The internal cabling of a REDD.51 mixing console. Looks as beautiful as it sounds.
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REDD.51 wiring
April 7, 2009 – 8:31 am
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Olympic Studios, RIP
March 28, 2009 – 11:57 am
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Olympic Studios has officially closed after 40+ years. Among the bands who recorded recording there: The Beatles, Donovan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Ella Fitzgerald, The Rolling Stones, The Zombies, David Bowie, Queen, The Who… the list is endless.
L-C-R panning, with bleed
April 28, 2007 – 5:52 pm
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One little thing I noticed a little while back. When studying some of my favorite records from the 60s and 70s, I’d marvel at how well they pull off hard L-C-R panning, without making my ears twitch while listening on headphones. Hard L-C-R panning, or “assignment”, was practically the only possibility on older consoles such as the REDD.47 and REDD.51 of Beatles/EMI Abbey Road fame.
These days, with in-the-box, DAW mixing engines, and all modern consoles, mono sources can be panned to any position in the stereo field. But perhaps they shouldn’t. We have a long history of great recorded music that features hard panning, and it sounds fantastic. It simplifies mixing, and renders obvious any arrangement problems that might be masked by mashing tracks together.
One of the secrets to making hard panning work is mic bleed. Just a bit of bleed makes it sound natural… wide, but natural. I.e, if you record two guitars live, and hard pan them, you will get a bit of each guitar in the other’s mic. That is “bleed.”
Unfortunately, you don’t always have bleed to make things sound natural. If you record two “paired” tracks separately that you want to hard pan, consider crossing their reverb sends. This works great for two acoustic guitars, for instance. Left guitar, send to a verb panned hard right. Right guitar, send to the same verb panned hard left. Balance levels to taste, then bask in your cleverness.
If you are mixing digitally/ITB, with no tape or console crosstalk, and everything you are mixing was tracked separately or is an arranged track (midi/samplers/etc.), the complete separation can sound painfully artificial. Since you’re going to hell anyway, you might as well make the best record you can… so cross pan your reverb sends, and create some fake bleed along with everything else.
Works for me at least.
Secret weapons: soundfonts
January 12, 2007 – 9:19 am
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Scattered around my audio production drives, I have hundreds, perhaps thousands of free soundfonts, acquired in an addictive frenzy from 2003-2006. Eventually I stopped looking for new soundfonts, because I had invested in better commercial libraries.
A few soundfonts, however, have stood the test of time…. these are ones I return to for one reason or another.
FARFISA ORGAN
This is an electric organ… a cheap, trashy home transistor thing. Sometimes it’s just the ticket.
Rhodes VS Extreme
This rhodes sample set has a unique mellow tone that I haven’t found anywhere else. The samples are from a Rhodes MKI 73 Stage Piano.
FLUID Release 3 GM
When you absolutely need a glockenspiel, or some tubular bells, or a wood block… or a gong… or an 808 kick, or well, anything.. you’ll find it here. These samples aren’t going to floor you with their quality, but they are surprisingly useful in a mix, like the on-board sounds on an old Roland sampler.
Zvon Prepared Rhodes
There’s really nothing like this… it’s based on John Cage’s experiment where he muddled with the inner workings of a piano to create new sounds and percussive noises. You have to hear this to believe it… Zvon recreated Cage’s work on a Fender Rhodes, and created a soundfont. The light version is basically free (it’s only $2). The full version is $20.
http://www.lesproductionszvon.com/zvon_PR.htm