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That's how everyone feels when they compare any other DAW to their DAW of choice. You've adapted your workflow and how you think about things to Reaper's UI. I've had Logic installed for years. I still bitch about it under my breath almost every time I start it because I'd rather be using Pro Tools, I just can't justify spending the money for the amount I use it.
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Jul 7, 2013 13:13
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There are often bass attenuation switches on really expensive monitors too. You adjust them based on how close they are to the walls even in a treated room.
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Jul 30, 2013 03:10
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A real venue has at least 4 or 5 separate power services. The bar, kitchen HVAC and house lights are on one service, the audio system is on its own service (maybe sharing with video), and the stage lighting is on its own service. You can throw a knife switch on the wall and turn any of those services off without effecting the others. FOH audio, lighting and video each have a run back to their corresponding power service, which are usually located near the stage so yea, several heavily shielded 200-300ft power cables is how FOH is powered. Venues setup to deal with touring bands that might show up with their own PA, video or lighting gear usually have 2 or 3 more 100Amp-400Amp services so that everything in the venue can stay powered up (even if they aren't using it) and the tour can tie their own bare-ended copper and power distribution systems into them. If a venue isn't setup like that, there is basically nothing you can do to avoid getting shocked by microphones or safely clean up ground buzzes, period. Power conditioners are just plug strips that maybe have a fuse, unless it weighs about 100lb and says "isolation transformer" (and costs $1200+) you aren't cleaning up bad power. If all the wall outlets go back to one power service and the bar freezers are plugged into it, poo poo will buzz.
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Sep 15, 2013 13:23
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Well, single coil pickups are basically antennae. If the only time you have major problems is with single coils I'd guess that it's RF interference, not bad power. Does the noise change if you put the guitar on and twist left/right or move around the room? If the noise changes at all, RF is what you are probably chasing. A ground buzz in the USA will mostly be composed of 60Hz and harmonics of 60Hz (120, 240, etc), it's directly related to the frequency of the power if you want to try to analyze it. There's a 1500 seat theater I used to work at a lot, they didn't own a PA system so they rented one from a company I worked for all the time. They used to have absolutely ridiculous problems with single-coil pickups. I can recall sitting down with tour managers at sold-out light-rock/singer-songwriter type shows and having really awkward conversations where they tried to cancel the show after soundcheck because they didn't want to deal with their artist coming on-stage and playing through the noise for a whole set. The head-scratching part was during the show the noise would still be there, but waaaay less noticeable, like a 20-30dB drop in level. But how do you convince a tour manager, who could be fired if the artist is really picky, that the buzz will disappear when the room fills with people? In that particular room, their house light system (not stage lighting) was basically from the turn of the 20th century. After literally years of touring engineers and guys like me coming in and fighting with the buzz, they finally realized if they turned their house lights off completely (the way they are for a show) the RF activity drastically decreased and most of the buzzing disappeared. That was a case of an ancient transformer basically leaking RF. You could try something similar, turning lights off or unplugging major appliances, but if you live in an urban area or near a body of water with ships traveling through, it's possible there's nothing you can do aside from shielding your pickups as much as possible (which probably won't eliminate the problem completely). ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 04:10
