New Monday #108

Happy Monday!

Well, another fine plan, shot to hell.

We’re holding on releasing our Sunset Sound Chamber One plug-in for a bit. It’s for a good reason, but I feel vaguely bad. Here I am, writing about this thing, which I will admit is awesome, and telling you all sorts of history, and now... you have to wait. It’s like... I’ve been promising the kids ice cream cake, and everyone is at the table, spoons at the ready... and it’s HERE ARE YOUR FISH STICKS, KIDS! And then I drop the plate. They don’t even get fish sticks. And then I make them watch a documentary on school busing problems during the civil rights protests of the 1960s.

As long as we’re here, though, we might as well learn more about the ice cream cake that turns into fish sticks that you’re not getting for a while.

Capturing Impulse Responses

You go into a room. You set up a speaker and some microphones. Then you send a test tone through the speaker. You sweep the tone from really low to really high—perhaps across the range of human hearing, from 20Hz to 20kHz. You sit with your friends in the control room, with your arms raised up, and when you can no longer hear the test tone, you lower your arm and feel bad about choices you made when you were younger that have destroyed your hearing above 12k. You can fake it, and just leave your arm up. Just make sure you pull it down before Dan says, “The test tone ended 5 seconds ago, you faker."

ANYWAY... so the test tone goes out into the room, bounces off the walls and floor and ceiling, and finds its way into the microphones and then into a preamp and an A to D converter and then into Pro-Tools or whatever the DAW is. The recording of the tone takes into account the design and materials of the room, giving you a picture of how the room decays not only across time but across frequency. That’s capturing an impulse response.

Of course, the speakers and the microphones and preamps all make a difference. Our IRs of Sunset Sound were done using a variety of microphones and preamps, and the result is IRs with a lot of character. Some companies shoot IRs using special speakers and test microphones, such that the IR of the space is only the reflections off the surfaces in the space, uncolored by the response of the speakers and mics. Bah! We LIKE all that extra color and character. What makes Sunset Sound sound like Sunset Sound is more than just the architecture. In other words, THEM FISH STICKS NEED SAUCE, BABY!

Is anyone wondering about the sound of the test tone itself that was recorded when the IR was captured? Because that sweep from low to high is all over those recordings, right? It fed out into the room and into the mics... how to get rid of that? Well, generally, the test tone itself is a recorded track on the DAW, so you have that and all these other recordings of it with the echoes of the room and... any ideas? Australia—any ideas?

Reverse the phase and the sweep is gone. And, of course, you’ve got some other processing to do, but that's the basic trick: anti-fish stick eliminated fish stick.

IR Reverb/Convolution

Once you have that map, that pattern of all the delays and bounces of the room, what happens is CONVOLUTION. You feed a signal into the reverb unit. It takes a single sample, and runs that through the IR map of the room, which adds hundreds of delays to it. Then the whole thing advances by one sample, and that sample gets processed through the IR map. And you do this sample by sample by sample. If your session has a sample rate of 48kHz, then that process happens 48000 times a second. A lot of fish sticks.

It is processor-intensive, but it results in a highly accurate rendition of the way that instrument would sound in that chamber.

Algorithmic Reverb

All reverb is hundreds of thousands of delays. So, rather than going to all the trouble of shooting a room, we could just program hundreds and thousands of delays, and adjust their delay times and the number of repeats, and add filters and EQ, and make a model of the room. This is how our Micro Digital Reverberator works—the presets are approximations of how a room or a plate sounds, not a map of it.

The downside of an Algo reverb is accuracy. The upside is that you can mess around with the delay times and create all sorts of reverbs that don’t sound like the room. You can make it bigger, brighter, smaller, more midrangy—all sorts of fun stuff. You can also mix and match...

Hybrid

Take the beginning part of the IR—because those initial impulses contain most of the aural character of the space, and then graft that onto an Algo, and now you’ve got the coolness of the real space followed by the coolness of being able to totally mess with it. Make the chamber small sounding. Or larger than it actually is. Or modulate it. Or freeze it or bit crush it or stutter it or whatever you want. Start with fish sticks and morph it into ice cream!

Yes, the reverb that you will NOT BE GETTING RIGHT NOW has all of that innate coolness in it.

I feel very guilty. Eat your fish sticks, Luke. They’re cold and you deserve it.

Indian Summer

In 1966, The Doors cut a beautiful, simple love song, Indian Summer, at Sunset Sound, for their debut album, The Doors. It was actually more of a rehearsal run-down than an actual attempt at cutting the song. But, in 1966, The Doors were tight from playing live and cut the entire album basically live in a week. It also helped that Jim Morrison was totally out of his mind and/or drunk. Light My Fire was two takes, The End was two takes. The Doors was a fabulous debut.

Indian Summer wasn’t released. Here is the mix from 1966. This, and the whole first Doors album, were cut in Studio One at Sunset—really Studio Only, because Studio Two was still architectural drawings and a dream. Studio Only had a custom tube console built by Alan Emig and a four-track tape deck. This mix is on the Emig tube console, with Sunset Sound's gorgeous chamber one for reverb.

https://youtu.be/ly6C8hIEz-s?si=5YabTpNHFam7_aW3

By 1969, The Doors were a mess. Specifically, Jim Morrison was a mess and dragging the band into the toilet. Arrests, public drunkenness... the band was hounded by bad press, cancelled gigs. Things sucked. They went to Elektra Studios in LA and cut the album Morrison Hotel.

The second English recording console in the US was installed at Elektra Studios in LA. It was also a Sound Techniques A-Range, and the deal was brokered by Tutti Camarata, the owner of Sunset Sound. Elektra was a state-of-the-art studio at the time, with a great console and... a reverb chamber!

Morrison recut his vocal on Indian Summer and they mixed it on the Sound Techniques console using Elektra’s reverb chamber. Note the drums have Sunset Sound’s chamber on them—it was a four-track and drums and bass were mixed to one track and panned left, guitars and keys mixed to another and panned right, then one track for vocals and another for everything else. You can hear the sounds of the different chambers on this, and it’s a nifty comparison of two studios, two different consoles, but virtually the same recording. The Elektra chamber sounds smaller and darker to me.

https://youtu.be/klrKliyfHKs?si=4KGRHpN3Nq8BNbh9

And finally, there’s this, The Doors nod to the civil unrest and race riots of the late 1960s... the wonderful Peace Frog, cut at Elektra to eight-tracks on the Sound Techniques.

https://youtu.be/eh-9EVi_tN8?si=_FbgM0etReES4xX0

Oh no! And I found a different—really different—mix of Peace Frog too. The Sound Techniques is one punchy console. Great drums for 1969.

https://youtu.be/0NTg4Z_R_sU?si=DxjMc-b878QW8Y6A

And that’s it for today. I’m all Doors’d out.

Warm regards, my friends,

Luke