I’ve done a lot of jobs in this studio of mine, but few make me beam like the CD project I did with Rick Andrews.  Rick’s really put his heart into his music, and keeps up the good fight trying to get exposure and have success.  His guitar speaks a different language that’s really unique to him.

It was a great project to work on, very unique with lots of energy in every song.  Rick was very exacting and opinionated about how everything should be in the mix.  He couldn’t always explain it, but rather he felt it.  He knew when it was just the way it was supposed to be, and I moved things around until they fit his vision.  By the way, that’s the way it’s supposed to work!

On one tune he had called “Waited So Long” he expressed some frustration with.  It wasn’t a “that guitar should be on the left” kind of thing, rather Rick thinks visually about the songs.  He explained the movie he had in his head to me in great detail, and said “the song needs to sound like that!”  I knew what he meant, it needed something extra to communicate that vision…so I pulled that one out of RiffWorks into a DAW and found him a bassline that did the talking (of course Rick did the rest of the talking!).  Thanks for the kudos on that one man!

Today, I logged into Facebook, and saw a couple things about him.  First, today is his birthday.  HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRO! The second was arguably at least as cool, a video of Melodic Revolution Records artists, including Rick!  You can view the video here, he’s shown about half the way through.  Rick also has a track up on their main page, scroll down to #22 and give a listen to “The Sea and the Lighthouse”.  Awesome stuff

Rick is a great example of keeping true to yourself, keeping your head down and pressing forward.  Some day I’m going to get a phone call asking me what it was like to work with him “way back when” and I’ll be happy to oblige.  You can be part of the story today…check him out and get a download of of his debut CD here.  Support Indie music, and keep it real!!!

With the recent group buy on SampleTank XT packs, I’m guessing by the questions I’ve seen some of you jumped on that deal (or are considering the new group buy they have going on) but have never really messed with virtual instruments or DAW programs.

I threw together a short video to give an you an idea of how these things work together, and (in theory) how ReWire would let you use SampleTank through Reaper and into RiffWorks.  I say in theory because the RiffWorks and Reaper are not talking properly with ReWire.  It’s too bad and hopefully some day it will get sorted out!

This video is available in HD, so hit the full screen button!

I’ve done lots and lots of writing in this series.  The reason I went through all that is I’ve never seen room acoustics explained from a practical point of view.  ”Use a blanket, that’s all you need” is understandable, but is it the best thing to do?  Why don’t the higher end studio discussions ever talk about these “other” solutions?  And why do those higher end discussions have to be so friggin’ impossible to understand?

If you’ve read through the series, it’s been a long and winding road.  Through all this, I haven’t found anything that changes fundamentals.  No shortcuts that you can do at home that’s just as effective (or even close to) as the “real” stuff.  Sorry.  I’ve tried it all, and didn’t even bore you with half of it!

That’s not to say you can’t build it yourself and save money.  But we need to make sure we’re doing the “right” things, instead of just doing “things”.  That’s where the commercial products and guidance can be helpful, as few of us are acoustical engineers.  If you’re willing to learn though, you can build some very effective treatments on your own.  Search the web, most of the good stuff is based on 703 fiberglass.  I’ll leave broadband absorption materials to others to describe!

“Gator, you took the wind out of me with this one, I don’t want to spend hundreds or thousands on acoustic treatment!  And I don’t have a bigger room!  But I still want my songs to sound great.” I’m with you here!  Let’s talk about how to maximize your recording and maximize your money.

When we started out recording (maybe for the first time, or maybe this time around!), most of us bought something very simple.  In my case, it was a Line6 PODxt and Rifftracker (now RiffWorks) software.  The premise was things had changed, and we could get all we wanted in recording in the corner of our bedrooms and be the next big thing on MySpace or YouTube.  We could record all right, and it was time to change the world with our music!  Except for most of us, our stuff didn’t sound that great.  We blamed the hardware, or the software…and bought more of it trying to get the sound to be more “commercial” sounding.  It turns out that hardware and software was just fine, but if you can’t hear what’s going on it’s really hard to mix…whether you know how to or not!

I talked about how to record without a treated room – get good headphones!  I mean ones that are flat, not hyped, and can at least help you get really good sounding tone for your guitars, bass, and vocals individually.  The actual recording is still the most important part of the process, and will go great lengths to a good end result.  If you’ve already bought monitors, good for you.  You will get better recordings here too for most anything not bass related, because at least you’ve taken the speaker response out of the equation…and some speakers can be quite hyped!

I talked about trying all sorts of things I found on the internet to get around buying or making real treatment.  In my experience trying to be cheap, any of these is better than nothing, but none work too well compared to real treatments.  If you want to mix your own stuff, keep it simple.  Lay off the “wall of guitars” or you’ll probably end up in trouble!

Let’s Talk Turkey

If you get some really good flat response headphones, and take great care in recording…that’s all you need to do.  How do you get a great mix then? You send it off to somebody who does mixing and mastering.  Surprise…that’s how you do it in the “real” world too!  Still want to do it yourself?  I saw a great quote on the GatorForum I’ll paraphrase…”for all the money I’d have to spend for treatment to make the room effective, I could send my music to you and still buy a Marshall stack with the difference.”  If that first CD you do goes gold, you’ll have plenty of money to build the right studio and do it right yourself.  Spend your time making your songs great instead of guessing at mixes and blowing up mastering.  You’ll be much happier for it!

Do you need new gear?

If you’re like me, when things don’t come out the way you want you look for something to blame, and buy a better version of it.  I’ve spent all sorts of money on software and equipment looking for the missing link that turned out to be the room.  My advice would be…DON’T SPEND ANOTHER DIME ON RECORDING GEAR OR SOFTWARE!!! Okay, Instant Drummers excluded (props to my friends at Sonoma Wire Works), whatever software you are using is more than fine, and that interface, no matter how cheap is probably light years better than the digitally recorded stuff you were listening to in the 80′s.  If you want high end plugins or vintage equipment on your recordings, send it to somebody who has them, and more importantly knows how to use them…not that it will matter if your song is great in the first place!

