New Monday #16

Happy Monday,

So much to write about...

We’re in a Podcast

Our friends Benedikt and Malcom from The Self Recording Band recently had a conversation with Dan and I about recording, Korneff Audio, plug-ins, the industry, etc.

Benedikt and Malcom are great guys who know their stuff. Their website has lots of resources on it, including the Podcast with the guys from Korneff. Audio.

Double, x2, Twice as Much

Double double toil and trouble... Today we’re looking at doing things x2. And there are double the number of production ideas and tips in here today, including Dan Korneff’s Secret Secret. Read on...

Production tip from Shakespeare

Here’s the beginning of a monologue from William Shakespeare's Hamlet:

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his own conceit

This monologue from Hamlet goes on for like another 65 lines and then at the end, you get this:

More relative than this. The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.

71 lines of blank verse (that’s what they call this stuff) that do not rhyme, and then 2 lines that do.

I studied Shakespeare at Oxford in the early 80’s, this monologue in particular, and the question was always: Why do the last two lines rhyme?

Shakespeare did it to make them stand out. To catch your ear. To add EMPHASIS. To make you remember that particular moment as important.

I started to hear examples of this sort of thinking on records. Echos that would pop on for only a few words. A moment of strange EQ or distortion. Some little thing to grab your ear for a moment, like someone highlighting a line of text in a book.

The Beatles were masters of this, and they did it very often with doubling. Or, in some cases, not doubling.

And I Love Her, the sort of ballad ANYONE would be lucky to write (notice the all caps... emphasis...). Have a listen, and note how the doubling of the vocal works.

Only two lines out of the whole song are un-doubled! All the rest is doubled. And they don’t even seem to be very consequential lyrics, but they do force you to pay attention to the hook line that follows.

So, next time you’re mixing and making, think about what little moment can be made special, and how you might do that.

There’s another thing to learn from this particular song: if you write something with a killer melody and have a great singer sing it, you don’t need to do much production-wise to make magic.

Dan Korneff’s Secret Secret

I was surprised to learn that Dan’s mix bus has two iterations of the Puff Puff mixPass on it (along with a bunch of other things). I asked him about it, and he said this:

“If something sounds good, I do it again, figuring that it will sound even better. With the Puff Puff on the mix bus, I added one with the default settings, and it sounded great. So I added another one, same thing, default settings, and that sounded even better. I tried a third one, but that didn’t work. So two it is."

GAH!!! This is SO simple and SO obvious and I wish I'd thought of it, but I didn’t. Dan further confessed that he does this ALL THE TIME. He’s always adding another iteration of the same thing and listening.

This is a great trick. If it sounds good with one on it, try adding another.

Double Compression

A friend showed me a trick using two compressors when tracking vocals, and it became my standard operating procedure for recording vocals, bass, acoustic guitars, or anything that had too much dynamic range to fit comfortably on tape. I still track things this way 30 years later.

Here's an extended blog post on this, complete with settings, a few diagrams and usage ideas. This is a game changer for your engineering. Perhaps many of you already do this. If you don’t, you should.

AI is Still Here

Watch this good video in which a guy in our industry, Cameron from Venus Theory, discusses AI and its impact on audio careers, and how one might survive. His conclusion, by the way, is the same idea that I came up with a few months back, which is:

Double down on being yourself.

Again for emphasis: Double down on being yourself.

Happy Monday all. We always enjoy it when you write to us. Thanks for reading.

Two Times the Love,

The Guys at Korneff Audio