bitflipper

I often wear headphones for 6-8 hours straight. That's because most nights I fall asleep with them on.

Sennheiser's fuzzy parts are super comfy. If they get drool-caked, toss them into the wash. (Not the whole unit, just the earpads.)

I'm digging FreqAnalystMulti the more I dig into it. It may be the most versatile multi-channel spectrum analyzer I've used. Might even supplant my current favorites MMultiAnalyzer and SPAN+. It's certainly the best-looking of the bunch. 

Thanks for that.  Yes, I suppose FreqAnalyst Multi is slightly less intuitive than, say, SPAN+ or MMultiAnalyzer. But more confusing than Neutron?

pwalpwal, the difference is the three tools I'm currently evaluating are all multi-channel. The StereoScope tool, for example, shows you panning information for as many individual tracks as you want to look at at once. It's a very different view than, say, Insight's stereo meters, which can be deceiving. Let's say you have a project consisting of mostly wide stereo tracks - standard goniometers would indicate a nice stereo spread, even if the full mix actually lacked panoramic definition to your ears. 

17 hours ago, Christian Jones said:

...and THEN I'm done. 

?Don't forget the new reverbs you're gonna need to go with those. No, the ones you already have won't work.

Speaking of scientific-sounding nonsense, I'm sure many of you are already familiar with the DHMO (dihydrogen monoxide) page. It's a brilliant send-up of our irrational fear of "chemicals".

Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound, also referred to by some as Dihydrogen Oxide, Hydrogen Hydroxide, Hydronium Hydroxide, or simply Hydric acid. Its basis is the highly reactive hydroxyl radical, a species shown to mutate DNA, denature proteins, disrupt cell membranes, and chemically alter critical neurotransmitters. The atomic components of DHMO are found in a number of caustic, explosive and poisonous compounds such as Sulfuric Acid, Nitroglycerine and Ethyl Alcohol.

And on the topic of spurious correlations, the page also addresses the "link" between DHMO and gun violence. Turns out, every mass murderer throughout history has been a daily consumer of this evil chemical. I have my own theory regarding DHMO exposure and writing every song in Am, although that has - so far - not been supported empirically.

Just discovered this fascinating web site. OK, it's maybe not so fascinating unless you already have a corresponding fascination with statistics in general.  But even if you have only a casual relationship with science and math, this sort of thing is still important because the mainstream press routinely confuses correlation and causation in an effort to make you scared and/or outraged.

An example of a spurious correlation: there is a 99.79% correlation between the amount spent on science and suicides by hanging.

Or the 99.26% correlation between margarine consumption and divorce rates.

There is a 95.7% correlation between people dying by falling out of bed and the number of lawyers in Puerto Rico.

The site has 30,000 of these, enough to keep someone like me amused for many, many hours.

Of course, there are a few that might actually make sense, such as the 99.5% correlation between iPhone sales and people falling down stairs. Or this shocker: precipitation and sunlight have an inverse correlation!

I have no problem with EQ. However, you have to be consistent during the training period. Fiddling with EQ for each medium short-circuits the exercise. 

Once you've achieved a high level of autonomous familiarity with your system, you can then intentionally alter the EQ without worrying about confusing your ears. I often roll off all the bottom and extreme top as a test to verify midrange balance, something that may be masked by thundering bass.

I highly recommend two books on the subject. The first is a light and entertaining read, the second more academic, but both offer great insights. I've read both of them several times, although it's been a long while. I should dig them out...

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin (I see there's a newer second edition; my copy is quite a bit older)

Sound Reproduction by Dr. Floyd Toole (this one's in its third edition now)

Returning to topic...Bapu is going to have to do this all over again with his new cans. He's been in the game long enough to know that better playback does not instantly mean better mixes, but that it will over time. Any time you change your environment, you have to acclimate your ears all over again.

Recently I added a headphone amplifier to my setup, not for mixing but for kicking-back-in -the-dark-with-a-doobie focused listening. Those bedtime sessions have long been my final approval for any new mixes. Away from the computer, listening intently without visual feedback, I hear flaws in my mix that weren't evident while sitting in front of the screen.

The headphone amp was more impactful than I'd expected, a significant improvement. But different. So my homework this past week has been listening to past references, pulling up every recording I've valued for quality.  Sure, it's a sacrifice, but one I'm willing to make in the interest of better mixes.

Actually, it may not be necessary to create a correction curve that mimics your hearing aids' EQ. Hear me out. (no pun).

Everybody hears differently. Every room sounds different. Every speaker is different. Headphones are all over the map. It's a wonder anybody is able to make a mix that others find agreeable. Think about how that's even possible.

