jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

Ever been mixing and let's say, dialing in an EQ, setting on a track. You tweak and tweak until your positive you've got it sounding just right only to realize you weren't EQing the track and you thought you were?

YES! all the time.... soemtimes its an amazing accident that unlocks the whole secret of the balance. In the box I frequently will use a a couple fo the same exact comrpessor plugin on different channels, I'll have them all set up, leave them in the abckground open and decide to adjust one or automate one for the corus or soem shit but ebcause they're all teh same I grab the wrong one! and I start comrpessige a track thatw as perfectly, transparently peak limited and I fuck it up totally! And I think the mix sounds ebtter and that Iw as doing the other guitar track or whatever... But I will be like "wait? that's guitar2, aww hell, but that so mch better even though I was wrong, umm why didn't I do it that way in the first place?"

I think that confusion is a powerful source of discovery in recording. Soemtiems just hooking stuff up in an unintended way is totally awesome.... kind've an argument against patchbays ine xperimental type home studios.

I wonder if this whacky panner is available as aprt of my waves subscription. I kinda wanna check it out even though it doesn't sound like my sort of effect (and I don't like michael brauer mixes).

This a powerful platform man. I've stayed out of a lot if the "what should I do insert blank" threads because I see seasoned pros offering fantastic advice only to have it ignored & watch the origonal poster slip back into dithering & indecision...

don't you know that ocne you're hands one xperience has been ignored over a million times online you get to eat free at the sizzler?! Rncid shrimp cocktail here I come!

Jim seems like he knows you better but I'll take a stab at it.

can you ever really know somene?

I hope the next post we see from you is you super psyched cuz you just finished your 1st recording with your new gear.

yeah

Welcome to the rest of your life. I haven't looked back since i was recording into one portable stereo then playing it back while recording onto another so I could get 2 whole tracks!

oh man, thatw as so ahrd to do in a band situation, like you would have 1 crappy set of headphones, it was so nuts... remember your first band? you would try to get all the drums and bass onto those 2 tracks with whatever microphoens you could scrounge and maybe that shitty 1/4" only radioshack 'DJ' mixer you got at the pawn shop for 20 bucks???? you're like "this one is going to sound killer, I close mced some drums!!! And you would just jam bass in direct with no DI, right into the RCA on the tape deck with some bulshit adapter

kids don't come up this way anymore and tis a bummer, there's no struggle now

Jim-

Who talks smack on AT? The make a bunch of great stuff. That was my bread & butter in the early days but I still use them now.

AudioTechnica was what finally got me off of the 57's & 58's tit.

I know you have sense in your head, but man iw as just tlaking to someone about the AT 40s eries versus the transofrmerless 414 and they were so set on how awesoe it is and how AT only makes budget mics for beginners that they wouldn't even consider trying a 40 and acted like my ears were broke. If you wanna use a modern TL2 414 then I would rather have an AT4050 end of story Sounds better. On everything. NOT A BEGINNER MIC, but man the 20 series sounds close for enxt to o scratch. And the AT4047? shit dude, sucker hangs with a classic old 414, its just fixed pattern so that's a bummer.

wait...

Isn't Bitwig crazy cheap?

Like cheaper than just about everyone? It's Ableton-esk" is you're wondering. At least thats what i gather. Looks interesting-trippy GUI.

aww yeah, I wanna try bitwig, glad you mentioned that! I think everyoe in this thread should buy bitwig this weekend because its so cheap.... it apparent;ly has LFOs thatc an control like every native paramter or some shit:

https://www.attackmagazine.com/reviews/gear-software/a-bit-deeper-exploring-the-new-features-in-bitwig-studio-2/

And FL Studio is the first DAW I used and I like it's UI more than Ableton's.

then you answered your own conundrum, Nikhil.... you used FL when you firsts tarted, think producer is ebtter bang for buck and you just liked it when you used it before? then buy it. You have my permission tos top worrying about it and chill the fuck out.

