Fatten Up Your Horns
The EM Cool Tip of the Month is presented courtesy of Cool Breeze Systems.
If you ever mix a recording with a brass section in it, and you feel you need to beef up the hits, stabs, falls, screams, or funky honks, this month's tip might come in handy. With today's editing capabilities, you can really tighten up horn parts if you need to. Instead of editing, however, I want to discuss dynamics control and range expansion.
Depending upon the size and chops of the horn section, using a high-quality pitch shifter to add upper and lower octaves can really help the horns pop in the mix. You can use most professional digital audio workstation programs in combination with pitch-shifter plug-ins such as Waves UltraPitch, Wave Mechanics PurePitch, or Digidesign DPP-1 to accomplish that goal. In this example, the brass section consists of two trumpets, an alto sax, and one trombone, all recorded on separate mono tracks. I'm using Pro Tools with Digidesign's DPP-1.
First, place EQ and compressor plug-ins on each horn source track. Set the compressor to a ratio of, say, 4:1 and adjust the EQ to taste.
Insert a pitch shifter on each trumpet track and on the trombone track. Set the pitch shift of both trumpet tracks to +12 semitones (one octave up) and the trombone to -12 semitones (one octave down). Start by setting the wet/dry mix percent parameter to 50 percent. Experiment with lower percentages for a more subtle effect.
Add an Aux Input track and label it “Horn Reverb.” Insert a reverb plug-in and assign its input to a stereo bus (5-6). Create sends from the horn tracks to the stereo bus (5-6) corresponding to the input selection of the Horn Reverb Aux Input track.
Assign all horn track outs and the Horn Reverb track to a new stereo bus pair (7-8).
Create an Aux Input track and label it “HornSubmix.” Set its input to monitor bus 7-8 and insert a stereo compressor. If you have a gain-optimization plug-in (such as Waves L1 or L2), try inserting it after the compressor for added control.
Note: Adding additional routing and plug-ins can delay the source signals and affect the timing of the tune. Depending on your rig, you might need to compensate by shifting tracks in time.
This technique doesn't work in all situations, but it might be just what's needed!
— Steve Albanese
Learning the Old-Fashioned Way
When people ask me what's the best way they can improve their recording and mixing chops, I have a one-word answer: mimesis. (The word “mimesis” means the same as “imitation” or “mimicry,” but I intentionally don't use those words because they have connotations I don't want to confer.) The notion of mimesis (and the word itself) comes from the ancient Greeks, who felt that the best way to master an art was to mimic masters of that art — but again, mimic in a different sense than the one in which we tend to use that word. Even though we have the saying “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” our culture does not generally value imitations, at least not commercially.
What I mean by mimesis is very specific: pick a recorded song you like and rerecord and mix it to sound exactly like the original. It's generally best to start with a classic — early Elvis, Beatles, and Rolling Stones records are excellent choices for this exercise — because the productions are less sophisticated and the arrangements and performances less demanding. First, of course, you need to analyze the song from every angle. Do some research to discover where and when the song was recorded, what equipment and how many tracks the engineers used, what instruments the musicians played (including amps and types of drums and cymbals), how the song was put together, and so on. You don't have to have the same exact gear, of course — but knowing what it was can help considerably in recreating the sound. Naturally, you also have to come up with the musicians to play the different parts (this is a great exercise for them as well).
After recording all the tracks as identically as you are able, it's time for mixdown. Pay close attention to all elements of the mix, including levels, effects, panning, and compression, and do your best to recreate each of them, as well as the overall blend of elements. Obviously, you need to have the original track cued up and ready to play so you can refer to it regularly throughout the process. Very important: this is not an exercise in creativity. The idea is to copy — note for note, lick for lick, and effect for effect. (You can get creative later when it comes to your own songs.)
Interestingly, it is precisely the intent to copy — which is to say, the commitment to stay true to the source and not insert your own ideas — that makes mimesis such a potentially deep learning experience. I have done mimesis with recordings twice — first with Patsy Cline's “Walking After Midnight” and later with the Elvis recording of “Blue Suede Shoes” — and I can't begin to tell you how much I learned in the process. But don't just take my word for it — Picasso copied works of the masters in his formative years, as did countless other great artists (including poets, playwrights, novelists, and composers). Indeed, it was only a few generations ago, before the rise of dedicated schools and masters' programs, that mimesis was the primary way people learned any art. Not surprisingly, it still works today.
— Brian Knave
X Marks the Spot
Many Mac-based musicians frequently need to alternate between booting up in OS X and booting up in OS 9. The obvious means to restart in a different OS is to open System Preferences, select Startup Disk, choose a system folder, and click Restart. But there's an easier way to restart in OS X: simply select Restart from the Finder, and as your computer reboots, hold down the X key.
— Geary Yelton
Rack It Up in Sonar XL
Adding DX synths or ReWire devices in a Sonar project used to be a pain before the Synth Rack was introduced in Sonar version 2, but now, it couldn't be easier. Go to the View menu and select Synth Rack, and the Rack will appear on the main Track view. Click on the icon at the far left of the menu bar and pick a DX Instrument or ReWire Device from the list in the dialog. If you've loaded a VST shell such as Fxpansion VST to DX Adapter, you'll also find your VST Instruments there.
For each new synth or device you choose, Sonar will insert into your project a new MIDI track that has your instrument assigned to its output. To edit the instrument, click on the Properties button in the Rack (second from the right) and tweak to taste.
By the way, if Sonar crashes when you try to use a ReWire device (such as Ableton Live), be sure to grab the newest patch from the Cakewalk Web site, which fixes the problem.
— Dennis Miller
Be sure to check out the streaming movie tutorial of this tip to view this procedure in action. Log on to www.emusician.com/cooltip to take part in this online adventure. Also, if you dare, take the quiz to review what you've learned!