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Alexsy	Date: June 16, 2005 @ 1:40 AM the stuff that i've put on my site here has all been recorded in my living room. practically speaking, that made sense since i have the most space there. but tonally ... it wasn't bad, just flat, in my opinion. so i did something a little different tonight. i put my amp in my shower (clearly, making sure the tub was dry before hand.) i just posted the experiment on my page here ... alexy.dmusic.com ... it's called 'in the shower' ... what i like about it is the natural reverb on it ... the whole thing feels very echoy. i'm wondering where other people record ... what makes for a good recording room, vs. a bad one ... and i know next to nothing about mic placement, but i'm always looking to learn ...
pog	Date: June 16, 2005 @ 2:01 AM rule #1 is ... there are no rules. rule #2 it should sound good to the artist that's creating the music. rule #3 analogue effects are often betterer than digital effects. rule #4 all of these rules don't apply because of rule #1
zedsalt	Date: June 16, 2005 @ 11:51 AM "Rule Number Five: No Poofters! Rule Number Six: There is noooooooooo...Rule Number Six. Rule Number Seven: No Poofters!" Bathroom acoustics have been used quite a bit, and for good reason. Really, anytime you get out of the mid-sized box, it tends to sound refreshing. Victorian and NeoVic houses are great for all the odd sized and shaped spaces they provide. There are two grain silos here, fifty foot tall concrete tubes with open tops, one with a hard floor, one with about three feet of silage. Are they really versatile recording spaces? Well, no. Do they have a useful and novel sound? Oh Yeah!
onewhodreams	Date: June 16, 2005 @ 11:54 AM I record in my living room too, which is right next to my kitchen and 3 feet from my front door. Might have ta' give the bathroom a try though...
Alexsy	Date: June 16, 2005 @ 5:46 PM mmm. grain silos. now THAT would be freaking cool.
BigAndy07	Date: June 29, 2005 @ 10:26 AM How are y'all recording? Are you using a mic in front of your amp, cuz if you were hooking it into a recorder, that wouldn't work. I'm just asking because I've been hooking up my guitar into a 8 track recorder, and I really don't like the sound I'm getting.
zedsalt	Date: June 29, 2005 @ 12:13 PM I haven't played through a guitar amp for over fifteen years now.
hueseph	Date: June 30, 2005 @ 2:33 AM " cuz if you were hooking it into a recorder, that wouldn't work. I'm just asking because I've been hooking up my guitar into a 8 track recorder, and I really don't like the sound I'm getting." You can't just plug your guitar into your recorder. A guitars output is not at line level. If you want this to work, you can go through some sort of effects unit or use a Direct Injection box(DI). Myself, I find that closets give a nice dead space. I record next to the kitchen and near the living room. Usually after midnight. Not the best way to record.
zedsalt	Date: June 30, 2005 @ 12:24 PM Don't the recorders you folks are talking about have input gain and level controls? All of the methods I use for recording my acoustic involve at least one track of magnetic soundhole pickup DIed to the recorder. For acoustic or electric, the analog gain and tape saturation make for an awfully sweet sound. Some of it gets lost in A/D conversion, but I have the analog tapes, eagerly awaiting the day when digital catches up to analog in sound quality.
LostYears	Date: July 2, 2005 @ 1:31 AM anyone know of any cheep rooms or studios in the portland area, i dont got much money
sinai	Date: July 2, 2005 @ 6:44 AM i'd love to record an albumn in castle dracula...the bass would prolly collapse the place though...
PsychoNaut	Date: August 28, 2005 @ 4:55 PM Put Your Amp to 1st floor and go to play/record vocals to 6th floor in a building that has open narrow hall. Or lighthouse. Man, lighthouse reverb, it´s evil.
GeneHilbert	Date: August 28, 2005 @ 5:22 PM LostYears: save your money and buy your own gear...... Then you'll be able to record anytime you can for years to come.
