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Post by jazznoise on Nov 4, 2017 3:40:29 GMT -6
Well it depends. Sponsored posting and shared posting et al is not what it used to be, only about 10% of those who liked your page see any of your regular posts and sponsored posting tends to just force all those who already liked it to see it loads of times and show a few random others.
It used to be much better but they're throttling it now to gain more revenue from it. Problem is I think they've killed the golden goose, as do lots of analysts. Their user base isn't growing like it used to.
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Post by jazznoise on Nov 4, 2017 2:59:54 GMT -6
Some people want a really dry drum sound, though, and if the only space you have is reverberant than it comes down to isolating the drums and trying to make a simulacra of a kit in a dry room. RE: Recording the kit as a whole. I generally prefer to work that way - some bands really like it, some want something more sculpted/elaborate seeming. Today I'm in recording a band who are young and have basically said they don't really mind about the audio quality, the day after I'm working with a stoner metal band, wednesday it's a much tighter Post-Hardcore/Emo band that are working to a guide click. Here's a track I did recently for a band, one of the 10 songs we recorded live that day. Kit sounds great - player tuned it nicely and absolutely hammered the thing. We did some guitar double tracks just to feel a bit posh and that was it: drive.google.com/open?id=0B1hzErNHBufHRWdheXlSMVJTRDQThe band and I were happy with the raw feel it gives the tracks. Not every band would want that, though.
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Post by jazznoise on Nov 2, 2017 13:30:08 GMT -6
Problem with MD421's is they're hypercardioid. I've used RE20 over 2 toms and it works well. But if you've the channels, mic each.
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Post by jazznoise on Oct 17, 2017 14:42:45 GMT -6
I promise you that no one in Ireland plays trad on an instrument called a recorder. For us it's an alias of the melodica.
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Post by jazznoise on Oct 16, 2017 18:00:45 GMT -6
A recorder from 3rd grade ? Sm7 all the way Yeah. Recorders are pretty popular in traditional Irish hymns, which is what this is. I heard a demo they recorded with their phone and this guy can play too. Think the theme to Titanic. There's a mix up here. A recorder, to me, specifically refers to the reed based instruments with the keys you blow into through a tube with a moutpeice. What you're referring to is what I'd called a tin whistle. I've recorded tin whistle, and trad in general, a fair few times. As it's a small wind instrument the fluctuations in volume can be wild and the perception of reverb is not that noticeable, so distance is your friend. Depending on the player's preference varying from above (more of a classical, balanced flute sound) to in front (trad players tend to like this, less of the breathy sound but a lot of tonal variation note by note). A reasonably even handed SDC like an Oktava mk012 will work well, I've gotten good results about 18" above the players head angled so the capsule is perpendicular to the whistle itself.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 28, 2017 3:08:24 GMT -6
Yeah the sort of aggressive ADT effects on things like Mr. Blue Sky or most Queen records are very different to "double tracking". Short modulated delays, obviously work well. I don't own anything that does *that* vocal sound sadly, even the ADT plugin is a bit meh for me.
I sometimes like to run modulation in Mid/Side, but almost nothing supports it natively. Shame as it can be a cool effect, not dissimilar to the panned harmonizer H3000 type effects but less static. I'd rarely run a harmonizer on anything except to help stereoize mono loops.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 27, 2017 15:11:42 GMT -6
Exactly, I resent that they're not being upfront with the costs. Don't tell me a logistics and freighting company can't workout costs to a degree of error where they could offset them against each other. It's just a cynical charging system that isn't worth the paper its written on, there's an 'implied contract' they're almost always breaking when they sneak this crap in. Fight it and it goes away.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 27, 2017 13:41:45 GMT -6
I hadn't specified the courier, ergo a I never made a contract. Besides, they get paid enough to do a job. They just whack stuff like that on because people think they have them by the short and curlies. The workload is predictable - they could build it into the initial fee (undoubtedly the risk of failure to be paid for it is) but they seem to prefer to do it dishonestly.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 27, 2017 13:33:18 GMT -6
Just re the shipping costs I've had this before with FedEx and I paid then their duty but I told them to stick their additional fee up their hole. They threatened debt collectors for about 5 minutes before emailing me to confirm they had decided to waive their fee. What about dealing with import/export is not part of a courier's service?
