Ask an audio engineer anything

ask an audio engineer anything

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You ever work with SSL boards before? Like a Duality for example?

You really can put engineer behind anything.

>shitpost engineer

yes, I regularly use the SSL 6000

Ur nothing special faggot nobody gives a fuck

How did you get into the industry

can you quickly explain the function and give me some pros and cons about sidechain technology in audio production software?

I got into music at a really young age. I started playing the piano when I was around 6 or 7, I still do it. I also make electronic music and I went to a private audio engineering school

Is room reflections what's making my guitar sound like shit in recordings?

What do you for a living?

Sidechaining is a compressor setting which is used to achieve a pumping effect on eg. a bass sound (at least in today's commercial usage of it).

pros and cons? well my personal opinion is that it's a cool effect. I'm guessing you just asked that to check my legitimacy lol

what's it like being poor

it could be. What microphone are you using? How large is the room where you're recording?

What are the job oppurtunities like?

Is it good money once/if you land a job? (Relative to the time and money spent becoming qualified)


Got a mate studying it so im kinda interested

worry about the quality of your mic and the software you're using + your actual instrument before you worry about the layout of the room.

signed not op

I'm still in school, actually. I haven't graduated yet

Using a e609 and sm57 into a studio channel pre into a sapphire pro40.

you can do alot cooler stuff with it actually

If you're going to private school like me, you have to be ready to make a big investment. Also, when you first graduate it's almost 100% certain that you'll have to work for free. It's all about getting experience. Once you've proven yourself, you have more chance of getting a job.

On the other hand, audio is a broad field. You can do pretty much anything you like.
sound for games, commercials, movies, etc etc you name it. It's all about what interests you

This

not a bad setup, mic positions are of critical importance and also how are you EQing + compressing the guitar?

what guitar are you using? if you're using the wrong pick for the strings, the wrong strings in general or the action is too low you can get some horrible sounds coming from it.

failing that if you're sure its the room you can buy cheap acoustic foam in ebay to soak up some echo

those are decent microphones. I'd have to take a look at your setup, it could be anything. Can you describe how it sounds now and how you'd like it to sound?

why get all that shitgear when all you really need to achieve a good mix and master is sausage fattener?

Good guitar, good amps, good pickups, good new strings, good pick. At this point the only thing I can think off is there's too many reflections so I can't layer it without it sounding like shit (obviously metal guitar).

spoken like a true FL Studio user.

Please stop calling it a "private school" and call these institutions what they really are, spoiled rich kid diploma mills.

make sure your mics are in phase and in the sweet spots of the cabinet.

Do you guys actually have any fucking clue as to what those hundreds of switches dials and sliders do to audio, or do you just make it up / use about 5 of them.

I guess you could call it that, yeah.

Whats an audio engineer?

It just sounds basic and home audio shitty you know? Like I got good monitors and I got good ears and when it comes to guitar it's all about the source and it just sounds shitty. I can only come to the conclusion that it's the room.

we know what they all do.

It seems like they're a lot of them, but they're actually all the same. there's one channel strip (top to bottom) which has different switches and knobs, but then it's just repeated.

So if you know one channel strip and the signal flow to the master and auxes, you know the entire desk pretty much.

I have a friend on VoIP who uses voice activation. Every now and then, when he starts to speak, the first half second is accompanied by a very loud sound. Almost like a surge of concentrated noise or something.

What is causing this, and how do I get his mic or computer to stop assaulting our ears? (Besides forcing him over to push to talk.)

...

anything you can think of that has sound in it, it's got an audio engineer behind it.

movies, games, commercials, etc etc

also, music recording

Usually it's EQ you're seeing on a PRE so if you got 20 PRe's on a board and you got 20 EQ's and each EQ has like 5 knobs that's 100 knobs easily.

is it white noise? (sounds like wind) or does it have a distinguished tone to it?

do you attend some school in London by any chance?

Checked

it's probably the room. Make sure you isolate it properly. also, make sure you're using the right mic techniques

im a self-taught working sound engineer

learned everything i needed off you tube and now i work in the video game industry

how do you feel about going to school for something that is easily self-taught and applied?