Can you please compare the features of those two,

not really, I just tried to answer this and was like "wtf, nothign i said makes sense to me now that I read it back. Maybe the request was too broad? DELETE!" Just pick one, learn it and own it. They are both popular because they both do the same basic stuff just in different ways.

I like FL but most of my friends like Ableton ebtween the 2. I've been with FL sicne it was just a beatbox in version 1 or 2 in the 90s so i am sued to it and I am totally happy I don't have to slave it to Cubase anymore with rewire like I sued to, just more to glitch out. Its an integrated recording, VST hsoting and MIDI solution as longas you don't need to do serious multitracking of live band stuff. My impression of ableton is absed on a demo copy I got of ver1 way abck in teh day at winter NAMM in anaheim when it wasn't even available to buy yet, so I have no diea, but it turned me off when I took it home and tried it and I enver looked back, man. But people who are discovering it now that its old and established and has all the eblls and whistles love it. ISo if its cheaper then go for it sicne you aren't really tied to either way of doing thigns yet anyway. Whatever you get will be your home base and seem normal to you after a year.

they always take a while if you don't hound the fucking AP guy and get on the next check release... or whatever it is in this case. big organizations always take their sweet time with solo contractors, I think they wanna see if they can get away with not paying at all.... that's what record labels used to do to the bigger studios I worked at. if the and's management didn't book you directly and pay up front for a lockout with advance the label would just enver write you a check for the balance ebyond the initial deposit if the band already ahd the masters. but if you held the masters hsotage for payment it would get around no one would book you. I have a rpetty dim view of corporations business practices when it comes to dealing with any smaller entity or self employed people.

you wrote an invoice, right?

what the heck, buy it right now, if the mic is weird you can throw it at some rich people and then take their wallets and buy another mic while they're dazed

I had an MXL 'mogami edition' tube mic, lots of self noise... I repalced the 12at7 with a vintage one tested for low noise and it stillw as kidna hissy. Never use 'em again. It did sound pretty ncie for a 300 dollar microphone though, just noisy. I talked to MXL about it and they were like "what? tube mics hiss" and Iw as like, no they don't. So fed up with thse assholes. But it did have a solid C12 kidna sound if you could toelrate the nosie and wanted to take it all out with soundsoap or steinberg denoiser.

maybe the solid state ones are better... iw as totally stoked about he tube one when i got it. It just came out and like no... wound up switching to an ADK when they first came out and was happier.

mean sure, do that, but work on the music, egar is not going to make miracles be it budget gear or magic holy grail shit.... as longas you can get stuff to work well for your needs? eh, whatever. I have stuff I am piky about but less with recording and mixing stuff then with guitars amps and keybeds. I feel really picky about keybaord weighting and aftertouch feeling normal to me and I like certain guitars and pickups and can't get on with 90% of stuff inthat vein and I am pickier about amplifiers. But that's not you. I am really picky about using speakers to mix but everything else its just whatever is handy. If I just hand a shitty mackie desk and some RNCs it would e fine as longas I ahd some Ns10Ms or old tannoys to lsiten thourhg because that's normal to me. I guess whatever feels normal to you is okay, if that's headphones, why not, just know most headphones have a specific soundto themselves and aren't like sltieningin acar or on your hoe stereo or whatever, its very specific and you need to elarn it if that's all you plan to use. I just ahte headphones in general, man. I wanna feel it and ehar it and the feel it is about moving air with some bass drivers getting power, evne if you lsiten really quiet, which you sould. Its like why I feel weird about amp modelling, it never moves any air. If am playing I want t feel the air vibrating. even on sytnhesizers I am really fond of hitting a guitar amp with it for the feel it factor. Air is always vibrating around you in the modern world and your whole body si aware of music and soemtimes good music is good because it feels good against your chest and ehadphones don't do that.

headphones and speakers do not do the same job, buy some monitors... if anyone tells you I am wrong they're full of shit, like most people you talk to about any technical subject

or just forget it and do whatever,what do I know? just do your thing and be happy, embrace whatever comes out and be proud like evryone is whenever they sneeze tehse days

picking a mic based on shape is downright idiotic, its a tool and if its shaped weird to you so what? does it work? ballpiene hammers look weird to me but theya re good at hammering small things versus a normal looking hammer

I don't know what CAD is up to these days, they sued to make great back electret condensers in the 90s. Had an equitek and it had a really nuetral sound for quiet sources but it sucked on vocals in my opinion. Others may like them for singers. Dunno.

