Happy Monday!

I started watching Severance Season 1 a few weeks back, and the first thing that struck me was the music. It’s amazing.

No Spoilers

There’s a mysterious company, Lumon, which is located in a town somewhere in the Hudson Valley of NY, where there’s always snow on the ground, and the cars are from decades ago, when boxy was the new sexy. The decor at Lumon is neo-Danish minimalism from the 60s, the technology is analog—film cameras and cassette recorders—except there are computers with bitmapped graphics. But somehow, the company can do brain surgery in the office with a rechargeable drill, inserting a chip that divides their personality and memory in half.

One half, the “Outie,” continues on in life as normal. The other, the “Innie”, exists only on the Severance Floor of Lumon. When the Outie steps into a particular elevator at Lumon, the personality switch happens, the Innie steps out and works all day at a job that neither worker nor audience can figure out. The twist that drives the whole shebang forward: the Outie and Innie are basically separate people who know of each other, but have never communicated and have no idea what the other’s life is like.

Season One starts slow but dang, is it captivating. The story hooks in and pulls you along by the head and the heart—by turns it’s thrilling and hysterical—there’s wonderful acting, a wicked, bizarre visual design sense to everything, and fabulous music by composer Theodore Shapiro.

Mr. Shapiro is a major film composer with credits all over the place: Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder, The Devil Wears Prada, Wet Hot American Summer, Captain Underpants—an eclectic credit list that lets the composer stretch out in all directions. He’s won two Emmy awards for Severance. It’s relentlessly inventive music.

The score of Severance is minimalist, in keeping with the visual design, usually not much more than a piano and often built out of repeating four-chord sequences, but man, does he get mileage out of it. Like the characters, the music seems split. Like the overall aesthetic of the show, there’s something dreamlike and ominous happening in the music, leavened by cultural references and a healthy dose of humor.

Here’s a video of the opening credits. That electronic stutter at the end is edited snippets of a single piano note.

I found this longer breakdown of the opening music that gets into the chord changes and dissonance and makes clear why there’s always an element of jazz tickling your ear. No spoilers in this video.

But there are spoilers in this interview with the composer, so don’t read it unless you’ve been watching. Severance is full of surprises—as is the music—and surprises are what make life worth paying attention to.

Season 2 Opener

Season 2 Episode 1 kicked open with the hero, Mark S, played by ever quirky Adam Scott, getting off the elevator and running like a maniac around the Severance floor. Watch it now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RAE3bC1RZY

The camera work is amazing—fluid and exciting, a mixture of digitally controlled cameras and a handheld. It and the music impart a sense of energy and thrust to what is essentially a confused man running around a white hallway.

The music is Burnin’ Coal by pianist Les McCann. It swings and it cooks—jazz with a heavy dose of soul music to it. The original recording, cut live in the studio in 1969, goes on for over six minutes. For this scene, the music was pruned to fit the video, and the video pruned to fit the music, with a string rise added at the end to pull us into the mystery and world of the show.

Les McCann

McCann was a pianist and singer. He’s one of the innovators of “soul jazz,” jazz with an emphasis on more straightforward R&B rhythms simple structures, and a social conscience. The Cannonball Adderley Quintet’s Mercy Mercy Mercy, Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder, music by Stanley Turrentine and Shirley Scott, organist Jimmy Smith—soul jazz. McCann’s music was intimately connected to the civil rights movement and his live recording of Compared to What was a hit — here’s video of it from the Montreux Jazz festival.

Les McCann had a way with really simple piano parts.

Burnin’ Coal is on McCann’s 1969 album Much Les. It’s a forgotten masterpiece.

Much Les has a bit in common with Roberta Flack’s debut album I wrote about a few weeks ago: same studio, Atlantic in New York City, same producer, Joel Dorn. Same console, same tape deck, and the same warm, wooly sound. I love the sounds of these recordings: hard-panned mono tracks, room sound rather than artificial reverb, everyone yelling to each other.

We made a Soul Jazz playlist for you here.

For those that have watched the show—spoiler alert— here’s a video of director Ben Stiller and actor Adam Scott discussing the thinking behind the scene. It’s a treat to see the collaboration between these two. They also go into detail on how the camera movements were accomplished, what’s CGI and what isn’t, and the demands of putting such a scene together. It’s really an interesting video and worth the watch.

An Easter Egg

Severance is full of Easter Eggs, and we’re coming up on Spring, so here’s a fun thing for you all: a Severance-themed Sale!

Mark’s Innie is part of a four-person crew at Lumon that is the Macro Data Refinement team. They’re often referred to by the initials “MDR."

Is it a coincidence that Korneff Audio has an MDR, our Micro Digital Reverberator?

Get it now for 50% off by using the code severance-50. The Sale is ‘til Wednesday at 11:59pm EST.

Click this link!

That’s all for this week. A lot of you all wrote in regarding Peter Frampton—thanks for that. It’s always a treat to hear from you all.

Uh oh! Time for S2 E4 of Severance...