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Hogscraper posted:Mixing was also a little problematic too. Like I said before there was a ton of bleed to deal with especially on the vocal mic. It acted almost like a room mic. This limited how wet I could make the vocal effects. Jeremy sounds really good with a slap echo but if I put too much on there the hat bleed hits it and the whole band sounds out of time. Not good. The first mix I did was a lot different because I just had the audio up. Once I put the main video shot up and synced the audio and had a visual going it affected my mix choices a ton. Less reverb and such. It seemed out of place to have things drenched in verb but visually have the singer up in your face. Also, if you want to mix with the video in front of you, do it by gently riding things up when they're featured on camera or nudging FX to go along with focus tricks and stuff but I would try to put the proximity of vocal FX thing out of your head. You actually tracked that poo poo live, most bands with a video anything like that are just putting the album track behind it with 16 more layered vocals and 3 FX engines and the general public would still probably describe it as a live video. You'll probably get a bunch of comments on how good the room sounds if you drench the singer (and thus the band) in verb no matter how ridiculous you or I think it sounds. For some reason it bothers me that the camera shots aren't shaded the same way but that might have been intentional. The editing and the composition are spot-on, but it looks like it could have been 3 or 4 takes at different times of day with the way the colors are between different camera shots. That's probably just me being an anal-retentive bastard who pretends to know things about video because I mostly do corporate poo poo now and they have an unending budget for video (like 10x the audio budget as a general rule, video should be motherfucking perfect all the time  ).edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCXqr2eRHOw As an example, here's a video that a crew shot at a show I mixed. That's just my boardfeed mono'd out (which totally dicked the percussion player, not sure how I phased him out) and smacked into a limiter that I never even listened to then sent to a camera. I find the drum sound pretty absurd because of the slapback on the kick and snare (and I'm not 100% sure it's just my FX, might be the main PA reflecting back off the building I'm mixing from), but the band and film crew loved it. Not saying that will work in your situation but gentle slapback can add depth like a verb even when the whole band bleeds in. ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Sep 18, 2013 |
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Sep 18, 2013 17:15
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himajinga posted:Buy a cable tester, kids. I have a fancy expensive cable tester and I never use it for XLR because my multimeter is usually more handy and the pins are easy to get to in XLR and TRS cables. I only have that monstrosity with me if I think I'll need to test cat5 or NL2/4 speaker cable, and I actually have a different tester that usually finds speaker cable problems while it's finding speaker driver problems so I almost never use a "cable tester" period.
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Sep 27, 2013 18:43
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If you turn your amp on and it doesn't buzz with nothing plugged into it, and doesn't buzz with a cable dangling out of it (and with nothing touching the dangling end of the cable), you can be fairly certain that the source of your noise isn't bad power. If you then plug a guitar in and get a buzz, the problem is somewhere in the guitar end of the equation. It could also buzz when you plug an XLR into the direct output on the amp to record, and if that happens it will probably clean up with an audio ground lift (pin 1 lift) rather than trying to mess with your power. There is way too much misinformation about power/ground and virtually everyone, even people who should definitely know better, call all buzzes power problems. All buzzes sound the same to most people, and to a certain extent they are. Any buzz in the USA will probably have a large 60Hz+120Hz+240Hz+etc component because of the frequency of the power, but a true ground buzz will ONLY be composed of those harmonics (in Europe it would be 50Hz/100Hz/200Hz/etc because their power is 50Hz). At the end of the day both buzzes are caused by voltage on the ground that shouldn't be there, but one is there by way of an unshielded antennae being part of the circuit and the other is inherent on the ground leg of the circuit because of an electrical problem. If it sounds like something is sizzling on top of the buzz, or you can create a phasing effect by moving around and waving the guitar, the source of the stray voltage causing your noise is RF, not electricity. The only difference between single-coil and dual-coil pickups is dual-coils are wound alternately so RF interference cancels itself out before it gets to the amp, like the difference between balanced and unbalanced cables. There's no difference between the way those 2 pick-ups are grounded, only in how they reject RF. edit: For most concerts I do, we bring our own expensive power distribution (200A 208V 3-phase) and tie it into a knife-switch in the venue with huge bare copper ends. There is virtually no chance of us having a grounded power issue unless something is broken (usually the power distro is humming audibly, smoking, and/or arcing when this occurs, and if there was a problem with the entire power service some other show probably would have died or gone up in flames). We still deal with buzzes all the time because there are tons of ways for well-maintained gear tied together by audio cable to buzz on an isolated power service with a solid ground connection. e2: maybe more clarified ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 01:34