Snoogans775	Date: August 28, 2005 @ 6:56 PM a lot of USB interfaces, sound cards, and recorders have calibrated instrument level inputs that get a similar effect zed mentioned
leedsquietman	Date: January 20, 2006 @ 8:37 PM Listen to Led Zeppelin IV - Recorded mostly at a huge olde worlde victorian mansion house (Headley Grange) with those Oxford University 30 feet high ceilings in each room etc and real coal fire in one room and freezing cold everywhere else. Like the drums to When The Levee Breaks, allegedly with mics hanging down from a bannister and the drums played in a hallway corridor ! Ambient indeed. (note they re-recorded most guitar parts at Island as the ambient sound of Headley grange was great for vox and drums but less so for guitars and bass)
woodhead	Date: January 21, 2006 @ 1:22 AM The only thing that I have actually been able to leave alone in recording from analog to some what digital are the rooms. Living room - Large room in a studio, couches help deaden the room some what but with decent mikes can still capture the room sound - Works great for acoustic Drums. Bathroom - I use this for vocals some times and also for acoustic intruments the porcelain helps with reverb and some time add some water to the tub. Walk in closet - Nice tight space and with the clothes in it can help deaden the room as well (great room for vocals, nice and tight) Bedroom (medium sized) great room for Guitar amps, espceially dist guits at loud volumes, neighbors hate it so record during prime time hours (house application only, do this in an apartment and you will get kicked out) Remember there are no rules, this has been said in this forum and be willing to experiment. P.S. Garage another great room for Drums some times, depends on the acoustics P.S.S. if you would like to test your room, stand in the center and calp loudly, if there is any slap back, find it and make sure to dampen it.
leedsquietman	Date: January 21, 2006 @ 2:32 AM I once placed a mic in a metal bread bin / bread basket and sang into it, it produced a cool gated reverb !
zedsalt	Date: January 22, 2006 @ 11:15 AM Why use any sort of actual space when recording digitally, woodhead? Digital doesn't record phase angle variance.
kingo	Date: January 22, 2006 @ 3:02 PM Oh come on Zed. That's the silliest thing I've ever heard.
zedsalt	Date: January 23, 2006 @ 11:02 AM That was a big selling point when CDs hit the major markets: "No phase angle distortion!". I never could figure out why they were advertising the fact that they were foisting such a flat, boring sound upon us. Refer to it as "distortion" or "variance", either way, it's a tremendous loss.
olethros	Date: January 26, 2006 @ 8:43 PM Phase distortion appears whenever you are filtering a sound. Normally whatever you do with a sound counts as 'filtering. The thing with vinyl was that there was some special filtering down before the track was etched on the master, and afterwards there was an inverse filter applied to get back to the original spectrum. I think this was called the RIAA curve and it probably caused a fair bit of distortion. A good D/A converter on a CD player will not cause any phase distortion (i.e. changes from the original signal) when you play back the CD. Of course, later on there can be many different types of distortions, but at least the path from the CD-recorded track until the pre-amp in the CD-player should suffer from virtually zero distortion. Hope that helps.
olethros	Date: January 26, 2006 @ 8:45 PM Of course, recording something onto digital properly is a problem in itself; not to mention that in practice A/D and D/A converters are not so fantastic or that the peripheral components used tend to be sub-par (and thus swamping whatever benefit you could get)
zedsalt	Date: January 27, 2006 @ 10:57 AM I wasn't referring to phasing problems; I was talking about phase angle variance, the aspect of sound that gives us the ability to determines a sound's origin in space. When hearing an unrecorded sound or an analog recording of a sound, this is experienced as something which surrounds the listener and extends infinitely outward, going beyond his/her hearing. In digital, it's a straight line connecting two points. Just another of the many aspects of sound that digital is incapable of capturing.
kingo	Date: January 27, 2006 @ 11:09 AM But that's not true. That'd have to be based on recording technique; it's not a feature or a flaw of the medium itself. Methods of capturing and recreating that aspect of sound are available regardless of recording medium.
zedsalt	Date: January 28, 2006 @ 11:11 AM I've yet to hear a convincing job of faking phase angle variance in the digital realm. Whoever remastered Billy Thorpe's "Children of the Sun" album did as well as any I've heard. Even when one A/Bs it with rematers of other "spacey" recordings (Andy Johns' work with Floyd, for example), it impresses me. But as for sounding like a real space? Not yet. Not that I've heard.
zedsalt	Date: January 28, 2006 @ 11:13 AM Er..."remasters".
olethros	Date: January 28, 2006 @ 3:24 PM OK, so you are talking about the relative delay of a signal from one channel to the other. However I fail to see how this could be compromised by digital recording techniques.
zedsalt	Date: January 29, 2006 @ 11:21 AM Reducing the three-dimensionality of sound down to "the relative delay of a signal from one channel to the other" is precisely the shortcoming I've been focusing on in these last few posts. When you stand outside and a car passes with its stereo blaring, you hear more in the way of change than the crescendo/decresendo, correct? Admittedly, there are some of the changes in tone and timbre that digital is capable of capturing...to some small degree...but it isn't capable of recording the variance that gives us the ability to locate the soundsource. It's part of the reason that all reputable providers of music as therapy shun digital and seek out purely analog recordings.
