jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

That seems like the rule but i suspect its actually the exception. It happens multiple times a day but compared to the sheer amount of music content uploaded to YouTube or Tiktok those successes are a drop in the bucket. I wouldn't think the odds of your well produced track cutting through the noise of spotify are any worse than getting a million youtube views with your live groovebox exploration. I think YouTube really lends itself to low production values. The poor sound quality is a real leveler.

Its rough. Computers have raised the bar for production values. Gone are the days when an indie dance track could be cut with a drum machine and a couple of synths live through a mackie to a dat tape or cassette. Creativity often takes a back seat to leveraging a bewildering array of digital tools said to give you that 'professional sound' to be remotely competitive on streaming platforms in the computer age of music.

But as for computers slowing things down? I dunno. I find I'm just slower now because I'm older. I don't work holidays and only do weekends if I need to, I don't usually work late unless I'm really inspired, I take more breaks because my ears get fatigued faster, I don't skip meals and no longer accept fast food as actual food and I have to deal with way more responsibilities... coupled with how discerning I've gotten about the details (okay, nitpicky and perfectionist) adds up to a slow production timetable.

We're not unproductive, we're middle aged and day jobs have taught us to slow down, do our best work and put our well being first. Even if I'm working on other people's music, if you can give me extra time you get better stuff back.

Thanks for affirming my sanity.

Are you sure it should be under DAWs? The website suggests to me it's only standalone as an iPad app but is really a virtual instrument plugin for a fully featured host DAW. I mean, I'm sure one could make reat music using only a tablet these days but I wouldn't call it a workstation if I've got to open it as a plugin to integrate it with my studio. What do I know though? I'm a dinosaur.

I'll live with that price bump. I've definitely benefited from name associations when selling under the radar gear that someone has made famous... or infamous.

I'm actually all through my tube microphone phase. Occassionally I'll use my rode NTV on a female vocalist, it's the only great mic they ever made, but that's about it. My friend Larry makes the ADK tube mics and I used to own one, but I haven't tried his new stuff... maybe I'll get one of his 251 style mics. In tube mics I really want a u67 or nothing and they're unobtainium. There's nothing quite like a 67... no one ever copies the feedback circuit, they tone down the capsule brightness or add some eq to the preamp but a real 67 has a dynamic 'equalization' where the attenuation of high end only occurs when you hit it with a lot of treble. Its clever... it works sort of like a presence control on a guitar amp in reverse. It's like a dynamic shelving filter powered by phase cancellation from the negative leg if the output transformer.

Anyway... you can get a great recording from almost anything these days. It's a real golden era. I'm consistently blown away with how easily stuff comes together with modern budget mics. This wss not the case when we were young.

Its probably not all that rare in eastern europe. Commies cranked out just as many microphones as their capitalist neighbors, they had a lot if propaganda to record. I'll bet every radio station in a former eastern block country has a couple TAB Funkenwork condensers buried in a closet... you probably can't trade them for Levi's these days though!

I had to look the schematic up. Both 18" models look 90% the same, but I was incorrect about them being a b15 head. They're almost twice as powerful, using 7027a tubes which were an ultra robust 6L6 ampeg used in the V/VT series amps, ab18x is the same amp design as the b25 and b25b heads that I used to like for bass.... which is a V3 with larger coupling caps and different bright and deep switch values. The b18n is solid state rectified, so will be less compressed than a b18x or b25. Different power supply. It makes a difference. The B18Ns ive recorded were punchy as heck versus a b25 and the silicon diode bridge rectifier is probably the reason. I think they're going to sound and feel more different than is indicated by the schematic. A fast, stiff power supply changes amps a lot, especially bass amps.

Ampeg bass combos are legendary, of course, but the B18n & B18x are exceedingly rare, AFAIK.

I know 2 guys who own B18Ns. Anthony and Brian.... different years, same amp, a b15 head on a jumbo cab with a cleveland 18 inch. Maybe it's because the ampeg plant wasn't far from philly but I encounter weird ampeg variants regularly. Trash godz party headquarters is home to a several cool 60s ampegs including Cam's gemini2.

So far so good

Sounds like you know what you want. Problem solved.

Traffic is low anymore... and we never had a lot of rules.

I don't do traditional forum/BBS moderation here. Life's too short.

Mods please add Gibson Les Paul Junior Tribute DC Bass

Hahaha.. ha ha... meh

Maybe this isn't music related but it is to me...

We are going to pump you up!

