I’ve always disliked tracking anything with headphones, especially vocals. Some vocalists have pitch problems on headphones. Some are just uninspired. If you’re recording yourself, it can be a pain in the head to keep switching your set-up.

The simple solution is to record without using headphones and instead monitor with speakers. There are a few ways to do this. I’ll go over all of them briefly, then show you a way to do it that works amazingly well.

First things first: remember that most of the leakage a directional microphone picks up is reflected sound coming in the FRONT of the mic. Remember that the back, or sides, of a directional mic are designed to reject sound and overall that works pretty well. I’m assuming you’re not cutting a vocal with a omnidirectional, especially if your goal is to cut down on leakage.

A moving coil mic is generally going to pick up less of the stuff you don’t want, which is the room reflections coming over the shoulder of the person singing. Why? Because moving coil mics are less sensitive overall—a big heavy diaphragm attached to a big heavy coil of wire has more inertia. Condenser mics will generally pick up more of everything, but I’ve cut tons of vocals with speakers for monitoring using condensers and it usually works out fine.

Just Record and the Hell with Leakage

You can set up a mic in front of the speakers and cut the vocals and just ignore the leakage. Depending on your room and the volume you’re working at, leakage might not be an issue. Obviously, use a directional mic with a cardioid or hypercardioid pattern, experiment with where you place it—you might get less leakage if you put it right in front of one speaker rather than in between the two (the polar pattern will affect this a lot).

In the mix, you’ll have to gate things or edit out the leakage. However, there can be problems because the leakage on the vocal track, when the gate is open or when the vocal is playing, can mix with the music on your tracks and you might hear a change to the snare or the low end whenever the vocal comes in and out of the mix. This is evident on the Chris Isaak song Wicked Game. My quick fix is to ride (automated) the vocal level rather than gate or edit it, so I can control how much of the overall sound of the track changes.

Using a moving coil rather than a condenser is recommended if you’re doing things this way.

If you’re sitting down, think about throwing a piece of acoustic foam over the keyboard/work surface and on the monitor. Close reflections suck for a vocal.

If the leakage is a problem, then you’ll probably have to start playing around with phase.

Put the Speakers Out of Phase

I think this is an awful solution to a problem, but I’ll explain it anyway, provided you promise not to use it. I tried it once and it was a waste of my time.

Set up the vocal mic so that it is in the exact sweet spot of the speakers, then reverse the phase of one of the speakers and THEORETICALLY the resulting phase cancellation will result in far less leakage, and because the singer is not exactly in the sweet spot — the spot of maximum cancellation — they’ll still be able to hear the music well enough. Engineers also have done things like putting out-of-phase speakers to either side of the singer, equidistant, pointing at the mic.

Why this sucks #1: It sounds awful

This sounds awful. Out-of-phase speakers sound awful. Mostly you’ll kill a ton of bass, so the music won’t be exciting—there's nothing quite like an unenergized and uninspired singer, and the net sound will be phasey and plain old weird. If the singer shifts or moves, they’ll hear all sorts of swooshing and if the phase issue is bad enough, they might get nauseated. Did you know huge weird phase shifts plays ear games and causes something akin to motion sickness? Ever cut tracks with a singer who wants to vomit?

Why this sucks #1: It works like ass

Because most of the leakage that comes in a mic is coming in the front, and is predominantly indirect sound, chances are the speakers out of phase trick isn’t going to buy you much. The out-of-phase sound that goes bouncing around the room comes back as in-phase leakage.

If you want to cancel using phase, you have to flip the phase AT THE MIC, not in the air.

Use Two Mics

Get two identical mics. Flip the phase on one of them. Put them very close together, displaced vertically rather than horizontally (one over the other rather than side by side). Have the singer sing into the in-phase mic, combine them into one track or do it in the mix.

This basically sucks too. In a live situation, this might be workable, but in a studio situation, unless the singer is working really close to the in-phase mic, this is going to be all over the place. Little movements will change the frequency response; the out-of-phase mic is picking up the singer's chest so things could wind up overly warm or thinned out, depending on how the phase cancellation affects frequency response. The singer has to put a lot of effort into staying still and in one place, and that usually results in a stiff, bad vocal.

