Pipeline!

Perilous Podcasting: Drug Rug

After 2 weeks of head-scratching by our engineering staff, the Drug Rug podcast and live stream is finally correct. Some people emailed me thinking that the whole thing was pitched up and sped up a step beteween the actual braodcast and the initial posting of the set online. What was at issue was unmatched sampling rates that made the entire recording altered from it’s original form. Last night with a few hexadecimal calculations, the situation was remedied.

For those who have an older version of the set, delete it and reload it. For those who subscribe to our podcast via iTunes, the idea is the same, the process, just a step more complicated. First: Delete the Drug Rug set from your podcasts. Second: Unsubscribe to the Pipeline! podcast. Third: reSubscribe to the Pipeline! podcast. Forth: Get the Drug Rug Set again as it will now show up again. Fifth: Listen to the band rock at the proper pitch and tempo.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Pipeline! Dashboard Widget for OS X

We’ve created a Pipeline! Dashboard Widget for OS X that makes it really easy to skim through and listen to the weekly podcasts of our live band sets.  Check it out, and let us know what you think!

Mackie Onyx 2480–First Thoughts

So we have this new Mackie we’re reviewing. This past Tuesday we introduced ourselves to it, set it up, and mixed our first live set on it (The Touch Me Theres played). And so, because you never get a second chance to make a first impression:

–The thing is massive, compared to our old digital Spirit 328. But, it still fits on the desk OK… although there’s a hole in the back-center of the tabletop for cables to feed through, and this hole prevents the board from sitting entirely on the desk. The front hangs off an inch or two, no big deal tho.

–Having +48v on each individual channel is nice, on one hand. On the other, we never had a problem w/ a master +48v switch, and now we have a lot more buttons to turn off… not complainin’, just sayin’.

—-In general, regarding the sound:
Let me take a step back first. I’ve never been totally happy with the sound of our Pipeline mixes (this is with the old board). They’ve tended to sound muddy, with little high-end extension (especially w/ vocals and, they always come out heavy-sounding, and snare a bit too). And, the lows never seem too tight or strong; basically things have sounded a little “pinched”. WRT the highs, I think the overly-bright Samsons may be a disservice. I wish those things had a -4 dB setting for the tweeters (it only goes to -2 dB).

Actually, what I REALLY wish for is that Bag End system that we reviewed. Those monitors made me so happy that I will not rest until we buy them. But I digress.

Back to the Mackie: We get the band set up, Donnie starts playing the drums. I bring up the kick channel first, for the hell of it, it’s a D-112 on a drum w/ no hole, just an inch from the head, and… HOLY FRIGGIN’ LOW END. It wasn’t a particularly tight kick, sure, but I’ve NEVER hear that much low end come out of those speakers from a D-112 on a kick in our setup.

Specfic points about the sound:
* There’s more bottom-end extension, and the low end seems tighter than before.
* Using just a pair of our standard SM81 drum overheads, I almost didn’t need other drum mics; the snare mics were doing little, and it sounded fine without them at all. Just the overheads were enough to cut through sludgy guitar and bass–that’s something I rarely found with the old board. The sound from the mics sounded a bit tighter, more focused that usual. And, there’s definitely more cymbals than usual, more high end–which is a really good thing.
* On the snare, with a RE-10 on top and a 57 on bottom, it really cut through, with little of the dullness of before–with not EQ . Especially that RE-10 came through with a character that I haven’t experienced from it–usually it has a bit of low-end. But here, it didn’t sound heavy at all, and the 57 on bottom didn’t sound quite as raspy/nasally as it usually does.
* The SE mic coupled w/ a 421 went on the guitar, and the difference was dramatic, night and day. (speaking of which, let’s check out that SE mic next time, it was acting funny throughout the set). Need more experience to determine if it’s the board bringing out the differences in the mics, or something unrelated.
* The polarity switch on the Spirit’s channels had a specific and predictable effect. Flipping polarity on the Mackie, however, created a much more subtle difference with out standard drum setup. Again, something to explore further.
* Didn’t get to do much w/ the Mackie’s EQ.

–The kick was interesting, actually. It sounded terrible as-is, so I reached for my new favorite drum/bass/guitar “processor”: the ART TubeMP we’re reviewing. Plugged it in, cranked the input gain past “destroy” and all the way to “annihilate” (basically all the way up). It sounded massively distorted, of course, so I eased off until it sounded merely disgusting by itself. Throw it in the mix, and voila–a even, tame kick sound that sounded pretty darn good.

