DAW 101

A DAW or Digital Audio Workshop is a computer application that processes sound for replication. DAWs often come with a host of included plugins, otherwise known as effects or FX.

DAWs synchronize synths to a clock to allow them to generate time sensitive musical information. Plugins cover everything from synths to audio FX to in-app cosmetics. Midi is the aforementioned musical information. When put to work in a contained environment, a producer can orchestrate anything they set their mind to.

Plugins

Plugins go by a few different names. VSTs(Virtual Studio Technology) on Windows, AU(Audio Units) on Mac, AAX for Pro Tools, so on and so forth. Plugins can do a variety of things from synthesizing noise, manipulate phase, automate & script volume, perform midi

Plugins designed for apple products are coded differently than those made for Windows. The same goes for Linux. When given a choice between VST classic and VST3, use VST3. If you do not own Pro Tools, do not waste hard drive space on an AAX version. You will never see it and they do add up over the years.

Sidechain

creates room for drums in our mixdown. It is accomplished using any of the methods below, but each use case is relative.

1. Route your targeted output signal into the compressor.
2. Set your attack, release, and ratio.
3. Decide if your compression sidechain will duck the reciever in full

Compression sidechaining is not an accurate method as it computes incoming signal in real time. No matter how effective your hardware is, there could be a 10ms delay up to 100ms delay in the form of bloom. You may learn more about parameters in compression.

The best use case of compression sidechaining is to duck one instrument using signal from a second instrument. Some examples would be a broadband sidechain with a pluck ducking a pad or sustain, ducking the top of your kick with signal from your snare to increase headroom on a 4/4 pattern, or to make vocals pop in a mix that is overwhelmed by midrange

1. Right click the volume fader of your sidechain group.
2. Match your sidechain shape to your kick drum. Flatten a render of your processed kick to prevent bow-tying in your sub.
3. Copy this sidechain shape and paste it anywhere your kick plays or drums and bass are playing at the same time.

Inline automation is the act of scripting your sidechain. Because the daw is reading code instead of reacting to an input, you can get a snappy attack on your sidechain, increasing the pop, or transient, of your drums.

Additionally, you may lead your sidechain in specific parts of your song. By easing your sidechain in before the drum hits, you can get a louder bang with less volume. This is best used on every other snare or before major transitions.

1. Set a limiter on your master.
2. Boost the signal of your desired sound until you achieve the desired affect.

Because limiting is brickwall compression, it still has to process incoming signal. If your signal is snappy enough and loud enough, it will force your limiter to duck other sounds to clear headroom for your loudest source. This is best used with transient shaping and on drums.

Recording

Please refer to:

1. Phase for microphone etiquette.
2. Noise for elaboration on noise floor/cieiling/ratio, etc.

1. Performing a piece correctly is more about presenting a product than it is worthy of a listener's attention than it is about pride. Respect your fans and they will respect you.
2. Once a song is published, there are no do-overs. Tune your drums. Change your strings. Make your vocal delivery personal.
3. Practice your own parts to a metronome to avoid frustration in the booth.
4. Expensive cables and microphones do not clean the dead skin and oils from your instrument. Buy fresh strings for the clearest audio quality.
5. Is your signal red? It is clipping.
   Everything else in the chain will carry your clipping noise up to the master output until it is present for our ears to bask in until the very end of time...
   
   Turn it down.

Gain staging for a microphone or line-in is all about balancing silence. For most sources, best practice is to set one's own input gain to -10 decibles, and to record in mono. -10db is loud enough to provide natural gain, but quiet enough to prevent baked in distortions. Any inputs quieter than -30db allow for artifacts from hardware and software to bleed into the recording. Those artifacts will make compression a nightmare to manage.

The recording is now in the DAW. All performance flaws and imperfections birth the soul of a recording.

Vocals

A rule of thumb when processing vocals is to concentrate, rather than cut. The human voice has a built in bandpass filter called "lips". Lips are a device our ancestors have used since the dawn of time to captivate and enthrall. Too much EQ will filter their lips off and that sounds boring.