I am postive the at2020USB is a solid little USB gadget. I would get that. I have one. I use it all the time even though i don't need to. I only mentioned BLUE because their mics tend to have pads and that can be ahdny recording loud sounds, the 2020 has no pad and can distort the itnernal preamp if you put it close to a guitar or abss amp or something making it a limited ONLY MICROPHONE for rock and stuff with live amplified stuff

buy some fucking yamaha speakers too

you can do it, just compress and EQ until it sounds that way... if you know what the tools do its not rocket science, nothing fancy there

fiversify your lsitening and you will ehar where all this modern production is coming from, theys tand on the shoulders of giants.... you need to lsiten to some history to get it.... joe meek productions, phil spector, goerge matin and geoff emmerik with the beatles, there's tons of stuff, these guys were either inventing gear or repurposing it to make the sounds that are the basis of what everyone does

you can't know where you're going unless you.... well, whatever

just go usb, they sound fine, people are hung up.... in your situation what you can afford is a usb mic and it will be a huge upgrde from what you have allowing you to sample weird stuff and sing a vocal. go auio technica or blue... at ths tage what else but a ic will you plug into yur bdget interface? you don't ahve access to anything and you're in the box. Embrce it. Be streamlined.

you want the most practical tools you can afford and then yo want to stop worrying about them and jut get on with it... with USB mic you can turn around and maybe buy some sftware too, you are confined to the laptop, accept it and move on

yu aren't going to make a backstreet boys song in your mom's back room unless you have thousands of dollars at your disposal, but you can still make YOUR music... I mean, why would you want to copy the backstreet boys? there's already a abckstreet boys, they're known as the backstreet boys, they're famous for doing whatever bullsgit that is I had to listen to. But you? Youa re a unique and special snowflake and no one ahs heard your music yet.

aww jeez Nikhil that's low... maybe steal something? stealing gear has a hallowed punk rock tradition? no? ummm... at 250 all in you are in a spot... maybe just get a USB mic and ski the itnerface if you are doing mostly VST instruments?

also, the strings have had all the mids EQed out to make space for the pianonand vocal fundamentals but they have a high shelving EQ on them to give more of a natural bowing sound to canned stuff (and also because without drums there are no cymbals up top to eat up the dynamic range up there, just some detail in the vocal attack at 12k I think)... it might be built into the sample but I expect not, so I would look at a compressor with a long release, low threshold and low ration followed by a high shelf filter at about 10k... personally I would also put a high pass at 16k to take them abck in the mix but I they sound forward here and i suspect all their dog-frequencies are still there, tough to tell on youtube. If its still too dynamic you could put some peak limiting maybe a 5 to 1 ratio just grabbing the peaks with an attack dialed in to maybe a 32nd note or so of the song so its grabby but do a fast release time sine before EQ you have soemthing elvelling the body of the violin notes....

a lot of work went into making this so cutting and precise, seems wsted but hey, I cna guess at what they did pretty easily

I hope this makes a little sense to you, I swear mixing isn't rocket surgery and you on't need fancy stuff to do it.... lots of options are great and fany gear is great too, but you don't need it, you just need toudnerstand the medium you are mixing to, understand metering and have a sense of what is called psychoacoustics so you can mnipulte the ear of the audience a bit, though you don't seem to dig ons tuff that really fools the ear into hearing depth out of 2 speakers, you like bright and flat a lot which is easier