The next time you think a new piece of gear or the “Ultimate Colossal Mastering Plug-In Suite” is the answer to your problems, take the money out of your wallet and put it in an envelope.  Spend some of it on a new guitar or better mic.  Keep the rest as a “recording fund” for when that magic song comes out of you and you really need it to shine.  Send your music off to somebody who knows what they are doing (I have some suggestions ), and spend that mixing time writing the next magic song instead of sweating over trying to get a mix that will highlight the awesomeness of what you wrote and played!

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So in conclusion…

There’s no doubt you are the best at writing the songs you want, and playing the way you want them played.  When it comes to the engineering piece, you need a) the experience, b) the equipment, and c) the ability to actually hear what you are really doing to your music.  Skip the “home remedies” version of acoustic treatment and if you’re really serious about doing it all yourself, go straight to the pro stuff.  If money is an issue, build up your room treatments over time.  You can’t ignore it, but you can get around it if you segment the recording process into it’s traditional areas – songwriting, tracking, mixing, mastering – and use the things and expertise that is most appropriate at each stage.  Think through carefully what are the best things you can do (and let others do) to maximize the value of both your time and money in home recording!

Actually a lot of things matter…but one thing we’re doing with treatment is trying to “fix” a room that is smaller than ideal.

There are several spots in the room we need to absorb mids and highs:

- behind each monitor

- on the wall to the left and right (between where you sit and the monitors sit)

- on the ceiling (between where you sit and the monitors sit)

- on the rear wall

These are the places sound bounces off of and back into your ears so quickly it messes with the sound of the monitors.  You can find lots of info on the ideal spots, but basically have somebody hold a mirror along the walls and ceiling (I guess that’s hard to do ) and anywhere you see the monitors from your mixing chair, you need something to absorb or diffuse it, to keep it from bouncing back at you and muddling up the monitor’s direct sound.

When you take out the sound reflections, you then can hear what’s really going in all it’s glory from your monitors!  So…why don’t we just pad the whole room then?  Simple…it would drive you nuts!  Seriously, that much absorption would sound very unnatural to work in, and not balance correctly with the bass, so you want a good balance in the room overall.  Keep the direct reflections down, but still have some level of things bouncing around the room (albiet greatly reduced) so you don’t go nuts in the vacuum and “over liven” things to compensate.

I mentioned that in a small room you can’t treat bass.  Sure you can treat it, but getting treated to a level that is useful is nearly impossible in my opinion.  While the mids and highs seem to improve and get easier to work with as you add treatment, the bass is so bad in a small room that the same level of improvement doesn’t help that much.  To get to a useful amount of treatment, you’d probably take half of the room up in bass traps, and it was small to begin with!  So from a very practical standpoint, I’d say skip the subwoofer, skip the bass traps and do the best you can with reference songs, headphones and other systems when trying to judge bass.  It’s just not something you’ll solve in a small room.

Which begs the question…what happens in a larger room?

I’ll start by saying the move to a bigger room had nothing to do with acoustic properties…I’m really not that smart! I was happily recording, mixing and mastering in that small room and had done lots of successful projects there.  Things were so much easier to do than when I started I thought that this was the holy grail, and aside from the bass tweaking challenges things translated pretty well.  I would have stayed in that room forever…had I not started to record other people and needed a bit more room.  I’ll talk about the unique (read cheap) “features” of this new room another time, but after deciding on this move it hit me that in theory, the sound should be better.  The reflection points are further away, and the bigger dimensions should probably break up the sound and give me a better shot at a useable bass.  That’s when I decided to figure out how to measure the room I was leaving, and the one I was going into.

Measuring all done, everything was torn down and brought to the new room.  I was excited to get a first impression of the room before mucking around with any treatment.  I was amazed!  It was really clear like I’d never heard before (again lol).  Again, nothing changed here equipment-wise, just the room.  I went ahead and put the auralex foam up, but only in the left and right reflection spots.  The bass traps are around here somewhere, but probably not doing anything to trap.  And yet, the bass is nice and smooth, the balance of the sound is awesome…and for the first time I’m hearing things in commercial recordings that I simply cannot hear anywhere else even when I know they are there.  Sure, you hear things on a good system that you go back in the car or on the iPod and it just wasn’t that obvious before.  But I’m now hearing what the engineers have actually done, instead of what the earbuds or car or boombox did to them…ponder that for a minute!

If we go back to the original plan we all had getting into recording with some software and a hardware interface, what was our goal?  Just about all of us had visions of recording our best songs, making them shine and getting that “studio” quality without the studio price.  And things quickly went awry…and we struggled to figure out the “tricks” and “secrets” those professionals were keeping from us.  The more we asked, the less they told us – what is the magic preset?  ”There is no magic preset” they replied.  So we listen to their work and try to copy what we hear…what we hear…which turns out not to be what they did.  Sure, some of us do better than others at this, through some combination of experience, knowledge, detective work or plain luck – but it always seems to be missing something, especially when it gets compressed down to an mp3.  What are these things they do?  The same things we try to do, set levels & panning properly, reverbs and delays so they gel nicely in the mix, eq so things are balanced.  But they can hear what’s going on so much better and be so much more precise, because you can hear the minute impacts to the mix at this level.

“Hey Gator, you’re rambling.  What about the big room?”  The big room is a big enabler to bringing it all together.  The black line is the small room with no treatment…the purple line is the big room with treatment just at the left and right.  So what do we see?  Fundamentally we see balance, caused in large part simply by the size of the room.  The bass is a lot smoother, as those long waves have room to breath and not build up so much in their resonant frequencies.  In the mids (where our vocals, guitars, keyboards all live – you know, the important stuff!), my untreated small room had a lot of combing (sharp but very narrow spikes and dips).  In the larger room those waves bounce around a lot more and end up a lot lower in level by the time they get back to the mixing spot.  Sure, there’s some improvements we can work on to make it even tighter, (particularly a couple spots in the low mids) – but the graph shows why I can hear this big semi-circle of a sound stage – and when you can hear it, you can use it!

