r/audioengineering

Hey so I have just realised my hearing on my left side is worse. Did a test at home and my left ear is 4db quieter than my right ear.

So it’s time to stop messing around and get ear plugs for work. What brands do you recommend? Price is not an issue would spend up to 1000$ on them as I need to keep my ears looked after.

I live in a studio and I don't have room for a lot of the homemade sound booth setups I've seen. But I'm wondering, if I set up a mic on my desk, put a reflector shield behind it, then put like a comforter over that and myself, would I have a good sound booth? It seems like a decent way to go, but I'm not sure if there are issues that I haven't thought of.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with pro bands and producers for a long time, and lately a lot of indie artists have been reaching out to me to mix their albums. The problem is that, in many cases, the songs feel almost unmixable at least in my opinion. For example, everything is played in the same octave, the frequency spectrum isn’t balanced properly, the recordings are poor quality, etc.

I’ve already talked to some of them and explained the issues, and they understood where I was coming from. But I’m curious if any of you have dealt with this before, and if there’s actually a way to successfully mix songs like this.

In an effort to prevent phase issues, the general advice with spaced-pair overheads is to place both mics equidistant from the snare drum so the snare stays centered and phase-coherent.

What confuses me is that this usually means the left and right overheads end up at different distances from their respective crash cymbals. In practice, one crash often sounds more direct and defined while the other sounds a little farther away and less detailed.

On parts where the drummer alternates between left and right crashes, I’d expect them to feel relatively even, but instead one side can sound noticeably different because that cymbal is physically closer to its overhead.
How do you all deal with this? Do you just accept the tradeoff as part of spaced overheads, or are there techniques to keep both the cymbals balanced and the snare phase-coherent in the center image?

Curious how experienced engineers approach this.

I’m micing up my drum kit with 4 mics: a spaced pair of condensers as overheads, plus close mics on kick and snare. The room I’m recording in is less than ideal, so I end up high-passing the overheads pretty aggressively (around 500hz) to tighten things up and get rid of mud and ugly room buildup. It actually sounds pretty solid overall, but I do lose some depth and body from the shells in the process.

If you were adding a fifth mic to help bring back some fullness and dimension to the toms/shells, what would you choose and where would you place it? Curious about both mic choice and positioning.

There’s not a lot here: I went into the Camden preamp, 1176 style comp, pultec style EQ, out into an opto comp to finish it off. I’m really, really happy with the sounds I’m getting with my vocals and guitar so far.

For certain tasks I just want to capture a long stereo take from my interface. Sure I can use the DAW but I really would prefer something minimal, no fuzz, no unnecessary processing etc. I’m on macbook pro m4.

I'm kind of a beginner as far as trying to make my stuff sound really good, mix-wise, even though I've been making music for a while.

Every now and again I'll come across some advice on various forums concerning the stereo width of the kick, bass, snare, and other elements in the mix. Some people suggest making the kick and/or bass mono, and letting other elements remain at 100% width, such as pads, leads, and other embellishments.

I have different plugins that allow you to set the stereo width of a track at 0%, but is this truly "mono"? It usually sounds goofy when I do it. The kick and the bass always seem to lose a dimension, and they sound thin.

In the context of ambient / lofi / downtempo stuff, what advice do you have concerning the stereo widths of different elements in a mix? Is it reasonable to just let every element remain at a default 100% width? How do you handle these things in your mixes?

Listen to David Palmer's vocals on Steely Dan's "Dirty Work". During the verses, the saturation becomes more apparent when his voice increases in volume, yet it never creates an unpleasant harshness. It's round, and warm, and thickens parts of the vocal.

I find that even plug-ins that are given high praise, that emulate saturation from old consoles, such as Decapitator, can sometimes have a brittle digital quality to them when pushed even just a touch too far.

What are some ways to avoid this and add more body to saturation so that it has a more uniform warm fuzziness to it like analog recordings? Tone shaping before Saturation? Have the voice of an angel recorded in a pristine treated room?

Hi all,

I’m miking a drum kit and I’m trying to avoid that classic snare wire sound and get more of a round warm body sound but not like a tom sound. As I’m not the musician I cannot touch their stuff and they’d prefer I don’t. Any ideas? I fit helps this is more the snare sound in going for in the video below. I’m using a shure beta 57a if it helps and the mixer is a mackie profx30v3

https://youtu.be/fkqxrsQtqcQ?si=nsZ1xD79DstPv-ji

I was talking to a friend the other day about negative experiences with mastering engineers (real ones, not random bedroom guy with Ozone) and we were moaning about how mastering engineers increasingly don't seem to respect the sonic vision of the pre-master mix (and the mixer, and the artist). Both of us have been putting stuff out for decades and both of us agreed that the first stuff returned from ME's is now more often than not significantly, and easily identifiably NOT faithful to the mixes.