Here’s the best way to do it.

Record an Out-of-Phase Leakage Track

The first time I tried this was tracking a jazz choir and I didn’t have enough headphones. I put them out into a room and set up a pair of big, loud monitors, and put two Crown PZMs mic out, each taped to a music stand. The speakers blasted into the choir, the mics were spread about 8’ roughly 6’ from the first rank of the choir. We cut a good take. I had the choir shuffle their positions around and recorded another take. I played back the four tracks and it was a big leaky mess until I reversed the phase of the second take. Leakage GONE. Vocals untouched.

This technique works jaw-droppingly well. Here’s how you do it:

First of all, set up the mic so the singer is really comfortable and loves how the speaker monitor mix sounds. I usually did this right in the control room in front of the console dead center, but it can be anywhere. Once you get the singer happy, tape the mic stand down, tape the mic to the stand — whatever you have to do to make sure that microphone doesn’t move at all.

You also can’t move the speakers, and you have to do all the recordings using the same speakers. And you should tape down the monitor level: it has to be the same for every take. Ideally, you do all the vocal tracks in one day.

So, set up your vocal chain (mine was usually a Quad Eight mic pre followed by a Summit TLA-100 and then an Aphex 551). Get it to sound dandy good. Put the vocalist in position, then have them sing. As many takes as you need. Punch in, etc. Don’t do any comping yet!

Once you get a good take, have the singer stand there in front of the mic silently and record just the leakage — exactly what the singer was hearing when they did their vocals, but no vocals. Now the magic: play back the vocal track, reverse the phase of the silent track, and bring it up in the mix until the leakage disappears. And disappear it will. This works like magic. Comp the vocal til the cows come home this will still work. You can even bounce the vocal track and the leakage track together — just make sure the leakage track is phase reversed.

In the old days before unlimited tracks, if I was going to double the vocal, I would cut the double and reverse the phase of that — I have yet to have a singer cut a double so close that any of the vocals canceled, but I suppose it’s possible. I also don’t see the point of cutting a double so tight that you can’t tell it’s a double — just bring up the original track by 3dB and get it over with.

This technique works amazingly well. It’s how Chris Cornell cut a lot of his vocals. I’ve used it on hundreds of sessions. This method will also work with an omnidirectional or a bidirectional mic, and it works like a charm with condensers as well.

 

Happy Monday,

Driving Songs

A friend had an early morning event to drive to, and it got me thinking about speeding around in a car, which of course got me thinking about the best driving song anyone has ever recorded, this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zKAS7XOWaQ&list=PLe6ZCJT_4KPm_1xpeYct48rflHClPpPyW&index=1

Damn, that song rocks. It's the perfect driving song: perfect tempo, perfect feel (thanks to a great rhythm section, Ian Paice and Roger Glover), killer solos by Jon Lord and Richie Blackmore, and a one-and-done vocal by Ian Gillan. Lyrics about cars and/or sex, of course.

'Made in Japan' was a seminal record, cut absolutely live with no overdubs across three nights in Japan, in 1972. The Japanese market was clamouring for a live album, the band grudgingly complied. They really had no faith in the project, but not wishing it to suck completely, they flew engineer/producer Martin Birch in to record things.

Birch tracked things down to either 8-track reel-to-reel or two 4-track decks that were synched. Organist Jon Lord recalls there being two 4-tracks, but the technology limitations of the times leads me to think it was probably an 8-track. Martin Birch thought the equipment used looked like junk. The band's PA system was by Marshall and based around a 16-input solid-state console, so perhaps that figured into the recording somehow as well. No one had high hopes for the recording, and most of the band didn't bother to attend the mixing sessions.

Actually, the recording came out REALLY good. So good that the band managed to push their record label, Warner, into releasing it in more countries than just Japan. 'Made in Japan' was hugely successful, aided by a single, 'Smoke on the Water', and is rightly considered one of the great live albums.