Warm regards,

Luke

 

Happy Monday -

Korneff Audio started on a Black Friday five years ago, with one plug-in, the original Pawn Shop Comp. Five years later, we’ve got nine, and a bunch more waiting to see daylight. So, I guess happy birthday to us?

For this episode (producer/engineer John Agnello calls each of these an episode... sounds like an eventual podcast...), I thought I’d be extra useful by giving some info on our plug-ins, specifically going into how Dan and I use them in the studio, some design background, some usage hints.

There’s so much though, that I am splitting this into two emails, one today and one tomorrow. SO... keep an eye out for New Tuesday!

Factoids and Uses and Whatnot on All Our Plugins, going by age

Pawn Shop Comp/Pawn Shop Comp 2.0

It’s misnamed. It’s really a vintage channel strip consisting of a tube preamp coupled to a FET-style compressor. It works on everything, including the mix bus, but it’s el supremo on vocals and bass. Tons of saturation options because of the preamp, and the ability to switch in different tubes and transformers. The way we use the PSC is to put it on a channel, flip around to the backside, fiddle with the preamp and the tubes and transformer, and THEN adjust the compressor. Think of it as selecting the console you want to use before engaging the channel EQ.

Fun Factoid: The Operating Level control is a circuit Dan nicked off a cassette tape duplicator his Uncle Bob had given him when Dan was a wee teen. He liked how it sounded, so it wound up in the Pawn Shop Comp.

Usage Secret: I’ve mentioned this before... two of them, one right after the other, set one to respond quickly and the other a bit more slowly (play with attack and release). Swap the order in the inserts ’til you get something smooth.

Talkback Limiter

This beast is another FET-style limiter, based on a circuit found in SSL consoles designed to keep studio talkback mics from destroying speakers and ears. Hugh Padgham and Peter Gabriel invented gated drum sounds with this circuit.

Yes, it is amazing on drums. It makes anything snap and click and punch. It lives on our snares, kicks, room mics, etc. It’s probably the best overall drum compressor out there.

But, and I suppose it’s part of the FET transistor modeling, and the artifacts produced by an FET, the TBL adds a thickness to things. It’s hard to describe but I can hear it in my head. It has a similar sound to Neve Diode compressors. It makes me clench my jaw and want to bite something. If you know Neve compressors, you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, the TBL is really great on things like vocals and acoustic instruments provided you back the DRY WET BLEND way way down towards DRY. Like, barely crack it open. It adds a little beef and evenness. We typically follow it with another compressor.

Fun Factoid: for distortion effects, click around to the back and mess with the trimpots. AND for a real adventure, on the front panel, click on the power lights at the top and see what happens...

Amplified Instrument Processor

I wrote about this thing's monstrously good sounding EQ a few episodes ago. Further, I wrote a whole course on how to use it. If you want to be enrolled in the course, reply to this email and I’ll sign you into it.

Usage Idea: Put an AIP on each of your submix buses. Switch on the Proprietary Signal Processing button on the front, and then play around with the three different settings on the back - one is tube-ish, one is tape-ish, and one is California 1970s’ solid state-ish. Again, do this BEFORE you do anything else with the plug-ins. It’s like picking out different sounding channels for each grouping of instruments.

Micro Digital Reverberator

You know who likes reverb units with almost no controls? Me. I love messing around with compressors, and EQs, and delays but when I get to reverbs I just want presets that sound good. I don’t even like adjusting simple things, like the decay time. Maybe it’s from screwing around for hours on 480Ls and always going back to the presets. Who knows.

Do This: Even though the original hardware units this puppy is modeling were basically designed to go on an insert or across a whole mix, put the MDR on its own channel and feed it via a send. Why?

1) You want to be able to EQ your reverbs. This is a HUGE trick. This guy explains it better than I can, so go read this.

2) You want to be able to feed the output of one reverb unit into the next, and so on.

What?? Cascade the reverbs?? YES!!!! It’s total insanity and fun!

In fact, do this: Put THREE MDRs on three separate channels. One is a short small room, one is a plate, and the last is a huge concert hall. Use the small room to widen and add a touch of ambiance. Use the plate for vocals, but just a smidge, and then use the concert hall for pads, etc. NOW... feed a bit of that small room INTO the concert hall, but just a touch, to have some movement and depth way way back there in the speakers. For special moments, like the end of a solo, or a chunk of vocal line when the singer screams out his ex-wife’s name in anguish, or when someone has decided a certain single snare hit is incredibly important, feed the small room into the plate and the plate into the concert hall. Obviously automate this stuff.

Fun Factoid: Everyone overlooks this, but the MDR has stereo widening/narrowing on the back....

The Echoleffe Tape Delay

This is one intimidating monster. I’ve seen grown mix engineers fling themselves into oncoming traffic when they discover there are individual EQs, bias, and pan settings for each of the three delay lines. I have stood over their mangled bodies, finally at peace, and I’ve whispered, “Did you know you also have complete control over wow, flutter, tape age, head bump, as well as tape formulation, and you can switch off the Echoleffe’s delay function and just use it as a tape saturation simulator?"