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 24, 2017 10:10:32 GMT -6
My favorite hardware for mixing bass is the mute button on the DI track. Amen. If you're not getting a bass tone on the day I don't know what people expect. Sometimes the amp sounds not much to brag about, at which point I'll mix in a bit of DI with a fast acting peak limiter. Not great, but it can give some definition to a poor bass tone.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 20, 2017 6:41:55 GMT -6
Tonight's The Night is also a great record. That song gives me the spooks.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 18, 2017 3:37:57 GMT -6
Just quoting specific points because I think in a roundabout way we're talking about the same things with different experiences. I'm not talking bedroom bands either, lets take the Djent movement for example. There's plenty of pretty successful Djent bands and they use an Axe FX and Superior Drummer, they have access to endorsed equipment from multiple vendors with professional drummers that have their own kits.. What's their excuse? I understand layering, it's been done since I started recording bands etc. takes a lot of work to get everything tight but it still sounds decent. Although going exclusively with a drum VST and fake guitars is of course the easiest way to detriment production and sonic signature values. I think we definitely do agree on a lot of it. Maybe because we see the process, so we know how samey it can be. They're like "Oh, look how good it sounds!" because the reward/investment time was a lot quicker than with their Mesa MKII they never really figured out how to setup. I know lots of well recorded metal with drums, or at least a fair bit, that's what makes it frustrating. Ironically I find with rock bands, they often point at bands like QOTSA and fail to consider the amount of work that band put into experimenting in order to define sounds - recording cymbals seperate to the kit, using overdriven bass amps for guitar tones etc. etc. Agreed. It radically needs a shake up. The pop-punk revival has some of the most homogenized 'independant' music and they badly need someone to put them on notice. Some of the math stuff is fine, but timbrally all the records are painfully samey.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 18, 2017 3:25:58 GMT -6
I'm not talking about a venue business. I'm talking about living rooms owned by the artists, their families, friends and fans. Some of my friends play a huge amount of house shows. We've had a band from the UK before who did a house show for us - made more than they did in some venue dates, despite being sold out. Also no one filthy drunk, it was all ages, there was food. It's quite big in the underground, but mostly for acoustic music. LA and NYC aren't going to have that happen? That just means they wont get shows. There's plenty of people, artists will move on - seriously.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 17, 2017 11:31:13 GMT -6
Solo'ing groups of instruments is often much better for problem solving than solo'ing an individual channel.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 17, 2017 8:00:24 GMT -6
mrholmes Yes, lets not allow interesting topics to organically grow. If only this was a forum to discuss matters of music and recording, oh wait..! Agreed. We're talking drums, we're talking aesthetics, we're talking music - it's on topic. jazznoise I'm not really disagreeing with you, I used to love metal and over the course of two decades it's become somewhat white noise. Saying it's "your decision" is like saying the sky is blue, it's obvious but it doesn't stop them doing it en mass. Here's the thing, they only need to crack out superior drummer and a Line 6 device then go for it.. What you've said is great in theory here. It's a low resource way to easily make your art. On that level, that's fine. But I wasn't really talking bedroom bands (ie bands without giggable rigs or kits to make and perform the music with) as the cost from them to self record is insanely cheap. An interface and an Audix Drum Mic pack and you're there. Amongst a 4 piece, it's cheap and easy. But in the context I spoke, we weren't even really talking self engineering bands. We're talking guys who hire a guy and then instruct them to strip all the character from their music. It's a bizarre and very real paradigm. I don't quite understand what the point of your last point is, although my point was doing metal "properly" is an expensive and inconvenient venture that can easily be shunned for many of the reasons you mention. I understand (to an extent) why they do hang onto pre-conceived notions and follow formula's as such.. It's an ironic genre filled full of biasm in what's supposed to be an artistic and expressive medium. It'd be interesting to see how Iron Maiden would do if they were to be released today.. Not following your point here, ironically. I guess what I was saying is that these bands get so hung up on optics that they stop making music. At times, I think the core issue is just musicians who are really more into being seen to be in a band than they are to actually making interesting music. The band has to sound 'profesh' even if the music stinks. It's bad obviously, it's a toxic culture to make music in but even from the cynical standpoint it comes from I frankly don't see why anyone feels like making samey sounding music will get them noticed. It's like modelling your restaurant on McDonalds and hoping people will come because it looks like McDonalds - they have the head start on that, you're probably not going to win. Using the same