8-tracks. Those drum sounds cut to two measly tracks perhaps? A track of bass, a track of organ, a track of guitar, and a vocal. A pair of tracks used to record the audience. Or maybe the whole is mainly a stereo mix off the board? Big magic afoot on 'Made in Japan'.

I've put together a playlist of songs to drive to, and you're all invited to contribute. It's located here on YouTube, with 'Highway Star' leading it off. There are obvious choices like 'LA Woman' and 'Radar Love', and some less obvious entries, like The Cure's 'Just Like Heaven' and the Moody Blues' 'Question'. The criteria for inclusion is: it has to make you want to speed around in a car, and there's only one song entry per band or artist. Lots of things you like by Iron Maiden? Sorry, whittle it down to one. People might be wondering why 'Them Bones' isn't on the list. Because 'Them Bones' is a song that makes you want to WRESTLE. This was the fave soundtrack tune when my son was a toddler and we would re-enact the WWF on the big bed upstairs for hours, with constant, completely safe body slams, etc.

Either put your entries in the comments on YouTube or reply to this email. If this is somewhat successful perhaps we'll make some other playlists.

Setting Levels

I recently got an email asking questions about the operating level of our audio plug-ins. Hi Alex!

I wasn't fully satisfied with my answer. Actually, I'm not fully satisfied by any answers or dogma regarding audio levels. Dan and I have discussed this at length many times.

There's a lot of online talk about levels, gain staging, where should the faders be, what should the meters read, yada yada yada. This is a complex topic.

I've written a series of articles on this, covering the technical stuff in an understandable manner and always stressing the practical sides of things. Here are links. If you read it in the order of the links it is like a comprehensive course. You can also, of course, skip around.

https://korneffaudio.com/what-the-heck-is-bias/ (It starts off discussing bias. Because if you understand this then everything else makes a lot more sense.)

https://korneffaudio.com/harmonics-and-harmonic-distortion/

https://korneffaudio.com/what-causes-distortion/

https://korneffaudio.com/noise-in-audio-engineering/

https://korneffaudio.com/dynamic-range-headroom-and-nominal-level/

https://korneffaudio.com/compression-saturation-and-distortion/

https://korneffaudio.com/at-last-gain-staging/

https://korneffaudio.com/nominal-level-and-meters/

Here's all of this in a nutshell

Digital audio equipment, and the procedures and processes involved in recording digital audio, are heavily based on equipment, and procedures, and processes developed by years of analog recording, and this makes total sense. Digital recording evolved out of analog recording. We think of, and describe, many aspects of digital recording using an analog recording mental model.

The most important mental model that we use is that there is a "sweet spot" to set the levels, in which one gets an optimum result.

With analog equipment, there is definitely a sweet spot. It's a place wherein the signal feeding in and the signal feeding out of the equipment are as similar to each other as possible: the frequency response is the same, the transient response is the same, there's minimal noise, there's minimal additional harmonics added (harmonic distortion). The sweet spot is the level at which the signal has maximum linearity: what goes in is what goes out. This is assuming you're not actively eq'ing the signal or compressing it or some such.

That sweet spot corresponds to something called the Nominal Level. Gear is designed to work at nominal level, and if you want things to sound good, try to get things to be at nominal level.

How do you know what the nominal level is? It's usually indicated by a meter of some sort. Get the meter to look correct, and the audio will be correct. It really is that simple.

So, what does a correct meter look like? It depends on the meter. I could get into a huge discussion about meters, and next week I will specifically break down the meters on various Korneff Audio plug-ins to help you really understand things, but for now, I'll give you the absolute baseline concept:

RED IS BAD

If there is nothing else you learn, learn this. Red is a warning, and most meters will show red when levels are out of the sweet spot on the high side. Levels below the nominal (below the sweet spot) aren't as problematic as levels above the sweet spot that cause things to flash red. Seriously, most level setting on both analog and digital devices is simply to adjust the input
so that things occasionally flash red. OCCASIONALLY. Not all the time.