This thing is the opposite of the MDR. It’s bristling with controls like a pissed-off German porcupine. It’s a pity, because once you get the logic of the controls, the ETD is quick to use and impossibly versatile. It can do easy things, like adding slapback on a vocal (it’s overkill for that, honestly), but it excels at making sounds you’ve never heard before.

The ETD can turn a single note into a keyboard pad that modulates and moves. It can twist delays into reverbs and musically sync the whole thing to the tempo of the track.

Usage Ideas: Set the delay times to below 11ms - set all three of them differently. Pan them everywhere. Play the track, and adjust the feedback for each delay line on the front panel, then go to the Tape Maintenance Panel and futz around with wow and flutter — this will add modulation to the delay times and suddenly you’ve got flanging happening that is out of this world and panned all over the stereo image. Gradually increase one of the delay times to get pitch-shifting effects. Automate the changes of the delay times. Play with the REVERB DENSITY switch on the front panel to basically DOUBLE the number of echo returns.

Even if you never buy this thing, download the demo and spend a week writing songs with it.

Licensing

Our original five plug-ins are iLOK-based for security purposes. Yes, we are phasing that out and soon our original five will use our own proprietary licensing system developed by Dan, the damn genius. When will this happen? We are hoping very very soon, but no promises. But know that we’ve heard your requests to get the heck off iLOK and we are working towards that.

I don’t have a new record this week. I’m still listening to Kim Deal every day. It gets better and more creative and insightful with each listen. But here’s a great interview with her on the Broken Record podcast. She talks about everything, including the new album. And she’s really really funny! And so so smart. She talks a lot about Steve Albini, and sadly, she occasionally refers to him in the present tense, as though he was still alive.

Warm regards,

Luke

Happy Monday!

We started our Black Friday Sale today. And we added plug-in bundles, which people have been asking for. SO... 40% off plug-ins and up to 60% off on bundles!

Kim Deal

A few weeks ago I wrote about albums by older guys. I was in some sort of search for meaning, I suppose.

On November 22nd, former Pixie and Breeder Kim Deal, at age 63, released her first "real" solo album, 'Nobody Loves You More'. It's simply wonderful. Might be the best album of the year.

Kim had released a few things on her own in the past decade, things she recorded on eight-track tape — she's an analog kinda gal, but finally hunkered down in Florida, learned Pro-Tools (by bugging her friend, engineer/producer Steve Albini for lessons over the phone) and got to it.

Most of 'Nobody Loves You More' was recorded by Steve Albini, with Kim producing, along with a crackerjack bunch of players ranging from rock musicians to jazzers, to string players, and more. The record is lush, quirky, and ever-interesting. Songs evolve from sparse, punky Americana into a cha cha, or there's a pedal steel, or strings. It's all over the map, but it's held together by melody and Ms Deal's fascinating voice. It takes a bit to get used to — she sounds like an animated cartoon character played by a chain-smoking alcoholic, but it's the perfect voice to deliver the pain and magic of this album.

The record is full of pain. She lost her mom to Alzheimer's, and then, following in quick succession, her dad, her aunt, and her uncle — within one year. And then she lost Steve Albini — he died after 'A Good Time Pushed', the last thing he ever recorded.

But while it's a painful record, it's not sad. There's something gorgeous and content about it, triumphant and wise. And Ms. Deal has a great sense of humor, which comes out in the lyrics and the scatological arrangements. It's such a good record, and so worth a listen. In a fair and decent world, it would sweep the Grammy's.

But it won't. Because it's not something built to fit an algorithm and tweaked to within an inch of its life — there's not even autotune on it. It doesn't have guest rappers, songs written by fourteen people, or Max Martin anywhere near it. Kim has about 7,000 subscribers on YouTube. This music wasn't written with data science and AI pitching in on the lyrics. It's not statistically constructed to increase engagement. It ain't fucking "content."

It's a record by someone doubling down on the one thing all of us can double down on: being one's self. Unapologetically screwed up, vulnerable, perhaps a bit pissed-off, but playing your own damn game.

'Nobody Loves You More'

Apple

Spotify

Some things on YouTube:

Nobody Loves You More

Are You Mine

Disobedience

A Good Time Pushed

Crystal Breath

A short one this week. Have a lovely time - the holidays are upon us. Love love love.

Warm regards,

Luke

Reverb has been a studio staple effect since the 1950s, and traditionally, it’s been an expensive proposition. As an acoustic phenomena, reverb is complex and re-creating it required dedicated spaces initially—reverb chambers. Real estate ain’t cheap. Later, mechanical reverb simulators, like plate and spring reverbs were developed, but it was still costly. Digital reverbs started appearing in studios in the 80s, sounding great but again, rather expensive.

In the early 90s, the price barrier was broken and digital reverb units became affordable enough to find homes in smaller studios, home set-ups, and in musicians’ live setups. Soon artists were replicating their live and home studio sounds in the big studio by using these little cheap reverb units.

More expensive digital reverb units used a process called convolution to simulate reverb and other delay effects. Convolution required a lot of processing power, which made for an expensive and large unit.