woodhead	Date: January 29, 2006 @ 6:04 PM It's part of the reason that all reputable providers of music as therapy shun digital and seek out purely analog recordings. OK so you are telling us that major recording studios and RIAA type companies are still recording in Analog? and that they are not using Pro Tools which by the way is the standard for recroding today, so you are telling us that they are using 2 inch tape, and have not moved in to the digital realm yet.
pmscpc	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 2:55 AM I don't know how true it is, but Jon Anderson from YES was rumoured to have insisted a bathroom be built in the studio at some point. For it's reverb qualities, rather than hygene
olethros	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 3:28 AM To the three-dimensionality of sound: I have listened to recordings in digital media where, with just two speakers, you could hear things going behind you, above you, below you, etc. It was just a demo recording and it does not work if you are not in the correct location. It's all a combination of delays and filtering. If all the microphones and pre-amplification are exactly the same, then the only difference I can see in digital recording is the behaviour near the amplitude limits. My question is: after the signal becomes just a voltage on a wire, why is it better to record it on some kind of tape than it is to use an A/D converter in terms of stereo?
zedsalt	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 11:43 AM Whew! That's one mighty big leap you made there, Woody! See, there are people who have made a life out of trying to understand human behavior and helping people modify their behavior in an attempt to better their lives. One point...perhaps the only point....where this community intersects with the one you mentioned (the people who consider themselves the apex of the recording industry) is in "music therapy". This overlap has shrunk to almost nothing, because digital representations of music don't seem to have much, if any, of the therapeutic value of actual music (according to every piece of empirical data gleaned from decades' worth of research). And y'know, Olethros, none of the advancements in getting those digital representations to sound more like actual music would have happened if everybody had just sat back and said, "I'm darn happy with this '70s CD sound". You are, of course, welcome to settle for whatever you wish, but it makes me all the more thankful that I've never heard a full-time engineer, producer, etc. who shares that opinion. "...why is it better to record it on some kind of tape than it is to use an A/D converter in terms of stereo?" I hate to answer a question with a question, but why is the Mona Lisa "better" than the copies of it that reside in connect-the-dots books? That's not a very good analogy, though; the connect-the-dots version of the painting are so much closer to the origianl than digital reproductions of music are to music.
olethros	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 1:18 PM Both the tape recording and the digital recording are representations of the exact same signal that is apparent as voltage on two wire terminals. I agree that none of these recordings can capture some aspects of music as you experience it coming directly from the instrument. But the digital recording is a representation of the original performance as much as the analogue recording.
olethros	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 1:28 PM I think you got me confused, I am not sure what you mean anymore by 'analogue'. Real instruments do sound much better than any representation of them, be it digital or analog. I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I really don't understand your point.
kingo	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 1:32 PM Don't mind zed, he's just a luddite at heart.
olethros	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 7:25 PM He's got a point about the horrible quality of early CD systems though. I sometimes wonder whether the complicated peripheral electronics compromise overall system quality by introducing parasitic effects... Speaking of digital.. whatever hapoened to the high-frequency switching amplifiers? (Those, instead of trying to have an output proportional to some input signal, they switch between min and max voltage very very fast, so that on average they are following the signal exactly - that is, within a T ms time window they have an error of a/T, where a can be very small and depends on the switching speed). Are they getting popular or are standard techniques still holding their ground?
zedsalt	Date: January 31, 2006 @ 11:27 AM I wouldn't ask anyone to just take me at my word on...well...anything. The fact is that the facts are available...well...everywhere. If you want to know what makes digital recording so pitifully inferior in sound quality, read...well...anything that mentions the difference and was written by...well...anyone that's not trying to sell you digital recording equipment.
kingo	Date: January 31, 2006 @ 1:30 PM All I'm going on is googling "phase angle variance" and "phase angle distortion," along with the words audio or digital or CD. I get a lot of not much except occasional references to some stuff that guitarist dude from Boston said back in the 80s (I think) that sound similar to what you're saying. OH, and I go also by the fact that I listen to a lot of shit and have heard, and have created, digital recordings in which sound sources are well placed in the spatial field. I'm not arguing that digital sound with the sampling rates used in CDs don't lose resolution compared to some analog signals; what I contend is that you're overstating your case to such extremes that it's impossible to agree with you. In any normal listening environment, the difference between a digital reproduction of a sound and its analog equivalent is not very noticeable. The digital sound is most certainly not "flattened" to the point of destroying the illusion that what you're hearing is located in a particular location in space. If it were, then everytime I made a digital, binaural recording it wouldn't sound, well, binaural.