Getting to that commercial quality is certainly possible, but not without having that level of quality at every step in the process.  If we cheat on any part, it adds up in the final result.  And who among us doesn’t really want the absolute best end product we can get?  In summary…if you have a big room you can use, use it!  It will make a big difference.  Treatment then makes the sound that much better, instead of being used to fix it.

Hmmm…it seems I’ve said that about almost everything in the recording process.  Do great tracking (recording), then you spend time in the mix just making it that much better instead of fixing it.  Do great mixing, then the mastering can really make it shine.  Write a great song, then the producer can…well maybe not…but you get the idea.  And ironically, being able to hear is absolutely fundamental to all of it.  Ironic because we don’t understand it, don’t deal with it, and then wonder why we can’t get those results.

I hope this series has helped at least give you some idea why the room is so critical, particularly for mixing and mastering.  Even if you don’t understand the theory, understanding what is good and bad and where your particular limits kick in can make a big difference in getting the best final product you can.

I’ve gone into a lot of stories and detail, because I want you to understand this isn’t some theoretical discussion…it’s a reality show.  Not the one liners you find on a forum from people you have no idea whether they are messing with you or not.  In the final blog on this series, I’ll pull it all together.  Results and facts instead theory and long-winded stories.  And how, believe it or not…you can really maximize your recordings and your money by working with Gator-Studios.com!

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Still with me?  Great!

Let’s review a couple points from the last blog, shall we?

If you’re room is untreated, you’ll want to:

- Have some good, flat, honest headphones to record with

- Keep your mixes simple, so you have a decent chance of getting a decent mix

- Mix via the “hokey pokey” method (you put your CD in, you take your notebook out, you write down where it’s off and you shake it all about…in the car, in the boombox, on the iPOD etc. until you fix everything you find everywhere).

Yes, mixing in an untreated room is possible!  But…your mix will never be anywhere as good as it can, and it will take you forever.  You could probably make enough cutting grass in the same time you take to mix this way…to send it off to the guys at Abbey Road!  We’ll keep opportunity cost and other financial muck out of this, in the promise of keeping things understandable

If you buy what I’m saying so far, you probably want to know what will make things better.  In this case we call that “acoustic treatment” and this treatment can be a lot of things.  In my quest to be cheap I’ve tried a lot of things a long the way to varying degrees of success.  Here’s a few:

Housewares (Blankets, Quilts, and closets)

If you have any spare thick quilts that you can hang on the wall, those will help some.  They’ll tame higher frequency reflections somewhat, and if you bundle them up in a corner they might help a little with bass.  You’ll need more quilts to do both, and in a small room you’ll run out of room to sit before you get things well tamed.  Have a closet in the room, with clothes in it?  Open the doors and let your clothes absorb your sound…hopefully your sound smells fresh like a summer breeze!

These are kind of brute force methods, you won’t get the right amount or type of treatment, but they’ll tame things down a bit.

WWO (Windows Wide Open)

When I finally got the whole “reflection” thing about sound, and understood where the hottest points were, I set about to see what I could do.  One of the big spots is right behind the speakers on the wall.  Right behind my speakers were 2 windows, so I would open them up while mixing!  It actually did help, unless somebody was cutting the grass, or cars went by, or kids were playing in the street.  But sound that bounced that way went right out of the room.

The Cone of Silence (SE Reflexion Filter)

It didn’t help a lot, but with the addition of an SE Reflexion filter behind my head I was able to make due.  The Reflexion is meant to have a mic in the middle of it, to keep reflections of your room out of your mic (the same problems the room causes to a mix, actually get recorded so this is twice as bad an effect of an untreated room!

Like I said, I’ve tried a lot of things…lol…so I figured if it would block sound I could stick my head in it and bloc the reflections off the side and rear walls.  Not ideal, but it did help.

Po’ Man’s treatment (acoustical ceiling tiles)

As I mentioned I added something extra with the 2nd Auralex kit…MoPads.  These are little acoustic thingy’s you put under your monitors and subwoofer to decouple them from the desk and floor.  I was not really believing these would help much, but for the price I couldn’t resist.  Sound-wise, it was an effect you could either convince yourself was there, or convince yourself it was not.  Out of curiosity, as I was tearing down the old room, I decided to do one extra measurement…that was with the MoPads but no other treatments in the room.  And…I was a bit shocked at what I saw!

- Point 3…As you put more things up to deal with your room sound, you will start noticing more things…and more things wrong that you didn’t notice before.  This may put you on a never-ending quest for better room sound!  There, I warned you

Okay class, open your books to page 3 rip it out, then throw it all out the window.  We’re not here to talk technical junk, we want to know what works and maybe just enough of why to convince ourselves that it’s real.  Where shall we begin?

Let’s begin with the untreated small room.  Most cats I’ve met recording at home have this as their studio.  I did.  It’s the typical bedroom studio, mine was 11 x 12 or so but with a vaulted ceiling.  Yeah, that makes a little difference.  Sound bounces off stuff that is hard, and gets absorbed by softer things.  It’s why your empty room is echoey and when you get the bed and bookshelves in it, not so echoey.  Ceilings are hard, just like walls.  So are wood or tile floors.

Throw a ball against a wall 20 feet away.  Then walk up 4 feet from it and throw the ball just as hard.  What happens?  The second throw, before you finish your follow through it smacks you in the face.  Not good.  Just like an 8 foot ceiling or 11 x 12 room.  The reflected sound hits you too soon and too hard after it comes out of the speaker and messes up your face, er I mean the sound, and in unpredictable and odd ways.  The further away the wall, the less impact to the sound you hear…since it has further to go and further to come back and loses steam along the way.

Part of the sound is messed up volume/eq-wise, i.e. the room reflections actually make some frequencies sound louder and others quieter than what’s really coming out of the speakers. See this graph?  This is from monitors that are flat enough that the difference between all the frequencies should be basically unnoticeable.  But that graph ain’t flat!  If you like numbers, the difference is 33db in the bass area.  If you don’t like numbers…then take RiffWorks, put something on play (InstantDrummer is fine), turn the master volume down to where it says “GAIN” and then up to +18.  That should give you an idea what this graph is saying to your volume, again on different frequencies.

