Apr 1, 2001 12:00 PM, PAUL D. LEHRMAN

Every month, we at Mix and Mix Online get hundreds of e-mails and forum questions about how to do stuff: mike a drum kit, get into a school, get out of a school, get a record contract, get out of a record contract, achieve the sound that some well-known group has on their latest album or handle an annoying client. Usually we try diligently to answer these questions ourselves or refer the questioner to someone more qualified. This month, we are very pleased that my old buddy Phineas T. Grumpmeier, Lit.D., Pd.Q, L.S./MfT, now on the faculty of the Department of Misapplied Audio at the Southeast Hackensack Institute of Technology, has agreed to lend us his impressive expertise and respond to some of our typical questions. Over to you, Professor Grump…

What's the best computer for doing audio editing?

We all know the problems that both Macintosh and Windows machines have, and although things have gotten a bit more stable recently, I still don't trust either of them. I also don't think much of the fact that, because there's no way to move session files between them or even between most applications on the same platform, then whatever you get now you're going to be stuck with forever — unless, of course, whenever there's any kind of update, you're happy to convert everything you've ever done throughout your entire career into a new format.
That's why I use a 1982 BBC Acorn for all my audio editing. I get 38 seconds of 8-bit, 6kHz audio on each 5.5-inch floppy disk — but you know, what goes around, comes around. And, as it happens, it's just perfect for Web work. The disks are dirt cheap, if you can find them, which I sometimes can in flea markets and on eBay, although dumpsters behind office buildings are a more reliable source. But the best part is that I don't have to worry about those silly hardware or software updates, because I know darn well there aren't going to be any.

I'm building a studio in my parents' garage. I have a lot of experience doing live sound for solo acts at open-mic Mondays at a local club and hanging around with the DJs the rest of the week, and I work days at a video store where I get to watch a lot of TV. So I'm positive I'm ready to move up to the next step and record major label acts and score Hollywood feature films.
I know that the gear isn't as important as how well you use it, and I think mine is good enough: I've got an 8-track cassette recorder in pretty good shape, a couple of microphones with the model and serial numbers scratched off (they're black and have a round ball at the end, if that helps) and some kind of mixer I found at a yard sale, which still has most of the knobs.
I also have a pile of old 2×4s and some slightly used sheetrock behind the house and a couple thousand empty egg cartons (my folks own a chicken farm), which I know will come in handy.
What else do I need to buy, and where can I go on the Web to get free advice about design, acoustics, wiring, equipment, and recording and mixing techniques? I need to keep my total budget under $500.

It sounds to me like you've got all that you need to go head-to-head with the big studios. Their stuff may be flashier and more expensive, but that doesn't mean it works any better — if it did, why would they need to keep full-time technical staff around?
As for information about how to build your studio and how to produce records and film scores, there are dozens of acoustical consultants, designers, composers, producers, and recording and mixing engineers who have posted everything they know on the Web, and it's yours for the taking. After all, they've already made their money, so now they're happy to give their knowledge away to anyone who wants it.
Just go to your favorite search engine, type in “How to make a hit record” and you'll be directed to thousands of great sites, some of which will also feature surefire ways of making $10,000 a week in only five minutes a day, while others will have grainy pictures of men, women and animals in truly remarkable poses. Best of luck to you. Just make sure those egg cartons are clean.

My favorite grunge-metal band is the P*gf*c*ers. They rule. Their lead singer, Nolo Vox, does this really cool thing on their tune “P*ss on Y*u B*t*h,” in which it sounds like he's throwing up into a trash can. I want to get a similar effect on my band's next record. How did they pull off that amazing sound?

