Finishing Line / Reverb

The Land Lovers record wings its way down to WAV Mastering tonight - just a few little bits of tidying up here and there left.
Assuming I can restrain myself from tweak-mania on some frequency in the snare thats annoying me or some similar wild goose chase. Why is it always the snare?

As mentioned last week the Acousticas Bricasti impulse responses...
Are.
A.
Maaay.
Zing.

They really brought life into the mixes over the last week or so - even adding too much reverb sounds good with them.

I was looking around for a convolution reverb for PT M-Powered on Mac last week to give the IRs a try and was surprised how few options there are.
Altiverb don't do demos.
Waves IR-1 is $800 or something stupid.
SIR / Voxengo don't do RTAS.

The two options left were TL Space and MCDSP Revolver.
I'd heard great things about TL Space from Steve Shannon, but I had already demo'ed it about 2 years ago, which ruled that out, so Revolver it was.



Initially I was dissappointed to see Revolver reporting a latency of 1024 samples.
This immediately kills a reverb plugin for me - if I wanted a pre-delay, I'd add it myself :)
Luckily, a bit of digging around turned up a low-latency mode with zero reported latency.
Nice.

So, the Bricasti IRs.
Wow-eee.
Wonderful stuff. Like I said, you can use way too much reverb and it still sounds good.
No, make that great.
The right IR immediately becomes part of the sound - like its always been there.
Most of the time I'd start off by finding one that suited the vocal, then trying to feed various other things in to it to see how well they sat - snare, guitars etc.
Sometimes I set up a seperate verb where I needed a different sound, but for the most part feeding everything into one 'main' reverb worked a treat.

Revolver is cool, with a huge number of tweaky parameters (luckily split across several different pages to keep the interface uncluttered), EQ and two seperate built-in delays.
DSP use is fine, and the included presets are pretty decent.
Combined with the Bricasti responses, it's definitely the most fun I've had with a software reverb.
I'll report with more thoughts on Revolver as I get to know it better.

Anyone got a real Bricast I can 'borrow'? :D

Nearly there..

Just reaching the finishing line on the mixing of the new Land Lovers record - not much sun for me over the weekend :)
Should have time to share some thoughts and files from my MA-200 vs AK-47 shootout over the next few days.
In the meantime the Hired Hands single I recorded is up on their myspace.. head over for a listen!

Shootout!

Telefunken AK-47 vs. Mojave Audio MA200 shootout..
Files and comments to come over the weekend.

Reverb..

Anyone who has a suitable convolution reverb should check out the free Bricasti M7 impluses that Acousticas.net are giving away.
Sounding super (I've yet to hear the hardware, which I imagine is crazy good).
The Bricasti was reviewed recently in TapeOp.

Here's the download link - http://www.acousticas.net/World/IRs/AcousticasM7.zip

More on convolution reverbs soon.

My demo hell

Plugin demo, that is.

I tried out the SPL Transient Designer and TwinTube plugins recently.
Anyone who's used a Transient Designer will know what a useful little tool it is - it can really rescue a less than ideal source.
I've had good results with it in killing nasty boingy rings on close mic'ed drums and easing down the attack on a hammered acoustics.
It's also very cool for subtle changes that can bring a track a little more to life - a bit more attack on a bass or guitars, or whatever.

I also figured I'd give TwinTube a whirl.
I think I've mentioned before how much use I get out of the URS Saturation plugin - just the other day I used it to add some grind to a drum bus for the first time in ages.. great sound.
The TwinTube offers a single saturation sound, but luckily its one that compliments the URS plug quite nicely - a somewhat smoother sound overall, but still very much able to provide plenty of dirt.
At the moment it's sitting on a lead vocal for a song I'm mixing and I'm quite happy for it to be right up front.
The harmonics section is one of those features thats just begging to be abused.
While it can be handy for adding some life to dull instruments or synths that roll off everything above 2khz, the way it reacts with the saturation section (read : brings the crazy) is almost certainly going to be roundly abused in the next few days to make some fun sounds.

The 'hell' part of the demo experience is that I initially only bought Transient Designer after the demo period expired, but those clever Germans at SPL promptly dropped an extra 30-day trial of that and their EQ Ranger plugin (haven't tried it, the last thing I need is more EQ).
This fiendish ploy has most likely gotten them an extra sale :/

It Lives!

I'm back on the Blog Wagon, so to speak.

Just finished up a single/7" for Hired Hands with mastering by Richard down in Wav Mastering.
Had a lot of fun recording them in their rehearsal space (a large church hall), a lovely room with nice ambience. In fact, the room was like an extra member of the band - in a good way, luckily.

I even managed to take a pic during the live tracking part of the session, although most of the juicy stuff is obscured - nice big pic here.. PIC.

Drums are hidden between two down n' dirty gobos (tables covered in blankets) with the guitar amps either side (one, a Vox, is visible to the right).
Bass amp is behind the Mac, facing away from the drums.
Drums were SM7 on kick, U87 snare, Royers overhead all into API.
An ATI 8mx2 took care of the other mics - 441s on guitar, SM57 and some MXL mic on bass.
Clarinet, Sax and fiddle overdubs were Royers with a little bit of U87 here and there.
Vocals were mostly SM7.

The next week or so will be mixing the new Land Lovers record at home, with finishing touches back in Nutshed Studios where the album was tracked in a fun but intense 5 days in March.
12 hour days with recuperation via rum leaves little time for sleep :)

Long time no Update

A busy weekend coming up though, with gigs by Dreams of Violence and Hounds.

Sandwiched between the two, I'll be out in Beechpark with Yeh Deadlies. It'll be a big 6 piece band bonanza of live recording. Should be fun, although setup's gonna be a pretty big job.
This time there will be session pics.

I've been doing some mix work recently for Dollar Store Toys - excellent indiepop fun.
Hopefully that'll become a release in the next while.

I finally sold off one more principle in exchange for a copy of Melodyne. For emergency purposes only, damnit.

In other new product news, anyone looking to get one good preamp for their home recording needs (or adding a great pre to a collection) should check out the new Daking One Pre :

The Daking is great for Snare, Acoustic and a plenty more besides. It's got enough gain to keep your ribbons very happy, too.
The only thing I'd miss is the output level knob from the Mic Pre/EQ which you can use to get some beautiful saturated sounds with by driving the input hard.
Depending on how the euro price works out (or if you're visiting the US) it looks like being my recommendation for a preamp in the 5/600 price range.

More info here.