zedsalt	Date: January 31, 2006 @ 3:56 PM I overstated something?
olethros	Date: February 1, 2006 @ 7:17 AM A good analogue storage medium can be as good as a digital one. Most of the problems with capturing and experiencing a 3D sound are related to the fact that the recording is always a 'point recording' and that speakers and microphones are bloody sub-optimal to say the least. One of the best listening experiences that I've had recently was this: A friend was wearing two small mics behind his ears, recording to a digital device, while listening to a concert. Then I listened to his recording with some good headphones. It was as if I was in the bloody concert.
kingo	Date: February 1, 2006 @ 7:51 AM Olethros: That's a binaural recording, which is what I was talking about. Yes, those recordings sound amazingly realistic as far as how they duplicate the location of a sound source. According to the only reading of zed's argument I can see, that shouldn't work on a digital recording device. Which means your experience, and my similar experiences, are in our heads. Which is a shame.
olethros	Date: February 1, 2006 @ 9:14 AM Hm, speaking of rooms, last year I saw a demo of 'room audio space recreation' using multiple speakers. The more the better, but it can work with just two. This creates a complete reproduction of the sound in some predefined volume of space, rather than the reproduction at a 'sweet spot' - the reproduction is perfect for any sound sources that lie outside the space. While there are some distortions for recreating sound sources that lie within the listening space, it is possible to do even that. There are also problems when the number of listeners is more than one, since they can occlude sounds from one another.. but it seems promising. The technology is based in converging ultra-sound waves. The recreation of the aural environment is based on a set of point recordings coupled with a model of the room acoustics. So far the only practical scenario for use of this system is in a cinema theatre, where all the speakers can be placed just above the heads of listeners to avoid occlusion, and where the material absorbs sound and there are no reflections (which would make the system stop working)
zedsalt	Date: February 1, 2006 @ 11:27 AM There you go! Get a copy of "The Sounds of Dawn Chorus", encode it to a CD, listen to both. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that the only available cassette copies are analog end-to-end, from the binaural "head on a stick" mic to retail. I mean, that's all it takes, really, once someone gets a chance to hear how the two different methods reproduce/recreate the same sound, there can't be any further argument. Of course, the sad thing is that you have to either make your own recordings/encodings for comparison, pay big bucks for new audiophile analog, or get "store bought" recordings from WAY back to make the comparison. That's the situation that decades of settling for less have created. A basic understanding of how the two technologies work can serve the same purpose, though. Toward that end,I put an absolutely silly amount of time into web searches yesterday afternoon in an attempt to locate some sort of reputable, fact-based assertion that digital sound quality compares favorably to analog. While failing to find one, I did learn some interesting things. This just isn't the hot topic that it was seven years ago. One can still find explanations, charts, graphs, etc., which detail the difference with varying degrees of precision, but most of the analog vs. digital debate has shifted to cell phones, hearing aids, and video. These, obviously, are issues in polar opposition to the recording "debate". Digital video contains MORE visual info than analog, and the dramatic reduction of audio information in A/D conversion is an overwhelmingly POSITIVE thing when it comes to phones and hearing aids. Here are a few of the better explanations of why analog sound quality is infinitely superior: http://happybob.com/marc/digital_sucks/index.htm http://www.tiptopsound.com/articles.asp?ArticleID=4&Page=5 http://x2.i-dat.org/~csem/UNESCO/1/index.html
olethros	Date: February 3, 2006 @ 6:57 AM OK. Point 1: Filtering and capturing frequencies above 20Khz. a) Microphones don't usually record much above 20Khz b) Amplifiers already have filters in place for cutting off frequencies above 20Khz or so. c) Analog media such as tape already have a limitation on maximum recordable frequency - this is a physical limitation of the medium, much similar to the amount of bits that you can fit in a digital mediun. d) Loudspeakers certainly don't respond to frequencies much higher 20Khz If _any_ of the 4 points a-d are true, you will lose those frequencies. 2) Analogue represents a continuous range of values. Yes, but real analogue media don't have infinite capacity. Rather than having the amount of information recorded limited by the amount of bits that you have per sample, the limit of information is imposed by the inherent noise in the recording medium - the effect is the same: a loss of precision. 3) Behaviour under extreme load I like the 'analogue distrotion' too. I think points 1) and 2) are a significant source of confusion. Even ignoring sources, analog recording media, as _any_ type of recording media, has an intrinsic limit on the amount of information it can contain. In digital media this limit is expressed via quantization. In analogue media it is expressed via noise. The information limits are due to the purely physical properties of the medium and nothing else. There is no way to overcome them. Then the trade-off is between different types of noise.
