Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Tim's Water Closet

By Tim Dolbear - www.timdolbear.com

The Drum Room. When I worked at Goodnight LA Studios, we had an exercise room off the main room, well maybe it was a large booth, but exercise equipment had taken over it... When we tracked drums, we would leave the door cracked to that room to let the sound slip in and captured it with a stereo pair of mics. The room was a very lively room and worked as a good drum room verb to tuck in under the drums in the mix.

At Eclectica Studios in CA, we has a small bathroom off the live room the was tiled, so I did the same there. But moving to Austin I knew I'd loose that room, so I set out to make a perfect drum room verb. A short, bright, dense, depth, to bring up under the kit in mix down. Now this is not the short main drum verb, nor a long over all verb in the mix, this is something always there and is a PART of the kit.



Making this verb was interesting, thus why I am writing about it. The short tile room verb patch I created using UA's Realverb and was the closest I got to the real thing. I A/B the real thing with the emulation for days and could not figure out how to get the density up but to decay so fast on such a small room.



The Answer was to place a compressor AFTER the Reverb plugin. The result is my channel preset in Samplitude called Tim's Water Closet.



So mess around with running reverb into a 4:1 compression with about 5-7db reduction on hard hits, you'll be surprised!.

The link below, you can hear the results, there are 2 verbs, the Water closet which is short and tight and the second over all verb, but with out the Water closet, the Samples don't sit well together in the room, : http://www.eclecticarecordings.com/audio/dr1.mp3

Reverb: Real or Fake?

By Tim Dolbear c2012

Reverb, personally I like 'verb' in my mixes that sound musical, not necessarily real. I love outboard reverb units and a few plugs, such as Samplitude's Variverb. Convolution verbs that model a real space just don't work for me mixing Pop/Rock.

Visualize Your Studios Setup.


By Tim Dolbear c2012


Just because you have a nice Kitchen, don't mean you know how to cook. Equipment and plugins are only tools, and are only as good as the engineer running them... I have too many plugins, I have all the UAD plugs and SSL plugs because of beta testing for them, but the ones I don't use, the ones that I have tried and don't really fit my style of work, example, the UA Trident EQ, I move in my VST folder to a subfolder called 'Others'. 

I want my list as streamline as possible and more importantly, I only want available the ones that I use and know, really know. Its the same with my outboard gear, I only keep what I use and know inside and out. If something sits for a year with out being used I sell it. 


Here is great advice I got along the way: "You have to be able to visualize your setup in your head, this streamlines your workflow, only keep on hand the important parts, the ones you are an expert at using, trim the rest!" And its true.

Microphone Pre-amp love.

By Tim Dolbear c2012

I have more channels of Pre-amps they I can use, but having 1 great Tube pre-amp (Manley) and 1 great Solid-state Pre (1979era Altec) has served me well. Really great Solid-state preamps sound as good but different as high end tube. I never knew solid-state could sound equally as good til I got the Altec, I guess I bought in to the hype around 'tube'. But for 10+ years these 2 have been my goto pres. 

Try this if you are new to audio production: place a mic on a good sound source, then move it between all your preamps, try everything, cheap, expensive tube, solid-state, every combo, you will notice that the same mic will sound and react completely different thru a different pre-amp.