I find most stuff to be equal in the sub 500 range of capacitor mics, I like audio technica myself... its not a popular statement amongst nerds, but the AT stuff is low noise and very open sounding, evne the cheap ones.. Rhode mics make some nice stuff, the NT2 is a solid multipattern and affordable. Very low self noise and pretty ersatile inthe U87 sense. I like shure SM7s, used they go for 300 USD. EV RE20 is a great mic, good for ltos of things... never hurts to have an audix i5, like a 57 if a 57 was a microphone! the Beta57 is a great hypercard dynamic for anything but vocals. Cascade fathead, great ribbon, open and modern not like an old RCA at all. Warm audio just cloned the AKG 414 and U87 recently and theya re affordable too. haven't tried them, hoping tog et some review units in soon though. I don't know if you ca still get Oktava mics out of russia but I liked every Oktava model except the tube mic. The ribons had an inviting warmth and subdued top and the 3 main condensers really sounded great. Really their own thing. Very cheap. The pencil small diaphragm codnenser with the screw off capsules, the mc02 I think? total winner

Buy an RNC or an alesis 3632 for peak limiting when recording if the focusrite interface has inserts. I'm not real familiar with the I/O on this prosumer stuff so look on the back. The modern pop vocal sound you want will generally have some compression right into the recorder.

you're always copying stuff, maybe just throw out the reference book and try writing, arranging and recording as YOU and see what happens when you just elt your imagination runa way with you

this moved me to tears but not in a good way, it hurts my ears... 1) sounds like a pretty stock digital piano, anything will do, just try compressing the shit out of it and EQ with a lower midrange notch and and an upper midrange boost if it lacks sheen, i would start with a cut around 350hz and a boost at 6khz maybe and tweak until it sat. then maybe compress it some more, no, defintiely comrpess some more, its really compressed.... strings? compress the life out of some ROMpler strings, its one fo the msot irritating soudns I've ever heard. EQ with peaks, not shelves so the vocals have more 'air' and sound clsoer than the isntruments

2) vocals? get a group of guys who sing decently together in abrbershop ahrmony and then autotube the shit out of them to the point of stealing their humanity? Youa ren't doing this wthout multiple singers and lots of antares or similar tuning software. The real key is the 4 distinct voices in well-developed harmonies. If you do it on your own without auto tune software at best you will get Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody with lto of the same guy in ahrmony. at worst you will get mush. You aren't known for your singing.

I really am not sure why you would want to replicate anything n this... it is so artificial sounding it made a trickle of blood come ut of my ears. I got a minute in to hear the other soudns you asked about and started to cry.

also, compress the shit out of everything and then compress the music ina group, the vocals in a gorup and then use a tone of bus compression, this is compressed until all the dynamic range has been squeezed way probably with layers of gentle and reasonable comrpssion as I suggested... oh, and after you put some VCA bus comrpession on the mix whack any remaining dyanamics off with L2 ultramaximizer to make it extra flat and lifeless. This is everything I hate about modern music. OH! mastering? send your finished song that's over compressed and over-tuned to a coke-head new york amstering engineer and tell him to make it the loudest song without rums on the radio and pay top dollar to ehar him destroy all the nuance with brickwall limiting over your already lifeless and soulless music. If Iw ant soulless music I'll listen to real amchine music like kraftwerk or soemthing.

I am tempted to say soemthing really cruel right now but I won't since i have a track record of getting in your face when you say things thata re way outside of my worldview. if you like this go look for a studio itnernship in india and learn all the modern pop tricks, your Baliwood (spelling?) has this sort of 'production' down.

here in america we don't like to call it Imperial... we have this thing about the royal family

jazz is like punk, you can use anything.... but its the opposite of punk in that you have to know what you're doing

me too, I love a good panang curry, even jail curry is probably awesome there.... for father's day my mom got me a thai chilli pepper plant for my yard!