An innovative designer named Keith Barr, trying to skirt this issue, developed a different means of generating reverb in part inspired by an older analog delay technology called “bucket brigade.”

Picture a bucket of water being handed from one person to another to another to another. That handoff takes a moment of time. The more people on the bucket bridge, the longer it takes the bucket to travel from start to finish.

This is roughly how a bucket brigade circuit works: a signal is passed from location to location within a circuit, or within a chipset. In the case of an analog bucket brigade, the signal quality degrades as it goes from location to location — think of water splashing out of the bucket as it’s passed.

Mr Barr did a similar thing but in the digital realm, using a computational loop. Think of the bucket perhaps being passed in a circle. The result wasn’t necessarily realistic, but it had a unique character, and for certain types of effects it was better sounding than convolution. Most importantly, it could be accomplished using less computational power, which resulted in low-cost, physically smaller devices. Instead of needing a dedicated room or a three-rack space box, you could get high-quality reverb out of a guitar pedal.

Mr Barr’s designs found their way into all sorts of processors and into the hands of musicians and engineers. The sound of many genres, such as Shoegaze and Trance, is built around these little, low-cost reverbs.

Our Micro Digital Reverberator is faithful to the sound of these units if not to the technology. Computational power is now cheap. Our MDR is built from carefully sampled impulse responses taken from our own collection of vintage hardware that we used in our home studios decades ago. It’s an interesting twist of fate that an inexpensive process, created to mimic an expensive process, is now itself being mimicked by the expensive process, which isn’t expensive anymore!

Whatever. The MDR has the sonic character of the original units and the fast, easy interfaces that made working with these things such a snap in the studio.

We use them the way we used them 30 years ago: slapping them onto a send and return, picking out a preset, and moving forward on the session with minimal fuss. Sometimes we’ll swap in something different in the final mix but more often than not, the unprepossessing Micro Digital Reverberator winds up being the reverb we use across the entire project. Fast, simple, and inexpensive has always been a winning formula.

Keith Barr died in 2010 at a relatively young 61. He was an innovator and a pioneer.

We’ve gotten really good feedback on our blogs, and we're glad a lot of you have been finding them helpful.

But in much of the feedback, people ask questions, usually about technical terms or issues. I try to write things such that they are “self-explained,” and you don’t need to google terms, but there are some concepts that require going deeper. And our plug-ins have more possibilities and performance if you understand things going on under the hood, or in the case of our plug-ins, around on the other side.

So, for the next few weeks, I’m going to address some of the these technical concepts in an easy to understand way. There will be some details I'll gloss over, and a few things I’ll simplify, but conceptually, everything I’ll write will be useful and applicable. The technical stuff is important to know and apply - it’s the reason we call ourselves Audio Engineers, because it’s engineering.

LET'S START WITH BIAS

Bias. There are reasons I want to start here, rather than something more elementary like dynamic range or “what is a dB” or some such. If you understand bias, you’ll understand a lot of other concepts, and things like dynamic range and harmonic distortion will actually make more sense when we get to them. And if you understand bias, our plug-ins will make more sense to you, especially since almost all of them have a tweakable bias control on them.

LOTS OF AMPLIFIERS

Analog recording equipment is made up of a bunch of components, things like tubes and transistors and transformers, etc. And digital plug-ins are all simulating the characteristics of those analog components.

Generally, in a piece of analog gear, no matter if it is an EQ or a compressor or a mic preamp, the heart of it, the thing that makes it work, is some sort of amplifier. So, for the rest of this article, when I write amplifier or component, I am NOT referring to a guitar amp, or a mic preamp or a stereo power amp; I'm referring to a little circuit thing stuffed down in all the analog gear you will ever run into. A recording console has literally thousands of amplifiers in it.

Amplifiers in equipment can be based on tubes, or on solid state component like transistors or OP amps, or some sort of combination. Obviously, if you've got a bunch of amplifiers in a device they're going to contribute a lot to the sound and character of the device, which is why tube EQs and compressors sound "tubey" and Neve EQ's sound "Nevey." The amplifiers inside the gear impart a particular sound.

AUDIO CIRCUITS HAVE A SWEET SPOT

Amplifier circuits of any type — tube or solid state — actually don't want to work properly. In some cases they don't want to work at all. They are very particular about the amount of input fed into them, and they can be very particular about power in general. And unless power is handled just right, a component might not work, or work like ass, or work inefficiently and burn out quickly. They have a sweet spot.

If you feed in too little power, you’ll be below the sweet spot, and for a lot of components, they simply won't work, or if they do work they're very quiet, or really noisy. If you feed in too much power, you’ll be above the sweet spot and while the component will work, it might be distorted or otherwise bizarre sounding.

Weird shit happens outside of the sweet spot. It’s like frying eggs. If you set the frying pan’s temperature too low, your eggs are going to be sitting in oil getting all disgusting without getting cooked. Nice. Oily raw eggs. If you have the frying pan crazy hot, when you drop in the egg, the oil will come splattering out, making a mess, burning the egg and your face off (if you decided to lean over the pan like an idiot). The sweet spot of the pan is the right temperature, such that the egg cooks just fast enough that you have control, and you get the egg that you want.

