It all seems very warm and dry, kind of woody sounding: is that common in folk music or is it quite varied? I think that's a function of the fact that most of the classic records in this genre were made in the 60s and 70s. If you listen to folk records from the mid-80s onwards you'll hear that peop...

This is one of those areas where I find it hard to dissociate how good a recording sounds from how much I like or dislike the performance! Penguin Eggs is an amazing album and does sound very good, but possibly not altogether 'natural' -- I think there's some DI signal from the guitar in there -- an...

As far as I can see the Zoom L20 ticks all your boxes, and there's the smaller L12 available for the second studio.

Hugh Robjohns wrote: ↑Thu Jun 27, 2024 2:42 pm I know the cc8 capsule design was supposed to be inspired by the old ck1, but it sounds so much smoother and more refined to my ears.

Mine too. I'd love it if they made an omni capsule...

A stereo ribbon mic would be a good choice if you can set it up so that the singers are 45 degrees either side of the mic. Then you will have one ribbon element pointing at each singer and getting good rejection from the other.

@Tim Gillett, there is a Shure 'tech portal' on their website where you can access detailed technical info about their products. I think you need to create an account in order to do so, though.

Very few mics have low-pass filters. If they do, it's typically because the mic itself is inherently quite bright and the manufacturer wants to offer a more mellow, vintage voicing as an option. So you might engage the filter if what you were capturing was sounding harsh, scratchy or overly sibilant...

Goodness, a blast from the past. AKG made dual capsule mics maybe 50 or more years ago. ... Interesting that Shure has for the first time AFAIK put out such a mic. Maybe an AKG patent has expired? There have been quite a few designs over the years that have used dual capsules, for various different...

Logic is still very much its own thing, and I'm not sure I know of another DAW that is all that similar. (Personally I still struggle to get my head around it, though I know many love it.) LUNA is a good shout actually. It's free and cross-platform and it's aimed at exactly these scenarios. It's qui...

Nice atmosphere. I'd agree with James that the bass is rather sub heavy.

Have you checked the mix on a phase meter? The balance changes pretty radically when you hit the mono button. I think there might be some out of phase elements in there.

Thankfully, at least when you buy something with an external PSU, that PSU is always clearly marked and identifiable as belonging to the relevant item...

Not.

Neil Young's album On The Beach was recorded by Al Schmitt. Reportedly Young insisted on releasing the initial rough mixes and wouldn't allow Schmitt to mix it properly, which is why it doesn't have his name on it. So I guess that might be a case where no EQ was used, although who knows.

Aja would seem to be a bad example here. Al Schmitt did not record most of it and Bill Schnee who did states that he did use the console EQ on the drums during tracking.

Sadly PreSonus have discontinued the Quantum 4848, which I think was the most cost-effective way to get 24 line-level I/O. I think one reason why there are very few such interfaces around is that Thunderbolt is kind of dead except at the high end, and on USB, nearly all manufacturers are using the X...

I've done quite a bit of this type of recording and my experience is roughly as follows: (1) Guitar spill onto drum mics often sounds great. Drum spill onto guitar mics usually doesn't. So turn the amps up, if you're using them, and don't worry too much about guitar spill from the PA if that's the a...

I would definitely recommend taking a look at the HD490, they are excellent. Neumann NDH30 and Shure SRH1840 are my other favourites in that sort of price bracket.

I'm not sure there are any current Neve products that are direct competitors to the PureDrives really. The most affordable of the many 1073s on offer nowadays is the 500-series version, which is nearly as expensive as the PureDrive Quad even without the chassis, and only gives you one channel. At th...

I've been using Bloom a lot since I got it, and I still think it's very impressive. It's not one of those plug-ins you try out while writing a review and then forget about when the next thing comes along. For some reason I seem to get a lot of multitracks to mix that have problematic or badly record...

Big fan of SoundToys' Decapitator and Radiator. I also use Softube's Harmonics a lot, and I have just discovered their Focusing Equalizer which is perfect on some things. For more subtle stuff, Acustica Taupe, Arturia Pre-73, Slate VTM, Softube Tape, Overloud Gem Tapedesk. Goodhertz' Tupe can be ver...

I almost never think about 'depth' as a factor in mixing. I don't often use reverb with the aim of making things sound more distant, either. For me, reverb is a tool for filling out the sound and making it bigger. I'll often use a ton of reverb on a snare drum, for example, but the aim is to make th...

I must say that "natural" and "lifelike" aren't really the adjectives that come to mind when I hear those tracks. It sounds nothing like a band playing in a room. Everything is presented as very close up to the listener, and the width of stereo sources like the vibes and drum kit...

dbfs wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2024 8:34 am Pro Tools is clunky

I'm curious to know why you say Pro Tools is clunky? I've used most of the DAWs on the market and I have never found anything that comes close to it for multitrack audio editing. I also love that you can do pretty much everything in one window.

It's probably just force of habit, but I prefer the clip gain approach over having gain controls on the channels, because the settings are reflected in the waveform display. With a well recorded multitrack you can often get a pretty decent balance by eye adjusting the clip gain settings until the pa...

Pro Tools doesn't have a gain control as such, but it does have multiple ways of achieving the same thing. You can adjust clip gain on a per-clip level, or you could insert a Trim plug-in on the first insert point in every channel.

Sorry OP, but you've invented a new genre of music Really, no. Black metal has been around for at least forty years. And if you listen to the OP's references you'll hear that his track belongs squarely in the genre that they are in. It is perfectly on point as regards the music and the choice of so...

IMO some of the earlier comments fail to take into account the genre you're aiming for. For me things generally sound OK for the genre, but there's some sort of resonance in the bass register that's probably eating a lot of headroom and making it all too mushy for real impact. So first of all I wou...

I think it's hard to know how successful this mix is without having a clear idea of what you're aiming for. Some extreme metal is deliberately very lo-fi. Some is crystal clear and beautifully mixed. This track is somewhere in the middle at the moment. What bands are you referencing? My comments mig...

Also just to say, that 12th fret advice for acoustics is a good starting point but have you tried some more radical positioning? I was surprised recently when an engineer mic’d up my guitar (which has a fair bit of low mid) with an LDC about a metre away at between one and two o’clock from where I ...

Personally, I do a Save As for each revision so that a new DAW file is created, but all referencing the original audio. Then, if I give the client version 8 and they say "Actually, I preferred the snare reverb from version 6," I'll use the Import Session Data feature in Pro Tools to import...

In case anyone's interested, here is the key: A: Audix PDX720 B: Shure SM7dB (used as an active mic in this case) C: Earthworks ETHOS D: Warm Audio WA-87 E: Universal Audio SC-1 with Hemisphere plug-in modelling Neumann U87 F: Neumann U87 (original, not the current U87Ai) G: AKG C414B-ULS H: Univers...