New Monday #128
Happy Monday -
I am writing this wondering what to write about. I have the late July doldrums.
There’s a beta version of the KA1776 that’s getting beta’d right now. You should see an update this week. The back panel elves went crazy on the back panel, see?
KA1776 Rear Panel... worth the wait.
Ok. Wrote about that. Sigh.
I could write about a song—oh: Two weeks ago I wrote about a charming little tune called Little Love by a singer named Pearl, and the producer/co-writer, Matt Ingram, wrote me and said the bass part was played on a Mini-Moog. I thought it was an electric bass…. There goes my credibility, shot to hell. Sigh.
I want to start a whole new section of New Monday called “That Damn Ringo” and it’s dedicated to how cool Ringo’s drum parts are on Beatles songs. After all this time, there are still people that feel the need to put Ringo down. “Ringo isn’t as good as Mitch Mitchell/John Bonham/Neil Peart/Charlie Watts/Chuck “Leadfoot” Masterangelo,” etc.
That Damn Ringo
Well, there’s She Said She Said. Ringo is so good he doesn’t need to play the hihat. This was actually the song that sold me on The Beatles.
She Said She Said has been remixed by Giles Martin. He goes back to the original takes, separates the individual tracks out, and presents a different view of the song. I'm not always a fan, and I think in the case of this song, something is lost, but George is now on the right, John is on the left... and John's rhythm part is unexpectedly interesting and cool...
I made up Chuck “Leadfoot” Masterangelo. But feel free to pretend he’s real and make your drummer friends feel inadequate.
A Detour for the Tour Bus
Speaking of inadequate, many years ago, my cousin Patty married a guy named Lee who was, and still is, 6’5”. And a great guy. At their engagement party, Lee’s sister, who was hot, brought her boyfriend, who was a lawyer and… he was a dick. He had a Beau Middleton energy—Beau Middleton being the bad guy/enemy of Nicholas Cage in the movie Valley Girl.
Actor Anthony Edward aka Beau Middleton aka Goose from Top Gun
So, this lawyer boyfriend of Lee’s sister asked me what I did for a living, and at the time I was a guitarist and making records, etc., and I told him that, and he proceeded to launch into this whole THING about this band he was in, and how they had THE BEST DRUMMER and on and on about gigs in North Carolina blah blah blah like I could give a shit shaped like a carrot that your bassist fell into a pool and other adventures involving guitar cords and alcohol.
He paused for a breath and I quickly interjected, “In my 10th grade social studies class we did a mock trial when we were studying the rise of the communists in China and I got to be a lawyer.” And I proceeded to launch into a whole THING about me cross-examining some kid in my class and how we had to swear people in and how Mr Norton, the teacher, was the judge and on and on and finally he interrupted me and said, “Why are you telling me this? I’m a real lawyer.”
I patted his chest and said, “I’m a real musician.” And then I walked away. Score! 10 points for the goofy Italian kid!
Beau Middleton stayed away from me the rest of the night, and later, at Patty and Lee’s wedding, I found out Lee’s sister ditched his lawyer ass. There was much celebration.
This was a great song on the Valley Girl soundtrack:
SO… what was the point of that story?
This was the moment when I discovered that you can tell an awful lot about people by how they react when they find out information about you. Do they ask questions, or do they compete and talk about themselves?
I usually ask questions: “Oh, you’re a lawyer. What kind of law? Have you ever bribed a judge or bought off a jury? Do you sleep with your clients?” Things like that.
I always have a guitar or something behind me in a Zoom meeting. When it is a meeting for a plug-in or music biz thing, usually no one cares and that’s that. But when it is for something else, very often, some guy spots the guitar, and launches into a whole THING about his guitar and his band and the whole dick lawyer scene. And suddenly, I know all about this guy, and he knows very little about me. These guys just never ask questions.
Tell me, in a business situation, would you rather know about them, or have them know about you? Information is power.
Ask questions.
Speaking of information and power:
The Sidechain
On a compressor, the sidechain is a circuit that feeds some of the audio signal to the detector circuit that then causes the compressor to kick in and out. The sidechain is SUPER IMPORTANT. No sidechain, no workie, GI Joe.
A stereo compressor=both channels get fed the same sidechain signal that is a mix of a bit of the left and the right.
That high pass filter on compressors? It’s in the sidechain. It rolls a bit of the bass off so the compressor doesn’t trigger on the low end stuff, like the kick, etc. It sort of balances out the response of the compressor, but because the filter is in the sidechain, it doesn’t change the frequency response of the audio signal; it just changes how the compressor reacts to the signal.
Early de-essers were compressors with a bit of EQ in the sidechain to make it more sensitive to the upper mid frequencies where esses in singing occur. Or cymbals, or harsh guitars. Stick an EQ in the sidechain and you can make the compressor do all sorts of funky things. Weird resonance on a piano note? Compress it with an EQ boosted to that note in the sidechain.