It's possible through ear training. You spend enough time listening to well-made records through your playback system, whatever it may be, and over time your brain comes to "know" what a good record sounds like. It's been studied; it's a real thing, and it works. All it takes is the admittedly herculean effort of kicking back while listening to good music. 

Of course, if the playback system can't replicate all frequencies (e.g. laptop speakers or generic earbuds) then you'll still have to use a spectrum analyzer to fill in the missing bits. But the all-important midrange is going to be there, and that's what counts most. It's worth a try, eh? Set aside a half hour every day to just listen to some reference recordings in your favorite genres.

On 8/11/2019 at 10:17 AM, henkejs said:

Since reading about the Sonarworks profiles for headphones, I've been wondering whether there's a good way to create a custom profile based on your own specific hearing loss using data taken from an audiogram. Creating mixes that translate well is hard enough under the best of circumstances. It's even harder when you know that what you hear may not be the same as what other people hear even if they're listening in the same room as you.

If you have hearing aids, and I do, my understanding is they're not designed to approximate the experience of normal hearing. They can be tuned to enhance specific frequencies where you have deficits, but generally only in the range of human speech and not, for example, in the very low and very high frequencies.

Thoughts?

Thoughts, as requested:

1. You absolutely could create a correction curve if the audiologist has given you a detailed analysis. However, I wonder if the hearing aids would even be capable of full-spectrum sound, even after equalization.

2. I wonder if the midrange emphasis might actually help with mixing. Same idea as using Mix Cubes. As long as you supplemented your monitoring with visual aids to check the low end.

3. The problem of not hearing the same things as others is a universal problem, because no two people perceive sound exactly alike. Sure, it's exacerbated by hearing impairment, but consider that everyone over 30 is hearing-impaired. Especially musicians. Nobody can truly trust their ears. You just know that better than most.

Sorry, a picture of where I came from would violate the TOS.

? No Facebook for me, sadly. 

10 hours ago, Harry C. said:

Bitflipper you have to know  Ozone 5 was a plugin not like Ozone 6 which is also a stand alone Version.

True, but that doesn't answer my question. Ozone 5 doesn't do anything that subsequent versions can't duplicate. 

Oh, don't be a Luddite! ? I'm a piano player who owns a real grand piano, but that doesn't stop me from having multiple Steinway libraries.

Just kidding. I don't own a real Steinway, so a sample library is the only way I'm ever gonna get one into a recording. 

The OTS Pear is a little dated, not quite as good as Trilian IMO, but it's only $59 and unless your song prominently features the instrument it should do the job just fine. It has the main feature I look for first in a bass library: the ability to slide convincingly between any two notes, which many (most?) bass libs can't do without complicated scroll wheel trickery. They're scripted slides as opposed to sampled slides, but in context that's usually good enough.

Curious as to why you need O5 specifically. I'd think O6/7/8 would be fairly simple to substitute. 

I don't have it myself so I can't speak from authority, but it just sounds like that library may have too many limitations.

Pear is the only OTS bass I don't have. When I need an acoustic, I turn to Trilian. Spectrasonics is a different world from Kontakt and not as easy to use, but the instruments are truly outstanding. Especially the acoustic basses (yes, basses, plural). Trilian's rather pricey but you get a whole bunch of basses and they're all good.  

I name such projects with the date they were started, sometimes appending the key, e.g. 8-14-2019 Am. If the test project is to explore a new soft synth, I'll name it accordingly, such as "Amadeus" or "Synthmaster".

That's usually enough of a memory jog to find them later.

It's also helpful to separate "real" projects from test projects in the file system. I create a lot of temporary projects for the articles I write, projects that may not even be songs, just tracks that demonstrate the features of a plugin or instrument, or to take screenshots from. Those live in a separate folder called \projects\tests, so that they don't clutter up my actual music projects. Another subfolder is called "Ideas", where I keep song ideas and chord progressions. 

On 8/11/2019 at 8:19 PM, Christian Jones said:

...the key switches get all messed up in the transpose, but in a way that doesn't make sense - like, the key switches are alternating themselves between C1, C#1 and D1 to C2, C#2 and D2 each time I press one of the key switches - immediately after I press one then next time that key switch will have moved itself either an octave up or down...

Ah, I see the problem. Most users ask this question because they're using a short keyboard and Kontakt maps keyswitches to keys that don't physically exist on the controller. In that case, moving the keyswitches up an octave along with everything else is desirable.