Now that we understand our instrument, first steps should be a de-esser. Your de-esser reads frequencies where human voices generally produce the most unwanted noise. In other words, we keep the pretty air noise, and remove all the ugly kuh-siss-puh-tohh sounds. It is one of those things that you dont know is on until you take it off. Invest in a good one.

Back to how the mouth filters like an EQ. We will use an EQ to prevent the next effect from smooshing the nuance of human enunciation. Our Pre-EQ will take any unnecessary bass out of the recording. Bass can enter a microphone from a number of sources and many of them will not be audible until compressed.

In most modern music stylings, a reliable multiband compressor will do so much work. Your vocalist's microphone provides its own EQ. Multiband compression will bring out the $40,005 audio quality at no added cost. Try to keep it under 24% and add no more than you need. Even 9% can do it if the vox fit the mic.

After compression, you have the question of Stereo Processing.

Your lead vocals are now in mono and ready to receive some polish. You should add your first EQ before or after the multiband compressor. Feel it out. When using compressors, our EQ objective is to cut around the second octave to remove any background frequencies and use as few bell curves to nudge any heady bass tones or flat highs in our favor.

You may now look into low mixed reverb or my personal preference; delay. Reverb can get cakey like wet flour or drying paint. If you have lots of staccato notes, pick delay. It is much easier to control and provides the same richness as reverb. Read my delay topic to learn why.

Once you have chosen your prefered room sound via delay or reverb, the last step is gainstaging. I use saturators becuase they provide more volume with less clipping. If you're uncomfortable with putting a distortion on your vocals, you may alternatively compress the vox behind your time fx and throw a soft clipper at the end.

I sidechain my vocals into my mixdowns. Whether it is a guitar, a pluck, vocals, percs, kick, snare... we use our vocals as an input signal to make room.

In addition to creating room for the vocals, you want your stereo mix to come from comping and harmony. Take Billie Eilish for instance. Her harmonies will be hard panned like guitars while her lead vocal track will be hard center. The lead vocals...[to be continued]

Guitar

Please refer to:

1. > Distortion for achieving all guitar tones.
2. > Phase for amp recording etiquette.

Index

1. The Basics
2. Intonation
3. Analog Mix
4. Digital Mix

When recording, there are a few standard practices that are not up to interpretation. Leave the tone knob rolled up all the way up. Your producer is not your guitar tech. Mixing cannot create frequencies that a tone knob un-alives. Double tracking should be 2-4 channels of dedicated re-recording each part, per left, per right channel.

We should also talk about the impact of a good set up before continuing.

The "Neck" of a guitar cannot be mixed out of a recording. Buzzy frets? the neck is backbowed. This forces strings to canoe upward and touch strings with open frets. Are notes sharp or flat for no reason? Check that the neck isnt flexing up over the body. This will disproportianately increase the travel distance of a string, altering the pitch accuracy per note, per fret.

Fix either of these issues at home by unscrewing the cover on the top of most "Headstock"s. For backbow, loosen the truss rod with a hex key via counter-clockwise motion. For arching, rotate the truss clockwise. A truss is meant to provide stability to the wodden neck. Do not attempt to loosen or tighten based on rigidity. When in doubt, make the motion of the clock in sequential order in an orientation you recognize and before adjusting the truss. You only get one neck.

Setting the neck requires the fretboard to be flat. This may be tested by rocking a perfectly flat object along 3 or more frets. Something as simple are a speed square or other machined level tools may work in a pinch. Raised frets contribute to buzz, but do not affect intonation. These must be hammered back in to remove this type of fret buzz.

Intonation is a little more complicated. Setting the pitch of the 12th fret to the whole tone is my prefered method. No oscilliscope required. Take the pitch of the ghost harmonic at the 12th fret and reference it to the pressed 12th fret. If the 12th fret plays sharper than the open note and the ghost note, more distance must be created between the saddle and the nut. Do this by tightening the saddle post. If the 12th fret is flat when pressed, shorten the length of the string by loosening the saddle post.

Adjusting saddle distance is not the same as adjesting saddle height. Saddle height should not be changed unless a heavier string gauge is causing unwarranted fret buzz and no other issues. Same for if a string bends multiple semitones when pressing down lightly. decreasing saddle height will improve pitch accuracy.