Bass is a particular problem from the room.  Imagine your gain knob pointing at “GAIN” when you play an open ‘E’ on the bass, and then at +18 when you play F#.  Youch!  That’s not going to work.  The good news is if you recorded direct, like through a TonePort, it’s all even inside the computer and speakers, but you can’t hear it that way on your speakers or monitors.

When you’re listening now, you will probably notice this on some bass notes.  Some boom, some get weak.  You may think you’re good though, because the difference is not as dramatic as I’m making it out to be.  But what you are hearing are some of the frequencies and not others.  You may hear the boom of the low note on one fret (the main frequency resonating), and a weaker sound on another (the combination of the reduced main sound and the harmonics) – but what you are hearing is not real!  So how do you dial in bass tone when each note sounds like it’s eq’d completely differently?  Uh…it’s not easy for sure!  This is where good headphones are required…for dialing in the tone.

I mentioned part of the problem is the vastly different volume of different notes on the same instrument.  This up/down tends to get narrower the higher in frequency you go (that’s that jumbled up mess on the right of the graph).  Another part of the problem in the higher frequencies…they bounce better.  Think of bass as a semi flat kickball, mids as a tennis ball and highs as a golf ball.  Golf balls bounce a lot better than a semi-flat kickball!  The bad news is you have all 3 hitting the walls/ceiling and bouncing in their own different ways and causing all sorts of different changes to the sound.  Those mids and highs now have a reverb to them in addition to different volumes for different frequencies.  Sheesh!  That’s why when you crank a mix up in a room like this, it gets muddy and hard to hear details.  And detail is exactly what you need to be hearing!

Let’s review the key problems:

- Your computer speakers or monitors are nowhere near the problem that your room is

- The bass in the room sounds like you’ve cranked the volume and eq up on some notes and cranked it down on others – you can’t eq it one way or the other to fix it, and there’s no way to tell what your tone really sounds like through the speakers

- High frequencies bounce better than low frequencies, and keep bouncing around – this is like adding bad eq and a varying reverb to the sound you hear

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So…if you can’t hear your bass tone and your guitar tone is masked by a bad eq and reverb that’s not really there, odds are the results are not going to be that good without the effort of listening on different systems in different rooms or cars to find those things that are way out of whack.  Each place on it’s own is compromised, but you can usually tell if something is way off and go back and tweak it into a reasonable shape.  Are you going to get the best tone you want?  Or the best mix you want?  Nope.  Sometimes you’ll get lucky, sometimes you won’t.  But you can help yourself along greatly with good (and I mean good!) flat headphones when you are recording.

An awful lot of what goes into a good sounding track is how each track sounds when it’s recorded.  The playing and the tone are so critical to the end result you absolutely need to do your best here.  Good headphones will take the room out of the equation, and provide a much better reference to what you are really recording.  And guess what?  If the tracking (recording each track) is superb, you’d be amazed at how little needs to be done to get a great mix.  Even if you can’t hear what you’re doing because of the room, keeping it simple will usually get you a good result.

So why not mix in the headphones too?  Depending on how bad your room is, it might be your best option…but it’s a sucky option for setting levels and panning.  In addition to taking out the room, you’ve now put the soundfield inside your head instead of spread out in front of you both left to right and front to back like a semi-circle (and yes…this is what it really sounds like if you can hear it!)  You’re just not going to get the right perspective on panning, reverb, or levels if that’s all you use.  You’ll need a second opinion for sure!

-And of course if it’s something really special (like for a CD, website, film/TV/radio)…send it to Gator! If you recorded it well we will be able to take it to the next level for you.  If not…let’s just say we have some really good tools to fix things

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Next time, I’ll talk about some treatment options, and the real impacts they have or don’t have.  Stay Tuned!

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It’s amazing how short-sighted people can be, at least in my opinion.  Some people do things that revolutionize the world.  Some people make a big splash evolving the world.  And we seem to go gaga over the evolution guys and not the revolutionaries.

Am I talking politics?  Nah, actually I’m talking music.  Les Paul died today.  On my birthday, of all days.  We all know him from the guitar that bears his name, but he’s far more fascinating and influential than just a name on a headstock of a guitar.  If you don’t believe me, spend some time reading up or watching biographies of the man.

Anywhoo, an old friend posted on facebook a nice farewell and how he touched so many millions.  I echoed the sentiment, and said  his contributions were so significant his coverage should dwarf Michael Jacksons.   And some dude, maybe I went to high school with, maybe who’s life is stuck in 1984, posted this:

“Les Paul memorials should dwarf the response about Michael Jackson.”

DING DING DING We have a winner for most absurdly hyperbolic statement!

Sorry, but let’s try and keep a dose of perspective on hand. Les Paul was a brilliant pioneer in a niche area that directly affected thousands. MJ was a global icon who at one point in time was, arguably, one of the most influential people on the planet.

Yeah…

So, let’s think about this for a minute.  Let’s skip the Michael Jackson of the last 20 or so years, let’s ignore allegations of all sorts of things, all the things we know he denied he did that we now know he did.  Let’s purely talk about his impact on music, and on the world.

Michael in his day was a fabulous songwriter.  A fabulous singer.  An amazing dancer.   Arguably in the early and mid-80s he was the best.  Like the Beatles in the 60′s were.  Like Elvis in the 50′s.  And the Bee Gees in the 70s.  He had an amazing run for several years.  And then pretty much only showed up on our radars when he wasn’t paying his bills, was holding his kids out windows, or in court.  Hey man, that’s fine, but has nothing to do with music.   For the last 20 years he’s been that guy who was amazing in the 80′s that now makes for good TV on slow news days.

Now…let’s think about Michael Jackson recording like Benny Goodman did.  A couple mics, spread the guys around, play live, record to wax and hope everything is good enough to keep the take.  Michael always danced around, bobbing, snapping, tapping while he was singing, and they never could get him to stop.  The perfect recipe for a recording disaster, unless you can edit individual tracks.  Which brings me to the man.