I actually went for a really close miked sound on this one and built a blanket fort around the amp closet to get a really dry signal. Just driving a speaker so hard that you have to put a pad on a condenser that close up really adds a lot of flavor that just doesn't cone from modeling. There's just something magic that usually happens when you turn alternating current into sound pressure and then turn it back to current and record it.

...gauche of me to propose this, I'm sure, but why not just re-record that one part in-tune? Wouldn't that be faster than Melodyne-ing every load-bearing note that is too many cents north or south? Cramer seems like a pragmatic/big-picture sort of artist. I don't think he's gonna hate you too hard if you needed to swap out the bass.

Nah that's what we did. He got me a new track about 2 hours ago? I actually mentioned the tuning issues immediately but wasn't sure if it was maybe shoegaze style points and wasn't something to worry about. Plus I bugged him to cut an extra lead vocal and didn't want to demand he like re-cut everything. When I got the di recording into an amp it just became intolerable every couple bars to have the anchor of the song wobbling flat and sharp so I pressed the point. That's hard when theres a Kevin shields approach to pitch on all the guitars. And Iayers of distant miked warbly vocal harmonies.

Edit: I probably should be making a youtube video of this one so bedroom guys can see every pitfalls that come up and the moving parts of pre-mixing, because almost nothing recorded at hone is good to go when it gets to me. This instance I'm like an extra producer too, flying in drums, committing new sounds to tape from existing DI parts, putting stuff into tibe amps... replacing vanilla plugins with toys that probably haven't even been emulated as plugins yet... trying to get sone excitement going so it sounds less like a dude in an apartment with a laptop and the same focusrite scarlett everyone uses these days lol

Right now my rule is that everything has to have moved some air before I try to mix in earnest. On a song like this l, just getting everything into open mics immediately makes it sound authentic.

I first heard them on the Crow OST and got really into them. They didn't put out that much music.

EDIT: I'm going to date myself but I was really stoked about the crow when it came out because I loved the comic which I first encountered when it was collected by Tundra which was Keven Eastman of TMNT fame's extremely mismanaged publisher... they did From Hell around that time. I look back and I really feel like that was a magic time... it's not just nostalgia. I swear its not. The crow comic may gave turned me on to joy division...

Man, I'm drinking beer and deep diving Trash Theory on YouTube because... why not? This guy is reminding me of music I forgot like Lush. I'm kinda stalled on mixing, I had an out of tune bass track that derailed things when every tuning plugin failed to deliver... quel surprise! My ears are exhausted anyway. I had Cramer's DI guitars blaring through old amps all week. I wanted to keep room sound out so I went with the amp closet with a tent of blankets but my neighbors could hear it and I think it bruised my kidneys. Thom Cramer likes low end.

That guy's hella cool.

I've been watching a lot of documentaries lately trying to remember the 90s from the rock side a little better because I'm doing this thing for @ThCraymer and he's really into some of the bands I listened to as a young asshole whenever I wasnt blaring pummeling industrial, acid house and Detroit techno which was my favorite music if I was driving. I haven't used my spx90 this much in years.

https://youtu.be/YlvmTp6-SwU?si=vgbK6-sREVP_w6ZP

Like halfway through this documentary I went "damn! I forgot aout medicine, those guys were cool!"

Any duncan or dimarzio set like the ckassic JB and jazz set or a super distortion paired with a paf+ neck a la 80s Hamer... I'm pretty partial to a pearly gates neck with a 59/custom hybrid bridge but it's more rock than metal. Dimarzio has always sounded more metal to me... if you don't need all the output I love theT-top 70s Gibson humbuckers. They sound like acdc and late period zep through any good tube amp, like a jcm800. Pretty low output by modern standards but enough for classic tones and/or than enough if you've got an amp with more gain on tap than a 800.

Or get something customed by a small builder. Support small businesses. I deal with Angeltone in the Pacific northwest.

If you want to be really cool, get a set of firebird humbuckers in full size humbucker cases. I know theres a guy who makes them. Firebird pickups are badass... it's just that firebirds aren't.

Yeah... I'm not on either party's side or anything but that went down right when I was starting to do more than make coffee and it was the talk of the studio business.

Its interesting to have observed a cultural change from the inside and then hear other people's recollections from other perspectives 20 years later. Somewhere around 05 I realized I was never going ty o gave a chance at becoming Jimmy iovine or even bob Clearmountain

As a business? Yes. Conceptually it's been gone since the major labels tried to charge them for music videos that had up until Napster been provided free. Its kinda interesting ironic the CD boom days came art a time of ridiculous production budgets for videos. Those 90s videos launched the careers of more directors than David Fincher... but despite trying to make mtv for the bill, the majors still bankroll music videos in spite of the lack of an outlet that serves as a taste maker for millions of teenies... and a lot of twenty somethings.

