For guitarists the guitar amplifier is to the electric guitar precisely what the testicles are to the penis, apart from you can sit on your amp without having to go to hospital.
Later still, with the rise of drum machines and sequenced music, it became very rare to hear records with shifting tempi. Sometimes it's nice to get away from the restrictions of the click track, and the inevitable arguments you have about what speed it should be, but more often than not in studio, everything you play is accompanied by some overbearing sound beating you through the song. We tend to use a cowbell sound.
Your ears do a similar thing when you're confronted with loud sounds to protect your brain, and for this reason compression is also used as an EFFECT, because compressed sounds are equated with volume and therefore excitement. Compression is also heavily used in mixing because consistent signals are easier to pile on top of each other.
There is more mystery surrounding compression than any other recording technique. I can't tell you why, it's a secret.
Our compressors are mostly built into our PREAMPS.
For us it used to be the quick four-track version you'd throw down using whatever shitty sounds you could make in your house, and that left room for the lovely 'proper studio version' you'd eventually record (although you'd always prefer the demo. Or your girlfriend would). It's not like that any more.
The electric bass gets DIed a lot, which can be slightly weird. When you DI a guitar or a bass, you get a curious 'nude' sound from it, because is not attractively clothed in testicular AMP-sound. This is sometimes done deliberately with guitars because they sound incredibly 'clean', although it generally speaks of a particular era and style of music ('80s', 'Nile Rodgers').
It is routinely used to record bass because bass is one of the simplest signals there is. Many producers forgo the bass amp entirely because the amp itself doesn't provide all the frequencies you get from a DI. Often people record both the amp and the DI. I find that bass is one of the easiest things to record, but one of the hardest to actually make sound good.
Analog, which is how humans encounter the world, is about lovely curvy lines in a sexy continuous motion - if you had an analog clock that didn't go 'tick' the hands would pass through every point of every millisecond of All Time. It wouldn't miss a thing. That's not like digital, which is about small, regular, discrete blocks of data. Your digital clock doesn't see any difference between the first bit of each digit and the end, it's just second 1 for 1 second and THAT'S IT.
In analog sound recording, the signal is a continuous wave generated by the source which is converted into an electrical impulse which gets drawn onto the medium. The accuracy of the image is dependent on the sensitivity of the thing turning it into electricity (usually a microphone). Digital recording is the same up till the sound becomes electricity, which is where the ANALOG-TO-DIGITAL CONVERTERS come in. They listen to the sensuous peaks and troughs of the source and maps the co-ordinates of which bit was a peak and how steep the sides of the trough were, and each co-ordinate gets sent to the computer where it decodes the co-ordinates and reassembles the sound wave out of little bricks. This means that a certain amount of the sound is implied, like the infinitesimal gap between the seconds of a digital clock. Of course, you can't hear the gaps, because the co-ordinates are taken at such a high resolution. It's like if you make a circle out of Lego, the smaller the bricks you use, or the greater distance from which you look at it, the less you can see the edges of the individual bricks.
Whoever it was that invented the CD decreed that it should encode music sounds at 16 bits (the number of bricks it takes to go from a trough to a peak) at 44.1kHz (the number of times you plot the co-ordinates per second ). In theory there is a lot more implied information on your CD than on your tape. We are recording at 24 bits, 48kHz which in theory implies a lot less.
mp3s, children, can imply music entirely. You may be listening to some now without realising.
I can't tell the difference between any of them. When the band is rocking or the tune is beautiful I'm satisfied - I don't have to try to feel the square edges. And a computer is a lot smaller than a 24-track.
If, by some unheard-of confluence of unlikeliness, you make a mistake while you are recording something, it is possible to fix the fuck-up by whizzing the tape back and replacing it with a moment of supernatural brilliance. This became known as 'dropping in' in the days of tape, when pressing record meant erasing the earlier version for All Eternity, and was therefore much more terrifying than it is in digital-land, where you do it 'non-destructively'. This is where you stack up millions of alternative versions on top of each other, thereby deferring the decision about what to use for All Eternity.