Then there’s keying, which is when you feed a signal into the sidechain from another channel entirely. The classic application is to run a bass track through the compressor, and a kick into the sidechain, and set things so that kick hits cause the compressor to clamp down and lower the gain of the bass. Suddenly, there’s that kick coming through the low end because it moved the bass out of the way. This is called Ducking and you all know this and if you don’t, knowledge is power and you’re an Energizer Bunny now!
Of course, run the background music through the compressor and then run a voice-over into the sidechain and now the voice-over drops the gain of the background like the invisible hand of Chuck “Leadfoot” Masterangelo, broadcast engineer.
You can duck everything. Too much reverb? Duck it with the vocals, and then when the person is singing there’ll be less reverb and it will be clearer and when they stop singing you’ll hear the reverb the reverb the reverb the reverb… Works good for echos too, and also on any instrument. Truly, you should be ducking your reverbs almost all the time, especially as your mixes get more and more dense.
I duck the room tracks on drums with the kick, to get the bottom end cleaner. So… kick ducks room tracks and the bass. When there is some sort of solo kick part (oh, that happens all the time…) turn off the ducking so you can hear the kick in the room. Contrast!
Vocals lost? Duck the midrange of the mix a little bit. I could go on and on.
Sidechain Blend Knob
NOW… our KA1776 has a blend knob on the sidechain. Click SIDECHAIN to BLEND and feed something into the Key Input.
What this does is let you feed a mix of the audio signal you’re compressing and some external source into the same compressor. Now, why the heck would you want to do that?
I first started doing this on the SSL bus compressor. I was mixing, and I liked how it sounded, but it wasn’t quite… gluing together.
A Brief Discussion of Glue
I hate this word. People are all, “Compressors glue the mix together.”
It seems to me that one musical part tends to be loudest on the mix, usually a kick and snare thing, and that will cause the compressor to reduce gain, and the entire track getting a touch quieter and then louder and then quieter and then louder makes it sound like the band was actually tight and not a bunch of drunk lawyers playing the Christmas party at the Law Firm of Middleton, Middleton and Shithead Esquire.
It makes the music more rhythmically cohesive. Some engineers also say there’s a harmonic distortion component to it but I don’t see how the whole band generating harmonic distortion through the same compressor is any different than harmonic distortion caused by separate circuits all around the studio, etc. If you have a compelling argument for this, please write me!
Sidechain Blend Knob Part 2
SO… I had this mix with an SSL bus compressor on it, and the band was a mess. Like they never met each other. The tightest track on the song was a rhythm guitar part. But if I pushed that up into the mix such that the compressor “rode” on the guitar part, it threw balance off, making it sound tighter and yet worse. Sort of, “They suck as a band, but that guy who does personal injury for the firm is like the Ringo of Rhythm guitar.”
Clearly, the solution was to somehow trigger the bus compressor from the rhythm guitar, but not entirely. So I figured out how to get a send to feed the external key (sidechain) of the bus comp, and then fed the entire mix through the external key, and then brought up the send on the rhythm guitar and… dang! They still sucked, but they sucked TOGETHER.
This is was the genesis of the blend on the sidechain on the KA1776. There’s even more stuff you can do with it.
What if… you have a bus feeding through your trusty KA1776, which you purchased when it was first released for only $17.76! And you decide… let’s have it ignore the vocal a bit. Like… less compression on the vocal, but still have the whole bus or whatever compressing. How would you do that?
Split the vocal track to two channels, reverse the phase of one of them and don’t let that phased reversed signal feed any outputs (you don’t feed the output to a bus or the stereo bus) but you do feed that phase-reversed vocal into the KA1776 key, and then blend it a bit. The phase-reversed vocal cancels the vocal signal a bit in the sidechain and now the compressor is less sensitive to the vocal so it ignores it. Are you following this bit?
Some of you are saying, ‘Well, just feed an uncompressed vocal somewhere else into the bus and yada yada yada…” Sigh. Don’t take the fun out of things for me.
Compress the room tracks then phase reverse the tom toms so they don’t get compressed and are strangely dry. Or feed the toms into the sidechain after delaying them so the compressor squashes down after? Or shift a copy of the tom tracks ahead in time so they trigger the compressor BEFORE the tom hits? Set a long release and it will sound backwards.
Set the KA1776 to dual mono. Pan out a doubled guitar part wide right and left, and then have the left guitar duck the right compressor and the right guitar duck the left compressor and suddenly you have tighter guitar players. Or you could dick around with the mouse and the DAW, moving things around like you're designing wedding invitations in Canva.
The point is to EXPERIMENT. And we just gave you a thing with which to experiment. Tell me your ideas.
Should we set up our own Korneff online community? Let me know what you think.
Good lord, I talk too much. For not knowing what to write, I wrote a lot. I hope it isn’t all dumb. See you at the Korneff DeLalio Manuel Valente Ragan and Christadoro Esquire Xmas party. Dan’s buying. I’m making sammiches!
Warm regards,
Luke
Shout out to Robert Johnson: musician, photographer, videographer, fighter pilot, coffee drinker, all around good dude.