What kind of music do you play?

I'm well aware of UA's historical business model of plugins locked to their own hardware... but they've been making recent strides in transitioning to native DSP like everyone else. This classic hardware-locked UA approach didn't work for my needs, but it always seemed a straightforward proposition that I never felt was executed in any kind of bad faith.

That said, now that Luna can run natively without any UA hardware, and UA has been porting some of it's previously hardware-locked plugins to native VST/AU/AAX, I am ignorant as to what remaining aspects of Luna still favor the UA ecosystem over any third-party offerings.

There's tight integration with the proprietary hardware on both of these, sort if like protools and eucon. I dont know that it's done in bad faith, it's just that I actively avoid ecosystems like that. It's a personal thing. If i encountered a client utilizing Luna or Studio1 I might rethink that but it hasn't happened yet. If I ever did a full integrated system I would probably get a used euphonix/avid s5 digital mixer and go 100% Protools on a $5k+ power mac. It crossed my mind at 1 point when a lot of post houses were selling their giant 5.1 mixers to go to the s6 control surface but I chickened out. Presonus offers a scaled down, budget version of that ecosystem with the studiolive line and studio1. I've just been burned by that sort of package before... you cited emagic and that was one time. I actually still have an emagic serial bus midi interface. That midi timing was tight... TIGHT

Anyway, my policy on trying new daws now is really needs based. If no one comes to me with projects in these upstart daws then I'm not going to worry about getting them. The only daw I don't have that us commonly used is logic. Since apple bought it I became rather snarky towards it. Couple that with the fact that I decided not to go back to team mac when I bought a new laptop and I guess I'm just not going to use logic and people will have to print stems. Otherwise the daws everyone uses are protools, ableton, cubase/nuendo, and a surprising number of home recordists use reaper as do a lot of budget friendly project studios in basements and garages and cold war era bunkers... I have yet to have a project come in that was done in anything but those 5 platforms. I've been tempted to get an entry level apple silicon iMac with logic just to make that a possibility. It's always better if I can open the project myself when I'm dealing with amateurs and logic always seems to be the choice of guys who are longtime mac users but are new to recording. If 8 did classical these days I would be looking at pyramix though.

All the stuff we're talking about is about to go out the window. Audio over IP is here and its changing everything. Theres of course Dante, but AVB is still alive and is taking a new form, Ravenna. Once the dust settles and mac and windows provide robust OS level support for audio over ip protocols the latency will just keep getting lower and only dsp processing will introduce anything audible. USB and even thunderbolt interfaces are about to go the way of pcie. The whole DSD thing is really taking off too but it hasn't been embraced outside of classical recording and audiophile consumer circles. Although tascam has been making a stereo master recorded with DSD support for tears now. I've been considering buying one so I can record my mixes at 2 sample rates simultaneously, 1 back to the daw and the other to the tascam. Occassionally I make a cassette pass too, just for giggles.

I feel like Luna is probably like a slicker version of studio1; to really get ty he most out of either you need to go all in on UA or presonus hardware. Deep integration is the big feature on these type of platforms. They might be great, but it's a way to force you into only shopping one company's products instead of trusting your ears and the specs. That's a commitment I can't make. And I don't need to. I use any daw more as a an advanced editing platform and tape recorder (that doesn'tmean I want it to sound like a tape recorder, I want NO sound from the media)... integration with some sort of dsp in my interface isn't all that tempting. Next gen 32bit converters are more important to me. They (ua) make a lot of bold claims like being the only daw with analog sound built in which is utter bullshit. Its still digital and mixbus also uses a similar approach. I have always been turned off by the marketing hyperbole the modern managers of UA throw out there.

YMMV.... Luna does have an enticing gui lol. That matters to a lot of folks.