The story goes in olden times you recorded directly to wax (which became the mold for record).  Somebody figured out how to record to magnetized wire, but it sucked.  Apparently those crafty German Socialists made magnetic tape work (when they weren’t busy trying to remake the world into what they thought it should be), and Les Paul was given one of the captured machines in 1946.  Short story is he is the father of looping, multi-track recording, and the guide of things we had to do until the 90′s, which is plan out the optimum order to record and bounce tracks to keep the song sounding good.  Ever wonder why the drums, bass and rhythm guitars usually get done early and the vocals get dones last?  Bouncing would lose it’s fidelity with every take and Les figured out these tracks could stand the degradation better but the vocals and leads needed to be clear, and thus recorded last.  We don’t need to do that any more, but usually we still do.  We are drones lol

This wasn’t like the Wright Brothers being the first to fly.  There were a bunch of other folks trying to be the first with a plane.  Multi tracking and looping was a concept so foreign that he disguised it as magic for a long time.  He confounded President Eisenhower and VP Nixon with it at the White House.  The trick was a novelty on TV.  He was the Criss Angel of the 50′s.

Les Paul fundamentally changed music forever.  All music.  Not just pop music in the 80s.  Think about Sgt. Peppers sounding like Buddy Holly.  Think about Dark Side of the Moon sounding like Chubby Checker.  Wolfman Jack talking over Pink Floyd.  Well maybe not that bad lol

Geez, I didn’t even mention the dude basically invented the electric guitar in the ’30s.  Or that he and his wife were topping the charts as performers for several years.  Or that after a horrific car wreck while on the road playing, he talked the doctor out of amputating his bum arm and instead into setting it permanently at a 90 degree angle…so he could still maybe still play guitar.  (Would the US government let him do that? okay okay…lol)  How about that he kept playing guitar for another 50+ years, and played out weekly almost until his death?

So we have one dude, who was top of his game for a while that got all weirded out, it eventually caught up with him and he’s dead.  Like a lot of other stars.  A month later another dude, who created groundbreaking concepts, figured out how to do them, enabled the world of music to be what it has been the last 40-60 years, beat all odds to keep playing music for almost a century, he’s dead too.

Why does the evolution get all the play, and the revolution gets a footnote?  Is it the freakshow aspect?  Is it because one guy was popular 20 years ago instead of 60?  Do we just gauge the relevance and importance by how the media treats it?

I won’t take anything away from Michael Jackson, he was incredible in his time and deserves any attention he got.  As a songwriter myself I’ve studied his works and he brought it all to the table.  And you folks in LA, if you want to throw a million bucks into holding a funeral you’re welcome to it.  But making Les Paul’s death a scrolling footnote on a news channel is not the way to be.   The man had an incredible life, was amazingly creative and smart enough to make the things he thought of work, which dramatically changed music forever.   And a great performer and guitar player in a time when folks didn’t dance or hide behind fog or explosions.

It just seems to me, it’s like comparing George Washington to Bill Clinton and saying “Washington just chopped down a cherry tree, and not a lot of people really care about cherry trees any more”.  Rarely do people come along in the world that have so much impact, especially impact that redefines a whole segment of life.  We should recognize and celebrate that.  So I celebrate the man and the revolution he created – he’s the reason why we can do what we do here.  The rest of us drones would have just kept doing things like we had before, and we’d still be cutting mono wax discs run by a falling weight.  Thanks Les!!!  This dude was inspired for a long time by you, and I will miss you.

Sonoma Wire Works has had FourTrack out for a while, but I’m just getting around to iPhoning myself so I’ll give a review of it!  First off, FourTrack is a four-track.  What the heck is a four-track?  Let’s look at some brief history.

Back in “the day” (as in way back in the early 1960′s and before), recording was a little bit different than today.  Good studios had things like record-cutting lathes, driven by a falling weight.  Gravity was much better at keeping time than motors of the day.  In these olden times, you didn’t mix tracks, you mixed people.  You moved the people around to balance the sound into the mic.  I guess if you told them to move closer in certain sections, they were the original automated faders!  They played live, it cut the wax, and if the take was good it was done.

I’ll skip the Les Paul part (you should read up on the man, we wouldn’t be here in recording without him), but the jist is it was figured out how to record more than 1 track at a time, with tape.  It cost a bunch of money, but it was doable so over time studios with a bunch of money started putting them in.  Let’s keep the cliff notes version going…in 1967 the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s” which was recorded on…a four track.

Now let’s be honest with ourselves.  Abbey Road Studios has unique acoustics, and the very best equipment money can buy.  A large selection of the best mic’s, preamps, compressors etc. were at their disposal.  But all crammed down into 4 tracks of tape.  So while the iPhone mic is not exactly a Neumann, for $10 you’re at least mixing and making decisions like the Beatles!  Even better, you don’t have to limit yourself to 4 tracks at the end of the day.

The final piece of history is mine.  In the late 80s we borrowed a 4 track to record our band demo.  We couldn’t afford one, but it was the holy grail at the time for a band.  And we had what turned out to be a hell of an engineer make our tracks sing!  In 1992 I finally saved up enough for my own 4 track.  I also had a MIDI interface and a Roland D-110 to trigger drums off SMPTE code striped on the 4 track.  That plus the computer, was probably around $3K.  Ten bucks, plus being able to use Instant Drummers in RiffWorks would have been simply too hard to comprehend even in 1992!

My usual long and boring preamble being done, let’s look at FourTrack.  First, even though it’s from Sonoma Wire Works (makers of RiffWorks), there are no riffs or bars here.  It’s a linear recording program, just like a 4 track.  The program allows 1 mono track at a time to be recorded, while the other 3 play back.  You can pick a spot in the middle of a song to record on a track (a la punch in) with the time wheel (or whatever it’s called).  Each of the four tracks can be mixed and panned independently.  Just like a 4 track.

Some things to note:

- There is no input level control.  You need to mix like in the old days (move the sound source instead of the fader).  It’s not a big deal, just keep it from going over +0db.  One of the promo vids shows a drummer playing with some version of Hot Sticks to keep the volume down, and putting the iPhone behind pillows.  It worked fine.  Be creative!

