You’ve probably guessed by now, but I love prog.

Did I say that out loud ?

Well, it’s true – there doesn’t seem to be much point in denying it any more – after all, Radiohead are one of the biggest bands in the world, and they’re prog, right ?

So while it may not be exactly hip, I don’t think that enjoying progressive rock can be considered quite the crime against music that it once was.

And, being me, one thing I’ve always enjoyed about “progressive” music is that it almost always sounds superb.

I started early – the first album I taped to play in my Sony Walkman was “Oxygene” by Jean Michel Jarre, swiftly followed by Sky’s “5 Live” and “Script For A Jester’s Tear” by Marillion… and from then on I was hooked. I even got my friends to listen to “Songs From The Wood” by Jethro Tull !

Once I got to university I quickly realized the tragic un-coolness of my ways and diversified swiftly into Talking Heads, Prince, techno and later brit-pop – and since then my tastes have become more and more eclectic, especially I as I became exposed to all kinds of different genres through my career as a mastering engineer.

But lately I’ve been re-visiting the progressive back-catalogue, and finding I still love a lot of that stuff just as much as I used to – and, I’m really enjoying discovering more via new connections on social media.

Including, along the way, Steven Wilson. I actually worked with him once, in fact – authoring the Enhanced CD single of Porcupine Tree’s “Piano Lessons”, and mastering a few bonus tracks along the way. It wasn’t until his first solo album, “Insurgentes”, that I really got interested though – I made a copymaster of the album at SRT for promo purposes and got hooked.

Because of the music, but also partly because of the sound.

Everything Steven has worked on sounds fantastic to me – and his new solo album, “Grace For Drowning“, is no exception – just check out the song above, for example ! If you ever want an example of the power of perfectly balanced dynamics, that must be it.

If you’ve heard Steven’s work before, that won’t surprise you – but what might is to learn where he recorded it. Here’s a shot of his studio:

“It’s not how luxurious your room is, how good your speakers are or the quality of the acoustic space, it’s how well you know what you’re hearing, because if you know what you’re hearing, you can make good-sounding records!” – Steven Wilson

The image above is taken from an excellent article on Sound On Sound’s website:

Steven Wilson: Recording & Marketing Porcupine Tree

I strongly recommend you head over and read the full article – here’s another unexpected quote, given Steven’s reputation for unusual sounds and audio production excellence:

“A lot of the stuff I use comes free with Pro Tools. I don’t feel the need to rush out and buy the latest fancy EQ or compressor because I’m comfortable with what I know and like. Sometimes having all this stuff available is a barrier between you and creating.”

So, does this mean I want you to start adding instrumentals, unusual time signatures and even the odd bit of mellotron or e-bow to your music ?

Of course not – or not unless you want  to. And it doesn’t mean I don’t still appreciate unusual, lo-fi or even outrageously distorted music, either.

It just re-enforces the message of my last post, and this one and this one and this one that you can make your music sound great anywhere.

Even prog.

Stop worrying and love the prog is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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So we know that Peter Gabriel writes and records in a shed – how about David Gilmour ?

Well his studio is on a boat.

And what a boat… well, houseboat. Watch the video and see.

Once you’ve finished wiping the drool off your keyboard, you may be thinking –

“Well it’s pretty bloody obvious why he writes on a boat, Ian – and, if I’d sold 50 million copies of Dark Side Of The Moon, I think I’d record on one, too.”

But stop.

Rewind. Go back.

Listen again to what he says at 3’12″

In case you didn’t bother, I’ll tell you.

“We have made most of two Pink Floyd Records in this tiny room”

NOT in that enormous, beautiful control room, with it’s analogue tape machine, massive monitors and zillion-channel desk – they did all the recording in the tiny little room next door.

Sure, the technology was in that lovely big room, but the noises were made in a space not much bigger than your spare bedroom.

And they sound lovely. Don’t believe me ? Watch this – all the way through, mind you.