EDIT: I don't really care aboutlooks. I need sample accurate editing and sample accurate latency handling. Once i deem something ready to mix I'm not really looking at the DAW anymore. I don't color code tracks or even look at the bullshit DAW meters much once everything is gain staged to my satisfaction. You don't see music. Looking at the computer too much busses your ears to listen for what you see in the waveforms. It's a big distraction from making things sound cool. Even analog metering can take you off course. If I start worrying about how many red lights are going off it takes my mind off the song. This is not to say that everything can be red lined with impunity on every production., but you gotta focus on the music and whether you're presenting in a way that's sympathetic. You do that with ears. Visual feedback from your tools is there to get you to a place where your ears can decide. It's there so if you hear something that jumps out as off or so wrong its super cool you can find out where it's coming from. It can then be corrected or replicated. When you start obeying your tools you're not making artistic decisions. One should be confident in their skill and taste. The daw is an awesome tool but it wants to tell you how to make music and it has to be resisted. Subverted even. Tape had lots of limitations we fought. Computers keep adding possibilities but using them sucks you into this really nonmusical place. I don't know anything though. I just know what works for me and the mindset that gets results that make me smile. I'm not terribly successful so maybe I ought to pay closer attention to trends and think more about the potential audience than I do. I'm usually just trying to please myself and hopefully the other people involved. I think the quality of my work is really dictated more by the qualities of the underlying material and how much fun I have listening to it.

I just call em as I see em. I'm not offended by latency I knowingly add with a plugin or whatever... I want my daw engine to work smoothly with my interfaces to achieve the lowest latency my system can provide so I know I have a good starting point... and I need latency compensation to be accurate with U-He quality plugins OR badly coded ones that don't properly report latency. All summing points MUST be in phase no matter how long some of the delays. It's the host's responsibility to handle all this well.

Korg polysix and the green membrane button OG dx7 are in my opinion at the pinnacle of unweighted organ action keybeds. I sometimes regret selling my last dx7 but it's big and heavy and I got a tx7 instead... same exact synth sans keyboard. I like the wsy my polysix plays so much that it's now my master keyboard for trashgodz, i have my prophet slaved to it but with local control on do I can double my left hand with both synths and then add flourishes with my right on the prophet keyboard.

The end product is disposable, but they're pretty little pieces of litter, at least.

It's crazy how nice it looks. I really wish they would revive this idea! Just maybe with nicer paper?

I'm doing this mix for ThCraymer and he's in ableton.

You're a real mensch, Jim. I love that you're doing a mix for him.

Its been pretty fun. I'm about ready to mix now. I went to town flying in real drums and I've been reamping his DI guitars... he had this ambience going with ableton plugins that I had fun exceeding last night using a my space echo sandwiched between some lexicon... that was a wine slugging good time. I may have spent awhile just making freaky sounds for no reason too lol

My son's hone with a sports injury today so I had to halt production til monday. Kids are noisy and I still have 2 parts to reamp with open microphones.

And [Ableton Live's] latency handling is the worst.

Are you saying the total roundtrip latency achievable in Live is inferior to what other DAWs can do on the same system with the same audio interface, or are you referring to the way Live handles per-track delay compensation for live-input recording? It's been years since I've used another DAW to record live audio, help me understand how Live is less-than on this front. I'm curious to know you findings.

Yup. I can get my roundtrip under 10ms in protools and cubase even with a pile of plugins. Not so in Live... and all the latency compensation occurs in the master section rather than on a track per track basis.

EDIT: so for example let's say I set up a bus compressor on an aux, hardware or software... in live that parallel compression will be out if phase by the number if samples the plugin takes to do its dsp work or the roundtrip latency in and out if the interface to send and return to hardware. In protools and cubase when the plugins report latency ir you check the roundtrip on a hardware insert they correct everything automatically at the track level (they've gotten so good at it that I don't mind mixing hybrid anymore)... live tweaks things in the master somehow and it never cones out right. This is true of a lot of daws actually. But that's a huge deal breaker for me. I need my timing to be exactly as recorded. Even a couple milliseconds is too much. Apart from parallel processing this us important because all if those little latencies from track to track are cumulative and can turn a great groove with some cool ambience into something that's hard to get to get. That's my 2 cents. I've been in some discussions about midi timing too and here's a place live performs well internally but gets weaker when sequencing hardware. Anyway, I also dislike all of the stock plugins for one reason or another. And I want a channel strip available with filters, gain staging etc. Protools lacks some channel strip features too and it drives me batty... I shouldn't have to insert a gain plugin to get a little trim or boost pre-fader... or fool with gain levels in a sub menu. I want basic mixer functions available in my mixer all the time. Live is a tool made by technokrauts and it feels that way. There are things that are so cool about it and it looks sleek and modern but it's also very limiting and and and also time consuming to use in ways other than the technokrauts intended you to use it. I don't want my tools dictating the way I'm going to do my work.

Ha! It really seems that nobody cares much about the loop stretching in Live in 2023, every DAW can do it well now, or so I gather, so decent loop stretching has become basic table stakes. There's a whole generation of more-recently-minted producers that use Live everyday, but barely touch Session view. I can't even remember the last time I saw a YT video in which someone used Session View.