LINEARITY AND NON-LINEARITY

For many amplifiers, the “sweet spot” is when the response of it is LINEAR. You’ve probably heard this term a lot. Basically, when a circuit is linear, the signal that comes out of it is the same as the signal that feeds into it. Now, if it’s an amplifier, the signal coming out might be more powerful (louder), but if the amp is linear, the frequency response of the output closely matches the frequency response of the input. In simplest term, shit sounds the same going in as it does coming out.

If the level of power you feed in is BELOW the sweet spot area, the response is NON-LINEAR, if the device even worked and passed signal. If you go OVER the sweet spot, the response is also non-linear, and what comes out of the component isn’t the same as what went in.

How is the output different if the component is non-linear? Well, there can be a lot of things different about the two signals, from changes in the frequency response to changes in the envelope, but the thing engineers are usually looking at when they want to discuss linear/non-linear is Harmonic Distortion.

We’re going to spend a lot of time on harmonic distortion, but not today. For now, all you need to know is that if a device is behaving in a non-linear manner, harmonic distortion typically increases.

Recap:
Linear: what comes out is the same as what goes in
Non-Linear: what comes out has been changed, and is different from what goes in.

AMPLIFIERS ARE LAZY

Now, here’s the problem, and this is true for many of the components in a piece of audio equipment. They only behave in a linear way across a small range of power. In many cases, this range is TINY. Outside of this range, the component is non-linear. So, the big trick to designing an analog preamp or a compressor, is to make sure all of the different amplifiers are getting a power level that makes them linear, and that level might be different for many of the components involved. Again, if you’re below that tight power range, the component might not even work, and if you’re above it, the component will add distortion.

So, for most amplifiers, there needs to be a BIAS signal added to it, and this makes the amplifier play nice with the audio signal. The type of bias signal can be very different depending on the component, and the circuitry involved can be different, but in general, all bias signals push an amplifier or a component towards efficient, linear performance.

BIAS: THE GUN TO THE HEAD

Bias for some amplifiers or components is basically a gun to the head. As an example, to get an analog tape deck to record, a super high pitched and very powerful bias signal is mixed in with the much weaker audio signal and actually printed to tape. This bias signal is so strong that it forces the magnetic particles on the tape to actually record. Some types of transistor based amplifiers also need to have a bias signal mixed in with the audio input signal, and then the bias signal, which you don’t want to hear, is filtered out.

In this case, bias is like... going to a birthday party place when you're a little kid and you want to go in the Ball Pit or use the Bouncy Castle or something and there's a height requirement, and you're too short. Your head needs to come up to a certain line by the door, and if it doesn't, no Ball Pit for you, you stumpy little bastard.

But, you have special Bias Shoes, that add a few inches to your height (they add power). You put them on, and now you appear tall (powerful) enough to get into the Ball Pit (linear amplifier performance).

BIAS: SETTING A CAR IDLE

Other types of amps use bias differently. In this case, the bias is sort of an efficiency adjustment. A device might work with a wide range of bias settings, but again, there is a sweet spot where it works best.

A way to think of this is to think about a car idle. When your foot is off the gas, with a normal gas powered car, the engine runs but it doesn’t put out so much power that you can’t control the car by just holding down the brake. In fact, if it is set right, you should be able to drive the car, albeit very slowly, just by the brake. If the idle is set too high, when you lift your foot off the brake the car jumps forward. You can set the idle so high that the car can’t be stopped even with the brake slammed down. The idle can also be set so low that the car coughs and stalls, or that when you step on the gas it dies. If you set the idle just right, the car purrs like a kitten, can be controlled by the brake at really low speeds, and when you punch the gas it takes off and there’s plenty of power to drive with.

A bad idle setting is hard on the engine, hard on the transmission, burns more gas and makes the car really hard to drive. Likewise, for some types of amps, like a tube amp, if the tubes are biased correctly the amp is quiet, has plenty of power when you need to rock out, and the tubes have a long life. Set the bias wrong and you’ll burn out tubes, cause excessive distortion, or the output might sound dull and lifeless.

ADJUSTING BIAS

First of all, what you SHOULDN'T do is open up your mic preamp or your vintage tube compressor, locate the trim potentiometer that adjusts bias and then dick around with it. In physical audio gear, bias is generally set at the factory and it's not something the average person should deal with. Now, as gear ages, bias settings can drift, and as they do, the performance of the piece of gear will change. In some cases, the drift might make things sound better, and it other cases, it might make it sound worse.

But with virtual equipment, like Korneff Audio's Talkback Limiter, or Pawn Shop Comp, there's a bias potentiometer that you can adjust. And as you might think, if you turn the bias counterclockwise, the circuit's performance changes one way, and if you turn it the other, it sounds different yet another way.