Now OK, I know that’s not technically a Pink Floyd song, but it’s David Gilmour still, recording superb-sounding music, in that same tiny little room – where I don’t even see any acoustic treatment, actually. Some soft furnishings and carpets, maybe. It probably has decent proportions.

[Edit to add - actually, as Richard points out in the comments, that might well be a broadband absorber above David's head (rockwool in a frame, to you and I) and perhaps even some foam in the corner behind - so, let's qualify that and say there's only minimal acoustic treatment :-p]

But at the end of the day it’s a real space, not so different from real spaces you have access to – and it’s where a musician who could literally record anywhere in the world chooses to make his records.

Yes, there are some nice mics, and a lot of expensive gear on the other end of the mic cables, but that’s not why those records sound great. Decent mics and converters are very affordable these days, and even David was recording to digital, just like the rest of us.

The recordings sound great because they’re great instruments, with great performances, recorded with care and attention to detail.

And that’s something we can all make happen.

Tell me about your unconventional but great-sounding recording spaces in the comments !

(Thanks to Bobby Owsinski for posting the original video)

PS. Here’s another great album recorded in a great, real space:

Production secrets – Daniel Lanois on making Neil Young’s ‘Le Noise’

Why David Gilmour writes and records on a boat is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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The message of this post is simple, short and sincere. In fact, it could almost be an open letter:

Dear Peter Jackson,

PLEASE ask your audio engineers to stop auto-tuning the dwarves.

Please.

Yours sincerely,

Ian Shepherd

PS. Please…

What the hell am I talking about ? Well, check out the first official trailer for the new film of the “The Hobbit”, above.

It’s a great trailer. As a massive fan of both the books and the films of “Lord Of The Rings”, I’m very excited. But after seeing this trailer, I’m also now very nervous.

Why ? Just listen to the use of auto-tune in that song. It’s not blatant – not like the X-Factor’s ill-fated experiment last year – but it leapt out at me within the first few notes, and again and again throughout the song. (The close-micing and miming doesn’t help either, but let’s stay focused.)

Now, call me a stuck-in-the-mud fuddy-duddy traditionalist, but I don’t quite recall the exact moment where Tolkien described how Gandalf fired up a quick “sound like T-Pain” charm while the dwarves sat around Bilbo’s fire and sang of gold and dragons. I wouldn’t put it past the elves, mind you, but not the dwarves…

Seriously though…

Which film in the “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy was the best ? For me, unexpectedly, it was the second – “The Two Towers”. In no small part, because it relied least heavily on CGI.

It felt more real, and personally that’s what I want from a film of Tolkien – I want a cinama experience that will immerse me as deep into the story as the books did when I first read them as a ten-year-old. And as they did again when I read “The Hobbit” to my seven-year-old for the first time last month.

And there’s nothing that will jolt me out of my state of suspended disbelief faster than hearing that most unnatural of 20th-century music tools, the auto-tune box. It made Cher sound like a robot, it makes Michael Buble sound like a robot, and it makes Thorin sound like a robot.

And if there’s one thing they don’t have in Middle-Earth, it’s robots.

There may yet be hope

I haven’t given up on the film just yet – mainly because this is only a trailer, and since the song features prominently, I can imagine some exec somewhere suddenly deciding that the dwarves’ vocal performances were a bit shaky right at the last minute, so auto-tune may well have been applied as an after-thought, and it won’t come anywhere near the finished film. I really hope so.

And in case anyone misunderstands, this doesn’t mean I want out-of-tune dwarves.

Because the good news is – its perfectly possible to improve the tuning of any musical performance, without auto-tune – even a dwarf.

How to tune a dwarf

You do it by hand.

(Stop sniggering at the back, Gimli ! Oin and Gloin, don’t even get me started on you…)

You work through the performance, note-by-note if necessary, and tweak the tuning by hand – pitch-shifting or time-scrunching the audio up and down as necessary, through a process of skill and trial-and-error to find what works.

But wherever possible, you only do it to whole notes, not within the note.