I have no clue how people use this jawn. Not saying live is useless but I can't guess what a workflow would be like using just live for a professional grade production unless its hip hop or dance music. It has a really nice time stretching algorithm that's faster to get results from than other daws but it's not really worth it to use it when you trade a lot of other functionality... it's got uses but it's not a great system to take every style of music through to a finished mix. It'll fight you making a rock record.... takes 10 times longer to do everything than in say mixbus.

The last show I played I forgot earplugs. What a mistake. It wss loud as hell.

Typically I bring them and use them if I feel uncomfortablewith the spl at sound check. In my misspent youth I never wore them at clubs and shows and probably would be able to hear tones above 20k now if I had... in my 20s I got really into bringing earplugs to any venue or club just in case and invested in prescription plugs when I was trucking around in a van, blasting marshalls every night. I certainly recommend them to everyone who wants to have most of their hearing when they're old. It's an even reduction, unlike those orange hear-o type foam plugs.

Lololol, as long as print receipts and adding machines are used in retail, this keyboard is a real winner, why didn'tit catch on?!!!!!

I'm doing this mix for ThCraymer and he's in ableton. I haven't opened it in awhile and I get into his project and remembered how much I loathe it. Kids who start out in ableton are only learning to use the ableton ecosystem. It's nothing like any other daw or hardware and some of the stock tools, though useful, have senseless, intentionally idiosyncratic GUIs and parameter names. And the latency handling is the worst. If you're not doing a lot if loop stretching it's just crap. A toy. Others will be offended and I'm sorry, but it's not a comprehensive recording solution. Its gimmicks are available in other platforms now, they sound just fine l, they're just buried under menus because the really useful bread and butter features are out front, laid out in a way that mirrors a classic analog studio and the focus is on low latency and timing accuracy for actually recording records. Learning ableton isn't learning music production, it's just learning ableton, which is more of a big fancy dance music instrument. I really don't iunderstand ableton's spread in popularity outside that target market.

This is also mostly true of flstudio but it can be made to handle latency better and really use your modern interfaces speed. Ableton struggles. Both suffer from a needlessly idiosyncratic gui (although live is comparatively streamlined as it wasn'tbuilt piecemeal on a win95 virtual akai mpc)... but I'll get off my soapbox.

I really enjoy overloading the instrument input of the preamp in my univox stage echo with the delay off from recorded +4 line level signals, it's just a 4558 typething but for some reason it sounds really cool, especially on synths (some synths are hot enough to overload it live, they tend to be old analogs)... this is a cheap old magnetic platter echo that has a weird delay tone. Not terribly valuable. You get 2 weird fx for a couple hundred bucks. Really 3 fx, it distorts well and the delay time can be set short enough to do manual flanging which sounds righteous.

a distressor has a lovely drive section even when the compressor isn't doing anything. You can go from a little fatness to seriously hairy on most sources. Not cheap but useful and worth every penny.

I like hitting a neve or api hard... my soundcraft 400 has a raunchy drive when you whack it hard at any stage, even before actual distortion sets in cool stuff occurs, depending on whether you'rewailing the input, the fader amp via a hot signal into the insert return or youjust assign to a bus or aux and red line it, cool stuff happens in these type of 80s and 90s desks that you don't get from most new offerings in the budget range... for subtle saturation my soundtracs us better, the line inputs have a sweet spot when the clip lights are going that's really nice... the tape returns and aux returns less so... if you're thinking of buying a mixer, look at older ones with big power supplies if you want to saturate without the low end crapping out. A small Ramsa (panasonic pro audio dept) from the late 70s or a yamaha rackmount pm mixer can provide great saturation for under 500 bucks with multiple channels and summing.

I have good luck with the my summit compressor... with the compression knob down and the input gain up it makes a great saturation unit right into tube 9overdrive territory, a pro vla can do that too but it's less lush... there's a dirt knob and a 'tint' button on the overstayer stereo fet compressor that work great for adding thick harmonics with the compressor in or out and its stereo with dual ganged controls which is handy. A pro vla is pretty cheap. The 1 and 2 are both good. You also get 2 channels of tasty opto compression that handles bass well for a very reasonable price. Their tube MPA can saturate too... I forget if it has a line ine in but if you use a DI and drop the input signal from +4 to consumer -10 you should be low enough to avoid clipping the transformer much and hot enough to push the preamp...