I've been eyeing the fully hollow double cuts for awhile like the fulld epth trini or barney kessel with the horns....a s well as the full depth 335 shape one, forget the model ES it is, but those are way cool. But I have reasonable jazz skills.

for the record I woulld take any ES model gibson memphis gave me.... heck, Ill take crappy ES models, love 'em

I know it takes pedals well but it sounds like a lot, perhaps you need a synthesizer to play sometimes. Although to be fair I have 3 modelling delays right now I think not including the line 6 m5 that has delays. 2 that tap and sound different and the alter ego just to sue the screwed up echorec model for longish, pitchy slapback which im totally into moreso then the DM2, 3, AD9,carbon copy etc I've owned... but yeah, I don't really find myself using a ton of this stuff. Every time I turn stuff off or ditch the uber rig and just go simple I like my sound way better. You may find yourself feeling the same if you really bond with the deluxe reverb.

Idon't really look down much past the position markers soemtimes, I grew up during shoegaze and the epdal revival but I was not part of it.... I am more like this:

http://imgur.com/a/IR5tB

I need everything streamlined either by having limited options or 1 touch presets so i can stalka round and be improvisational and have fun. Fucking with pedals is not fun and doesn't feel like rock n roll to me. I assure you I am executing something totally weird and difficult in this stage shot and that heather had the shutter speed adjusted to grab my hands without blurring. I'm also pretty sure there was nothing in-line but my Radial ABY, I am probably just all vintage marshall there. Its kidna hard to deny the basic stuff when you are playing on point. Or I find it ahrd to deny! I just want the clarity of next to nothing between me and V1 except maybe a buffer or a hit of boost.

good call, I have been using ac30s off and on for 15 or 16 years now (matchless for about 10) and I am still all over the map with dirt/boosts and stuff. I just took my whole rig apart again and have been just using the matchless, a slapback delay and then my always on jfet liendriver I designed tog et some extra comrpession, voltage and upper mid into the EF86 channel and I'm not missing any of the other amplifiers or the nova drive or being able to change my sound which is where I was more or less 2 years ago. I dunno. Maybe all you need is boost or lots of boost and if you wanna play cleaner turn your guitar down or go fuck yourself?

well okay, I took the matchless out of the rig and stuck it in my bedroom with the other 2x2 and stuck a different delay in line with the boost after it to just have some basic, no knobs shit that's not a straight ac30, has a good mount of gain on tap and not deafeningly loud (because I wanna start to actually practice again and do it with a legit guitar t one at volume so i can be all precise like I used to be and do paul gilbert speed-wanking again) and I was like "wow, why is my rig so excessively bloated now? Fuck this is great just to have like NO options! Why did I spend the last year and a half building theamp-switching MIDI-FX behemoth I seldom use???"

but yeah, its hard enough with amps you know well to figure out what will work in-line with all your guitars.... I always wind up with less and less. I mean, with a deuxe reverb you really can't screw p with a strat, a tubescreamer and nothing else. Or maybe a carbon copy, a gibson and just turn the little girl up until it grunts and the audience abcks up a ltitle in a small venue.

there it is.... not sure how you cna have a reissue of a guitar that was neve rissued in tehfirst palce except maybe as a custom order, but whatever Memphis Gibson

split parallelogram inlays, gold hardware, stock bigsby... ES345... but don't see a varitone chickenhead and thats weird... but an ES255 should have solid blocks in ebony and double ehadstock binding and the crazy diamond inaly like all teh fancy gibson guitars

if it was me I wouldn't be shopping for any other shit until iw as 100% satified with my guitar and amp for a few months.... not having the DRRI yet I would hold off. Thats an amp that might ened a speaker swap, rebias (theya re notoriously cold from teh factory) bright cap mod (I like the fixed bright cap, but most don't).... who knows.... or get the silverface one that doesn't soud like a silverface. People love that one because its un-hsitorically gainy... but just wait, i am tell ing you you will thank me when you get used to your amp and guitar and then find the right gadget to stick between them.

or the world's most pwoerful blue tooth and some remote pres

if wishes were horses I would have one of these with the legs, problems solved.