Which means, you retain all the essence of the original performance. Slight shifts and twists in tuning that aren’t problems, they’re character and emotion. Exactly the things you get from real, great vocal perfomances.

The result is something that still sounds real, true, natural – and also in tune.

It takes longer, it takes skill and patience, but it sounds so much better – especially with harmonies. Auto-tuned harmonies end up sounding like synths, somehow – or like choirs of robots out of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Share And Enjoy!) Check out the dwarves in the trailer at 1’26″ and 1’42″ to hear a milder version.

Whereas well-tuned vocals, like those from a great singer (or a well-tuned less-great-singer) sound rich, and exciting, and emotional – exactly the feeling you need from a ragged band of dispossessed dwarves singing gloomily about regaining the long-lost treasure that’s rightfully theirs.

A challenge

So come on, Peter – do the right thing, if you weren’t going to already – send the songs in the film back to the studio and get them tuned by hand.

Care and attention is lavished on every other aspect of these films, the songs deserve it too. You can do what you like with the end credits (although seriously, did Annie Lennox really need autotune ?) – but in the film, it’s just plain wrong.

And if your engineers look blank, or tell you auto-tune sounds better ? Send it to me, and I’ll prove them wrong.

Why dwarves don’t need auto-tune is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Day 11 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

Since this is the final post in the series, and my speciality is mastering, it would seem to make sense for this to be a mastering tip.

But I’m not going to do that.

Regular readers already know all about my views on levels and mastering ! For example:

How to avoid over-compressing your mix

How to make your music loud (without killing it stone dead)

Learn the Loudness War secret that will give YOUR music an edge

- and there’s no need to repeat myself here. But this tip is about loudness – or rather, levels.

Specifically, gain structure.

Gain structure just means – how loud your audio is, at every point in the audio chain. Back in the days of analogue it was crucial to get the levels as high as possible at every point in the chain to get the best signal-to-noise ratio, but not so loud as to cause distortion.

These days, it’s not really an issue. With over 60 dB of signal to noise ratio in even a 16-bit signal, all we need to do to get clean audio is avoid clipping, and we’re good.

Or, are we ?

Here are 3 reasons to pay attention to gain structure, even in a digital recording environment.

1 – Where’s your head at ?

Pro audio equipment is always built with plenty of headroom in the analogue stage. You can push it as hard as you like and never run into trouble. But with “pro-sumer” or “home studio” gear, you can’t always rely on this.

To avoid trouble, always give yourself 3-6 dB of headroom at the converters when you’re recording – if you’re using 24-bit, you’ll never hear the difference. Plus you won’t get a nasty surprise when the drummer decides to go all “Animal” on you !

2 – Don’t float your boat

Most modern DAWs operate using 32-bit floating-point arithmetic. There’s no need to know what that means (although it’s pretty zarking clever) but in practical terms it means you have almost infinite headroom – you can’t clip your signal digitally.

That’s right, you can max out every single channel in your mixer, and then just pull the master fader down so it’s not clipping at the output.

But I don’t recommend it.

Not all plug-ins can be relied on to use 32-bit float correctly, and if you’re not careful you could end up clipping everything going through a VST reverb (say) without realising it. It’s safer to just keep things clean.

And until version 10 Pro Tools was still using fixed point. 48-bit fixed point, but even so – in Pro Tools, if it’s clipping, it’s clipping.

3 – It’s just bad practise and makes you look like a n00b

;-p

Seriously though, once the meters are hitting zero, they’re not telling you anything useful. There’s no reason not to keep the levels sensible, so do !

And just as analogue converters don’t sound great if they’re maxed out when you’re recording, so it’s best to give your playback D to A some headroom, too.

Rather than adding a limiter to your main ouput and pushing the mix as loud as possible, crank up your monitor gain, and give yourself a few dBs more daylight.

Your converters will thank you, your ears will thank you, and your mastering engineer will give you a big sloppy kiss. OK, maybe not that last one.