you can also try overloading a passive di box but it'll take fiddling to get transformer saturation without peaks distorting. Only high end di boxes can take really hot signal, they're designed for about -20dbm, maybe -10 consumer line so +4 professional level thats over a volt at 0VU into 600 ohms and higher into a DI transformer that's hundreds of thousands of ohms is going to be way into distortion and will probably generate some undesireable noise too, so care should be taken with levels. If you're coming from a daw then your meters are against full scale and a lot varies from developer to developer so YMMV. You'll obviously have to loop a DI sognal back into a mic amp because the signal will be too low for a line input after it hits a 12:1 transformer. Obviously a balanced line signal will need cold grounded out in this situation because an instrument input is unbalanced. Any 600:600 line balancing transformer can be saturated, the cheaper ones have the highest THD at the lowest levels. You'll want to slap it in a box with jacks or look at a shielded model and build some pigtails... boxing is better, but a pain. Look for transformers with a full 50hz to 20khz or greater frequency range unless you want filtering and look for high thd figures. You're not shooting for fidelity with a Jensen lol. You want artifacts.

A valley dynamite can make an outstanding distortion if you know how to misuse it... and it's a swiss army knife of dynamics tasks with a no fuss set if controls and a crazily good detector circuit. A dbx 160x has good saturation but it takes a lot of signal. Both are really useful tools that can also generate harmonics. If you slam the input and gun the make up to saturate the output stage too, you will need a pad on the return or a wide gain range on the input of the next device.

Obviously anything all tube will tend to saturate well... and all the 90s joe meek gear leans that way even before you start abusing it. I'm a particular fan of the sc2 bus compressor. Very blown out saturated compression. If you've got a tape echo or even a good quality cassette deck, try wailing into it harder than intended for tape saturation, just be careful not to get the input circuitry distorting too hard. Anyway...

You can run anything into a guitar amp. One of my favorite tricks is to put a di with a pad between the amp and speaker rather than mic the speaker tone where I'm using the whole amp as a big saturation processor. It still needs that speaker load though, never operate a tube amp without a matched load.

I'll overload anything just out of curiosity.

Edit: Theres also those kits to build intentionally colored 500 series modules that can saturate even line signals in really purposeful ways. I think DIYRE makes them and they're called the "colour" series. If you can read a schematic and world a soldering iron you could buy 1 kit to try out and a cheap midas or fredenstein lunchbox to provide the 15v rails and if you don't like it sell them off. You can also build a great fet color box from Hamptone's jfet gain stage. The fets are getting hard to find but it's a really great sounding little preamp and the saturation is fat and gnarly. There's a tape op article with schematics and application notes. It's so simple that it can be made on vero or perf board in an hour. It dan run if a generic 24v wall wart. If you omit the voltage regulator circuit a single stage won't bias up perfectly and will be less linear which us what you're after.

You could throw together a colorsound powerboost/overdriver which has a wide studio type bandwidth, tons of discrete transistor gain and passive baxandall tone controls. Cheap. You could omit the footswitch for studio use. For line use you'll want to experiment with a reversed high headroom DI with a pad or a dedicated reampbut it should do cool stuff just yanking your interface output down...

I'm not sure what you're getting at $100 per speaker unless it's passive monitors on the used market and then you'll need a stereo amp... even then. Maybe aim just a little higher. I would say the kali lp6 us as cheap as I would go... I would steer clear of anything cheaper and stay away from anything with rear bass ports unless you can get them a few feet clear of the walls. You want front ported or unported in a tight space. Be wary of 5" or smaller woofers too.

Alternately get a set of old hifi speakers from a good brand and a decent amp. I started that way and for awhile recently was using some 90s Yamaha 3way hifi speakers powered by an alesis ra100 as one of my references again and getting badassed results for rock records. Sometimes I'll use old JBLs or ARs... lately its been some 90s tannoys on that same power amp. That's like my home hifi test and I'll do a 90s boombox or a crappy bluetooth speaker sometimes for the lowest common denominator lol. You cam get away with a hifi setup if it's of decent quality and you really learn its quirks.

What does your mom play?

Youll be fine in an apartment. I mix below conversation volumes. Typically quieter than any of the sources were in the room(s) they were tracked in. I recommend quiet 90% of the time. If it sounds good at low levels it almost always sounds great blasting. Mixing low also allows for longer sustained periods of work before ear fatigue sets in. Keeping amplification in its lower reaches also keeps distortion to a minimum. Most amps be they speaker or headphone amps have very low distortion figures these days but they're rated fir distortion at 1 watt. The closer you are to that 1st watt if power, the more accurate the signal will be to the transducer. Distortion increases with power, therefore using the full power potential of an amplifier fails to use it at it's most linear and transparent.