recording methodologies and programming procedures a lot of times ends up in similar results, can't say I personally love any VST drum software even though I use them a lot.. Don't get me wrong it's a far cry from the original Toontrack released but if you want a track to sound really good, I'd avoid. I suppose it's just like the "prosumer" recording movement, where a track would sound better in the hands of a professional using decent gear but cost / convenience rules the roost.. It's also far easier to "get right". I think the specific issue we were talking about here is not a recording system based on monetary and material restrictions, we're talking about the creative decision to replace entire musicians with computers imitating musicians. I think it's fine if you want to have a 909 blasting in the background, or you want to use a bass synth instead of a bass guitar, but to do it for vanity ("Heh our drummer's amazing,listen to this") seems totally pointless. Even if it were that the programmed drums were doing things that would be musically impossible for a musician (64th note triplet kicks held for 5 minutes) it would have merit. But it's saccharine - it's someone giving you a chemical with the intent of making you believe it's sugar. I use drum loops in some stuff for people I work for, usually supplementing it with additional programming. For hybrid setups programmed kits and loops are perfect, they're flexible and give the gestalt of a kit. You're not committing to performances and paying for musicians to come back in because the song structure has changed. I'll routinely layer these with accents and artificial drum machine sounds because the intended effect is not to replicate a drummer's performance but just to give some sort of underlying groove to the song. On the current project I'm working for with that, it doesn't sound real. It shouldn't, it's meant to be crazy Dance/Rock/Hip Hop stuff. I'll post some loops when I get back to my studio here just for context. I still end up toying with accents and muting certain velocity layers for hours. Maybe the syncopated snares are one machine, but you combine them with one from another on the 2 and 4. Maybe a short decay for the fast kicks, longer for the downbeat etc. Ultimately, there is no right way to make music, but I think imitating the process of other's step by step is severely misguided.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 16, 2017 7:57:43 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to. In all fairness metal is an extremely difficult music genre (and sub genre) to get into, for a start metal is niche and trying to find a decent drummer is like finding a well of gold in your back yard; also to note things like superior drummer only served to make them rarer. A decent 8 piece kit isn't cheap and all the gubbins extra you need for it, they are extremely loud and it's not easy to practice when you have neighbours.. It's one of the most difficult genre's to play, extremely technically involved and requires en mass stamina.. You ever tried to play a two hour set in an extreme metal band? On top of that, with metal being so niche if you decide to waver from popular genre's the chances of being noticed and / or semi-successful is abysmal at best.. It takes a hell of a lot of skill, money, determination and stubbornness to even produce a mediocre demo. On the flip side, metal / rock is mainly made up of guitarists (a lot of them very talented must admit) and the odd basist.. So if you're a half decent metal drummer / singer you can get a band without trying too hard. Our drummer plays double pedal, uses blast beats, and our tempo range is pretty solidly 150-180 BPM dropped tuned arghy-blargy. We're not a hardcore or a metal band, but I don't take tempo as an excuse. You write the songs, you better be able to play them. No one makes you join a Technical Death Metal band. I've also seen a lot of excellent grindcore bands that have been insanely tight, but that, power violence and black metal are really the only metal genres I'm really into in a serious way. The city I live in is the biggest city for metal in Ireland, people travel countrywide to the metal events held here. So from being constantly around it, I think actual metal fans are crying out for innovation. I grew up in an exclusively metal scene and it burnt out because of the amount of same-y sounding bands. I'd have much rathered see metal bands with drum machines, in that genre I still would. I'm obviously playing devil's advocate to some extent - I almost always feel the bands I like that end up making sub standard releases are due to the engineer's influence. But a lot of bands are self sabotaging and in particular with Metal and Hard Rock stuff, the quantity of self sabotaging bands is staggering. They're literally asking people "Make me sound like Alter Bridge/Avenged Sevenfod/Chelsea Grin/Early Trivium" and then complaining when their music washes into the abyss. Wittingly or out of fear these records are designed to be ignored, those artists essentially are the architects of the paradigm they become a victim of. I also understand how insanely conformist the metal music press are, as bad if not worse than the pop punk or pop music press, but that's a terrible reason to make any musical decision. So yeah, we can talk editing but if you want a very specific performance either get the drummer to drum or don't get the drummer to drum. If the performance you want is that of a computer, don't get a drummer. Practice is now 1 person less and the music is now closer to what you want it to be. What's so crazy about that?