So there you go – those were my 11eleven easy ways to make your music sound better.

I hope you found something useful – if you enjoyed these posts, please take a look around the rest of the site, and share some links with your friends !

To see all the posts in the series, click here.

Day 11- Check your level [11elevenproject] is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Day 10 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

So far the tips in this series have all been about “less is more”.

From which you might conclude that my mixes and masters use minimal EQ, compression and effects.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth!

In fact, I find that as a mastering engineer I’m often more “hands-on” than many of my peers, and this may be one of the reasons I’ve been successful. In one case I remember adding 46 dB @ 42 Hz to a reggae master coming from analogue tape – and it sounded great !

The key is to process agressively – but selectively.

If you have a thin-sounding kick drum and you’ve tried a few different mics and positions already – dive in with the EQ and compression. If it needs 8 dB of 100 Hz to get the snare sounding full – do it ! If the mix needs to pump like crazy on the mix buss, then pump it.

But do all this stuff after you’ve got the best result from the “naked” version – and use it only where needed. The effect will be ten times more powerful.

Sometimes the drum overheads sound superb and form the basis of the entire kit’s sound – other times you need to put in a high-pass filter at 3 kHz and go with the spot mics. Sometimes a raw synth sound is great – other times you need to squash the life out of it.

It’s the reason that blogs like this can only ever give guidelines, not rules – and why a real sound engineer’s answer to any question is – “it depends”.

Listen to the song, and give it what it needs.

Day 10 – Process hard – but only where necessary [11elevenproject] is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Day 9 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

How do you know when a mix is finished ?

Tough question – but my personal opinion is – when you’ve thought about every single bar, and know exactly why things sound the way they do.

There’s something about working with a real mixing desk that makes us want to move faders – and something about DAWs that makes not bother.

I often hear mixes where I think “why didn’t they ride the vocal there ?” or “it would have been good if that synth part had stood out more just there” – or something similar.

In the extreme case, you get “set it and forget it” mixing, where the sound is great in the chorus (say) but loses focus in the verses, or vica versa. There are no moment-by-moment tweaks to make sure every section of the song reaches it’s full potential.

It’s another reason for daring to bare – for example if you aren’t using compression to begin with, you have to do lots more level-balancing by hand, and it usually sounds better, even when you do start to add compression !

Back in the days of analogue tape, it was common to ride the level going to tape to get the best signal-to-noise ratio. With a modern digital system that probably isn’t necessary, but riding the levels is still a great technique.

It shouldn’t stop at levels, though.

By the time the mix is finished, you need to have listened and thought about what’s happening musically in every single bar. Was the guitar solo loud enough ? Did that tom roll work ? Should I double-track that section ?

That doesn’t mean something has to happen in every bar of the mix – but if nothing changes at any point, that should be a decision, not a default – not just because you haven’t thought about it.

Listen to a hit song – the chances are there’s no moment where something isn’t catching you ear, or keeping your attention – and the chances are that’s because of a deliberate decision by the artist and producer.

The devil is in the details, and attention to detail is what makes all the difference.

Day 9 – Think about every bar [11elevenproject] is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Day 8 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

Yesterday I recommended you mix naked.

Today’s tip follows on from that idea, but whereas yesterday I was suggesting you take everything off when you’re quite a way into the mix, this assumes you’re starting out with nothing on.

No idea what I’m talking about ? Read yesterday’s post first

So, today the idea is – keep your mix as bare as possible. Start with no processing at all, and keep everything as minimal as possible for as long as possible. Get it sounding as great as you can, just by balancing levels and automating changes. Maybe add some minimal EQ & compression, and a little reverb.

Now stop.

And start panning.

So many mixes I’m asked to listen are “cluster panned”, meaning everything is squashed into the middle of the mix, or floating hard left or right. Now, I’m a big fan of hard-panning, but as I’ve written before, I think people take the advice to LCR pan too literally.

Start by panning hard, and then fill in the gaps.

If your mix sounded decent in mono, panning will just give you more separation, depth and clarity.