+1 to everything Jim recommended, FWIW.

Well thanks! I always put forward listening skills as the most important ability for musicians and really anyone looking to do any type of audio work.

What our little ear holes take in is not what we actually "hear", in my experience. It's the select little bits of all that input that our brain has learned to focus on or filter out that comprise what we actually think we're hearing moment to moment .

I think that's very accurate. Your brain is always decoding sounds and automatically focusing on things that it deems important. Some of that is learned in childhood and some of it evolutionary like when a loud, unexpected noise startles you. Fight or flight response to sudden noises was in our ancestors' survival interest... creatures that didn't instantly transmit neurepinephrin to the proper receptors when they heard stomping were more likely to be a velociraptor snack than remain in the gene pool. A creature that can't pinpoint the relative distance of a sound source are likewise most likely to become a meal because they won'tshag ass in time to outrun that hungry birdasaur. Once our technology had reduced the risks to our survival, humans learned to hijack those survival mechanisms and apply them to tickle our natural love of organized sensory stimuli. If you're making music you need to overcome your brain's priorities and train it to focus on command.

It's pretty exciting once you start seeing/hearing some improvement. Some of the professionally-recorded stuff you thought was amazing will start to sound ragged, and you'll probably develop a new appreciation for certain recordings you dismissed earlier in life.

I still get excited and start dancing around when I feel like everything is going above and beyond what I thought my abilities to be.

Invest in a trustworthy pair of nearfield monitors (I recommended a pair but you can go cheaper, people like the Kali speakers which are front ported to reduce boundary effects in tight spaces) and a pair of akg k120 open back headphones (not to track with, they bleed, only to check your mixes where they excel compared to closed headphones costing far more). The best thing you can teach yourself is how to hear like a recording professional and you can't do that as effectively if your reproduction setup(s) aren't delivering your recordings accurately. I certainly learned some stuff on the job as an assistant and later an engineer but I got hired because I had a lot of self-taught skills... most importantly I had learned to hear subtle phase inconsistencies and pick out certain frequencies pretty precisely and put a figure to what I was hearing. Technique canbe taught or developed but critical listening comes first. Working on other people's music regularly is also a great way to tune up your skills. It's always easier to listen objectively to something that you aren't emotionally invested in... eventually you will become more detached when assessing your work as you separate your job as a technician from your role as the artist.

Any finished track that us optimized to your satisfaction for most playback situations is a master... but the art of mastering is a specific set of skills best performed with specialized gear in a room that's tuned to a degree far beyond mist commercial studios.

Making records is a time consuming and often painstaking process. Usually if something purports to be a shortcut you're either going to sacrifice quality or need to put more work in later disguising the shortcut.

Yeah that would be great :D when I do use autotune, I just use it very sparingly, as I don't want to take any of the character or timbre out of my vocals, and I don't really like the sound of autotune anyway it's just to fix the odd note that might be slightly out of tune (especially if I have more vocal harmonies). That method that you have sounds great! How would I be able to do it? I'm not really sure how to access the pitch shifter.

no no, just use autotune that way, what you do is duplicate the vocal track twice and put whatever tuning plugin you like on each duplicate. Mute the original and one other dupe and fiddle with the tuner to get a subtle tuning, then render that in place to a new track and delete the one with the plugin. Then take the next duplicate and tune it more extremely, render it and delete the dupe with the plugin. Then you work with all 3 files to make a vocal comp just taking the notes and phrases that sit best in the song. Try to blind listen and trust your ear to get a good balance of tuned and natural phrases.... delete the unused junk. Proceed with mix.

I guess my first introduction to DAWs in general was in '08, I was 14 at the time and the school computer had FL Studio... and am pretty much self-taught when it comes to any of the DAWs I've used lol, so I guess my knowledge is still pretty basic!

ah, fruityloops... we go way back to the 90s man... it was just a virtual sampling drum machine then like an akai mpc for a pc

I just noticed I used a lot more compressors than I thought, the bass and some of the guitars also had them!

how are you using them? there are many uses for compressors... the way of tasteful compression is a skill few have mastered, the dark side of gain reduction is a pathway to dynamics that some would call unnatural

Oh I've already compressed the file with graillon still there, in fact I'm about to send it to you!

got it

And yeah the Beatles were probably my very first inspiration, thanks :D I guess it started with the fact my parents used to play them in the car, I was pretty much brought up on the Beatles!