oh yeah, I just assumed he meant like a boost in the 'tubescreamer with teh gain at 1' sense for some reason

you know what's really udnerrated for solo lifts? mid-boosters. That's sort of what epople want from a de-gained tubescreamer with output cranked, but I fid the tubecreamer steals dynamics and adds weird harmonics that maybe aren't so good through every amp. A rangemaster style pedal can do this with various top end roll off points depending on the style but they're all pretty finnicky, even the brian may.... the Fullton mid-booster pedal is a real champ as is the mid boost on my radial ABY... I feel like there are some other pedals that do the clean mid-boost trick well but I forget which ones. The ones I like are harmonically transparent with good dynamics but with a mid hump or high and low roll off centered some place really musical but not with such extreme Q its like cocked wah wah...

not what the guy asked for but just thought...

the klon really does it all if you cna stomach the bass roll off... soul food is what i briefly owned and it was solid but I have to say the archer and the saucy box have that extra 5% the soul food doesn't. Not worth it to me, but maybe to Blake.

again, what kind of amp?

I thought he meant furniture, not mixing desk. in a nice home studio the 2 seem to go hand in hand, especially in the age of 35rd party 500 series gear

not a drive

the katana is a multi mode boost if I recall, it might be ale to add some dirt at extreme settings but its a boost with personality... if you don't have a tube amp don't bother

I am unfamiliar with the other drives though I think the EHX crayon is an overloading mixing channel type thing like the JHS colour box.... full range, shooting for the kinda extreme nasty fuzz from the Beatles revolution where they ganged 2 mixing desk channels together to create that really distorted elad sound that cuts through the dimed deluxe reverbs from the core rhythm tracks... the old Coloursound Overdriver and Power Booster pedals were like this but without a mastervolume (reissues and clones usually have a master making them far more capable and flexible as a drive or a dirty boost -- had one for eyars, only used it a handful of times). They are really interesting but defintiely not msot people's diea of transparent even though theya re fullr ange with the EQ controls dialed in flat.

if were into the transparent drive thing I would check out a Timmy. Everyone I know loves the timmy. They say its like a the abstard child of a tubescreamer and a klon. On paper it looks like a hifi tubescreamer with a fully adjustable frequency response isntead of fixed bass roll off, mid hump and a variable high cut control.

this is a whole genre of tone chasing that consumes guys for eyars on end while they trade similar pedals in and out spending thousand s of bucks, it always seemed like a rabbit hole with diminishing returns. I always wind up abck with pretty normal designs for drive and then i don't use them anyway LOL

Iforget, what are you using for an amp these days Blake?

http://www.purpleaudio.com/products/mf-twenty-25/

given my druthers I think I would build a small purple audio workspace for my modest homestudio needs... there's actually cmpany pretty local to me that buuilds custom desks for the whole Purple Modular format. If I ahd a lot of money and more space I would build a desk out with their summing, faders etc and then customize the inputs with different 500 series pairs. have my synth rack somewhere in there, a patchbay and some compression. That's not going to happen until my kid is older. Right now ahving lots of stuff in road racks that ic an put away is best sicne kids are infinitely curious about blinking lights and wires.

okay, good point... I guess the musicmaster was out there by the mid 50s. I gt ahzy on all the cheapo fenders though. Even the comparatively upscale mustang. I don't really know about melody makers either.

just buy a good cab if you aren't a legit woodworker who builds stuff every day.... at 150 bucks for the little amp you caa afford a decent cab. Treat yourself to quality speakers. You'll probably like celestions although through jensens and JBLs with the mid tone control st to mid scoop you cna get a great 60s fender thing happening with the quiler. It shines more set flat or treble boostwith the gain up and that definitely soudns better with celestions. Sounded good through all the different celestions I have. And I have a blue and then like every weight ceramic magnet they amde in the classic era like 65 to 85 when they introduced the vintage 30. Sounds great through all the different magnets and cone styles. Can't find a speaker it doesn't like.