It isn't just loudness either, it can be OTT bass emphasis in music where heavy bass isn't a key factor, or horrible additions to the top end etc.

Back in the day, I don't remember anything but subtle tweaks being something that ME's did intitially; certainly I don't think I ever was so appalled by the first pass that I immediately ditched the ME. Like, you could ask an ME to slam your mix into a limiter, but they would NEVER do that as their first pass; they'd never assume you wanted a load of subjective remedial work on a mix you were happy with.

Again, this isn't about 1 or 2 bad experiences, more a pattern over the years.

Thoughts?

I record vocals in fl studio and I got the hang of it. I typically record a lot of takes then slice them up to get the one I like the most. But one thing I’ve noticed is I end up with a bunch of individual takes that are just placed together, not really combined. It makes adding them to my vocal mixer tracks a challenge because it’s all discombobulated. I tried exporting the whole take as a wav and then putting that singular one in my mixer track, but are you supposed to do that for main lead, vox, bgv, etc? I feel like I’m working backwards by doing this. Has to be a better way to get my vocals grouped together without exporting but I can’t figure it out

I’m going to try this out today using APL Virtuoso. I have been mixing exclusively in headphones for the last few years using the combo of Sen HD6xx with apl virtuoso with great results. I also tried Slate VSX initially but returned them after about a week. APL sounds much more natural to me.

Now I’ve got it in my head that I’m gonna try the APM2 for mixing with virtuoso and minor corrective eq. Has anyone tried this? Or even the APM1? With or without binaural software? Am I losing my mind? Am I going to be ok?

Quick edit:

I’m talkin about the latest gen over-ears

I’m currently helping a friend master an album. It’s in the vein of Nirvana, Sonic Youth, etc. The mixes I’ve been given sound great. Recorded at a pro studio, good mics, great room, to 2” tape. I was in the room for the tracking session. The session engineer was running minor outboard gear. A touch of compression on the kick, a little distressor on guitars. Nothing egregious.

For what they are, in my opinion, it sounds great. The thing is when I’m referencing a similar sounding Nirvana track, there’s like barely any sub frequencies. The mixes and specifically masters that I’m working on have way more low end and without even trying. it doesn’t feel right, not necessary? I’m not sure?

I grew up in the 90s on punk, rock and hardcore. Have these genres always consciously cut sub frequencies? And why?

To my ears I prefer the sound of the stuff from the early 2000s and prior that has less low end. It’s pristine, clean and balanced very nicely. I’m trying to get the balance of my master a little closer to that sound. Any suggestions other than HP filter under 30-40hz?

Also.. what caused this increase in low end.. I’m assuming rap and more access to subwoofers but, it just kind of gets in the way sometimes lol.

I feel like I’m doing something wrong because all I ever see is people adding more and more bass and wanting more and more sub. It works for some genres but, not really with rock music imo. It just starts to sound artificial and way too hyped. Definitely not what a drum kit feels or sounds like when you’re in the same room with it.

Hello!

I’ve got kind of a weird experimental audio idea and I’m trying to figure out what tools/plugins I should look into.

I’m pretty new to more advanced audio stuff. I mainly use Reaper and basic VST effects, nothing too deep into scripting or modular setups.

What I want to do is basically take one or more speech recordings and turn them into something that gets chopped into small fragments (words / syllables / sometimes longer bits), and then have those fragments randomly shuffled and played back continuously.

So instead of a normal glitch/stutter effect or granular “smear,” I’m looking for something more like:

• automatic slicing of speech into chunks
• random or rule-based reordering of those chunks
• playback that constantly rebuilds speech in a new order
• sometimes you almost catch full sentences, but it never fully locks into anything coherent

I tried granular plugins already, but what I got was more of a washed-out reverb/cloud texture rather than actual “cut and rearrange speech pieces.”

So I’m guessing what I need is more like a:
stutter / slicer / buffer shuffler / transient-based random playback thing?

Does anyone know good plugins or workflows in Reaper (or other DAWs) that can do this kind of thing without having to manually cut everything?

Thanks!

I have some Genelecs to test. 8030Bs, and 8040As. They all seem to be functional and pass signal. How do I use pink noise or sine waves in pro tools to be sure they’re all working at full range and have the same frequency responses? Do I need an SPL meter?

Has anyone tried the new Auriteq flow controller? Seems pretty cool by the videos but just wondering if anyone has been using it and tell us their experience

Hi, i am looking for examples of relatively recent, say 90s onwards, songs recorded with the bare minimum of pro gear that have made it to mainstream radio stations. Like, the best ratio of non-professionalism : chart position. I mention charts and success to exclude deliberately lo-fi things like Daniel Johnston, or niche/underground stuff. I am looking for stories like "x famous record was recorded with 58s and two basic pres to adat and mixed in a mackie desk" or "z song was only the 8 outputs of an akai sampler to an allen and heath".