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 15, 2017 16:54:08 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 13, 2017 18:05:50 GMT -6
If you can't sell a record for €20-30 ($25-30) and be making 50% back it's time to scrap the project in my view. There's cheaper forms of vanity than that. Just do CD's and T-shirts until the record becomes viable. ericn From anyone I know whose into vinyl from a technical as well as musical perspective the general the quality of modern pressings are very good - heavy weight, generally not recycled/reclaimed vinyl, clean machines. The finest may not be what they were in the 70's and 80's, but the worst is far above where it was back then.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 13, 2017 5:42:46 GMT -6
Personally when I looked into it I didn't see it being financially viable for a run under 300. Seems like the cost per disc vs. the return would be pretty slim.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 5, 2017 20:15:19 GMT -6
I'd still love a decent remix of Zen Arcade.
(Sorry, being deliberately OT at this point).
For those struggling with cymbal sounds, why not overdub crashes? They're probably the easiest to fake into a recording with a couple of pencil mics and a decent reverb.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 3, 2017 9:44:07 GMT -6
No, they can have chops as long as they credit their producers correctly.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 1, 2017 4:02:53 GMT -6
If you guy's haven't seen it, Soul Jazz have done compilations of the Punk 45's of various punk communities incl Akron, Ohio, Bay Area and they're really great. You get stuff like The Jazz Destroyers, X-X, The Urinals etc. and a lot of it is way ahead of where music was at the time.
While I appreciate all this talk of 'real punk' the DIY communities are still quite large and even with much punk co-opted into popular music, I think declaring punk dead to be the most old man trope in the world. A lot of us young people are playing punk, and they'd find your dismissal jarring. They do shows, they put up touring bands in their homes, they write about the world around them and they don't have cash for band tee's or whatever. What's not punk other than you're not in it?
90% of the work I do is bands playing live of the floor, overdub the vocals and out the door but the music has evolved. Since the post-hardcore thing there's been drum machines (Big Black), big weird chords and psychadelia (Gasp). Genres like Black Metal would be considered coherent musical peers, albeit with different aesthetics and because of the change in cost a lot of these groups also have stronger visual elements. Bands like Slint, The Fall, Scratch Acid etc. tore up the rule book a long time ago and now we can make punk rock out of whatever as long as it's authentic.
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Post by jazznoise on Aug 28, 2017 16:52:34 GMT -6
popmann of course, the sausage still has to get made. I think it's a funny curve - I think cheap/low end projects are simple or can be in that there's no expectation so work can easily satisfy, and that at high levels everyone else is so skilled you'd really have to drop the ball to mess up the quality of recorded material you're being handed (and you've much less on your mind besides your specific task). I think in the middle, where you've a moderate setup and the bands are at a level where they can't afford to invest a gigantic amount but still are giving a sizable enough chunk of money to expect a good return is where the real difficulty is.
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Post by jazznoise on Aug 28, 2017 15:09:22 GMT -6
I think almost everyone sees themselves as a mix of the 2, as that's what the job dictates, but I imagine most people see me as more problem solving than creative. I learn things, and I read a lot of technical papers when I was first learning and I try to apply that understanding creatively. Sometimes it is - today I was running drum loops into the MS-20 and hand triggering the filter with the keyboard, tomorrow I'm using my bathroom as an echo chamber. But a lot of the time it's planning recording sessions meticulously and selecting mic's based on technical advantages, including understanding of things like the propagation patterns of various instruments.
I think it requires a huge amount of technical knowledge to be a genuinely creative engineer and I think being a creative engineer often means doing what the client wants with as little compromise as possible, rather than just parlor tricks.
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Post by jazznoise on Aug 27, 2017 18:58:57 GMT -6
I'd agree, most bands that actively identified as a punk band were often pretty poor. Bands like Scratch Acid or Big Black kept much more of the punk attitude without having to be all just power chords and denim jackets. I'd consider my band to be from the punk tradition. A lot of bands I know would. The idea of a sort of punk being 'legitimate' contradicts the idea of punk itself.
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