Are you from a wealthy family who is there to support you if this falls through?

do you have any goals/aspirations as a sound engineer? have you made any albums or songs? whats your soundcloud / portfolio page?

nice thanks. And no it's just a thing i ever wanted to understand.
Can you go a lil more technical and explain how it works? like that takes the way over the side chain and what is the actual side chain?
what else you teaser?

Which compressor/limiter are the best

What set up would you use to record foley audio.
I have heard of using two Mics, a unidirectional and a figure 8 pattern mic then merging the audio.

Is this necessary or have any real advantages over using just one microphone to record? and if so how would you merge the audio? is there a particular app to automate the process.

Using Windows and Adobe Creative Cloud.

The amplitude is too high and the length too short for me to attribute any type of sound to it. Just pure loud crackly ear pain.

How can you self-teach yourself recording a drum kit if you don't have the means to record it?

How can you teach yourself how to operate an Audient desk if you can't practice on one?

I have access to gear that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I don't think you can learn all of this stuff from books/videos. You gotta do it hands-on. That's why my family has invested that money

and yes, I am working on a portfolio. I have written an essay, done multiple band recordings and I am an electronic music producer

that's fucked. I honestly would have to take a look at the entire setup for me to identify the issue. For now, is there any way he can mute it?

Instead of an SM57 get a Beyer M201. If a 57 were a microphone it'd be a 201

Not OP

I have no experience with recording foley yet. I do hope to try it in the future

The advantage of using two mics, however, is that you can create a stereo image. You can merge the files together in pro tools.

it depends on what you're going to use it for.

for mastering the whole audio spectrum.

I believe you were pushed to greater lengths to learn about sound engineering so i still think you made a solid choice going to school

question = Why are audient desks [ mixing consoles in general ] still used above Digital Audio Workstations?

I also practiced "hands-on" - we both spent the hours in the studio working and practicing, you probably more and in a more rigid environment however

What is your end game plan once you graduate? whats your dream position? Do you listen to good music, or just commercialized normie trash EDM & Trap

I wish you the best in your career choice, i think that if you have a vision and a drive to make it happen you can succeed

is it just a software thing or can you actually buy a 19" master class studio sidechain?

The 57 is standard for most of the most famous metal guitar recordings of all time.

I use Urei 1176 and API 2500, great on everything. For bass or vocals Urei/UA LA2A, but those are very expensive and a lotta clones are just as good and much more affordable

how do you like your job at guitar center?

let me guess, full sail graduate?

make you some "beats"?

>I have written an essay

As an single essay? Have you only been there a couple of weeks?

Because you still need a live room and a control room (with a desk) to record a band. You can't do that in a DAW alone.

Also, I hope to work in sound for film. Be it score composition or sound design

no, sidechaining is a compressor setting. A compressor can be both outboard or digital, but sidechain itself is just the setting on it.

how do you like your job at guitar center?

let me guess, full sail graduate? learn't how to make yo "beats"?

we don't learn how to make beats. We learn everything about recording and mixing techniques, mastering, post-production, etc etc.

we don't make 4x4 kick patterns in FL Studio

thanks for the chat, consider bookmarking this youtube channel and watch this video if your interested in film sound design :)

youtube.com/watch?v=IEfQ_9DIItI

Don't you get tired working with niggers?

nice! I'll check that out.

Lol. There is maybe one black guy in my school.
also, I recorded a black rapper once. He was cool.

Hey OP or some other audiophile please take a second to answere this

If I am making music thats heavily based around resampling, limiting, compressing, subtractive techniques, more limiting and resampling etc - is the signal/noise ratio of my sound card going to begin to become important as I begin to reach the noise floor. Will a higher quality conversion process allow "more" limiting without incorperating noise.

I am thinking of investing in the apollo twin or apogee duet because i reach the noise floor of my focusrite very quickly making me have to bounce more often to audio, restricting my ability to modulate the sounds.
When mixing a heavily stereo track with ambient pads etc. Is the signal ever mono and then made to be stereo with time techniques or stereoization or is the channel often naturally stereo from the producer?


Do you ever use stereo image meters such as Paz or other oscilloscopes or is it purely mixed with intuition and ear.

When mixing raw stems, what instruments are typically sent to you in mono and which in stereo?