I checked with their producer, the London Conservatory-trained Trevor Trevor III. He told me, “We did most of the album at a studio in Hollywood, but for that one track, we rented a manor house in the Cotswolds for a week. We sent all the servants away except for the French cook and brought in three Sony digital 48-tracks, a 92-input Euphonix board, a trunk full of Neumann, AKG, Sennheiser and B&K mics and 16 channels of Millennia preamps, and we wired the banquet hall with big Tannoys in a 7.1 configuration.
“We tried recording Nolo in every one of the 52 rooms, putting him in different corners, on top of and underneath various pieces of the Louis XIV furniture, and setting the mics up in X-Y-, M-S-, ORTF- and B-format Ambisonic. We filled about 20 reels of tape, but I wasn't happy with anything we had.
“Finally, at around midnight, the last night we were there, after a dinner of frog's legs, octopus, blood pudding and trifle, Nolo suddenly said he wasn't feeling too well and ran out of the dining room. He didn't make it to the lavatory, but he did get as far as a large metal drum that was sitting in the hallway that had been filled with — um, uhh — sugar. As luck would have it, one of my assistants had accidentally dropped a Shure wireless mic into the drum earlier that day, and it was still on. So when Nolo blew his cookies into it, we had a clear signal right to tape. It was a wonderful moment, one that would be hard to reproduce, I'm sure.”

I need to find a good audio engineering school. I'm not sure what I want to do, but I love music and want to make it my career. It's got to offer guaranteed job placement in a professional situation, a scholarship, free room and board and not take longer than six weeks. And it shouldn't require a high school diploma. Also, it has to be near my home in Bemidji, Minn., so I can report to my parole officer every Friday. What's the best school that fits these criteria within a few hours' drive from me?

A quick look at the Mix Audio Education Directory shows that the Global Engineering and Technical Repository for Education and Audio Learning (GETREAL) has a brand-new campus, their 93rd, not far from you in Hibbing, above the hardware store. (The door's off the alley, knock twice.) They have six SSL rooms, four Mackie rooms, two Avid suites and a soundstage large enough for a 70-piece orchestra. Their programs range from one week to three months — the longer programs also include everything there is to know about video and Web design.
They will help you find a job, although you may have to accept an unbreakable lifetime contract as a washroom attendant at a theme park, with the possibility of promotion to assistant post-parade sweeper after five to eight years. Tuition is very reasonable, and room, board and snowshoes are included. My sources tell me, however, that they are having a little difficulty attracting faculty.

I know that to make digital tracks sound “warmer” I need a good tube mic preamp. What's your favorite?

The best preamp I've come across is a totally discrete module taken from a 40-year-old RCA broadcast console, hand-remanufactured with oxygen-free silver wire and NASA-spec resistors by members of an animist motorcycle cult living on a Connecticut Indian reservation. It uses a matched pair of Nuvistor pentodes, whose numbers are still considered classified, and are today only made by Russian emigré monks in a small factory in Hokkaido on the second Thursday of alternate months. The waiting list for these units is about two years, while the tube makers are more like five years behind.
Everything else out there sucks.

I have a Mac G4 running Pro Tools 5.1 and Cubase VST, using dual 888 interfaces, a MOTU Digital Timepiece, Aardvark format converters, an Opcode Studio 5, and a Horita blackburst and timecode generator. My MIDI rig is a Kurzweil K2600R, a Roland S-760 and a Korg Triton, all with digital outputs. My microphones run through JoeMeek preamps and Apogee 24-bit convertors, and then everything goes into a Yamaha 02R, configured for 5.1, and out to an Event digital surround speaker system and a Tascam DA-98HR. I also have a Panasonic DVCAM deck feeding a 500MHz Pentium 4 through FireWire, running Edit DV and Vegas Pro under Windows 2000 with a Layla card and a SoundBlaster Live.
My problem is I can't get anything to sync to anything else. Whenever I turn on more than two devices, one of them starts flashing “Word Clock Error,” and this horrible high-level burst of noise fills the room and sends me screaming out the door. It's very tough to figure out what's going on under these conditions. I've already blown three midrange coils, and my doctor tells me I'll have to stop soon before I suffer from major hearing loss, a nervous breakdown or both. Meanwhile, I'm working on a prime-time network production that goes on the air in 10 days, so I'm desperate for your help.
Why does this have to be so darn complicated? I have no idea what should be the master, and what should slave to what, and how to get the clocks and sampling rates to agree with each other. None of the tech support people at the companies have a clue. Why can't manufacturers come up with some standard way of dealing with external sync? Or is it just me?

