccessful attempts using samples. I ended up using real drums which were then heavily edited to fit into the song, then heavily distorted and compressed, just to mash them up a bit.

I think it’s a great idea to combine real drums and samples – it adds an extra layer to the song, and I think makes it a bit more accessible. I added another synth playing the original arpeggio line and twiddled the knobs in real time to give some added effects, then stuck some high-pitched synth parts over the top. Reverb, EQ, compression and the like were then added to each track just to tidy it all up.

And that’s basically it! I kept the same chord structure but added a few synth parts and gave it a dramatic ending. The original was put through a filter to make it less obvious and there we have a slightly weird electronic remix of Radiohead’s Videotape.

My advice would be to have a good think about the original song you’re going to remix; think about what elements you want to keep, and what you want to add to it. You can use as much or as little of the original as you like, so long as you end up with a remix that’s unique to you, and has your creative stamp on it.

If you’ve got any questions about how to remix music, or you’d like to discuss mixes and remixes of your own, just add a comment and we’ll come back to you ASAP.

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Everybody has heard of Moog, they’ve been making amazing sounding synths since the 1960s, and whether you’re aware of it or not you will certainly have heard one in action. It’s only been relatively recently though that it’s been possible to actually fit one into your bedroom, and the latest creation in the small but feature packed Moog is the aptly named Little Phatty. The version I’m using is the stage one, and has 2 oscillators, the usual Moog low-pass filter, a modulation section and envelope generators for both volume and filter cut-off. It also incorporates digital controls to all the parameters, which is a very handy feature and means you can have presets and digital memory.

When you turn it on the whole machine gives you a mini light display as it warms up, which is nice. It also comes with 99 presets that are great for starting you off. Upon actually playing the instrument you instantly realise what your set-up has been missing; that warm, thick analogue synth sound Moog do so well. The presets range from mighty, room-shaking bass sounds to face-melting leads and baffling electronic noise. The true beauty of the Moog transpires as soon as you start fiddling with all the buttons and knobs. It’s very intuitive to use, and in no time you’ll be locked in a synth trance creating all sorts of weird and wonderful analogue-y noises. The MIDI capabilities of the Moog allow you to hook it up to a sequencer or your computer, leaving you free to play with all the controls while the notes play themselves. The filter deserves a special mention; it’s the classic Moog four-pole low-pass filter and it sounds great. With the synth’s audio input you can even use it as a standalone effect too, allowing for even more sound-mangling.

There aren’t a huge number of features, it’s basically just a no-frills two oscillator analogue synth. This particular model went out of tune too, and needed recalibrating. This was fairly simple however and involved choosing an option on the small LCD display. The mod wheel was also slightly loose, and occasionally slipped when in use. These minor niggles are forgotten when you sit back and appreciate the sound of the thing though.

All-in-all this is a fantastic sounding little noise machine. The classic Moog sound is there for all to see, and packaged in a very easy to use and flexible synth. Although the price may seem slightly high, I think it’s worth it, especially when you consider what you’re buying: an analogue Moog synthesiser.

4.5 stars

The Little Phatty reviewed here is now in use at SoundShift studio, and is free for those renting the studio to use, you just have to request it first.

Free samples of the Little Phatty are in production and should be along shortly, so keep posted!

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So what does compression actually do?

Compression: the basic principles
Compressors basically reduce the dynamic range of a signal. Volumes over a certain threshold are reduced, removing spikes and peaks in a recording. If you read what I said about the Turn Me Up! Campaign in my post about using a limiter, you maybe wondering why I’d be advocating the use of compression at all…

Well, that problem was concerned with over-compressing an entire song so that it sounds as loud as possible, which leads to less recordings of reduced musicality and dynamic range. However, a certain amount of compression is needed on individual tracks to ‘tidy up’ the performance, and allow the parts to ’sit’ better in the mix.

The best way to describe the correct use of compression is that it tightens up a part, makes it sound more professional and allows it to sit in the mix much more easily. There’s a huge range of compressors on the market; whether a physical box or a digital plug-in for your DAW. Most of them have the same parameters though, which are as follows:

As well as being used to tidy up the dynamic range of parts, heavy compression can be used as an effect in itself, especially on drums. Have a listen to this:

Compression on drums

This recording was made using four microphones: two above the drum kit (overheads) and two about a meter away from it pointed towards it (rooms). The room mics have a large amount of compression on them, with a high ratio and low threshold, so everything is blasted to the same volume. The result is a powerful, pumping drum sound.

Thanks for the science lesson, but how do I use it?
Given its subtlety, compression is one of these effects that you have to really fiddle with and explore. Try and take into account the acoustics of the instrument you’re compressing. For example, you might like the attack of the snare, but want to fatten up the rest of the sound. So use a fairly long attack time so the compression is only applied after that first snap of the snare.

It’s probably best to use a fast attack and release on vocals, so the effect isn’t particularly obvious, but does the practical job of reducing the dynamic range.

There is a slightly more interesting use of compression though, and one which you no doubt will have heard in practically every dance song since the early 90s, which is known as…

Side-chaining
Side-chaining involves having a compressor on a track, but using something else as the source of compression. So for example, if you have synth track with some fairly heavy compression on it, but use a kick drum as the side-chain input, the track will only be compressed when the kick drum sounds. You probably won’t be able to do this in Garageband, but it’s certainly possible in Cubase and Logic. Here’s the method:

1. Send the source (kick drum in this case) to a bus.
2. Add a compressor to the track you’re effecting (synth in this case)
3. Set the side-chain input (often called key input) as the bus you sent the kick to
4. Fiddle with the compressor settings until you’re happy – you may want to start with a preset

Here’s a video demonstrating this (you might want to use the ‘full screen’ button on the bottom right of the player to catch the details of what I’m doing.)

And here’s a section of a typical dance remix. Try and spot the side-chaining, there’s quite a lot of it!

Sidechain compression example

I hope this has helped explain some of the mysteries of compression. As I always say, have a good practice and play around yourself, you’ll gradually get used to the effect and it’ll start to sound a bit more noticeable!

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