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Double post, but rereading my last one I might have been a little  Bottom line: audible ground loops can be caused by bad power or by tieing together devices with different ground potential via audio cables. It sounds like you aren't plugging any audio cable directly into your amp, so the only ground loop you have to worry about would be preexisting on your power. Your amp doesn't buzz all the time, only when certain guitars are plugged in, so it isn't the power itself. That's the logic I'm thinking through to tell you it's an RF problem. That you said it mostly happens with single-coils is icing on the cake. If any of those statements aren't true, then I might be typing a bunch of poo poo for no reason. ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Oct 1, 2013 |
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Oct 1, 2013 14:28
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What are you talking about, your clients should have shielded guitars anyway! They don't want their signature tone to cause a buzz that makes the audience want to rip its ears out during what could be their breakout show in the big city, with tons of RF activity everywhere! As an audio engineer you understand electricity way better than some guitar tech, you would be happy to shield their guitar professionally. It will take you half the night, but it can be done for the low price of $100 so that they can come back tomorrow and record!  (but it better not buzz when you're done)
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Oct 1, 2013 15:23
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The version of Pro Tools that's pre-OSX is v5 so I doubt it's that. The version of Pro Tools that probably came with that MBox2 is LE v7 or maybe 8. If you can make those run they'll be fine but you probably won't be able to download them from Avid without an account that has the hardware attached to it. Those versions were probably designed to run on Leopard or Tiger though, OSX tends to break Pro Tools pretty thoroughly with each major update. They are at 11 now. They probably don't support 7, 8 or 9 anymore and those were probably the only versions of Pro Tools you could have used/upgraded to for cheap.
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Oct 4, 2013 14:32
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No features or anything as far as I know. In the older versions of Pro Tools you had to have a Digidesign/Avid interface as a dongle to run the software, but as long as you have the official drivers the interface will work fine with any other DAW. I had an MBox when I bought one of the early Intel MacBook Pros, I want to say it was version 7.1 or 7.3 that finally gave it Intel support. I think you could get the installer for whatever the last stable version of 7 was with that MBox 2, but as I said 7 was probably Tiger or Leopard and won't run in Lion anyway. What you may run up against eventually is Avid not updating the drivers anymore. If you can find the driver on Avid's site (don't think you need an account for drivers, but sometimes they overhaul things) farther down the page will probably be all the versions of OSes that they support with that release. I couldn't use that MBox 1 to authenticate Pro Tools anymore even if I could run it because there are no drivers that work past Tiger or XP. ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Oct 4, 2013 |
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Oct 4, 2013 17:52
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You should have no problem running SPDIF from the 11R to the MBox, assuming your MBox has the input. You shouldn't need to connect the 11R to the computer at all, SPDIF will be a bit-perfect copy of the digital audio created by it. If you've never dealt with SPDIF outside of your home stereo, you need to make sure both devices are running at the same sample-rate and you need to make sure the devices are clear on which one is clock master and which one is slaved/chasing/sync'd to the master clock. They may decide this automatically when you hook them up, but if you end up with popping/clicking or no sound at all, that's how you troubleshoot it. Technically SPDIF wants a special RCA-ended cable with a different impedance than your typical RCA A/V cable, but as long as you use a cable under 6ft it doesn't matter. In practice cables under 10ft are usually fine, but the first thing you'll want to do if you have a problem with a 10-12ft A/V cable is switch to a real SPDIF cable or a shorter A/V cable before you decide something else is broken. e: But unless you have another program in mind that just routes something it sees on an input to the speakers, the easiest way to get it out of your monitors still involves firing up Pro Tools or another DAW and arming a track to record so you can listen to yourself playing. ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Oct 16, 2013 |
