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Lesson Info

Dialing in Tones and EQ'ing

By this point like I said, we went through everything and you should have your tone of the anti ledon on dh I think way want pretty close anyway we'll will be adjusting a little bit again and that's another thing is will be moving the microphones but now says now move the heads into the control room and this is what we usually do in my process to see the magic of tv oh yeah that the my normal process normally obviously we're not in a recording studio but so this is our control and we have to imagine that you know, this is our isolation booth this room is completely separate and we'll be ableto we wouldn't ideally we wouldn't be hearing the sound from the cabinets live in the space here, but we're just in an open space so we die island we get the sound of the amp in the room and then uh we usually bring the camps in the control room and there's usually a speaker passed through either you know through the wall or our panel or whatever so then we'll be able to the cabinets ideally would b...

e isolated, we wouldn't hear them and then now we're just we will be listening through our speakers and listening to mike positioning and also be able have the ability to as we're tracking in the song to be able to adjust the sound as we go sometimes I'll do that I'll be grabbing things if we need to clean up apart whatever while he's playing a literally just he'll be playing and I will kicked the game down and I'll be playing and then he wants to go for this one partner goes heavy and I'll just go and just snapped a novel way to the right and, you know, it's almost a little bit of performance on my side along with the player, but I mean, I'm reacting to what he's doing he's listening to the music, he's reacting against, not looking at a screen it's like live you're hearing it and it's that's what live performances you know, it's, the interaction of in the band side of it's, the interaction of the player, the different players together and it's like when I when I'm in the control room, working with a guitar player, I treated the very much the same way I will a lot of times just he'll be doing and like, we'll show a little bit about guitar pedals and I'll be, you know, playing with some guitar pills while he's playing and just twisting and work in the sound it's like it was funny we talked about yesterday were we're hanging out someone after that after the show and we're talking about he came out to europe on tour this one time and he was just supposed to be vacationing hanging out seeing the world and he ended up doing lights for us because you knew every rhythm and every little nuance and that's because and when he does records with us he's not like like just looking at a screen, moving things around and editing he's playing along he's feeling the music so by the time we're done on the record he's able to go on tour with us and every nuance and survive and bring the lights down and that's really just an extension and what he's doing in the studio so if your producers doing, they're doing their job in my opinion that you're not just a computer technician, they should be able to leave with that kind of feeling that they were in the band for that month or however long you were doing and feel emotionally attached to it because they do get it right but it's and again so playing with the band not not working against it and not saying I'm the producer and this is what I say goes it's it's really working your way into what the band does and just trying to maximize what the band does and I you know that that goes to each individual instrument but as a whole is a philosophy so um yeah it's again it's a more of an organic process of just really tryingto adjust and feel what they're doing what they're trying to accomplish and kind of working towards that so so we have everything in here and we hooked up with the amp we we are okay so was plug in here and we're going to start positioning the mikes on dh we're going to need is kellen coming in? Kellen okay james trashy on the chapter was asking do you ever use stereo techniques? Ahs let's take a balloon lynn for a specific cone just on one come uh I have but usually if I'm using a stereo technique I'm doing it for a specific effect but not I will do a stereotype sneak on for instance on an amp such as roland jazz course one twenty which is a stereo kind of amped there's like has this wonderful like stereo um chorus on it it's a combo happens to speakers in the chorus and the tremolo goes between the two speakers he really has this wonderful thing or sometimes we've done guitars through a leslie cabinet which is a rotating speaker cabinet and I will do a stereo technique for that but I usually for a single source guitar no I don't usually use a stereo technique miking but busing and committing my correct correct okay I mean stereo no you you know absolutely doing a stereotype nikon on guitar I mean I could get into a little bit about that about uh m s mike technique that's one of my favorite things to do in syria I mean aiken aiken demonstrate that a little bit maybe later in the day later possibly but yeah no generally it's on on guitar unless again which one of the things I will be showing would be a close and ambient set up and that is a way I'll do stereo but I'm not really stereo I mean, it is but again tow record a guitar close mike with the mice were showing and then have an ambien mike like at the player's head height that I showed yesterday um and then panning that to the opposite side to give a space of the camp in the room so it's kind of that great, but yeah, but stereo making techniques not as much unless it's really more of a stereo situation two cabinets or stereo and gotcha yeah, okay um quickly also to review the signal chain that we have here so that we have the microphone obviously going into the pre empt whether without a queue in this instance it's without a q it's a summit duel to preempt on dh then going into something mixer in this in our instance it's the mackey sixteen forty two online input um so what? I'm gonna one thing on this that I'm going to get into really quickly um what I do and my in my studio, I have to be the ability to someone a few different things have a channel limited something mixer and then I have my neo tech console and let's have a passive one. Ah that's really? Just you take it's it's just too in one out and it's it's just completely passive you plug into my cramps into it and it just sums it to an output and you're adjusting the blend on ly with the output side of the might cramp. So if I had the passive one literally the blend between the two mikes would be