Remember that our plug-ins, and most plug-ins, are based on analog circuits, and that means that there is math in there that is emulating the behaviour of how an analog circuit will sound depending on if you're in that sweet spot or not, and the meters on plug-ins are there to help you get the plug-in to operate in its sweet spot. So use the meters and your ears. Also, bear in mind that the sweet spot/nominal level is kinda on the big side. It isn't incredibly specific. It's like parking spots in a parking lot: there are a lot of parking spots that are near the door of the place you're trying to go and you don't have to get your car perfectly in that one damn perfect spot.

You don't have to be anal or OCD about your level setting, you just need to get somewhere near the door.

To answer Alex very specifically, digital audio uses a sort of "imaginary" nominal level that is labeled as -18dBFS, and our plug-ins, and most plug-ins, are designed to be their most linear at -18dBFS. In other words, the sweet spot is at about -18dBFS, but you don't need to be anal about this number, you really just need to know how to understand meters, and we'll talk about that next week.

I hope this helps.

Warm regards,

Luke

A very common technique in the old days was the Mixback. Basically, engineers would print whatever was going through the master bus (the stereo bus) to two open tracks on the 24-track master. Can you believe there was a time when 24-tracks was too many? Actually you can find track sheets from 8-track and 16-track recordings with lots of open tracks.

The mixback tracks were a running record of whatever was in the master bus during the session. They gave the engineer a good-sounding mix just by pushing up two faders.

If you needed to do overdubs, you’d just bring up the two mixback tracks and there was a headphone mix ready to go. Need more of something like the lead vocal? Bring up the lead vocal track a little bit and now the mix has more lead vocal. Need less bass? Piece of cake: reverse the phase on the individual bass track, slide up the fader and the phase cancellation lowers the volume of the bass in the mix! How cool is that? And yes, it really does work!

A better mixback trick: you could “punch in” the mix. If you didn’t have automation, with a mixback you could work on each individual section, punching in and out to do all sorts of difficult mix moves. And if the record company wanted changes to the mix, that was easy to do — add tracks in or lower them using the phase trick.

Automation ended the Mixback, or did it? With a DAW, bouncing rough mixes and then bringing them back into the session is very useful. It makes fixing latency issues a breeze: bring up the mixback mix, mute all the individual tracks and turn off any plugins on the mix bus. You can tweak the mixback by bringing up individual tracks, reversing the phase if you need to lower the volume of something, and then bounce that and bring it back into the session.

With a bit of ingenuity and enough ins and outs on your interface, you can even do a real mixback: route the master bus output to two tracks of the DAW (make sure you mute those tracks to avoid feedback), and then you can punch in and out of your mix just like the good old days. I mix this way all the time, punching the mix in section by section. And because it’s digital, there’s no generational loss or hiss build-up.

Happy Monday!

Have a listen to this!

I wish I could go back to ten-year-old me listening to the radio when I heard this for the first time. The damn DJ didn’t say the singer’s name, and I misheard the title as “Rocco,” or “Rock Oh."

Of course, the title is "Rock On,” David Essex’s biggest hit, and 51 years later, it's still amazing.

Essex was more successful as an actor than a musician, but he had 19 top 40 singles in England during his career, as well as successful albums. Rock On cracked the Billboard Top 40.

Slapback on the Vox

Rock On started with a demo, which consisted of Essex singing and playing drums on a garbage can as a drum. The engineer on the session put a loud slapback echo on the demo, and that is really the crux of the sound of it, and what makes it so frickin’ distinctive.

But the lead vocal isn’t echoed the entire time. It sometimes splits and hockets from the left channel to the right, sometimes it’s doubled, sometimes there’s a harmony. There’s a wonderful moment where a mass of vocals drop in like Māori warriors performing a Haka. Supercreative use of vocal texture, and keeping the ear’s interest while never losing the thread of the song.

Chordless Arrangement

The vocals have so much breathing room because of the minimalist arrangement of producer Jeff Wayne. Wayne heard the demo and figured out a score for drums and percussion, bass, and a few string players. The music bed is melody lines rather than chords. In fact, the only true chord is the massed vocal.