- There are no effects in the program.  If we were stuck forever with the iPhone version, that might not make some folks too happy, especially since we’re recording on a little iPhone mic.  I’ll talk both why this is not a big deal, and what you can do if you really want to be crazy and actually record songs intended to be final versions on this thing!

- There is no foldback or monitoring.  In English, you can’t hear what you are recording through the headphones.  We’re all used to this, but it’s not the end of the world.  You can hear what’s playing, just slide the headphones off a bit if you can’t hear what you are recording.  This didn’t turn out to be a big deal.

- It’s been a long time since I used a 4 track recorder.  If this is all you are going to use, there’s things you need to think about before you do them vs. a DAW or RiffWorks.  Like the order you record tracks, which ones get bounced and which you’ll want to be separate at final mix time (like the vocals).  Fortunately you don’t have to think too hard about this if you use a computer to mix in the end.  I’ll explain more!

A real example

Like most dudes I learn best by messing around with something.  So I jumped right in to try and write something quick on the fly and record it.  For me, RiffWorks is the best songwriting tool on the planet.  FourTrack to me is the best “I’m in the car and have this idea” songwriting tool on the planet.  And you can take your stuff right into RiffWorks or any other DAW.  Best of both worlds! (Van Halen, not Hannah Montana lol)

First thing, you want to force quit Safari.  Things got stuck after goofing around just a bit, so I headed over to Sonoma’s site to see what was what.  There’s a lot competing for memory in an iPhone, and at Sonoma’s suggestion,  I force-quit Safari and had no hiccups after that.  Then it’s a matter of arming a track, sliding to record, and recording!

I talked about the old days of SMPTE and outboard MIDI to have a computerized drum or metronome to play to.  FourTrack includes several metronome options, including 3 actual drummers.  You can set the BPM on the metronome.  This is important if you are going to add Instant Drummers or other MIDI drums later.  Since you can’t export the metronome drummer, you’re gonna want to.  So think out the tempo of your song and record to it.

The simplicity of the whole thing made it go very quickly.  Sure I had my usual vast quantity of redoing tracks, but it was no slower than RiffWorks or a DAW.  With the ability to re-record or punch in a section, I was able to think up the lyrics a line at a time without having to redo them all.  I recorded 2 guitar tracks, a bass and a vocal in no time…while writing my short masterpiece in real time.  You are not worrying about effects or inputs (other than keeping the level within reason), so you’re focused on only one thing – playing.

So, with 4 tracks all used up, it was time to “bounce”.  For you young folk, bouncing goes like this.  You mix the tracks you have the best you can, and “record” the mix to 2 tracks for stereo, freeing 2 more tracks up.  For you older folks, yes I know we used to bounce 2 or 3 tracks to one mono one…how did we ever survive? lol  You can bounce to the current song, or to a copy.  I chose to bounce to a copy, i.e. a new song file keeping the original intact.  I like to be safe!

4 track thinking…or not!

With 2 free tracks, I decided to record a backing vocal and a solo.  Once these were complete, it was mix time.   At this point I discovered a problem.  I’ve long since forgotten my 4 track ways in favor of seemingly unlimited tracks in the computer.  My vocals were uneven, but were bounced.  No way to change any levels or re-record now!

I figured, this is just a test so not a big deal…it was time to get this tune out into the world.  To do that, it’s computer time.  I’m sure there’s somebody out there with no computer and just an iPhone (which would be odd, since you need the computer with iTunes to even activate the thing, but I digress).  For the 99.9% of the rest of us, there’s 2 ways to get the music out of the phone and into the real world.  First is through RiffWorks, either one of the paid versions or T4.  I’m a longtime user of RiffWorks Standard, so I fired it up, hit import, and it gave me the opportunity to import from the iPhone right into RiffWorks.  I picked the song file I wanted, and poof there were 4 tracks now in my SongLayer, still with their panning info.  Cool!

Now that each track was a RiffWorks layer, I could have added compression, eq or whatever to each one.  I chose not to, so I could show what the raw FourTrack song sounded like.  I did add one thing, which was drums.  The metronome drummer is very cool, but doesn’t come along for the ride.  If you have Instant Drummers in RiffWorks, you’re gonna get much better tracks anyway with the variation and intensity.  ”Uh Gator, there’s no drummers for the SongLayer.”  Yeah I know, but if you recorded to a metronome or metronome drummer, you know the BPM.  Simply make some new Riffs at that BPM, pick the drummer settings you want, and throw them up in the song bar for as long as the song is.  Think of the regular riffs now as your drum track.  Mix and match however you want.  Done.

Here’s the raw output of the recordings from the iPhone, on the iPhone’s mic, with Drummerheads “Four On The Floor” direct from RiffWorks.

http://iKeelin.com/music/FourTrack-test-mix.mp3

Abbey Road quality?  Nah.  Does it get the point across?  Sure does!  I’m a big proponent of writing first, then recording.  In other words, get the song worked out first, then focus hard on recording each track.  When they are the best they can be, then set about to working on the mix, the effects etc.  When that’s the best it can be, then worry about mastering.  FourTrack fits right in for me in that respect.

But, not being exactly content, the next night I went back at it.  When syncing to the computer, it gives you an http address for the phone with a specific port, or tells you you can import directly into RiffWorks.  The first time I went right into RiffWorks, so this time I thought I’d check out what happens when I point a web browser at it.  A nice interface came up, complete with both the original and the copied/bounced versions of the songs, and the ability to download each wav file individually.  Nice!  I grabbed the 4 original tracks I had bounced, plus the 2 new ones.  Now I had all 6 tracks!  That got me thinking, if I kept bouncing to a copy, whatever I recorded I could still get at all the original tracks when I got to the computer.  I could bounce 3 times and get 10 tracks.  Or keep going and get more.  This FourTrack is not really a 4 track, it just looks like one!