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Oct 16, 2013 14:02
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dcgrp posted:I teach high school concert band, and I'm trying to troubleshoot my recording set up....  They all involve matched pairs of cardioid microphones, which you already have in the AKGs, you just pan each one symmetrically left and right when you mix/edit them. Just ignore the M-S setup unless you have a ton of money to spend. A wall is 1/2 or 1/3 of a corner. They all suck for microphones. Placement equidistant from all surfaces (possibly including the floor, which you might want to carpet as much as possible if its not, at least for 8-10ft in front of the microphone) is "ideal" because you should be getting the maximum amount of direct sound and minimum of any one reflection, but this will vary room to room (sometimes certain reflections sound "good"). Reflections will never be accurate, if you want to stand in the best sounding place in the room it will never be right next to a surface. There is a mic technique called boundary mic'ing where you use a cardioid or hypercardioid mic to capture one reflection and the direct at the same time instead of mostly the direct (you basically point the mic at a 45deg angle at the surface), but you usually don't want to do that on a wall, you would do it on the floor in front of a step dance troop or under the hood of a closed piano where you can't fit real mics, on a horizontal surface and far from a corner. Because your AKG mics have no high-pass filters built-in, you'll want to process them with a HPF plug-in before you really even know what kind of balance you have. The Cubase that came with your interface could definitely do that. Start at 150Hz and move it up and down a few hundred Hz to get a feel for what you're doing then decide where you like it best. With what you have I would normally say your goal should be to buy another SM81 (which has a very useful HPF dial), and Shure is a great manufacturer so it would be OK to buy another one made a few years apart and expect them to sound close enough to actually be a stereo recording. But I've worked with literally 100s of SM81s made over the last 20 years, probably opened dozens of them new out of the box in the last 6 or 7, I've never seen an SM80 capsule. I would guess you didn't buy that mic recently and it's old enough that if you want a stereo SM81 recording, you should buy 2 new SM81s. But in the immediate future, use your built-in stereo pair of microphones (your ears) to decide where to start placing a stereo configuration of those AKGs. Learn to use a HPF filter and export/bounce tracks without a bunch of uncontrollable bass garbage and then go from there. When you find a balanced placement you like, move on to learning how to use more full-featured EQ plug-ins and compression to get the most out of the raw recordings in a "regular" listening environment, like tossing it in the home stereo or the car instead of playing it with headphones/monitors out of your interface.
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Oct 25, 2013 15:16
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Splinter posted:How much will accuracy be reduced if the listening position is significantly closer to the monitors than the monitors are from each other? Is this a big concern, or minor? I'm going totally off the cuff here but if you want to scientifically convince yourself that your placement is still "within phase tolerance" (or something), reverse the polarity of one of the speakers then listen to the resulting weird sounds from the listening position and move them farther apart until it starts to sound significantly better. That's where it's going to start sounding significantly worse when they are in-phase. Only catch is I would only recommend doing that with a physical phase reversal, either swapping pins 2 and 3 in the XLR feeding the monitors with a soldering iron or using an adapter that does the same thing. Also do it as quietly as possible, you don't want to hear much of the room. To Battle posted:Have some drum mixing questions for you audio gurus. ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Oct 25, 2013 |
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Oct 25, 2013 15:41
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Because I haven't seen very many situations where clicking the phase reverse button in software works exactly how it should (in the most expensive digital speaker processors that button triggers a relay that physically reverses polarity instead of trying to do it perfectly in real time). When you're trying to be exactly 180deg out of phase, any minor latency difference is going to have a pronounced effect, you can ignore that entirely if you do it at the electron level in the cable. Of course it's also because I'm a live sound guy by trade and I don't consider the fact that you can probably create a perfectly out of phase sample to play very simply "offline" in a DAW rather than trying to do it in realtime. Doing that will probably work fine. 