–I wasn’t going easy on the board, that’s for sure. Output levels were consistently around +7 — +10 dBu (I think those units are correct), many of the individual channels had the +10 dB LED lit during louder parts, and the board didn’t complain. The easily-overloaded mix bus was a curse of old Mackie mixers, but it doesn’t seem to be here.

I didn’t have time to crank the gain on a channel and see how it behaves as it overloads–we should try this (carefully).

–Something was weird with the effects send to one of the Alesis units. It was working fine during soundcheck, but as they started playing it just crapped out and returned this signal full of digial hash. It would alternate between working properly, and then crapping out. I bet I was overloading the effect input, or something like that (even though I fiddled w/ it). Probably need to figure out proper gain staging on those aux sends.

–Yesterday we sent effects out of Aux 3, and returned them to one of the 8 stereo aux inputs. I think we should just returning all effects to channels 17-24 instead. We’ll get more flexible EQ that way, as well as longer faders/more precise control over the volume of the return. We just need to remember to avoid feedback loops.

–Having separate Left and Right faders for the main mix is annoying. Bryan asked if there’s some way to fix them so they’re always together–something to put overtop of them? I dunno.

–The matrix feature is cool, but we’ll never use it. A patchbay becomes more important w/ this board, as the insert points are on the back, not the top.

–Mute groups! Great for muting effects and junk between songs! nice!

–I’m sure I forgot stuff. I’ll add it in the comments when I remember.

Bottom line: I spent some time listening to the mix I did, and comparing it with other mixes I’ve done recently. Right now, I feel like this board produces tighter, cleaner mixes that translate better than our Spirit, and that the preamps (and lack of a A/D?) “get” a better sound from our mics.

Am I full of BS? Time will tell, but for now I’m totally stoked learn this board better and see what it can REALLY do.

ART TubeMP Project Series Impressions

I tried this out yesterday,. while recording a song with Shrinking Islands, Kyle’s band. This was multitracked to protools, not live-to-two-track like we usuallly do. We laid down most of the song.

Impressions:
–There’s a really nice overdrive/compression effect if you drive the input super-hard. We took a large kick drum and get it horizontally on chairs, tympani-style, with Andy playing it with mallets. Using the SE Electronics mic in omni mode, positioned about a foot above the edge of the drum, we got a MASSIVE bass sound, without the TubeMP. I inserted the TubeMP, turned up the input gain almost all the way, and the effect was somewhat similar to the Bluetube’s tube drive, with a little extra compression. It really helped bring out the attack, while maintining the big bottom. A little extra compression with the RNC and voila–a really nice sound!

–Recording vocals (kyle singing into the SE Electronics, omni mode again) showed the TubeMP has a better bottom-end that the stock preamps on our Spirit328. However, I had to turn the gain pretty high up, both at the input and the output, to get into a usable range, and when i did there was a constant low-end rumble, even with the high-pass filter engaged. I ended up switching to our BlueTube, which DIDN’T need to be turned up high, didn’t have the rumble, and sounded really nice with a little tube drive.

–The gain knobs work weirdly. On the presonus bluetube, the units on the gain knob are dB, but are spaced in a linear manner. That is, all the way off is 0 dB gain, halfway up is 30 dB, full is 60 dB. makes sense, and feels right. on the tubemp, halfway up on the input gain is 5 dB gain, with the last 25% of travel from between +24 and +45 dB. So the first 60% of travel does little, which makes no sense, and it sorta throws you off, and you have less control in the usable range.

–The impedance switch didn’t make any difference with the couple condenser mics I tried (SE and the KSM27). It’d probably be different w/ dynamics.

–Going back to this rumble, it was really disconcerting, made it useless for recording vocals. I need to investigate this more.

–I bet it’d be a nice pre for a kick drum mic. I’ll have to try that.

Other thoughts?

Circuit Bent Guitar Pedals

Bentpedals.com, it includes schematics too.

Inexpensive + DIY Mics

Two posts from the excellent Analog Industries blog. It’s well worth the read!

The Alice DIY mic kit, by Scott Helmke. Check out Scott’s microphones page, there are other DIY designs there.

ShinyBox ribbon microphones, notable as they sell for around $160!? Anyone have any experience with these? At these prices it’s worth getting one for Pipeline!, assuming they don’t totally suck and we can manage to not break it.

Not much posting going on recenly. I guess everyone’s recovering from the summer?