With all 6 tracks downloaded to the PC, I decided to import them into a traditional DAW program, Mackie Tracktion.  They popped in with no issue, and I grabbed some quick grooves from Toontrack’s EZ Drummer for the drum part.  Since I had all the original tracks, I did some quick work to them.  The bass was problematic, since not only was that little mic not ideal for the task, it also was affected by my room and placement.  Bass and small rooms don’t mix very well, and a mic will pick up the big differences in frequencies.  I threw some heavy compression and EQ at it, and it came in line better.  The vocals got a little eq and some compression to even them out too.  The guitars just got a little reverb thrown at one of them to make it sound a bit bigger.  A little limiting at the end, and a quick effort results in a new track.

http://iKeelin.com/music/whoisgator.mp3

Studio quality?  Maybe not quite my studio quality, but it’s better than some things I’ve worked on in the past.  Not bad though, it stands up fine.  Given no opportunity to work out mic placement, or use of our beloved direct-in boxes like a GuitarPort/TonePort/PodXT etc. here, I’d say this little experiment worked out quite well.

What can be done if you really really really want studio quality out of FourTrack?

From the input side, it appears you can use an iPOD video cable (with the other end being the red, white and yellow composite output).  On the iPhone, the yellow would tie into the mic input (instead of video output of the iPOD).  This would give you some capability for input, though whether it’s normal line level I don’t know.  With that input, you could plug in a mixer, GuitarPort, etc. to get direct and controlled access for the recording input.  A mixer would also give you some ability to monitor directly what you are recording, be they vocals in a mic or a live guitar/bass.  From the output side, you could take the red and white and plug them to a mixer or monitors, giving you a better shot at a good mix than using earbuds or headphones.  It still won’t be Abbey Road, but it should be on par with any other 16bit 44.1KHz mono recording you could do in a computer.  And that’s something Sir George Martin probably would not have been able to conceive of back then!

Overall, FourTrack is really cool.  It’s $10 which is a lot in AppStore terms, but let’s think real world.  $10 for this?  Are you freakin’ kidding me?  Everybody should have a copy.

More info at http://www.sonomawireworks.com/iphone/fourtrack/

These days I see way more advertising, way more special deals (and so-called special deals) flooding my inbox than ever before.  Businesses that have been around for a very long time going out of existence in a very short time.  Lots of “friends” always looking for a job, then disappearing when I don’t have anything to offer them.  Sad times indeed!

Fear not, the great companies will survive because they will continue to market, sell, and find creative ways to hang in there.  This commitment and creativity will set them apart when things pick up and really launch them.  The old dogs tend to get complacent and then uncertain, and the leading companies of the last boom are usually not the great ones of the next boom.  Times like these are opportunities for those who are prepared to weather them, and have the conviction to plow ahead!  Oh by the way…we plan to be one of these

Of course, it never hurts to have good friends to help.  Not the ones that call looking for something, then disappear as they try the next “friend” on their list.  I’m talking about real friends, the ones that think about you when somebody asks where to go for some help, or when there’s an opportunity…just like you would think of them in the same situation.  I consider everyone who has entrusted their art to Gator-Studios.com a friend, and the many that have referred folks to me as well.  Same goes for the good folks that pop by the forum or email me looking for guidance, those that are really looking to learn something and get better.  You put your trust in me, and I don’t intend to let you down!

And then there are those that stand out even more.  I won’t mention names but their hearts are as big as they come!  I’ve had folks drop gifts on the studio in the past, and very recently as well.  These folks thought of us and our mission to help the Riff world to be the best it can be whether just mucking around or trying to make a few bucks off CD’s or film/TV.  They understand that part of our plan is to “pay it forward” with the best tools and environment we can provide for our friends.  The quality of music coming out of Riff land is astounding these days, and we’re proud to be a part of it in whatever way we can.

In short, thanks dudes!  We have big plans for the future and fully intend to come out the other side in great shape.  This spring a bigger studio is being built, giving us an even better mixing and mastering environment plus some great options around tracking.  We plan to expand into some other studio opportunities as well.  Here at Gator-Studios.com we’re not hanging on for dear life, we’re plowing ahead into the future.  Come join us!

Let’s step back in time.  Way back.  Like 1979 back.  I was 12 and had been playing guitar for a year or two, my $35 Acoustic from the MAE store in Ft. Lauderdale.  In 1979 I wrote a song, and played/sang it in music class.  I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but I did…and my friends were amazed at the whole thing.  When I think back, I had a lot of song ideas back then.  I probably was some child prodigy genius to them lol

Alas, it was 1979.  Double-digit inflation 1979.  Stagflation 1979.  Jimmy Carter 1979.  Let’s just say money was tight, and unlike these days people didn’t take any little glimmer of talent in their kids and blow a million bucks trying to make them into the next baseball star or music sensation.  So while I had all these ideas, there wasn’t much I could do with it.  At 13 I “upgraded” to a $50 electric guitar from Sears (with action about as high as a 2 story building), not exactly a shred machine, and after a while I got busy with other things and didn’t do much with it, just messing around from time to time.  I saw some friends going way beyond what I could do so I didn’t see much point then.

I went off to college at 18, and I didn’t take my Sears special with me.  It was embarassing, why bother?  But I met some cool folks in my dorm who played and convinced me to bring that piece of crap up.  I never thought being able to play was a big deal, but to a lot of people it was.  Not that my chops were that great with that beast, but at least I had enough to hang in a jam.  That was my first time actually playing with other people and it was great!  So I started saving my money, and 6 months later with $200 in cash I hauled one of my friends from the dorm to Sabine music to try guitars with me.  It’s hard to try them backwards so I needed a second opinion.  I settled on a Peavey guitar…which ironically I played through an old Gibson amp I had…I was backwards in every sense!

I took that puppy home and swapped the strings to lefty, and man what a change!  I couldn’t reach the upper frets but it played a lot better.  It was fun again.  The next year we got an apartment and would have parties and inevitably somebody would have me pull out the guitar and play while they sang through the stereo.  My first open mic nights!  I had no idea how bad an idea that is.  Guitar was just a thing I did, like skateboarding to class.