What you're doing, in analog terms, is adjusting the overall output and linearity of the circuit. With one of our plug-ins, you're adjusting values in a computer algorithm that will change the harmonic distortion characteristics of the signal. Depending on the plug-in and the audio signal you're feeding it, you might even get changes to the envelope of the sound, the attack and release of the compressor, etc.

Dan especially loves tweaking bias on his vintage analog equipment and analog gear he makes. And he wanted to give you guys an experience of what that might be like, and how it might affect audio signals. All without the danger of blowing things up or getting electrocuted. In virtual Korneff Audio World, by all means click the Korneff nameplate, go around back and tweak away.

So that is BIAS. It’s a signal that makes an analog audio device work efficiently and have a linear output. If it's not set right, things will either not work at all or sound distorted or like ass in general.

Bias in a nutshell. Now, go be the damn audio genius I know that you can be.

If you have questions, feel free to post them up on Facebook or use the contact form up top and send us an email.

Nailing the reverb and ambience on lead vocals can be really tricky. This week, we’re going to show you a method for doing vocal ‘verb that’s easy, basically fool proof, and will work for music of any genre. AND we’re going to show you a nifty vocal reverb trick that you can use to highlight a specific section of a song.

Three Reverbs on a Vocal

The basis of this method of getting vocal reverb is similar to that which we use on snare - read Dan’s Snare Trick blog post from last week if you missed it. We will be using three different reverbs. The first will add thickness and presence to the vocal, the second will place the vocal in an acoustic space, and the third reverb is a special, which you can use to highlight the vocal in specific sections of the song.

ONE: Thick and Present

First, instantiate a Micro Digital Reverberator on the vocal channel’s insert, after all the other processing you’ve got happening (EQ, compression, etc.). Regardless of what MDR program you use, turn DRY fully clockwise and lower WET to around 50%. You’ll adjust WET more later.

For a program, you’re looking for a small room that will add texture and thickness to the vocal but not really reverb.

These are the programs we like to use. We tend to choose one that is the opposite of the voice — it it is a dark, bass voice we choose a brighter program. For a bright or higher voice, try one of the darker settings. If you don’t know what to pick, just use Machine 1 Small 1, it always works great for this.

Machine 1 Small 1
Machine 2 01 Small Bright .1 SEC
Machine 2 02 Small Bright .2 SEC
Machine 2 03 Small Bright .3 SEC
Machine 2 05 Medium Bright .6 SEC
Machine 2 09 Medium Dark .5 SEC

With reverb times above 300 ms (.3 seconds or higher) beware setting WET too high, it can sound like a bathroom. Typically, we wind up using Machine 1 Small 1 or Machine 2 09.

Most vocal tracks are recorded in mono, but at this stage, switch the channel’s output to stereo—you’ll see why in a moment.

Press the Korneff nameplate to pivot around to the back of the MDR, find the WIDTH trimpot and set it to 50% or lower. Because you’ve switched your mono vocal track into stereo, the stereo width control will have the effect of widening the voice a little bit. You can crank it all the way up to 200%, but depending on the song this might be a bit distracting. This is one of the settings you’ll be messing with later in your mix as you add in instruments, etc.

So, now your vocal should be a little bit bigger and commanding more attention in your mix, but it won’t be louder or processed sounding.

Quick trick here: crank up the INPUT gain to drive the MDR a little bit. This will get you a cool, slightly grainy saturation. Be sure you turn the OUTPUT gain down otherwise you’ll digitally clip the channel, and that will sound like ass.

TWO: Reverb and Ambience

The vocal, at this stage, is probably too dry to sound polished and professional, so we want to add a reverb effect that we can really hear and recognize as reverb. We’ll do this using an effects send.

Set-up a send from the vocal channel, and put an MDR on the insert of the Return. Set the DRY to 100% and the WET to 0%—this is the way the MDR initially loads in.

There are a TON of possible reverb programs on the MDR to choose from at this point, so a lot of what you pick will come down to taste. We typically use medium and smaller sounding rooms on vocals when songs are fast, and bigger, large rooms and plates and halls when songs are slower. These are the settings that we keep going back to all the time:

Machine 2 13 Large Warm 1.1 SEC is a gorgeous reverb and generally where I start. IF it is too bright, I look for something darker, if it is too big I look for something smaller, etc. This particular program blends really well within a full mix, and it adds polish without making things sound “reverby” like a record from the early ‘60s.

Machine 2 22 Large Warm 1.75 SEC sounds like a vintage echo chamber and is very musical and rhythmic on a vocal. Great for ballads and things like that.

Machine 1 Large 1 always sounds good, but it might be too much for some music.

Machine 1 Small 5 works great on vocals with lots of short words when intelligibility is needed.

Machine 1 Small 6 This isn’t a room, it is a smooth and dark plate reverb effect, and it can be way too much. We like to use this but throw it way back in the mix so you only really hear it in the gaps of the other instruments.

THREE: A Special

During your mix, you’ll probably have some moments where you want the vocal to jump out and really call attention to itself. For that, we’re going to use a special.

Sibilance - your enemy, your little pal...