Presonus outputs to Dig328 input

I noticed that the output of the Presonus is going into the line input of ch 1 & 2. I think this means that the presonus signal is also going thru the preamp of ch 1 & 2, and for sure the trim knob on ch 1 & 2 can boost the signal, in addition to the gain knob on the presonus. Could we insert the signal in the “Insert” input instead, bypassing the preamp? If we’re using the presonus preamp, then passing thru the Dig328 preamp too, aren’t we defeating the evaluation?

Any more impressions on SE mics?

On what other instruments have y’all tried the SE mics?

Check out this interesting GearSlutz thread discussing SE3 on snare.

Hooray for vacuum tubes! (PreSonus Bluetube DP impressions)

We’ve had the Bluetube DP stereo mic preamp around for a few weeks now, and I’ve had a chance to use it in several different recording situations. It’s a pretty sweet-looking (the visible tube glow is cheesy but cool) little tabletop unit with two analog inputs/outputs and a solid-state gain stage on each channel that can be augmented with a tube-based circuit to varying degrees using a front-panel knob. We’ve always just used our board’s built-in pre’s since I’ve been around Pipeline, so the ability to swap in something else adds an interesting new degree of freedom to recording. It’s a nice piece of equipment overall, but I’ve found two situations where I really like this thing:

- For quiet singers/instruments that really need a high preamp gain, the Presonus doesn’t exhibit any of the “graininess” (Nick’s word, but it’s pretty accurate) or audible noise floor that our built-in pre’s are notorious for when you turn them past about 3 o’clock. I had the tube drive bypassed in most of these situations (it was just adding distortion that wasn’t appropriate), and the amp was smooth and, at least for our purposes, basically transparent. The VU meters on it are a little bit strange; they almost never seem to match up with the pre-fader input level on the board, and not really in any consistent way (sometimes higher, sometimes lower). I don’t know if that’s the fault of the unit or just some subtlety about the two indicators that I’m missing.

- The second application, and the one that made me fall in love with it, was something Nick and I discovered while recording the Black Clouds set last night (archive). They’ve got two guitars (one basically used as a bass) and a drum kit, and I initially had the two Presonus channels hooked up to each guitar, thinking the tube distortion might enhance that filthy garage-rock sound that I never seem to get tired of. Which it did, but not to any really interesting degree; a cranked-up amp and/or an overdrive pedal will generate a perfectly usable level of distortion if that’s what the band’s looking for; there’s really no need for any at the preamp stage as well. When the band listened to their first soundcheck and asked if we could make the vocals sound “more dirty” though, we switched the Presonus over to the two vocal channels and cranked the tube overdrive as high as it would go. The result was insane, almost unintelligibly distorted vocals (think Pussy Galore or Teengenerate) that fit perfectly with the band’s messy garage-punk sound; they loved it, we loved it, and overall I think it was the main contributor to one of the best sets I’ve recorded in awhile. When they were singing quietly or talking, the vocals were smooth and distortion-free without any knob-twiddling on my part, which is probably standard but I thought it was nice.

Conclusion: the Bluetube DP is awesome for adding clarity to quiet things when they need to be amplified above the noise floor of our stock pre’s, but even more awesome for adding nice-sounding distortion to things that need/want it (I’d imagine you could get the same effect on a DI’ed electric guitar or similar, but haven’t tried yet). The levels it comes into the board at don’t seem to be very consistent, as I mentioned, but that could be because the sets I’ve used it on have all been very different types of music (the Black Clouds were the loudest band we’ve had on in ages). Since geography dictates that we record an awful lot of messy garage-punk, I’d really love to keep this guy around when we’re done reviewing it.

SE Microphones - First Thoughts

Andy recently brought down a couple microphones for us to review for Tape Op: an SE Z3300 large diaphram FET condesner and an SE 3 stereo pair from SE Electronics. I had the chance to use our new microphones this morning during a live session with A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

The instrumentation was an accordian and violin - no vocals. My better judgement told me to first try one microphone, maybe the Z3300 in a figure-8 pattern, but I was too eager to try both. The Z3300 went to the violin, about 15 inches to the players’ right side and at forehead level. The SE 3’s were placed about two feet away from the accordian’s keyboard.

Coupled with our new Samson monitors, the highs and upper mids were almost too much for my taste. The SE 3’s have a 5dB bump around 10k, which I thought was very noticeable. However, I’m going to have to get used to these monitors in different recording situations before I can really form qualified opinions. The noise level was very low for all the mics.

Anyway, feel free to have a listen in the archives. The performance began around 9:15, right after the concert report. I also recorded each microphone on a separate track in the ProTools session, so you engineers can audition each individually (route them to the optical outputs in ProTools and they should come into the board on tape channels 1-8).