Tube anti-depressants

After a fairly depressing day there is nothing better than hooking up your sound system through a tube preamp, turning it up loud and listening to the results.  Admittedly it was less than £50 and made by Behringer (the Ultragain MIC200) but considering the price it can make some nice sounds.  Which actually is typical of Behringer.  Most people knock them but in my experience they are generally fairly well built and adequate for most home recording projects.

I'm off now for a weekend of band-based fun...

Compressing, limiting and downright breaking

I feel like starting with one of my favourite rants.  Everyone who does any music recording should know about the compressor/limiter, that useful bit of kit which essentially reduces the music's dynamic range thus preventing your bassist sounding like he has set off a land-mine under the e-string during a quite passage.  It works by having a threshold level below which the input to output ratio is 1:1 and above which the ratio can be set between 1:1 and infinity:1 hence producing a reduction in gain.  A limiter is a compressor with the ratio set at infinity:1 and can be used to boost the overall volume of a track.  The limiter sets all output above the threshold to a constant level and allows you to increase the gain up to the point of clipping.  However in the idiotic pursuit of louder and louder tracks many people (professional and amateur) push the gain too far and get horrible digital clipping.  In ye olde days of analogue recording a bit of clipping was fine - it just added some warm fuzziness - but digital clipping is bad, very very bad!  Do the sound engineers think we can't hear it above a distorted guitar?  Do they think we only listen to music through £5.99 headphones? Grrr!

In keeping with my old blog I'll start by saying "In the beginning there was nothing, and it exploded" (Terry Pratchett).

It begins...

So, it begins (again). Hopefully now I have a vague theme to my blog I will actually keep it up for a sensible amount of time! When I started to get into amateur music recording there was a lot of good advice around but also a lot of crap and trying to find what I wanted was not easy. Hence I will share some of the things I have learnt and am learning as the "producer/engineer" (otherwise known as the person who spends the most on music equipment) for Noctula. In addition I will throw in the random and amusing things that happen to me just so you don't get bored.