Generally, on vocals, we try to get control of sibilance. Sibilant frequencies are in the 5kHZ area and they add intelligibility to speech and singing. They are the frequencies generated by consonants. As people get older, these frequencies get harder to hear, which is why you have to repeat yourself and speak very clearly around grandma and grandpa (especially if they were in a punk band when they were younger). Too much sibilance on a record, though, sounds hissy and spitty. It’s caused by sounds like S and T overloading a microphone or a preamp somewhere. Usually, we don’t want sibilance. However, this trick is all about generating sibilance.

Set up yet another effects send from your vocal channel. Crank up the send level a bit. On the return channel, add channel EQ or a High Pass Filter, and follow it with yet another MDR on that insert. Set it to 100% WET, 0% DRY.

Dan loves the Vocal Whisper preset on the Lexicon 480L unit, so we’re going to sort of rip that sound off a bit.

On the channel EQ you’ve got before the MDR, put a high pass filter at about 10kHZ and roll off everything below it. This will prevent almost anything other than high pitched vocal sounds from getting to the MDR.

On the MDR, set it to Machine 2 50 Multitap Reverse. Flip around to the back panel of the MDR and set DAMPING to -1.6dB, LPF to 13.2kHz and WIDTH to 170% (you can go higher).

As you play your mix, you’ll notice that S’s and T’s, and other sibilant consonants, will jump out and kind of sound like ghostly whispers. Adjust the High Pass Filter of the EQ to get more or less of the effect. Dan likes to use this in relatively open areas of the song to create a scary, unsettling mood.

A good way to figure out where you want to use this effect is to put it on the vocal somewhere in the middle of your mix process and listen to the entire mix with it a few times. Generally, there will be certain spots where the effect jumps out. I often just leave stuff like this on always so there is a random element happening in the mix to give me ideas.

Some Other Ideas

There are all sorts of fun variations on this you can try. As an example, rather than setting a high pass filter, set a low pass around 400Hz and send all that dark, warm low-end gunk into the MDR. Set the MDR to Machine 2 34 Slow Gate 450 MSEC. If you listen to the effect all by itself it, it sounds like a moron singing in the shower, but in the mix it gives the vocal subtle movement and texture, and makes it seem wetter than it actually is. When I do this, I set my other vocal reverbs to something bright so things don’t get muddy.

And of course, try this trick on guitars, synths, etc.

And that is it for this week. Let us know how this all works for you on our Discord or Facebook.

The other day on our Discord channel, Dan Korneff shared a snare drum trick that uses the Korneff Audio Micro Digital Reverberator.

Dan is well-known for his hard hitting, articulate drum and snare sounds. Not many producers/engineers have snare sounds that are considered iconic, but Dan does—search "Paramore Riot snare” on Gearspace - multiple threads come up.

His MDR snare trick is easy and gives you a lot of control over the size of the snare and how it sits in the stereo field.

What you're going to do is set up two different MDRs. One we’ll call the Fatter, the other we’ll call the Wider. Together, they’ll make your snare fatter and wider. Think of it as drinking beer and sitting around with no exercise all day for the snare.

Make the Snare Fatter

Start by dropping a Micro Digital Reverberator instance on the snare channel, or on the snare bus if you are combining multiple snare sources together. Do this by placing the MDR in an insert location, after any other processing on the channel.

Switch the MDR over to Machine 2, and bring up program 03 Small Bright 0.3 Sec. Set DRY all the way to the right, and bring down WET to around 2:00. You want to pass all of the snare through the MDR, and then add the effect back in.

03 Small Bright 0.3 Sec has a timbre similar to that of a tight drum booth or a small, highly reflective room. The very short time of this patch means that it will sound more like a doubling than a discrete reverb. It will thicken the snare up and make it last a little longer.

Press the Korneff nameplate to switch the MDR to the back side so you can tweak the circuit. Locate the blue trimpot to the left—it’s labeled WIDTH. Turn this all the way counterclockwise to 0%. This will make the the wet signal mono, so even if you’ve got a stereo snare track (for some reason), the effect will be confined tightly. This reinforces the snare’s solidity in the sound field.

Make the Snare Wider

To widen out the ambience of the snare, you’re going to set up another instance of the MDR, only rather than using it via a channel insert, you’re going to feed it via an effects send.

Set up a new send on the channel and turn it up to 50% for starters. Find the return, and put the MDR into an insert slot on it. The MDR instance will load and the DRY should be all the way to the left (fully counterclockwise) and the WET should be all the way to the right (fully clockwise). You don’t want any dry signal in an effects return.

A fresh instance on the MDR will come up set to Machine 1, program Large 1. This is not a coincidence—the plug-in’s default is the patch Dan uses the most, and it’s perfect for this application. Large 1 is dark and has a decay time of around .6 seconds and sounds like a big studio live room that has been damped down to control flutter and ring. It has a noticeable slap to it. To my ear, it has a “cannon" sort of effect on a snare.

Flip around to the back of the MDR and set the WIDTH trimpot to 100%. We want this as wide as possible to wrap that ambience around us a bit.