olethros	Date: February 3, 2006 @ 7:01 AM Addendum. Bad quality A/D an D/A converters really make a mockery of the whole process and introduce horrible distortions. These are much more common than you might think.
zedsalt	Date: February 3, 2006 @ 11:42 AM "Microphones don't usually record much above 20Khz" Microphones don't record anything. Some manufacturers limit the top end to that of average human male hearing (the average is 2 kHz higher for women); some set the bar a lot lower. "Loudspeakers certainly don't respond to frequencies much higher 20Khz." When a speaker is permanently damaged by too much volume in either extreme of pitch, I'd call that a "response", wouldn't you? "Analog media such as tape already have a limitation on maximum recordable frequency - this is a physical limitation of the medium, much similar to the amount of bits that you can fit in a digital mediun." So you're saying that there are sounds that are either too high or too low to be captured on analog media? That's interesting. I can't say that I've ever heard anyone express that notion before.
olethros	Date: February 5, 2006 @ 10:55 AM The microphone membrane responds strongly only within a limited range of frequencies. This is a purely mechanical property. ''Permanently damaged by too much volume'', I'd say is enough explanation. The thing is that the cone will move much less. The response, ignoring the cabin and the amplifier and anything else, depends on a) the magnet and b) the cone. Due to physical considerations, a cone has a maximum frequency response (driving a cone at a fixed amplitude but increasing frequency, requires increasing energy). Yes, analogue media does not have infinite sotrage capacity: The physics of information storage are well known. Digital, analogue, or whatever new X comes out does not make any difference - given a fixed physical medium, it is impossible to record data at infinite bandiwdth, because it will require an infinite amount of information. There is a very real and insurmountable limit on the recordable range of frequencies on any finite physical medium. Let's take an analogue magnetic tape. The tape is made up of little particles, each one acting like a 'little magnet'. Initially those are randomly aligned. In order to record something, you magnetise the tape, aligning little pieces of tape to different directions. Let's assume a simple type of recording, where an alinment of X degrees corresponds to the maximum amplitude value and an alignment of -X degrees to the minimum voltage amplitude. Then, in order to record a high frequency signal you will have to change the alignment from -X to X of subsequent sections in the tape. For a tape running at a fixed speed, you will have to space those alignment change more closely in order to be able to represent higher frequencies. Or you can make the tape run faster. But there is a limit on how closely you can pack data on the magnetic tape, simply because changing the alignment of one little bit affects the alignment of other bits close to it. The fixed medium resolution is also the reason why the sound quality is deteriorating on the inside of vinyl albums compared to the outside - because there is much less material to write data in per rotation. Hope this helps.
zedsalt	Date: February 6, 2006 @ 12:00 PM The speaker death thing was the voice of experience speaking. I like to play around with the cutoff and resonance controls on my Moogerfooger MF101 as tunes are fading out. I'm always very careful to avoid leaving it sit with the former way low and the latter way up, as I've been warned countless times about what this can do to my speakers. I learned fairly recently that this happens at frequencies too HIGH for us to hear, also. And that one can take a tape that he made while recording that speaker-shredding bit of "silence", put it in a friend's stereo (at her request) and...with the tone around seven and the volume about one and a half...turn a nice pair of speakers into a nice pair of cabinets in need of new speakers. I'm much less concerned about loss that's beyond the range of human hearing than I am that which is obvious to a guy with 15% hearing loss and dangerously disabling tinnitus. See, that's the sad thing, to me...when my dad wonders why his new Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys CD sounds like such crap compared to the vinyl, when folks like Eddie Kramer and Rupert Neve talk about the pain of having to have their work compromised by digital encoding's kakistocracy, when generations are brainwashed into thinking that they are hearing actual music... Y'know, it's interesting- usually, when I get into a discussion like this in a public forum, I get a few requests from therapists who use music in their work. This time, so far, all I've gotten is two emails chastising me for using the term "recording" when referring to digital representations of music.