You're right — it's just you.

What's your favorite plug-in?

That would be “Speaker Maker” from a small company in Uzbekistan called “Grzsnykolpfbimt PLG,” which, roughly translated, means, “Even lower than wholesale.” It can make any speaker you've got sound like any speaker you could ever want: You can turn a pair of Genelecs into NS-10s, or vice versa. I like to use it with the little Radio Shack mini-monitors sitting on my console, making them sound like Westlake 5s with a sub-subwoofer. The effect is uncanny. The 119 dB of boost required at 45 Hz makes the things a little warm, but a couple of inches of asbestos underneath them keeps them from melting through the meter bridge.

What's the best microphone for vocals?

I like the Astrovox 466, which we used to like to call “The Hackensack Hammer.” That's because it was made right here in Hackensack, N.J., and you could bang nails into the floor with it and then sing into it, and it would sound just the same. It's also useful for pitch-correction: If your vocalist starts to go flat, then you can hit him upside the head with it and he'll straighten right out. It's got a huge proximity effect that's perfect for those “voice of death” goth-metal tracks.
You can be sure that nobody will ever steal it, because it has a weirdo 7-pin connector that doesn't match anything else in the known universe. Best of all, the pop screen is electrically live, which discourages spitting and is useful for disciplining an egomaniacal guitar player: If you set up the polarity on his amp right, when he leans forward to sing, it'll fry his moustache right off.
Of course, it sounds awful, but who cares about that?

What's the best way to equip my studio for surround?

It depends on what you're surrounded by. If you're planning on recording lots of rap and you are surrounded by hostile neighbors, then I would recommend a high-voltage electric fence. Make sure there are plenty of warning signs to keep lawsuits at a minimum. If your studio is out in the woods and you're worried about the birds and porcupines making too much noise, then a small-bore automatic pistol can be very useful. And if you're recording Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears, and figure on being surrounded by screaming teenage girls, then a few cattle prods and cans of Mace are an excellent investment.

My PC-based DAW says that it handles 24-bit audio, but when I burn a CD, it's only 16-bits. What happens to the other eight bits?

The other eight bits are still on the CD, but they're in a special locked file that can only be opened by members of an exclusive record industry organization, the Society for Music Decoding and Interpolation, or “SMDI.” Should your CD ever be acquired by a record label that is a member of this powerful but very secretive group, they will be able to recover the extra bits when they reissue it, after your copyright expires, as a 24-bit DVD-A. This ensures that their catalog will never go out of date, but, of course, it does nothing for you.

i wanna be a audio engineer and do dejay stuf too. do you now any good books or softwears that can hep me lern!?

Start with Travis Bratwurst Teaches Typing. Then check out Spell Checking for Blithering Idiots, and when you feel you've mastered those, you'll be ready for Where the Heck is the Shift Key, Anyway?

After 20 years in computer systems engineering, I want to get back to my first love, which is recording and playing music. But I feel like I've missed out on so much that I need to catch up on: digital recording, DSP, synchronization, MIDI, DAWs, automated mixing, Web streaming and so on. Also, I'm very troubled by Napster and MP3 and what they mean for the music industry. If everything is available for free, then who's going to pay the musicians? I don't want to spend a lot of time learning all this new stuff and trying to make a career of it, and then find out I'll never get paid.
What would be your advice for the best place to go to study everything I need to know to get up to speed on all the important new issues in the recording field and also to get the skills to be able to continue to make a decent living in it?

Two words: Law School.

---

Paul D. Lehrman apologizes for taking the month off.

Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus