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April 2007 Roger’s Rules of Compression - Issue: April 2007
Roger’s Rules of Compression 1: Don’t. I would rather spend the time to ride the solo or vocal to get a cleaner sound with no compression artifacts. I also prefer to manually remove pops and sibilance. You can use the volume automation in a DAW to eliminate vocal pops and sibilance problems by drawing a V-shaped notch at the center of the pop or ess. It does not have to be very wide, and it will work better than any automated de-esser or pop filter. 2: For the most transparent compression, use a ratio between 2:1 and 3:1. This will increase the apparent loudness of your vocal, but will not have that annoying pumping sound of badly adjusted compressor settings. 3: Don’t compress more than 4dB. Watch the gain reduction meter on the compressor. Adjust the input gain or threshold level until the reduction reads between 3 and 4dB, no more. 4: Use multiple compressors connected in a series if you need more than 4dB of compression. Set the attack and release settings differently and you will have more compression without sounding like you’re killing the vocalist. 5: Parallel compression works in some circumstances. You have the dry signal and the compressed signal – mix them together to get the sound you want. Make sure you compensate for any delay in the compressor to avoid phasing. Roger Nichols is a recoding engineer and producer and has won seven Grammy Awards, the 2001 TEC Award, and received 11 Grammy nominations. He is on the Board of Governors for the Miami Chapter of NARAS and lectures at Berklee School of Music, Musicians Institute, Recording Workshop, Full Sail, Vancouver Film School, and University of Miami. Visit www.rogernichols.com. 5 Tips For Stalking, Managing, & Capturing Rogue Sounds With Traps & Baffles - Issue: April 2007
5 Tips For Stalking, Managing, & Capturing Rogue Sounds With Traps & Baffles Employing Sound Traps and Baffles is much like hunting. 1. Know your hunting grounds: Before the hunt, know and understand your acoustical environment. Once you bound a space with walls, a floor, and a ceiling, you’ve committed acoustics. The boundaries of your space define the low frequency modal response and set limitations for the ambient decay time. Wonderful programs and countless texts have been written that clearly describe the process for analyzing, predicting, and managing acoustical boundary conditions. Once you understand your environment you will better know how rogue sounds behave in the space; you can better identify where problems might lie and devise a trap to capture the problem. 2. Put the traps where the beavers are: Place traps to capture rogue sound much like you’d place traps for beavers. Placing beaver traps on the ceiling will do you little good, just like placing acoustical traps where the sound you want to capture doesn’t exist. Beavers pretty much live their lives along the floor plane. But rogue sounds live in the three dimensional world, so successful hunting can be achieved if the traps are placed in proximity to boundaries and intersections. 3. Be sure your passive trap is big enough to capture your game. Lower frequencies require larger and deeper traps to control and manage long wavelength rogue sounds. 4. Know how many you want to trap: Trapping one beaver vs. an entire colony will require different methods. The effective trap absorption efficiency is proportional to the area of coverage. 5. Conceal the trap: A good looking studio always seems to sound a little better. Integrate your traps into the architecture and along with those rogue sounds you’ll catch new clients. Bonus Tip #6: go to www.RBDG.com – Russ Berger is Owner of Russ Berger Design Group (RBDG), which is a design and consulting firm that combines expertise in acoustics, architecture, and interiors to create technical environments and buildings for recording studios, broadcast facilities, creative production spaces, and home theaters. Grounding, Shielding, Hums, Buzzes, & Things That Go Zap! In Your Sound System - Issue: April 2007
Grounding, Shielding, Hums, Buzzes, & Things That Go Zap! In Your Sound System Noise susceptibility (or the lack thereof) in audio systems is a function of two principal factors: shielding, and the “pin-1 problem.” The endless conversations concerning this matter inevitably involve earth “grounding,” a subject which has been around for so long (200+ years) that it has devolved into a sea of confusion, misinformation, and mythology, even though it is completely dictated by easily understandable basic physics. Conventional grounding mythology would have one believe that electronic systems of all kinds must be robustly connected to earth ground in order to properly function – audio signal processing systems in particular. The grounding reality is that airplanes, motor vehicles, laptop computers, blasters, etc. seem to work just fine without connections to earth ground. Nevertheless, A/V systems of all kinds are considered exempt. According to the conventional mythologists, “noise in audio systems must have something to do with grounding, what else could it be?” The bad news is that the short answer to this question would fill up this entire issue many times over. The good news is that on the Professional Sound website www.professional-sound.com, a long list of reference material will be found. In addition, the June 1995 issue of the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, entitled “Shields and Grounds,” includes seven papers which directly address this matter. Go to www.aes.org, and look up “Special Publications.” It’s available as freeware to anyone for $15 US, less if you’re an AES Member … it may also be downloadable. It won’t take you long to realize that the conventional mythologitsts just might be wrong! Neil Muncy has been around since the days when recorded sound was analog mono and vacuum tubes ruled the audio landscape. He has been a consultant in the audio field for many years, and can be contacted by email at: nmuncy@allstream.net.
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