Lastly, grab a tuner and play note by note to confirm that there are no dead notes or sharp spots. Bowing in the neck creates sharp notes. The strings must be loosened and the neck must be tightened again. Check one more time with that fret rocker for gaps or wobbling. If a string is floppy, the saddle was raised

Pickup height is the last factor to consider when adjusting a guitar. A player will know if their pickups are too high. What they might not know is how high pickups have the same magnets as low pickups. The magnets may pull strings out of tune, causing them to go sharp. This is an issue that should only happen to people who do their own setups without guidance. Factory set guitars will not do this.

The only time pickups should be adjusted is to increase dynamic range (lowering) or increasing the "bite" under distortion (raising). Do with that information and a size 0 Phillips screwdriver what you will.

An optimal room and speaker cabinet set up has a few requirements.

1. Acoustic Treatment:
   bass traps, broadband absorbers, surface diffusion
2. Direct Input + Amplifier Out signal diverter:
   for the sound engineer
3. Dynamic Microphone:
   You know which one. I may include some of my favorite mics if I get sponsored.

Acoustic treatment for guitars can be as inventive or as simple as one wants. A solution I favor is the still air box. I would frame a 3x3' cube with medium density fiberboard (MDF) and pack it with insulation. This creates an anechoic chamber, designed to isolate the sound of the speaker going into the mic. One could also spend the same amount of money adding bass trap columns, broadband absorbers, and cutting their own diffusion panels. Neither option is correct and both have a similar amount of context sensitive strengths and weaknesses.

Monitoring through a real amp and speaker while recording a clean DI(direct input) signal is a must. The trick is to mirror one's guitar input to a dedicated amp-out box. Since the dry signal is recording at the same time as the amp, mic position and distortion can be edited as mixing problems arise.

Dynamic mics are prefered over condenser and ribbon mics because guitar recording is about driving the speaker and amplifier until they get a little toasty. This is the type of thing you cannot achieve in an appartment, or even most neighborhoods. The speakers will reach +80db at minimum. This is then fed into the recording interface at -18db to -10db signal level. Analog recording can be turned up, but they cannot be turned down. Ever. This limitation is why amateur mix engineers try so hard to mix EDM at -20db and then crank a limiter in post without questioning why everything has to be so quiet.

| EDM doesn't. Your input signal does.

Same principles here. Roll up the tone, roll down the volume knob(s). Double tracking each left and right channel is a non negotiable for good sounding guitar. The trick here is a mix of convolution and harsh EQ. .

Bass

Bass is always recorded in mono. Standing bass does not require much beside a room with acoustic treatment and hard surfaces with optional wall and cieling diffusion. Bass guitar is more complicated and will be the only bass mentioned from here forward.

Bass guitar has become standardized by a direct input and a Fender Power Bass, or P-Bass. Direct in is optimal as it removes the potential phase canceling from a recording source. Frequency splitting is the best way to achieve clarity and texture.

Clone a recording of the bass track without any modifications. One is your dedicated mono sub. The other is your bass top. This one may be micd up to a live speaker cabinet, processed digitally in your guitar group, or treated strictly as a clean digital track for ease of EQing.

Filter the high end out of the sub channel at octave 3 at a slope of -6db. Optionally raise your cutoff frequency 7 semitones from the root to allow wiggle room on melody forward songs. This layer provides both sub and bass presence. The only assistance the bass top will provide is in the mid range. highpass filters will be applied on the master. Any cutting of the low end at this stage will negatively affect the bass response on premium listening setups such as cars or home entertainment centers. Only use a shelf to reduce bass distortion at the master level.

For the bass top, filter the low end out beginning at the 4th octave at a slope of -12db. I reccomend that lowpass filters are only added to the pre-EQ to reduce mechanical noise. This top can now be treated like a guitar or like a synth. Place white noise generation behind the EQ to create a humming fuzz. Use distortion to add mid-range. Do stereo processing for textural enhancements and improved dynamic presence in stereo settings. Add flangers to make the bass melt. The sky is the limit.

Wind & Brass

For the time being, please refer to vocals. Many of the recording techniques are shared among soloists.

Drums