The classically trained London string players hired for the session were playing too tight and in tune for Wayne and Essex’s taste. They solved the problem by getting them all a little drunk.

Enter Herbie Flowers

Wayne’s arrangement had a rudimentary bass part. Fortunately for the session, the guy they hired was Herbie Flowers.

Herbie Flowers was a top session man in England. He occasionally toured, but touring got in the way of his very busy studio career. By the end of the '70s he stopped counting the number of records he’d tracked on (over 500 at the time). Flowers played double bass (traditional upright string bass), electric bass and tuba, and was equally proficient playing rock, jazz, classical - whatever the session called for. He played bass for Bowie, Elton John, Miles Davis, all the Beatles except John, and tuba on Abbey Road.

Steal These Ideas

Flowers was also a businessman. At the time, session players got more money the more tracks they laid down. Herbie talked Wayne and Essex into letting him put two tracks down, one low and the other high. The result is the incredibly cool bass part on Rock On. It’s the lick that makes the record.

Flowers tuned the low bass down a half step, which resulted in a low-end mess of rumble at the end of each iteration of the riff.

Usually, putting reverb on a bass isn’t a good idea. But with the right arrangement, it can certainly work, and it does on Rock On. The riff Flowers came up with for the overdubbed high bass part, slathered with plate reverb and a hint of delay, sounds like a guitar part. There’s not a guitar to be found on Rock On.

Check This Out

I found this brilliant guy, Chris Eger, who put together what sounds like a note-for-note version of Rock On, with him playing and singing every part. It's a vision of what happened back in 1973 at Advision Studios in London. It’s a deceptively simple song.

Check out his channel. It’s so damn cool!

The Whole Album is Killer

While Rock On is the standout track, the entire Rock On album, which was Essex’s debut, is a sonic adventure. It’s 70s glam, but it’s peppered with horn arrangements that evoke Vaudeville, strange strange vocals, clever arrangements and wonderful production touches. And tons of Herbie Flowers bass lines with a fat sound that manages to be low and articulate at the same time.

There’s a semi-reggae tune called Ocean Girl... I don’t even know where to begin with this track. Is that an early use of vocoder on that vocal on the left channel? And if not, how did they do that effect? There’s something that sounds like a slide guitar flitting around the background, but I think it’s an Ondes Martenot, which is an obscure French electronic instrument, developed in the late 1920s. It sits somewhere between a cello and a theremin. It’s credited on the album. I think it’s lurking on Ocean Girl. What do you think?

Actually, this whole album is really worth a listen. Seriously. Put it on and cop a bunch of great ideas off of it.

Until next week... Rock On!

That was cheesy.

The Guys at Korneff Audio

Schönen Montag!

That’s German.

I’ve been bopping around Montreal’s subway system listening to Krautrock. It’s perfect music for trains and tunnels and feeling odd and alienated.

I went down a Krautrock rabbit hole. And this is your invitation to join me down there!

Krautrock... that is a terrible name, coined by British music journalists. I hope any German readers don’t find it offensive, and please feel free to correct or add to anything in this Neuer Montag.

It’s also ridiculously reductive. It’s applied to a variety of music recorded from about 1968 into the 1980s, that stylistically ranges from psychedelic jams to synth-based minimalism to prog rock with embarrassingly bad lyrics to punk to free jazz. As a genre, Krautrock is all over the place.

While a lot of it has a mechanical 4/4 beat known as “motorik,” the only commonalities seem to be a tendency towards experimentation and noise, and that it doesn’t have blues as a basis for chord structure or improvisation.

Whoops! Another commonality in Krautrock is a brilliant engineer/producer named...

Conny Plank

By brilliant, I mean Bill Putnam or Al Schmitt or Tom Dowd brilliant. An engineer’s engineer. Someone who not only knew where to put the mics, but also how to build the console. BRILLIANT. Conny Plank should really be much better known.

Konrad “Conny” Plank recorded or produced practically every group associated with Krautrock at one time or another. He also recorded albums for Scorpions, Eurythmics, Devo, Ultravox, Killing Joke, Brian Eno, and even Duke Ellington! Plank turned down working with David Bowie on the album that eventually became Low, (too much drugs, he thought). He also turned down working on U2’s Joshua Tree (too much Bono).

