studioporn

while mixing christa's vocals i encountered this problem that came up many times at my last place, namely that after working with the track for a bit i begin to notice a subtle harshness in the quality. on my yamaha monitors and on certain stereo systems, this harshness sticks out like a sore thumb, particularly when vocals are involved and particularly during louder portions. i spent hours last night fighting with the mix and using every trick i could think of to fix this problem--eq, compression, multiband compression, more eq, less eq, different eq, less compression, different compression....but no matter what i did i just couldn't get rid of it.

i started running through possible problems in my head. maybe it's the new preamp. but my other pres exhibited the same problem in the old place. maybe it's the room--the response is getting pretty good, but there are still those problematic frequencies i haven't tackled yet. but notching out those frequencies or their harmonics only fixed the resonant ringing and not this harshness. both my old and new audio interfaces exhibited the same problem, and same with both of my mixers. maybe something was clipping somewhere, but i was watching all the meters on all the gear like a hawk on saturday and was deliberately not running things too hot, since i wasn't sure yet how far i could push the new pre or the new audio interface.

i began to focus on the mic. it's a tube mic that i've been using as my go-to mic for vocals. it's probably getting to the point where i should start thinking about replacing the tube. but here again, i've had the same problem with other mics as well. but without anything else to really go on i figured hey, can't hurt to at least try replacing the tube to see if that has any effect.

then later on i wanted to work out some guitar parts and record some rough demos direct, so i grabbed my strat and plugged it in to the great river pre. figured i'd throw something other than vocals at it for a bit to get a feel for how it behaves. i dialed up a good starting gain and put a little bit of compression on my dbx 1066, which has been my default compressor for a while now. whenever i played more loudly i would start to hear clipping/distortion artifacts. so i pulled back the gain on the pre even though i had gobs of headroom according to the meters. things still clipped a bit on the louder parts. i pulled back the fader a bit on the mixer. same problem. i checked my cables to make sure they didn't have bad plugs or anything. but they all seemed to check out. i made sure everything was set to -10dBV. check.

at this point i was like, well, about the only other thing i haven't reallly eliminated is the compressor. i hit the bypass switch and lo and behold, the problem went away. i engaged the compressor again, problem came back. the problem seemed to get worse the more the compressor kicked in. but i dialed the ratio back to 1:1 and even when there was no compression it was still emitting these weird distorted-sounding artifacts. i know the dbx compressors are all famous for having that special "dbx color," but this just seems to have gone beyond the realm of color and into feces.

i had very similar settings to those used on saturday, so i'm pretty sure now that this is the culprit for the problems i'm having in the mix. i'm not sure yet whether this is a feature of the 1066 or if i just have a bad VCA or something--need to do more experimentation with that when i get some free time. if it's been like this for a while, it could very well account for problems i've had in other mixes and was never quite able to fix. my shitty alesis 3630's had the same problem but to a much worse extent, which is why i stopped using them ages ago and finally sold them off about a year ago. the problem on the 1066 is more subtle, which is why i haven't really picked up on it in tracking. but once you start setting up the mix and throwing in eq and compression it becomes more obvious. and leads to the "oh, it's a problem with the way i'm mixing" red herring.

so where am i now? well, i picked up a pair of dbx 160A's last year and never got around to using them except for when i did sound for sunil's live show. these are better quality than the 1066s, so i figured i'd do some a/b tests. i definitely like the ease of use in setting these up and the HUGE level meters are a big win for people like me who get off on blinkenlights. you can ride them pretty hard without getting any pumping/breathing artifacts. i was also able to slam it hard with my guitar and not hear any clipping, distorting, or any other sort of mangling. the only thing i really noticed was that when the compressor kicks in more than a few dB, a bit of the top seems to go away. but the resultant sound is very pleasant and easy to work with.

i also pulled out my presonus ACP-22 that i use here and there. it's an ok unit, but one thing that's always annoyed me is the transformer vibrates, thus generating a bit of noise that's just loud enough to make you go "what the hell's that?" if you're within a few feet of it. i also don't care for the level meters much--the attenuation LEDs are all green, which i hate. they should be red, dammit, the way god intended. no distortion artifacts, but lots of pumping/breathing when you hit it hard, and it colors the sound in a way i'm not sure i like, at least not on guitar.

so for the time being i'm going to unplug the 1066 and ACP-22 and just stick with the 160As, as they sound the best out of everything i have right now. but this whole ordeal got me realizing that i've been leaning more towards dbx compressors than perhaps i should, at least from a variety standpoint. i'm down to 3 now, but i used to have 2 166XLs as well. everything in my arsenal right now colors the sound one way or another, so i figured a first step would be to get something a little more transparent. not wanting to spend a lot of dough, i decided to buy a really nice compressor and see if it really is as nice as everyone says it is and as the name implies. they're only $200 new and i got this one for like 2/3 that price, so it's not like i'll be out a lot of money if i don't like it.