Double tracking and panning to acheive stereoness from mono sources can produce very powerful results but often sounds like LCR with disparity in the stereo image, any tips for creating an image that feels like a track is hugging eachother

pic sorta related, a snare

Still can't make drums and bass sound good toghether. Not even with samples... I need an advice. Thank you user

OP here.

using a compressor, you can make the track (on which the compressor is placed) decrease in gain, if it is linked with a different channel or sample, controlling the input.

for example, if you put a compressor on a bass channel, and set the input for the sidechain function to a kick track, you can set up the compressor so everytime the kick plays, the bass will duck behind it, in order to avoid frequency clashing, or to achieve a "pumping" effect. I have to go now. Have a good night y'all

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo faggot OP answer my shit cmon bud be a bro

how much have you spent on equipment so far?
i'd like to get a synthesizer this summer and fool around with it

yes

based on your haircut how badly do you want to kill yourself

What software should I torrent to start learning how to make music with nothing but a laptop?

turn down your amp gain, 99% of layered guitar tracks sound like ass because too much gain. use a good tube amp, and much less gain than you would use live.

MS audiorecorder

Fuck FL, reason is the shit

Why is the dynamic range on modern recordings so low? dont you analyze the waveforms before the final masterings? all i see is clipped waveforms in an attempt to go 'louder'. fucking stuff is always in the Red, and you just limit and squish the peaks in the waveforms and compress it to death.

and dont fall back on the stupid answer:
"well the customer wants it louder"
or
"we have to compete against the other music that is similarly mastered, so that our loud volume is consistent" or some shit like that.

Low Dynamic Range, Clipped, Limited, and fucking artifically boosted is killing me. fuck this modern mastering that you guys overboost. fuck you for not respecting the waveforms and giving me a DR5 on music...

Sidechaining is making one signal respond to another.

When a certain threshold of amplitude is reached by the signal being used as a sidechain, the original sound that has the compressor on it, will begin to be altered depending on the amplitude of the sidechain signal and the attack/release of the compressor.

Sidechaining can be done internally as well, for example; a compressor could be set to increase the 6-10khz range whenever the range between 0-200hz goes over a certain threshold, this for example would make your highs louder when the bass gets louder, or the other way round could increase the bass when the highs increase.

There are a ridiculous amount of creative applications for sidechaining when you consider that you could sidechain filters, or saturation, not just standard compression.


is this in relation to the soundcard? because i hope so...

my tunes are relatively phat but they are certainly no skeptical levels, i want my tunes to POP ykno

have you ever had a wet nightmare?

*after
>retard

Um not really. The sidechain is the key signal to the gain reduction circuit. Typically it would be internal unless routed to an external signal. In what you describe, the compressor on a bass track would be externally sidechained to a send on the kick track. That's only one use of external sidechain routing and not the definition of sidechain in itself.

but only a bi engineer would feel comfy behind anything

What's it like being a fat stoner.

>Audio engineer
Brainlet

still an upgrade from subhuman basement dweller

Wtf are you talking about? The quality of the mic isn't nearly as important as the acoustics of your room. This is basic!
And quality of software? Every daw out there can record 24 bit high res pcm..

What instrument did you give up on?

Its literally just loudness war.

customer wants louder track, listener wants louder track, radio wants louder track. the only people that care are a tiny minority.

theres not a lot to say, that is the reasoning.

i personally think tunes sound better when they are fucking huge, but its relative to the music. i mean if you're listening to some jazz or funk or whatever then the dynamic range is more important than with maybe house dubstep or dnb.

mastering grade clippers have very powerful effects on the RMS without absolutely decimating dynamic range like most limiters do due to a different effect on the crest value (i think).

spotify very recently is taking steps to normalize the levels of its playback just like itunes and tidal.

>read 3 times
>too complicated for me
now this bread is getting nerdy

totally a full sail faggot

get your amp off the floor. Rear field reflections arrive at a much lower intensity relative to the destructive interference of a floor. Also your gear might not really be up to recording industry standards..

...

>audient
yep full sail fag confirmed

>pic related is a sidechain in use

the EQ band you see in the pic is going to respond to the area of the spectrum the purple line is covering, so your EQ will be responding to other parts of the sound. This can be done with many many things for various mixing and creative uses.

or SAE. Same cancer pretty much.

so when i can silence a massive deep burp in sound a when sound b comes up with a sneaky high frequency fart?

OP here. missed the bus so I got time to reply to everything

None. I started playing piano and still do. I want to learn the guitar at some point though.