The center of his studio near Cologne was a 56-channel custom console, built to his own specifications and recording style with Michael Zahl, who now makes 500 series EQs and such.

Here is some vintage console porn. I love this stuff.

Plank also developed a recall system that used a camera suspended over the console to take a picture of the knobs. To recall this “snapshot” of the console, the film would be projected back through the camera onto the console and an assistant would turn the knobs to match the image projected onto them. Brilliant.

He also solved the problem of listening to finished mixes in the car: he built an illegal radio station in the studio. He and the clients would pile into his car, tune into the studio’s station, and wait for the assistant engineer to include the mix in a playlist of similar records. Again, brilliant.

And, of course, he was a virtuoso engineer, a huge believer in mic placement and working room acoustics. His recordings of percussion-based experimental jazz are fabulous, capturing everything with amazing clarity and precise stereo placement. He was also a master of tape manipulation, blessed with a fantastic memory that allowed him to edit long, free-form jam sessions into cohesive songs, linking forward and reversed bits of tape and noise without keeping detailed notes. He just sort of “did it."

Conny died young, at 47 in 1987, of cancer. His console is now in England, still making records for artists like Franz Ferdinand. The Motorik goes on!

Some Things to Hear

Here’s a curated list of some things Krautrock and Conny Plank.

This is a wonderful extension to everything I’ve written above, going into a bit more detail on the recordings and linked to listening examples.

https://thevinylfactory.com/features/10-essential-conny-plank-records/

Can - this is out there stuff.

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

Kraftwork - the Beatles of Krautrock. They’re still around. The album Autobahn was the last record they did that was engineered by Plank as they became more successful and ever more electronic. Here’s a playlist of vids. Great background music. Occasionally look up and see Germans dressed as robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQIYEPe6DWY&list=RDEMlS0N2Gz3BIH0JY8Cyyrimw&start_radio=1

Neu! - Loose, jam-oriented stuff. The recording below is an 8-track, engineered by Conny Plank. The drums here can’t be on more than two tracks, but there’s astonishing clarity and stereo perspective on everything. My guess is he did this with just two mics in exactly the right place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ&list=RDzndpi8tNZyQ&start_radio=1

Niagara - who says a percussion-only album can’t be amazing? Breathtaking engineering by Conny Plank, and amazing playing by a bunch of killer drummers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T5R4nFIBgg

La Düsseldorf - a spinoff comprised of members of Kraftwork and Neu! Industrial before industrial?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz9q9UZS4M0&list=PL4384B64D44A0F11C

Cluster - electronic and minimal, occasionally with Brian Eno.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l50cmJOiHv0&list=OLAK5uy_kNoI0SQPzDD4EFa5MY1gKk-dOyd202orU

Tangerine Dream - dramatic electronic Krautrock, or the basis of every sci-fi movie soundtrack since 1980.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdFHE73aOMI&list=RDEMflsAy-eLxQ2-oszlwebZ4g&start_radio=1

Faust - Krautrock as noise. Or punk ska. I have no idea what this stuff is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=menuXx3oq80&list=OLAK5uy_lJ5UzdPN6Dj1C7D3oYhQDSc_6Zjc3KgPI

Not Krautrock, but Conny Plank...

Eurythmics - Belinda. Recorded by Conny Plank. This is when the band was way more rock.

Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports This is the record that started ambient music. Plank was very much involved.

Ultravox - Vienna A huge early new wave hit. High romance and electronic noise, Conny Plank at the faders.

Devo - Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo. Produced by Eno, engineered by Plank. Insane stuff.

Scorpions - Love Drive. Conny Plank and early metal. Great sounds overall.

A Percussion Recording Tip

I used to use a stereo tube mic most often, but when I was dealing with a percussionist who was playing a lot of different things all over the place, like congas, and then some bell tree thing, and then a rik, and then a talking drum, and on and on, it became impossible to mic all of it with a pair and get good capture, or mic things individually and not get tons of phase issues.