It sounds like the library developer didn't take transposition into account, and may have hard-coded MIDI note values into some scripts. It's possible you just won't be able to do what you want to do with this particular instrument. At least not without remapping the samples, as you concluded. Something you'd think would be simple, but my experiences attempting to remap commercial products have had mixed results so I don't do it anymore. 

One of the reasons I'm fond of Orange Tree and Indiginus is that they support keyswitch reassignment right in the UI. My favorite Kontakt-based bass is OTS' Rickenbacker, in which drop tuning is a built-in feature. All you have to do then is transpose the MIDI track, rather than the instrument.

Plenty of word confusion around here, even if it doesn't usually rise to the level of clinical aphasia. I suspect it's like synaesthesia, insofar as everybody has a touch of it, and musicians are more prone to it than the general population. A little may even be a benefit if you're a lyricist or poet.

This isn't something Noel can fix. If anybody could do anything, it would have to be NI.

The issue is that synths often report inconsequential "changes", which could be something as trivial as playing back a patch that has parameters modulated by a random envelope generator. Cakewalk has no way of knowing whether change flags are important or not, so it honors all of them without bias. 

I keep forgetting that I have that one. It's good (and free!), although I usually reach for D16 Group's Syntorus when I need a chorus. Very flexible and currently on sale, too, for 25 EUR. Sale ends today, btw.

Speaking of freebies, I also use the free BC Gain plugin a lot. Pretty much every vocal track. It's part of the free Gain Suite.

But it's the metering and analysis tools that I've been concentrating on lately. The value of multi-channel spectrum analyzers is obvious, but I'm struggling to come up with a compelling reason for the stereoscope tool. It's fun to look at, but I'm not sure it'll actually help me mix better.

...said the patient to the proctologist.

You shouldn't have to remap the samples. That could be a real chore depending on how complex the map is (e.g. multiple groups and velocity layers).

Click on the wrench icon, then the Instrument Options button. In the dialog that comes up, click on "Instrument". There is a field there where you can enter a transpose value. Set it to -12, so when you play E1 Kontakt translates that into E0.

I haven't tried it from my interface. It has no problem driving 300 ohm cans, although that's not relevant because the headphones I use for editing are 50 ohms. Might be worth experimenting with, though I doubt there'd be much if any improvement.

Most powered (meaning you plug it into the wall) interfaces should have no problem driving high-Z cans, because they'll have at minimum + and - 12V rails if not higher. Where you have issues is with portable devices such as smartphones and dedicated music players whose output voltage range is limited by their batteries.

henkejs: yes, I have the first Large Band album on tap here. It was made in what I consider the Golden Age, that too-short period c. 1986 - 2001 before extreme squashing had become the fad.  Lots of detail in the recording, especially percussion. I'll have to give it another listen with the new amp. I'd expect some benefit, given its high crest factor. Thanks for the suggestion.

Craig: yes, I think a poll of references would be interesting. I've seen such lists in the GS mastering forum. Those have led me to a few discoveries that I wouldn't have thought of, such as Donald Fagan's The Nightfly. I'm not real crazy about the music, but the audio quality is exemplary. May be the same crew that engineeered Aja?

Sorry for the confusion. I've never had any doubts about headphone distribution amps like those pictured above. They are studio essentials. What I'm talking about in this thread is specifically a portable amplifier for a single (sometimes dual) pair of headphones, solely to enhance the personal listening experience.

That said, there's definitely a connection to recording, mixing and mastering. After you've worked on a mix for hours, you lose perspective. You concentrate on specific elements, swim in the cornucopia of processing possibilities (sorry for the mixed metaphor), and you are influenced by onscreen graphics way more than you realize.

I therefore find it very helpful to listen to my mixes offline, away from the computer screen, the carefully shaped acoustics of my room, and the high end speakers. Most importantly, away from any possibility of altering the mix. Suddenly that snare you'd boosted because you thought it weak is now obviously overbearing...I've had many "what was I thinking?" moments while listening to a mix on headphones in the dark.

This week I'm also enjoying the immersive goodness of my favorite reference recordings, some of which I'm now hearing as if they were new. Bouncing around on my player, I happened upon Paul Simon's Graceland. Holy guacamole, that's one well-made record! Not that I'd recommend it as a mix reference - it's too unique - but as a "does my system sound good?" reference it's amazing.  

Some others that I regularly turn to when I want to hear what an especially well-mixed and mastered record is supposed to sound like: Alison Krauss's New Favorite, Steven Wilson's Hand.Cannot.Erase, Taking the Long Way by the Dixie Chicks, Mark Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia, pre-Vapor Trails Rush, the remix of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper.

Now I'm out scouring YouTube and Amazon for some new stuff - suggestions welcomed.