Ben Peilow

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the severe lack of posts of late I have been extremely busy doing all sorts of jobs as it approaches to the festival season. As it happens I am writing to you now from the Netherlands having just done the UCI BMX supercross world championship in Papendal!

This morning at breakfast I just bought on eBay 2 small mic stands for £25 ($40/€31), and it got me thinking. When I was setting up my home studio setup for the first time, there was only one thing on my mind…microphones! That’s all I wanted. Without mics, there’s no recording right?

Well it certainly backfired, as when I went to record I realised I had to use and old frayed XLR to mini jack cable, using a cardboard box on a swivel chair as a mic stand, and a coat hanger for a mic clip (unfortunately yes! This is a true story!)

Where am I going with this? Don’t forget to invest in the little things that you may forget about when you first setup. Mic stands, decent cables, mic clips, perhaps some Velcro cable ties to keep your cables neat, a pop shield…you get where I’m going with this. Have a think :-)

What little thing do you most need? Alternatively, if you’re all setup and actively recording or mixing live, what piece of equipment did you forget about when you first started? Comment below.

It’s good to be back :-)

So I just went to band practice tonight, and our singer/guitarist came to us with a song he wrote over the weekend. All he used was MIDI drums and recorded bass and guitar (via his Orange amp) and the vocals with an SM58. Basically, it sounded GREAT!! This really hits home the point of keeping things simple. If you only have one mic and a 2 channel interface (which he has) you can still produce some really great sounding music. Don’t worry if you don’t have much, just keep making music.

Coming up I’ve got a few recordings I’d like to share with you that I think could help you in your recording process and/or live set up. I’ll be looking at a variety of ways capturing an electric guitar using a Shure SM57 and how moving the microphone can really make a massive difference to the tone and sound of the instrument. To save you reading one very large document I’m going to break it up into small chunks so that it’s easy to find a specific set of samples.

Stay tuned!

So I’ve recently finished a mix for a band and I’m now sending it off to a good friend of mine Jason Neal, who runs a studio called Vizea Sound in Liverpool for mastering (http://www.vizeasound.co.uk). As I was finishing off the mix today I realised that there’s an important step to the mix process that I could write about; and that’s listening to the mix on as many different sources as possible. 

It might sound great through you’re monitors in your studio/home studio, but when you play it somewhere else, all of a sudden it sounds completely different. This is largely because the acoustic properties will change from room to room, as will the speakers. So it;s always good to test you’re mix through as many speakers as you can before you unleash it to the world. Here’s a few tips based on what I’ve done:

• Through you’re main monitors in your studio (goes without saying!)
• A cheap pair of PC speakers (I’ve picked a pair for £1, bargin!)
• Laptop speakers
• Your phone (a lot of people do that these days!)
• Sennheiser HD215
• Audio Technica FC700
• Standard iPod Headphones (these are what the majority of the listening public use as headphones.)
• Your Hi-Fi at home
• Your car’s stereo system (this is always a good one to check)

There’s just a few ideas, but you get the picture. Do you do this already? Is there anywhere you like to check you’re mixes other than through you’re main monitors? Comment, as always, below.

So I’ve got a lot of plans for this up-coming year for you all! Here’s a preview of some of those things:

• Dynamic Vocal Mic Shootout - coming soon with a small selection of mics

• Recording Drum Workshop - trying out different mics and ideas. come and join us!

• Home Studio Budget Tips - ways of getting different sounds and saving some pennies too :-)

So stick around guys. 2012 is going to be a very exciting year indeed!!

:-)

So I’d like to share a tale with you, my audio friends, about a recording I did for a local band earlier this year. It was for my brother’s band called Atlas, they wanted a simple recording done so they could give out their CD for gigs as well as putting something on their Myspace/Facebook page. So I set off with my Focusrite Saffire Pro 10 and a few mics and went to their practice room to do a live multitrack recording. 

Now there’s quite a few things to be aware of in a live multitrack recording (which we’ll discuss another time!) but one thing that was very apparent was that the bass guitar sounded awful. The bass itself sounded really bad, and as we were in a local rehearsal room, had only 3 hours to setup, record 3 songs, and de-rig, we had to go with it. It sounded like this:

Bad Bass by benpeilow

As you can hear pretty terrible. [This was recorded through a DI box and then into the Focusrite interface.]

So having listened back to it properly back at my home studio, I soon realised this was a really big problem, especially as the bass opened the song on its own before the rest of the band came in. Having tried a variety of editing ideas and various plug ins, I stumbled across Logic Pro’s Pedalboard and the Splitter/Mixer pedal.

As you can see from the image above the signal is being split in two before reaching the mixer and becoming a mono signal again. Signal Path A was the original dry, bad sounding bass, whereas Signal Path B was sent to the distortion plug in that I inserted. This set up means that I could blend the two signals to taste. With just distortion, this bass sounds pretty unintelligible and you cannot tell what notes are being played, so by blending the two, you’re able to keep the clean signal and distinguish each note and rhythm. 

One thing to also notice is that the Splitter is set to “Freq” or Frequency. To quote Logic Pro’s Manual:

“When set to Freq, it works as a frequency-dependent signal splitter that divides the incoming signal. Signals above the frequency set with the Frequency knob are sent to Bus B. Signals below this frequency are sent to Bus A.”

In this scenario, everything under 110hz was the original bass guitar signal, everything above 110hz was the distorted signal. On the Mixer, it has been set so that only a small amount of the original signal is being heard. The end result sounded like this:

Better Bass by benpeilow

The popping is still slightly audible, but it is a big improvement. Thankfully, Atlas’s style was very much in the post-hardcore punk genre, much like say Gallows, so having showed the band this newly distorted bass sound, they really liked it and proceed to use a distortion pedal for when they played it live. Happy days. So here’s how it sounds in context with the rest of the band:

Bass In Context by benpeilow

So there we go, not only is it possible to fix a bad sounding bass with distortion (should the genre suit of course, you don’t wanna be doing this on a folk record now would ya!) but you can get some quite creative results when using the Splitter/Mixer pedal in Logic Pro. Have a go and see what you come up with!

As always, please comment below.

Recently I found a Yoga boundary microphone on eBay. I saw it with a few minutes left and it was only going for a few quid so I bought it. I didnt know quite what to expect; whether it was going to sound awful, whether it could handle any loud sources. 

So it came through the post and I checked it out and I was pretty impressed. I was doing a recording of my band Smoking Grace so I thought I’d take it along. When I was doing stage crew work at work local festival Moare Music, I remembered that the kick drum was miked up with a Shure 91 (boundary mic) inside the kick drum and a beta 52 for the outside, with the theory that the boundary mic provides the clicky sound whilst the beta 52 provided the low end thump, so I thought I’d give this a go. I think that it turned out really well. The general theory worked and depending on what kind of a kick sound I wanted, it was a case of bringing up either or both faders.

Here’s a few audio examples so you can hear for yourself:

The boundary mic inside the kick drum:

Kick Boundary by benpeilow

And a blend of the inside and outside mic:

Kick Drums by benpeilow

[These are as they were recorded and no effects/processing has been added]

So let me know what you think, and let me know what experience you have of boundary mics! Comment below