This is an inherently multitrack technique, as it works best when you're working with one instrument on a single track. It's hard to drop in on a track where there are lots of things going on because there is greater potential for glaring differences in level, tone and energy between the original and dropped-in sections. Some engineers refuse to drop in on drum tracks because it bothers them when the cymbal hit that's still ringing from four bars ago suddenly disappears after the drop. Today's homework is to listen to some recordings of drums and see if you can spot any mysterious cymbal drop-outs, and see if you prefer that to listening to the singing.
Other popular effects were mechanical, like the Lesley rotating cabinet, which was an amp designed for organs, in which the speakers were on turntables and you could control the speed at which they rotated, and the relative distances between you and the various rotating speakers created a rather superb wobbliness. Almost every sound has at some point been fed through a Lesley, it's just something that everyone does.
Another kind of effect is distortion or 'overdrive' where you amplify a signal beyond your equipment's ability to reproduce it. This is generally a byproduct of volume, so it's inherently exciting, cos you're just fucking shit up, man, and you just don't care. Some units are designed to distort in particularly musically pleasing ways. Where would Jimi be without his Marshall?
In fact these are the families of effects that are still in use, they have just been expanded exponentially. In the studio, effects became outboard units that created ever more sophisticated and editable effects, but since they were nearly all based on digital processing they have naturally emigrated into computers where they operate in a the much more fluid world of digital music production, and there they're called PLUG-INS. That's why there aren't any effects in our rack.
One of the few areas where hardware effects are still popular is live sound and particularly guitar effects. There is something about the way certain effects sound when they go through an AMP that creates a different thing altogether, and can be almost as much of a creative act as the notes you choose.
GLOSSARY
Despite being an intelligent, effective individual, someone takes it upon themselves to illuminate the self-explanatory for you as if you were a chimp in a nappy.
(I tend to call it a DESK when it's large enough to be furniture on its own.)
A superstition has developed about every part of the SIGNAL PATH in a studio. The mixer is often considered to be the key factor in the sound of classic recordings. People always go on about the desks they had at Abbey Road in the 60s, like that the sound of the Beatles was something that had built up like limescale inside the equipment and they were the lucky recipients of it being flushed out. There is no doubt that once your music has been turned into electricity, different circuitry can affect its quality in arcane ways. Engineers get a bit fixated on such things. In my experience there's no electronic unit in the world that can improve your shitty playing.
In our studio the mixer is only being used to listen to what's on the computer. What goes into the microphones goes through our OUTBOARD units into the CONVERTERS which turn it into a delicious digital snack for the computer. Then it sicks it out into the channels of the desk as two chunky channels, one for left and one for right. And that's what we listen to.
However, this technological leap implied that there was no reason why you should be limited to a mere two tracks and so very quickly they invented the four-track, the eight-track, the sixteen-track and finally the twenty-four track tape recorders. By the time they got up to twenty-four the tapes were two inches wide to accommodate a decent-sized piece of tape for each track. This meant that now sources didn't need to be performed together, so you could concentrate on one part at a time, and because you could keep recording that one thing over and over again multi-track recordings started to become Better Than Life.
It also meant that, rather than lots of musicians playing one thing, one musician could play lots of things, and this gave musicians a great deal of joy, because we love playing with ourselves. When they'd figured out how to make tape heads small enough to allow recording four or eight tracks on cassette, many amateur musicians were never seen again.
This process also removed the mixer part of earlier 1 and 2 track recording because all you had to do was give each source its own track and worry about it later. But you still did have to worry about it because otherwise you'd have to ship a 2-inch tape to peoples' homes and have them play it back on their 24-track hi-fis. So a whole new procedure came into being whereby the multitrack recording got mixed back down to a stereo (two-track) master. Now you could manipulate each original source as much as you liked, which is why records from the 80s sound like that. Eventually people started getting poisoned by GATED REVERB and the recording process became transparent; you just used the techniques required to get the sound you wanted, whether that was shouting into a wax cylinder while playing the tuba or compiling an assortment of samples from other people's records while playing the tuba.
By the time everyone had started slaving together four or five 24-track machines, music (in the form of the Compact Disc) had become DIGITAL, and it wasn't long before tape machines were puritan curiosities and multitrack recording had become theoretically infinite.
We're using a UA6176 (which we've christened 'The Brown Box') a Langevin Vocal Combo ('The Lady Box') and a CLM DB400S which handily does four at once without disgracing itself.
these facts were made up by Ben Hales