Here are some suggestions:

• Pan lead & rhythm guitars hard left and right
• Pan drum overheads hard left & right – or, 9 and 3 o’clock if it’s too wide for your tastes. The same for piano
• Pan “four hours apart” to stop stereo parts spreading right across the mix (eg. keyboards) – for example, 10 and 2 o’clock, or 9 and 1
• Mono acoustic guitar parts can sit nicely at 10, 11, 1, or 2 o’clock – away from the centre to avoid clutter, but not so far as to unbalance the mix
• Panning vocals or bass left or right can work as a nice, slightly retro “feature effect”
• Deliberately asymetric pans in general are a cool way to create drama and tension, but won’t work without something on the other side to balance them at the right moment, or for a whole mix

Once your panning is sounding great, you may need to tweak the levels and EQ some more. Now you can get on with all the more involved aspects of your mix, but you may find that much less work is needed than if you’d just dived straight in with all the processing at the beginning.

Day 8 – Deep-pan mixing: dare to bare [11elevenproject] is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Day 7 of 11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music

We’re into the mixing stage now, and this tip couldn’t be simpler.

Take everything off.

Mix naked.

Wait – no, not like that…!

This is inspired by my experience as a mastering engineer. There’s a point with every song where you have to ask – “Does it sound better than the original, even when level-matched ?”. At which stage you turn the mastered version back down to match the raw mix, and flip between them. If the mastered song still sounds better, you know you’re on the right track.

This is a similar idea, but for mixing.

It’s so easy to start doing things “by default”, just because it worked on the previous song, or it almost always works – or because we simply forgot to turn something off !

The antidote is to start a mix with all the processing off – and then later, when you start to feel either that it’s “almost there”, OR when you’ve started to suspect you’re losing your way – take everything off.

Actually, before you do that – save the mix.

Now, take everything off. All the reverb, all the EQ, all the delay and compression and everything. Bounce that “naked” mix to a temporary file, and re-load where you were up to before.

Put the “naked” version onto a stereo track, and mute it. Listen again to your mix in it’s current state. Then hit “solo” on the “naked” mix and listen to that. Match the level as closely as you can you might have to add a limiter to stop it clipping.

Now don’t get me wrong, the chances are it’ll sound a mess ! The gain structure will be all over the place, it won’t lock together properly, all the EQs will be all wrong.

But the basic balance will still be there, and some of it might just sound pretty good.

Keep an open mind and as you flick between the two versions, and make sure you haven’t lost something crucial with all the bells and whistles you’ve been applying along the way.

Maybe the vocal has more intensity without the compression, or the de-essing has sucked the life out of it. Maybe the bass sounds clean and tight without that big 100 Hz boost. Maybe it’s nice to hear the drums dry, without the reverb, or the guitars sound crisper without the chorus you thought they needed.

Probably not – but maybe !

If everything about the mix in progress sounds great, you’re on the right track. And if something suddenly sounds really good in the “naked” version, see if you can get that quality back into the current mix.

Every now and again, mix naked and see how it feels.

But keep your clothes on : )

Day 7 – Mix naked ! [11elevenproject] is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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Today is 11.11.11, and this post is my contribution to a great idea inspired by that fact – the 11elevenproject.

Check it out, and get involved !

I know there are lots of people submitting music (not surprising given that Imogen Heap is the executive propducer) so with that in mind, I’m going to do a quick daily tip every day for the next eleven days - 11 easy ways to improve the sound of your music.

To see all the posts in the series, click here.

Just think, if you do one of these every day for the next eleven days, at the end of it your music will sound 11 times better ! (*)

(*) This may not be strictly true

So without further ado here’s the first tip:

1 – Monitor your monitoring position

Where your speakers are, and where you sit, has a huge influence on the way your room sounds, and the quality of your recordings and mixes as a result.

Pick some music you know the sound of REALLY well and listen to it on your mixing setup. Ask yourself these questions:

• How does it sound ?
• If you move around the room, does it sound better ?
• Where does sit sound right ?