In 1989 my life changed forever.  Okay, it changed forever in 1975 when I cut my foot in half in a lawn-mower.  It changed a bit with 3 knee operations, and meningitis in 1988.  1989 was a real life changer though!  For in 1989, I met my future wife and put all these music pieces together.  You see, a friend of a friend had this band, and was looking for a second guitarist.  Oh hell I wasn’t nearly good enough for something like that, I almost didn’t bother.  I asked my roomate (one of my best friends) if he thought I was good enough to do that, expecting him to say “you suck, don’t embarass yourself dude!” and instead I got a very serious “yeah, you’re plenty good enough” which threw me back.  So I tried out with these guys and stuck.  The guitarist told me I needed to go back to Sabine music and get my guitar set up, it would play better.  It did, big time.

We were mainly a cover band, but had a couple originals we played.  Like every cover band, some idiot gets a jones for writing.  That idiot turned out to be me!  I don’t know why, I just had ideas and wanted to work on them.  4 tracks were expensive but I had a cassette deck so I bought another and would record with the bounce between them.  It was tough but for once I was turning my ideas into something I could actually show.  Of course there was no interest from anybody in going down this path, I think it was a little scary for all.  Eagles and Bob Seeger?  No brainer.  Originals?  Man, what if they suck?  Thank goodness money and school got in the way, it was a great excuse for all of us to move on.

Fast forward to 1992.  After a couple very tough years out of school, we finally got far enough over the money hump that I could afford a 4-track.  Sure I was working 2 jobs to get there, but I could now really start writing and recording!  I also bought a MIDI interface and a Roland D-110 which was state of the art or close to it at the time.  I finally got time to record a song I had kind of written around Thanksgiving.  It was simple, a couple guitars and a vocal, but it was real music!  Oh man this is something I could do all the time, I needed to find out how!  But those 2 jobs got in the way and one was starting to become more of a career.  So I put off writing and recording, a little at a time until I figured out I was never going to get to it and sold my 4 track.  I did get to mess around with a friend from time to time in Atlanta at some big studios, so music became an occasional weekend distraction for a few years, but not much more.  I’d write some stuff on the fly and we’d play with the big recording gear.  It was fun.

Let’s skip to 1999.  I moved to Kansas for a high profile job, which left no time for music let alone family.  Lucky for me my wife stuck with me as I rode to the top of the tech bubble in 2000 and down the slide after that.  I had huge success in 2001 despite the crash, only to find my execs decided to ignore me when it came time to take care of the people behind it.  I was madder than at any time in my life but stayed stoic through it all, until I got home one night and had to get it out.  I didn’t feel like drinking, screaming or beating something.  For some reason I was compelled to write a song.  It was the strangest thing, like I was a puppet that had to do this.  I had a nerve issue that made my fret hand feel like it was stuck in a light socket, but something forced me to write this song on the guitar.  So I went down to the basement, found my guitar, and wrote.  When I finished I realized there were a lot of things in life much more important than winning a $1B deal, or getting my just due for it.  It was a wake up call, that one day I’d wake up and it would be too late to do the things I valued.

Fast forward-it took 3 years for things to stabilize and for me to find my way out of that mess!  In 2004 I moved my family back to North Carolina.  Step 1, live where I want to.  Check.  My new boss was a guitar player, and we started having fun conversations about gear and bands.  I wasn’t a gear head and things changed so much since I last cared (that would be 1992 BTW).  I saw this magic bean called a “PODxt” that sounded too good to be true, but the sound samples were amazing.  I picked one up on Ebay in 2005 and was thrown back!  This was the freakin’ sound I had in my head when I was 12!  Damn!!!

When I registered the PODxt they sent an offer for something called “RiffTracker” that you could use to record with.  I checked it out and it looked pretty easy, so I threw the $99 at it.  I decided after all these years of writing songs that I should at least record them, and this would let me do that.  I did a couple goofing around recordings to get the hang of it and it was great.  Before I could get the first song done, work bit me again.  I closed a major deal that had to be delivered by the end of 2005, and unfortunately it highlighted everything that was broken in all our processes.  Things got worse every day, and one day I joked that if it got any worse somebody would write a song about it.  The next day things got worse, and I said I would write a song about it.  Off I went and 2 hours later there was a song about it.  Freaky.  It was a big hit around the office!

February 2006, one weekeind I got some time to record.  I started on the first song I wanted to do and it went great.  The odd thing was I got 3 other ideas recording that song.  The next song I started to work on ended up coming out as a different song idea.  Every time I started to record an old song, a new one came out.  It finally hit me after all these years that this was something I need to do, and it’s been there all along!  At that point I decided I had to see what my potential was to do this “for real”.

Now it’s 3 years later and we’re caught up.  I haven’t come close to recording all the ideas I have, and new ones pop up all the time.  I like to spend hours writing, but life doesn’t give me blocks of time that way.  So I spent a lot of time re-acquainting myself with studio engineering and working projects for others, a lot easier at an hour at a time. 

I’ve been a Taxi member for just over a year, although I haven’t recorded anything new in about 6 months.  Taxi has shown me in no uncertain terms where I stand and what I need to work on…and that without working on this I’m going to stay on the “edge” of success forever.  Unfortunately life has it’s own ideas and so I’m slaving away keeping my family well fed instead of working on songwriting-deja vu!  I don’t see any reason to give up though, the time will come I’m sure.  Whatever talent I have, it’s still in there and just needs that extra bit of work.

And now to summarize:

- The guitarist was a guy named Ed.  Ed ended up owning a very successful studio for several years achieving lots of hits for his clients.  I recently hooked back up with him, and it amazes the crap out of me when he sends his mixes for me to check.  I guess I spent too much time getting up on studio engineering.  Good to have Ed back, btw.

- The guitar set up was done by a guy named Charlie.  Charlie used to play in Blackfoot.  Still the best setup I’ve ever seen.  I flipped it back over for my son, and even right handed it’s still the best I’ve ever seen, and it’s 20 years later.

- Remember 1979, because that’s what they’ll be comparing the economy too in about 18 months.  Barack Obama will replace Jimmy Carter in sentences.  But I’ll set my kids up with good guitars and instruction regardless!

- In 1989 I met my future bride.  She was the singer of the band I joined.  We were married 16 years ago today, and I owe it all to that guitar and Paul McCartney songbook I got in 1979.  Happy Anniversary Kerry!