SH Spotlight PART DEUX: Recording and mastering questions asked and (hopefully) answered

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Steve Hoffman, May 8, 2006.

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  1. lukpac

    lukpac Senior Member

    Location:
    Milwaukee, WI
    If you have an older machine that would run Windows 98/ME or MacOS 9, ProTools Free. It's...free.
     
  2. Jamie Tate

    Jamie Tate New Member

    Location:
    Nashville
    Most are very expensive ($1,000 and up). I sometimes use Sound Soap ($100) and it works reasonably well. It's not perfect. It's more of a filter than pop remover.

    There was a thread about this recently and some of the guys are hip to a $25 program that does an amazing job. PM Grant about it. He was one of the guys that was the most vocal about it.
     
  3. GT40sc

    GT40sc Senior Member

    Location:
    Eugene, Oregon
  4. OcdMan

    OcdMan Senior Member

    Location:
    Maryland
    I agree with you and can not stand clipped waveforms but if you only clip a few samples at a time, you'll probably never hear it. Some of the best sounding CDs I've ever heard have a few samples clipped every so often. DCC's Hotel California, for example.
     
  5. Doug Hess Jr.

    Doug Hess Jr. Senior Member

    Location:
    Belpre, Ohio
    Darles,
    I'm assuming you've heard rock or heavy metal music performed live at a big venue. Guess what-- you're listening to compression. Go back by the sound board and see the rack of processing equipment to add reverb and compression to the vocals and instruments. That's because it wouldn't sound right in concert either. To incorporate what was stated earlier, when my dad's jazz band plays at the local hotel ballroom, it's all open and live with no processing because that is the way it is supposed to be in that situation. For rock music/heavy metal, you are many times creating a sound that wouldn't exist without processing like even the distortion sound of the electric guitars. That is due to the "compression" as it were of the sound on purpose by overdriving the amp, etc. to MAKE that sound.

    Doug
     
  6. acjetnut

    acjetnut Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    http://familyjunction.org/media_music.html

    Check out "HBR" under the "Summer 2005" heading. Not one drop of compression or eq-ing on that one.


    The rest from that column is the same story, although I used a little compression on the vocals. "HBR" is an instrumental track.
     
  7. Metoo

    Metoo Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    Spain (EU)
    Acjetnut, I liked that tune you posted a link to better than some of the Porcupine Tree ones. :)
     
  8. acjetnut

    acjetnut Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    Thanks! I am a self-taught engineer, and use my own setup to record my band (the song you heard). I have learned countless things from these forums, especially with threads like these!
     
  9. acjetnut

    acjetnut Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    Steve, you have mentioned here times when you (and others) have had to manually edit out clicks on analog tape from an needle-drop. Does this mean that you slice off a tiny sliver of tape, then splice it back?

    If so, how thin a sliver of tape do you cut and are tons of these edits neccesary?
     
  10. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Why would you splice it back? Once (when I was really bored) I spliced together about 50 pops I had cut out of songs and made one long giant pop. Silly.

    No one does analog razor blade de-clicking any more. Digital de-clicking now.
     
  11. acjetnut

    acjetnut Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    I guess each profession has it's own way of blowing off steam.

    But I think I am confused now. I was picturing pops and clicks during the song being physically cut out as in:

    tape: ======= ====

    the space being where a pop/click once was.

    am i assuming wrong?

    [edit] I think my original question was worded funny. I meant splicing back the two pieces of tape, minus where you cut the pop.
     
  12. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    It was indeed worded funny. We splice back the "depoped" pieces yes. If done right it's not even noticeable.
     
  13. Squealy

    Squealy Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    Vancouver
    That's funny, I just did this (making tiny edits to remove pops) with some digital files of a needledropped album, as I was too lame to figure out the declicking function. It never occurred to me people did this in the analog realm.
     
  14. Andreas

    Andreas Senior Member

    Location:
    Frankfurt, Germany
    You can sell that one for forum fundraising.
     
  15. Dusty Chalk

    Dusty Chalk Grounded Space Cadet

    What did it sound like? One giant pop? Or a stuttering pop? I'd love to hear that. I'm a musician who likes to play with samples of unorthodox sounds for musical elements, and I'm sure I could use that as some sort of percussion. What can I do to convince you? At least put it out on MP3...Please? Pretty please? Sugar?
     
  16. sharedon

    sharedon Forum Zonophone

    Location:
    Boomer OK
    Speaking of pops, anyone ever heard "playbacks" - prerecorded singing parts made for vocalists in movies - which have pops in them, to cue the singer? I'd love to hear what that sounded like!
     
  17. Metoo

    Metoo Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    Spain (EU)
    the analog type was surely a labor of love and quite hard to pull off, I imagine. If a recording had a lot of clicks wouldn't you end up with a significantly shorter song?
     
  18. CaptainOzone

    CaptainOzone On Air Cowbell

    Location:
    Beaumont, CA, USA
    I've done about 10,000 of these myself, back in the day...
    It's not that hard once you get used to it.
    If by significantly you mean a second or two, yes.

    -Bud
     
  19. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    My first job in radio was working for Bill Drake and editing pops and tics out of needle drops. Whoo, what a miserable job; one false move and ya had to redub the entire song. I must have taken 600 pops out of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" alone. Drake finally bit the bullet and got Columbia to send us a tape dub of the master to use instead. I guess they didn't want to pay the $50.00 studio tab or something. :sigh:
     
  20. Metoo

    Metoo Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    Spain (EU)
    This would make a great test to determine who has a real vocation and thus separate the grain from the straw. :D
     
  21. DoctorDave

    DoctorDave Senior Member

    Location:
    Dublin, Ohio
    I remember doing the same thing with "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" by Roberta Flack, and that soft piano intro to "Wildfire" by Michael Murphy. I dubbed them both at 30 ips to give me plenty of room to make the edits, but it was still REALLY tough because so many edits had to be made. I know there were hours of work on each one! In the end, I got a tape dub of the Flack song (which I still have today).
     
  22. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    David,

    Working at 30 ips totally threw me off; I could only judge at 15. Funny.
     
  23. indy mike

    indy mike Forum Pest

    Can you list some cds you know for sure are flat transfers of the master tapes (maybe albums you've heard the master tapes for, but didn't get to work on for DCC)?
     
  24. Mike Ga

    Mike Ga Formerly meredrums and MikeG

    Location:
    Wylie, Tx.
    I do a lot of needle drops to cd, but not to computer.
    I have a stand alone unit that burns straight to disc.
    When I first started doing this, I set levels as I would
    on an cassette deck; allow some travel into the red-zone,
    but only transient's. I've been experimenting the last few
    weeks however with leaving the levels low enough to never
    go into the red at all, and leaving headroom to boot, due
    to digital not having a noticeable noise floor to consider.
    Guess what? These have been the best sounding so far.
    I can deal with tape hiss, pops, (few and far between on
    new vinyl, unobtrusive when they do occur, most of the
    time :mad: ), etc., on the source's, but can't stand the
    sound of digital about to go into "almost-overload;
    (think Tape Saturation here)" , which "should" be impossible
    from what I understand about the format. It's either "brick-wall"
    or nothing at all. The only caveat is that they have to be
    turned up more, relative to the cd's that I did at a higher
    recording level. I think that's what the "big knob" on my amp's
    for though! Am I hearing things or is this a valid approach?
     
  25. Darles Chickens

    Darles Chickens New Member

    Location:
    Siberia
    Steve: when I asked about DMM you said that one of the disadvantages is that "the bass has to be summed extremely high". What exactly does that mean, "summing the bass high"?
     
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