Mix in your surroundings.

On slow days when I get stuck in a slump I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what to write about. I mean, there are hundreds of articles and books on eq, compression and mixing.

But I like talking about it and sharing stuff with you so I constantly try to find an interesting perspective on all these books I’ve read, stuff I’ve learned and tricks I’ve experimented with.

Take reverb for instance, I’ve written a fair amount about reverb(link over here) and I’ve read and experimented with loads of digital reverb processors. But sometimes you get lost in all the digitalness(not a word I think) and you never become aware of your surroundings.

Do you guys live in a weird sounding loft in Manhattan? Do you have a really echo-y(and unsafe) elevator shaft you think could sound cool on a recording?

USE IT!

The old echo chambers of yesteryear were just that. Natural reverb chambers. Sure, they were calibrated and built to reverberated perfection, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stumble upon a cool sounding room somewhere.

I read an article about this producer/engineer in TapeOp #69(Check out the magazine). Christina Files told us in this article that she used the elevator shaft in their loft as an echo chamber. That prompted me to wonder how many of our day to day surroundings we can use to our audio advantage.

A friend of mine recorded a band in a house that had a long stairwell so he decided after listening to how cool the stairwell sounded to use it as an echo chamber as well. So there are definitely possibilities when it comes to using your surroundings.

• Buy some long cables.

• Position your microphone where your preferred room sounds the best.

• Position your monitors in the corners or wherever you think they sound best.

• Do you want weird phasing? Put the monitors in weird positions.

• Put one closer than the other.

• Put another in an adjacent room.

• Experiment.

It’s not only to get great sounding or weird sounding echo-y tracks, it’s also for fun and experimentation. Maybe you can’t use it the way you want to, but maybe it adds to the production.

If I didn’t live in an apartment building where I can’t even grill a steak on a barbecue without people complaining I’d definitely go nuts with my outdoor weird sounding elevator patio. I’m sure, when you think hard you could put some of your rooms, hallways or stairwells to good use.

Super flangy rhythm on guitar tip wednesday

I’ve been listening to Alanis Morissette these last few….well years but these couple of weeks a little more because I absolutely adore the production value many of her songs offer. There is always a lot going on and many interesting effects used throughout her first albums.

On the track Forgiven off Jagged Little Pill there is an interesting clean effected guitar. I could never quite figure out what it was until I accidentally stumbled upon it when recording a track for my own song.

In Logic you can emulate this quite well with just the flanger plug-in. Gives a nice shimmer to your strums, but you can’t play fast or it will all sound garbled. For that heavily flanged, but still not detuned or out-of-whack use the following settings:

• Feedback at 43%
• Rate at around 0.233 Hz
• Mix at 50% (Or you can put it as a send and there have the mix at 100%)
• Experiment with the intensity from 50% – 80%. I used around 75 because I had only sustained chords strums.

There, you may not be an Alanis fan, but you can certainly use these settings to experiment with whenever you are in a rut and need a new sound.

The difference between Gated Reverb and Gate Reverb?

Gated reverb is an effect that was used a lot in the eighties, and is still used sparely today. Phil Collins the artist usually recognized for his super-sounding snare drum with gated reverb. His snare sound still echoes in many tracks today, and audio schools teach Gated Reverb to their students.

What is gated reverb?

Gated reverb is when you feed a snare sound to a big hall reverb but gate it so it only sounds when the snare drum is hit. This is achieved by side-chaining the gate to the snare. And by fiddling with the parameters you can manipulate the attack and character of the reverb.

Phil Collins’s track I wish it would rain down is a good example of the snare reverb sounding only when the snare is hit and then hearing the gate kind of sucking the reverb back into it’s pocket.

But what about this Gate Reverb?

Reverb Gate is used in sound-reinforcement, or live sound. It is when you have a big reverb on the vocals for instance, and you don’t want the drums bleeding into the reverb and bringing muddiness to the FOH sound.

But you still don’t want to cut the microphone out of the mix because it adds to the overrall sound of the stage. Then you gate the aux send so nothing passes except when the signal gets strong enough to go over the threshold. The microphone is still picking up the sound of the stage but it is not being sent to the reverb.

Two almost exact names that name two completely different things?

Yeah, I know it’s a bit complicated. The thing to remember is that with gated reverb you are doing excatly that, you’re gating the reverb, or the output of the reverb. But with gate reverb you are putting a gate before the reverb, essentially the input of the reverb. So that’s basically the difference, whether you put the gate before or after.

One is an effect, the other is a kind of clean-up.