The solution was a t-shirt and a PZM.

A PZM is a flat plate of a mic that has a semi-hemispherical pattern — it picks up everything across 180 degrees. Not a cheap mic, they were originally made by Crown and were like $800 each. However, you could get a Crown PZM for $60 if you went to Radioshack, because the Realistic PZM was in fact a Crown mic. For $120 you could get a pair of great-sounding, albeit unbalanced wreck-around mics.

SO... I taped a PZM to the center of a t-shirt with gaffers tape and had the percussionist put the shirt on, the mic facing out from his chest, perfectly positioned for percussion pick-up. Since he was naturally balancing levels as he moved from instrument to instrument, I didn’t even have to ride gain. For the mix, I’d split the one track to a bunch of channels and then automate them with whatever EQ or effects were needed to get the best sound out of that particular bit of percussion. When dealing with expensive studio musicians, producers often wanted me to go fast with them in the studio and then work more on the mix because, well, my time was cheaper!

Thanks for coming down the rabbit hole. Tchüss til next week!

Fall is here! Leaves! Halloween! And I’m already sick to hell of pumpkin spice.

I must admit, I do have pumpkin spice lattes in the fall, and I enjoy them muchly. I like an occasional pumpkin spice milkshake. And some pumpkin spice beer is ok... not too disgusting. But after that it starts getting ridiculous, and suddenly pumpkin spice is seemingly in everything, from lasagna to eyedrops.

Really, it is best in pie. Pumpkin pie.

But, it is pumpkin spice season, so we at Korneff Audio are jumping on the bandwagon with our Pumpkin Spice Compressor, or PSC.

The PSC (also known as the Pawn Shop Comp) is a super versatile plug-in. It combines the punch of a FET style compressor, with a tube preamp section. And then on top of that, it has switchable tubes, resistors, transformers and transistors. The net result is something far beyond the simple sweetness of pumpkin spice, or the functionality of just a compressor. The PSC is like an entire spice cabinet of colors and flavors, and you can use it all over your tracks and mixes. Unlike a lot of plug-ins, there isn’t one thing it is particularly designed to do. It does everything, although we’ve not tested it with lasagna.

So, here are three “recipes” from the Korneff Audio Kitchen, for applying the PSC to your recordings. They’ll give you some insight into the ways the Pawn Shop can add magic to tracks, and hopefully stimulate your own thinking and creativity.

1) Use a PSC to Help Track Things Quickly

When I’m tracking parts to develop ideas, I want to get things recorded as quickly as possible. However, if I’m moving fast, chances are I’m playing or singing a bit on the sloppy side, mic positions and technique are a bit loose, and instrument sounds aren’t fully worked out. Consequently, levels can be all over the place and the sonics can be off enough that things get lost in the mix, or become too dominant and distracting. I don’t want to slow my workflow down by adding EQ’s and compressors, and then fiddle with settings, but I do need quick control over things. Enter the PSC.

As I track, each new channel has a PSC instance on it. If I need a little compression, I press Auto Makeup Gain, turn up the Ratio a smidge and then pull down the Threshold ’til the meter bounces a bit. The initial settings for Attack and Release are usually fine. If a track needs bottom or brightening, or if it’s muddy, I go to the Back Panel and use the Focus and Weight controls to get it to fit into the mix so I can evaluate how the part works. These are not full featured EQs, but their frequencies are carefully chosen and effective for making the sorts of fast changes I want in this situation. The last thing I want to do is sweep through frequencies, dick around with bandwidth, etc. With the PSC, there’s just two gain knobs and four frequencies, and that’s enough for quick fixes.

The PSC also has considerable saturation capabilities, so if I want to experiment with distorted, overdriven vocals, or see what fuzz on the bass might sound like, I don’t have to add a saturation plug-in, I just mess around with the Pawn Shop’s Preamp Gain and Bias. With just those two controls, I can dial in anything from some subtle overtones to full out stomp box.