Adjust Adjust Adjust!

Depending on the genre of music and the density of your mix, you’ll have to adjust the settings a bit, and this is where the PRE-DELAY control on the front comes in really handy.

PRE-DELAY delays the onset of the effect. At low settings it is hard to hear, and as you turn it up you’ll increase the separation between the dry signal and the wet signal. Below 40ms, the dry and the wet will sound cohesive, but once you get higher than 40ms, the two signals will separate and your ear will hear them as two clearly different events. Very high settings will give a slapjack like effect and start to add an additional rhythmic component to your mix. You may or may not want that.

On the Fatter MDR, the one set to Machine 2,, as you adjust the PRE-DELAY the sound of the snare will brighten. Turn up the WET control to increase the size of the snare. To my ear, turning up WET seems to increase how hard the drummer is hitting. Seriously, even if you’re not using the wider portion of this trick, it’s a good thing to slap an MDR with this patch on your snare always. In a weird way it is doing the work of both a compressor and an EQ but in a much subtler way.

PRE-DELAY and the level of the return on the Wider MDR (the one set to Machine 1), has a lot of effect on the location of the snare from front to back in your stereo space. By messing with level and PRE-DLAY you can “move” the snare back or forward in relation to the rest of the drum set. Too much effect can make the snare sound like it was recorded in a completely different space than the other drums, and this might be an effect you’re going for. I usually want my drums to sound integrated and cohesive, so I’ll set Wider so that snare plays nicely with the rest of the mix.

Feel free to use different programs on the MDR and experiment a bit. In general, though, the trick works best with smaller spaces on the Fatter, and larger spaces on the Wider.

Some Extra Ideas

I usually feed a little of the hi-hat into the Wider using the effects send. Huge, distant snares with small, dry hi-hats sound goofy to me. I like these two instruments appearing like they at least know each other and not like they’re meeting each other for the first time on a Tinder date.

You might want to think about automating the Wider return. In general, you should be automating your reverb returns, almost “riding” them like any other instrument in your mix. In spots where you want the snare to be prominent, ride the return up, in places where things need to be tightened and tucked in a bit, pull the return down. I especially like bringing reverbs up during fade-outs, so it sounds like the song is fading away into space rather than simply getting quieter.

See You On Discord

This blog was inspired by a question that came up on our Discord channel. Thanks to Mistawalk! Dan and I monitor our Discord, and we definitely answer questions and give out ideas and tricks all the time on it, so hit up our Discord. And our Facebook. We’ll help you out however we can.

 

Thoughts on Reverb by Dan Korneff

Reverb is probably the most often used effect in modern recordings. When you think about it, the ability to transform the space in which our instruments exist with a couple clicks of a button is pretty mind blowing. As with any element in the recording process, the use (or misuse) of reverb is completely subjective, and your only limitation is your imagination.

In my world, reverb serves two completely different, and equally important purposes. The first use is a very practical approach. Whether you realize it or not, EVERYTHING you hear exists in some kind of space. When you’re having a conversation with someone, their voice sounds different in a hallway than it does in a closet. Even if the closet is really small, you still hear some type of ambiance. You not only hear the direct sound of a source, but you also experience the ambiance of the environment.

Since most modern engineers spend a good amount of time isolating instruments (close mics with tons of baffles) and removing the environment from their tracks (ever use a reflection filter on your vocal mic?), The very first thing I do, especially on vocals, is insert a reverb on the channel and create an ambient “space”. I’m not talking about slapping a 3 second reverb on everything. It’s going to be something short — 1 to 3 seconds. Just a touch of something to make the track sound like it’s not hovering in the center of an anechoic chamber. Since I’m trying to recreate a natural space, it only seems fitting to use a more “natural” sounding reverb. One of my favorite settings is the MDR Machine 2 on Preset 1. It’s small and bright, and a tiny bit just fits right in for me.

Give these shorter reverbs a try on some tracks. You might just be surprised by how quickly your mix starts becoming bigger and better sounding.

The second approach is way less practical, and a LOT more fun! I grew up in the 80’s, where EVERYTHING was bigger. It wasn’t just the size of your AquaNet-soaked hair at school, it was reverb too! Everything was drenched in it. You’d have to send a rescue dog on a daily basis to help find your favorite singer at the bottom of a well. Every snare sounded like a punching bag, exploding from the speakers. What's not fun about that??

The impractical use of unnatural sounding spaces can lead to some really unique sounds that are so odd you’ll want to hear them over and over again. Using a setting like Machine 1 – Large 7 on a sparse guitar performance, or a short percussive vocal hook might just be that over-the-top decay you need to make the track stand out. Exaggerate your snare with the exploding ambiance of Machine 1 – Large 3. Add a little texture to a vocal with Machine 2 – Program 49.

If you’ve been behind the console for 25 years like me, reverb is not a new concept. Using these units for their practical purpose can be a thankless job, but necessary to bring extra realism to your music. But don’t deny yourself the fun of creating wildly unnatural or super exaggerated moments in your tracks whenever you can. Reverb might just become fun again for you.