If it sounds better somewhere else than your usual mix position, can you move your monitors or your mix position to take advantage of that improvement ?

(Remember, you want the music to sound better but right – if it sounds exciting but too bassy, that’s not good – or if it sounds clearer but also too harsh, that’s not right either. Better but right.)

Try the one-third rule – the sound is usually best if the distance between you and the speakers is roughly one third the length of the room.

Whereas if the distance is a half – ie. you’re in the middle of the room – you’ll often lose a lot of bass, and you can end up adding too much low end to your mixes, which will sound thick and muddled as a result.

Try it, and let us know how you get on in the comments ! If your current mix position sounds the best – great ! Feel free to ask questions.

See you tomorrow for tip #2/11…

PS. To head over and take a look at the 11elevenproject now, click here

11eleven easy ways to improve the sound of your music – today, for free [11eleven] is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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“Propeller Seeds”, by Imogen Heap, formerly known only as “heapsong2“, has been released – on the same day as the last ever shuttle launch, and like it, a little late – but such a success that no-one minds !

The song is superb, the video is beautiful, as you can see (despite having me in it) and I’ve already written in a previous post about the unique way that Imogen is involving her fans in the writing of the new album. Now that the song and video are released though, I thought I’d quickly explain a few of the reasons I love it so much.

The song is a collaboration with Nick Ryan, who Imogen met at a PRS event. I first became aware of Nick’s work when I saw a demonstration at TEDxAldeburgh last year of “Papa Sangre“, the immersive 3D audio iPhone game that he worked on - but his idea for this song was possibly even more ambitious.

Immi says the song is probably her first proper love song – it tells the story of when she met the new man in her life. Nick’s idea though was that not only would the song tell the story, but that the audio would too – the listener would experience the events and be transported into the locations where they happened as they listened – and the music would evolve out of those sounds and atmospheres.



In technical terms, this means that he and Imogen spent a huge amount of care and attention sampling, sequencing and morphing all kinds of sounds, from floorboards and piano stools masquerading as tree roots through to cutlery percussion, crowd noise and Felix’s Machines – as well as making impulse response recordings (bursting balloons !) in different locations, allowing them to build convolution reverb patches of those spaces, including the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford amongst others, and later place Immi’s voice back inside them during the song.

In musical terms this means that as the song plays, these sounds and environments float and swirl around you – sometimes sound effects, sometimes rhythm tracks, sometimes atmospheres and flavours – and Immi’s voice moves with them, from one location’s acoustic to another, as the story unfolds.

All of this swirls past you in a blur as the song plays – it reminds me a little of “Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite” – and you only really start to appreciate the intricate detail of it when you listen to the 9-minute “Places and Spaces” making-of commentary included in the release package. But as always the most impressive thing for me is that the song comes first.

When I heard a preview of the track (less than two weeks ago, still !) it was unfinished, and the sonic cleverness was distracting rather than immersive – because as Nick said, it was less important than getting the song right first. Once that foundation was in place though, then the 3D audio fun could start – but running throughout is a always a beautiful melody, with simple, evocative words, and a heartfelt emotional message.

So “Propeller Seeds” combines everything I love in sound and music – a great song; a great performance; playful, happy humour; 3D acoustic environments and startling, spectacular sonics, all with a captivating story – and above all, emotion and heart.

“@no_575″ summed it up perfectly on Twitter for me this evening, when she said the song is “like euphoria moving within sound”.

And that’s why I love it.

If you’d like to buy “Propeller Seeds”, complete with video, making-of commentary and an acoustic version of “Lifeline”, Imogen’s first song from the album – click here.

Update – I made a little video of the live performance of “Lifeline” at the “Propeller Seeds” release party, edited from mobile phone and camera footage – here it is !

‘Propeller Seeds’ by Imogen Heap – The first ever 3D immersive song ? is a post from Ian Shepherd's: Production Advice
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