Once I finish my “idea” tracking, I can re-record things more carefully, or, if a track is close enough, I can add other plug-ins to more precisely take the sound to where it needs to be. In many cases, though, the PSC stays in the signal path because it adds character and a subtle vintage “something” to any signal you pass through it.

2) Operating Level Control = Secret Spice Mojo

This is my favorite knob on the PSC. It’s sort of a limiter that overloads and adds some saturation and harmonics, but who cares how it does its Mojo, the point is using that Mojo.

At low settings, from 2 to 6dB, the Operating Level Control pulls whatever you send through it forwards in the mix: things get a little louder, and seem to sit a bit more securely. I use it strategically to focus attention on things in the mix that have to stand out—lead vocals, instrumental solos, key melodic ideas, etc. I tend to add a few dB of it on snares, to give them more “size” in the mix.

At high settings, Operating Level absolutely squashes things, and because it has a very fast release, it adds a strange “pumping” sort of distortion that sounds like bad radio reception or something.

I use Operating Level SPARINGLY—I don’t slop it all over my tracks like, well, the way people slop pumpkin spice all over during the fall. Another way to approach it: listen to your mix. Are you losing any one particular instrument or part? Use Operating Level on that. In fact, I’ve added an instance or two of the PSC and ONLY used the Operating Level Control on a few occasions. 3dB of it adds so much.

3) Divide and Conquer the Bass Recipe

Getting bass to sit right in a mix is often a pain in the ass. You typically want bass big on the bottom, but it can interfere with the kick, and it needs midrange articulation otherwise it gets muddy, but you don’t want it to sound all clicky and “fingery.” It has to sound good on big speakers, and it also has to be present on an iPhone speaker. And bass is difficult to record well, especially when you’re not dealing with a great player who has a great instrument.

Here’s a bass fix recipe that almost always works.

A: Copy the bass track to another channel, or if you’re using multiple tracks, set things up so that you have the same bass parts in two subgroups. You basically need two bass tracks in parallel to make this work.

B: Stick a Low Pass filter on the first bass channel and roll off everything above 300Hz. I use a pretty steep slope, like 24dB/octave. On the second bass track, use a High Pass filter and roll off everything under 300Hz with the same, steep slope. So, now you have the lows of the bass on one channel, and the mids and highs on another.

C: Put a PSC on each bass channel after the filter. Now you can process each frequency range independently of the other.

D: On the low bass channel, I use the PSC’s compressor to control the overall boominess and low end sustain on the bass. I set the ratio really high - like 20:1. The compressor’s release is the critical control here. Longer releases will keep the bass more under control and cut down how long it hangs around in the mix, while faster settings can give lows a lot of blossom and sustain. On the back panel, I usually switch the Transformer to Iron, which sounds slow and laggy to me, and that accentuates the bottom. On the lows channel, I’m looking to get a thick, soggy sound—like the goop in a pie mixing with the crust to turn it into a kind of sweet pudding.

E: On the other mid highs channel, I set the ratio to around 8:1 and experiment with attack and release to get the amount of articulation I want. Generally, this bass channel will have a slower attack setting on the PSC to bring out the initial “pluck” of a note, and a fairly fast release to keep things lively and jumpy. I set the Transformer to Nickel on this channel, as it imparts a nice crispness to the transients. On the mid high channel I want the sound to have a bite, like when you chomp into a nice, fresh apple.

Because I have independent control of the lows and mid-highs, I can add saturation using the PSC’s preamp controls to the mid-high channel to get additional character and harmonics, while not losing the tightness of the lows. I can also add effects like flanging or reverb to the mid-highs without making the low end loose and unfocused. If I want huge, thick low end I can get that too without ever losing the articulation and “cut” of the bass in the mix. In the final mix I can also ride the two different faders to easily adjust the way the bass sits in the mix.

And, of course, this technique isn’t limited to electric bass, it works on synth patches, as well as guitars and vocals.

Not Just for the Fall

I never know how to end these things... but in summation, the PSC, unlike pumpkin spice, is not just reserved for this one season. And it’s not just useful for one application. It can be an integral part of your workflow throughout the entire year, helping you to work fast and still get great sounding recordings.