like, oh, let's, bring out our first mike okay, now let's fold in our second and just play around with the outputs just to get the blend like louder or softer on this way on this side of it, we're going to just select and, uh, just a pretty much a standard output and then use are used the mackey to get the blend between the two my cramps that we have here, um one thing that's great on this side of it, we're doing the mackey on the line in, so that would that does is if we wanted to eat you the mikes sayif normally sometimes, you know, I have, like a bunch of like me, even focus right things that have a nick you along with the pre empt that if we need to do week you it's right there so if you don't have that ability and used to have a couple of basic mike cramps and like a lot of people have that the fbi type five hundred siri's racks that there's just usually preys without any q and if you wanted tio gets to meet you in there before you get you know before you get the signal to summing a way to do it on this with the mackey would be because if you go line in you're actually going through the whole signal chain in the console and you have some ability have a basic three bandy q and if you wanted to add a little top or bottom or sweep around and find the frequency that's right on the mids, you could um if you wanted to go for a cleaner signal chain, you go ok, we're going to go the completely purist round zero week you were not going to get you anything and a lot of people subscribe to that. Um, I do sometimes, but my philosophy is, you know, get the sound as close as you can without a queue and then if you need a little extra because especially in the in the hard rock and metal world uh, you know, the sounds air unnatural tio they are kind of unnatural I mean there they are they're they're a little process so to me the issue is never a bad thing but get as good as you can don't just you know sometimes you know I fall prey to it I'll just you know immediately just not even thinking especially on a quick thing for like even a demo style or whatever you know you're not really doing so much and focusing on the the the tone you know like the positioning getting really deep into it it's like I need something really quick and I'll just you know throw up the pre amp and then like quick and he's a little you know I could just eat you on just tweak it and just you know needs a little mitt okay okay that's good you know I fall prey to that too even when I'm working on legitimate things that you know you're really like trying to spend time and get the best thing possible you know sometimes you have to go wait a minute hold on and I'll start grabbing ae q and I'm like wait a minute stop and I'll take it off and then start moving the mikes and try and get the position so I always get the position best so if you're if you're but if you're going that purest route and don't want ever touch the q but you want to go into the summing mixer like something like this that has a q on it and you don't want to go through all the extra electron ix another way to do it on the back of the mixer here there's there's channel inserts sent these ones are a trs so it's ah descended return it comes toe one jack and you get a break out cable that goes from one stereo tippling sleeve cable to two and one would be send and when we returned like going and say if you were patching in a compressor into this channel so it's said in return send going to the compressor return coming out of the compressor back into the channel but if you use the inserts you can uh patch into just the return of the insert and the return generally depending I'm not really sure the signal flow of the maki but for the most part the return is usually past the new section so when you patching the return you're basically just accessing your putting in and basically before the fader and that's it you're bypassing the line input the line amp so you're not getting extra coloration fromthe line amp and on most mixers like mixes with a patch base you can do that unlike any attack on any mixer you can plug into the return and it'll go it'll bypassed the q on the neo tech that I have it actually goes past the q except for the low frequency, which is doubles as a high pass filter which I'll show about high past filters and the mixing section, but so that gives them more purist sound, so if you can patch and we didn't do that on this because I wanted to show that you possibly could do samy queuing if you needed teo on the mackey the mixer with the accused of zero color of sound in your opinion, is there really they often it can I mean again, if you're I'm saying it from a quote unquote purist standpoint, so you know, if you're trying to get his little color relation is possible, you know, get into the mix er get into the to the going to the returns, it's almost the same thing is when we talked about yesterday about patching into the power section of ahead, we talked about yesterday bypassing the pre empt same concept, so if you go into the return, you're getting rid of the q and you're literally just using the favors for something. Yeah, so something mixer and then out of the summit mixer. A lot of times I'll go to a compressor just a little bit just tow either for an actual effect, especially for heavy music, to try and collect the palm muting kind of gentian john kind of thing trying to get a little bit of extra pump on that it's there's a specific kind of sound that you get especially within eleven, seventy six, so compressor or not, a lot of times I don't use the compressor, and then possibly to another e q after the compressor. More often, the secondary q is when I'm using a compressor in the chain because the compressor will sometimes suck out the low end or suck out the high end because of what the compressor by nature is doing, like if if you have a guitar sent a signal, that's got a lot of bottom in the compressors, going to react a certain way, and it's, the detection circuit is going to is going to reduce the gain in the signal because there's so much bottom men so it's going toe going to get rid of the perceived by the men coming out of it. So if you want to maybe still get that effect of that pumping sound and how it's affecting everything and then okay, well, we need a little bottom end after that because the compressor is taking that away, so maybe put in a queue after it. If not there's, no rules again, she's, whatever is feeling right, or whatever is, uh, uh, really going to ultimately get get thea and result of what you're trying to achieve? And then from that into our interface, into the back, into the computer. And I showed that what we have here. The preemptive mackey. Eleven seventy six. The quartet.