I'm a beatle-brat myself... although John was alive when Iw as born and I grew up with my parent's original LPs on the old technics lol

Thanks so much! I guess I'm improving, here's one of my more recently recorded songs, I guess the sound is a lot clearer than before! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqJPMFJZPlQ

you really love the fab four don't you? like revolver and later... and solo lennon and harrison

okay, we've got a 'fake plastic trees' guitar sound with some tasteful harrison slide. Very nice. The vocals are a little thin and hollow which is a little bit your choice of EQ and a little bit the unsophisticated use of reverb. If you want reverb tips I can help you out. Setting up FX sends is a good start. The idea is even in a very wet mix you want to create a sense of front to back space in addition to what you've achieved just with levels and high end EQ. There's a lot to know about routing and predelay, we all have our tricks. The piano is mushy which is hard to deal with when you have fake piano, but a boost at about 6k (depends on the source material and surrounding arrangement, but that's the hammer strike... and also the CRACK of snares), a cut in the low mids and maybe some cautious RMS compression with the right time constants to get the attack to pop usually helps :-) PSP piano verb can also help it sound more live as it simulates the sympathetic resonances from unplayed strings in an acoustic piano... maybe some mono 1 microphone distant drums woulda been more appropriate than the weird electronic ones you did in the waltz part... there's also very little low bass which bugs me unless I'm hearing some skronky analog... the performance is nice though I would have recommended you not return from the bridge and just make that the outro for about 4 minutes of song. But I'm not big on 5 and 6 minute epics. Its a 90s thing. YMMV

I would love to join your FB group.

If you want your vocals tuned I can probably do a more transparent fix than what you have. I go back to when auto tune wasn't available real time so I tend to stay away from real time plugins... or rather I don't use them that way. When it was new the common practice was to tune only certain notes that jumped out or to print a couple tracks with different tuning tolerances and comp a new vocal with the best sounding phrases from the raw vocal and tuned tracks... I tend to still do it this way. It's time consuming but worth it. So just a heads up on that method. It allows you to adjust some if the parameters on a per phrase basis for minimal artifacts while maintaining the best parts of the unaltered performance. In my opinion, some stuff shouldn't be fixed, it provides character. YMMV

You probably weren't a commercial studio employee before '05 but I was... the tune and edit technique actually evolved from use of the eventide harmonizer for tuning. When I was learning we would take pitchy lead vocal tracks and comp a best possible take together, then come out of an aux on the SSL to a good needle tuner and get a read of whether it tended sharp or flat and how many cents on average. From there we would setup a pitch shifter for wet only and set it to the average cents off pitch and print that. From there we would comp the pitched track in where it sounded better in the track and maybe do more extreme shifting on a few egregious notes. Im told this was a giant PITA before computer editing got good but it was done. By the time I came in we were able to transfer tape to a computer to comp even if the plan was to use tape otherwise.

You may want to render your tuned vocal in place with all processing but graillon bypassed and the fader zeroed and I'll comp the raw and tuned tracks together and use a different algorithm if I'm not happy with either on some of the phrases. I'm used to scrutinizing the hell outta this stuff.

I don't think a lot of people know about thus sort of stuff anymore.

It's going to be a large zip with all that audio, so you definitely want to cloud it. Since you're not a gmail guy just use what's good for you and make it accessible to anyone with a link. I remember when it used to take a whole day to transfer just a few files for an internet collab lol. Now we're winging multitracks around in under an hour!

Compression and EQ. You know what? Leave everything as is apart from any 'mastering' processing on your 2bus. I mix into a few analog bus compressors so I don't want anything screwing with dynamics or the stereo image of the rough mix. I'll likely bounce a stereo mix and stems to take into protools or cubase. I don't usually mix with analog gear in ableton because it doesn't have good latency compensation. Lately I've been running some outboard compressors on interface ins and outs so I can use them as DAW inserts and automate volume in the box so I don't have to manually ride all 40 faders on my console, which is not automated but I'm aiming to change that in 24. And no, you can't hear my converters working. Even at 48k the 32bit sabre converters in my gear are really transparent even at super low levels. I did listening tests. I can't tell there's another round of conversion so I don't sweat it.

A lot of times my process involves having the rough mix up on a stereo daw channel as a reference so as I'm making changes I can mute my desk returns and solo that mix to hear if I'm being generally true to the original idea or if I've made a substantial improvement by departing from the rough mix.

Do you have any reverbs or delays as channel inserts or do you adhere to the OG practice of putting verb and delay 100% wet on aux sends?

Thread hijack over. Back on topic.