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Oct 25, 2013 23:19
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I just bought one of the new 13" MBP Retinas because my 2011 15" MBP poo poo the bed while I was traveling for work. I don't use my Mac as a traditional DAW, I use it to run Smaart, run several channels of music playback (like theatre cues basically) and maybe record 2ch at the same time. I don't edit much or load up on plug-ins for mix sessions so I'm out of touch on how much RAM Pro Tools might eat up, but I would think 8G is enough to load all the audio for most entire songs into RAM. My main concern is OSX Mavericks isn't really behaving for me yet, it crashes sometimes and some common program features don't seem to work quite right with it (like Esc doesn't exit fullscreen video a lot of the time, and Chrome's presentation mode is pretty buggy). I've had my RME Totalmix software crash once, which I've never seen happen before. The audio programs I use regularly (Smaart, QCart, iTunes, Logic) haven't given me any particular problems yet, but I have run into a general OS bug where sometimes the mouse and keyboard stop responding and I have to hold the power key to reboot. edit: Just installed a firmware update that's supposed to fix the key/mouse issue... Also, on the 13" at least, if you actually want to run at close to the true resolution of the Retina display, it chews through battery 2-3 times as fast. Otherwise the battery life on these things is ridiculously good. I flew from LA to the east coast, 7hrs in the air total, 9hrs including layover, used it most of that time to surf the web and listen to music, watched an hour of video and was still at 40% battery when I got home. YMMV (depending on your video codec especially) but I was pretty damned impressed - my iPad mini couldn't do that last time I tried. My only other nitpick is this machine doesn't feel as snappy as my 2011 15" with its 2.5" SATA SSDs. The PCIe flash drive in this one should probably outperform those drives on paper, and it can copy data around plenty fast, but right now I'm a little underwhelmed with how the OS generally responds. Of course my old machine is still running Lion so this could just be another Mavericks thing. IMO the new MBP Retinas are really impressive machines. With their PCIe internal drives and 2 thunderbolt ports, I think they're a great hardware configuration for portable DAWs. But if your primary use is as a DAW and you don't have to upgrade now I would wait. Wait until you at least see 1 Pro Tools update that specifically says it supports Mavericks because AFAIK you can't downgrade the new machines to Lion or Mountain Lion (if Chrome is stumbling with a new OS, Pro Tools will probably just bounce in the dock in my experience). Maybe the more traditional hardware in the non-Retina models behaves a little better, but I'm chalking up most of my issues to the early version of a new major OS update. ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Nov 10, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 21:16
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strangemusic posted:Please please don't ignore this post, I would empty quote it if I could. The Radial JDX Reactor, essentially a DI that goes between the head and speaker and incorporates some kind of filtering voodoo to get a tone that has more "amplifier character" than a DI, may be your solution. Actually most "industry standard" DIs can handle being put between the head and the speaker, the Radial JDIs, J48s, Countryman Type 85s, etc. THE IMPORTANT PART IS THAT YOU HAVE AN ACTUAL SPEAKER ON THE OTHER END OF THE DI. Your amp needs to see a real ohm load on the speaker outputs or THE AMP WILL EXPLODE, not the DI. If you unplug the cable from your speaker, leave the amp on and go to town on your bass, your amp will catch fire. So if you want to do this, don't use the ext speaker jack, wire the DI in parallel with your main speaker output and engage all the pads available on the DI. I would recommend buying a Countryman Type 85 for bass guitar personally, it has the highest input impedance of anything else so it tends to handle crazy active bass pickups better if you plug the bass directly into it rather than plug it into the amp. (I'm a big Radial fan, but the Countryman is THE bass DI). Flip the Countryman switch from "pick-up" to "speaker" (that's it's version of a pad) and you're all set to insert it between your head and cabinet. edit: It might only explode if it's a tube amp, but solid state could potentially burn up as well. In any case, don't worry about the DI, worry about the amp. ChristsDickWorship fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 11:24
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spider wisdom posted:I guess I was under the impression some DIs can simulate a speaker so the amp won't explode, expressly for this purpose. Then again I haven't been in the gear tech loop for a few years and I probably forgot what I knew; I will definitely defer to your knowledge. But maybe this — Most things called a "guitar DI" like that Radial JDX that promise the sound of a mic'd amp are meant to be placed in-line (in parallel) with the speaker the same way. They do exactly the same thing except they apply some kind of filter or other circuitry for the purpose of replicating a mic-on-amp sound. Other products like that are the Red Box (I swear this was the "Fender Red Box" when I saw someone using it) and a bunch of Palmer products but this one in particular. If you bought one I don't think you would be happy using it the other way, plugging a bass directly into it, so in the grand scheme investing in a Countryman makes more sense IMO. Unless you know you'll never use it on another acoustic instrument, or want the sound of your bass without the cabinet. Also I didn't look at your combo amp's manual or anything, it's possible that the main speaker out and extension speaker out are actually wired in parallel inside the amp, in which case you won't blow anything up by just plugging a DI into the ext out.
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Nov 8, 2013 17:27
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