JustDave

I have spent most of the last year (2011) recording lots and lots of basic tracks containing just enough information in either a guitar, keyboard or vocal (or combination of each) to remind me what it was I was intending to do with the finished song when I get around to finishing it. I have been doing this rather than completing full songs because of a problem I had discovered with my studio monitoring setup.

Basically I had been aware for some time that what I heard through the monitors in my studio was not what I would hear in a ‘real world’ environment i.e. a normal stereo system. I knew that when the upper bass/lower mid range was sounding good in the studio, it would sound light and boxy on normal equipment with bass and kick drum almost completely missing so I would have to over compensate in the studio to make it sound more like I intended it to everywhere else. This was OK although very time consuming because I would have to repeatedly listen to my tracks on several different systems and make notes about what was too loud or too quiet then try to apply it in the studio without paying any attention to what I was actually hearing through the monitors (before you ask, my monitors aren’t top of the range but are a very reasonable pair of KRK Rokit RP5’s).

This had proved adequate for the last few years (I recorded my whole debut album this way) but then I tried to mix my most ambitious track to date, ‘Self Portrait’. This song has around 70 channels in it compared with my normal 20 to 30. I must have mixed, remixed from scratch, tweaked, pushed, pulled and turned upside down etc. etc. etc. this track on at least thirty different occasions only to find that what I got on a normal stereo was still complete crap.

I started to do a bit of research on this and discovered that ‘standing waves’ and ‘room modes’ (no, I had no idea at the time either!!!!) in the lower frequencies were probably being created in my room causing partial or total cancellation of some frequencies so in April last year I bought a JBL MSC1 monitor controller with the room mode correction software. I tried for over 6 months to get this to work but in the end gave up and got a refund because even trying three separate PC’s each with different versions of Windows (XP Pro, Vista and 7-64 bit) the software would not take a single room reading.

In December I bought the IK Multimedia ARC System which took readings immediately and loaded really simply. I tried a couple of remixes with the ARC loaded but although there was some improvement in what I was hearing through the monitors, the sound in the studio still didn’t translate well to normal listening equipment, there was still quite a lot missing in the same lower midrange.

By Christmas I had decided to bite the bullet and ask the Wife what she thought of the idea of me hanging acoustic panels all over our spare room (I mean… er. Studio). Expecting the worst I showed her a sketch of what I was proposing and to my surprise she said “If you think it will help then do it, just try not to make them look too ugly.” After I got up off the floor I went on the internet and ordered a 100mm (4”) pack and two 50mm (2”) packs of Rockwool RW5 (I believe the US equivalent is Owens-Corning 705) which are rigid fibreglass insulation panels (not actually that rigid when you see them) and some mutually acceptable upholstery material to cover them in for aesthetic purposes (and to keep the fibreglass fibres in).

This approach did not involve any calculations, meter readings or any tests whatsoever and simply used a lot of the very good information available on various websites and forums as the basis for the design. (Two people who both own acoustic treatment companies but are very free with brilliant information both on their company websites and also contribute unselfishly in discussion forums are Ethan Winner (www.realtraps.com) and Glenn Kuras (www.gikacoustics.com), so a big thanks to these guys for the help even though I have not directly corresponded with either of them.)


As you can see from the photo I have used the two 1200x600x100mm thick panels to help the lower frequencies (these are reasonably heavy lumps of fibreglass so I have mounted them within mdf and softwood batten frames bracketed to the wall and door respectively) on either side of the desk and used a further two 1200x600x50mm thick panels with simple hook supports at the back behind the desk and off the ceiling above. A further four 1200x300x50mm panels are above and alongside the desk and some smaller triangular panels in all of the upper corners of the room. I still have three sheets of the 50mm panels left over for additional areas if necessary (I am going to make some portable 1200x600x50mm panels out of these to use as and when necessary either for recording or mixing). I should note that I have an open clothes rack and a shelving unit full of books and boxes in the two rear corners of the room so firstly adding corner traps there is not an option and secondly the diffusion and absorption provided by the books and clothes is probably not hugely below what the fibreglass panels would offer anyway. In total I have just under 5 square metres (55 sq ft) of panels installed permanently.

I can hear you from here…. “Yeah nice description dickhead, but did they do anything????” The easy answer is…… ‘Oh hell yeah!!!’

The first track I played suddenly had a lot of the missing bass/lower mid range tones in it and played with a nice warm tighter bottom end, it seemed less harsh at the top while still being bright and the definition between the instruments/vocals was far superior and tighter than anything I had been able to hear before. Most remarkable was the stereo field, previously things hard panned left or right had sounded more like being just slightly off centre whereas now things are very clearly where the pan control says they should be.

I did a quick remix of ‘Self Portrait’ over an hour or so and was stunned at how many adjustments I had to make to each track to get it sounding right on the ‘new system’. Once I had finished I burned it to CD and played it on a couple of other systems in different spaces and found that the sound of the mix on these systems was very, very similar to what I had heard in the studio. I listened to it regularly in my car and on other systems over the following week and then went back to make some adjustments at the weekend. At this point it became blindingly obvious that the few bits of acoustic treatment in the room had now provided me with a monitoring environment which produced results that were nearly 100% transferable to other audio equipment, in other words exactly what I was missing before. Basically my quick remix was better than any of the numerous previous mixes I had done, and by a very large distance.

I used the IK ARC system to see if there were any obvious changes to the readings it provided before I did the acoustic treatment and as you can see in the images below there has been up to a 10db reduction in amplitude in the lower frequencies where most of my problems seemed to be. I still don’t profess to know very much about this technically but I know that if I turn up a track by 10db something dramatic will happen. Well something dramatic happened after fitting the acoustic treatment and its all in a positive way.






I did try using the ARC system in conjunction with the acoustic treatment and it did give me some helpful insight into some of the likely minor mix corrections and compensations I may have to make (because three bales of Rockwool will not give anyone a million dollar control room on their own). This far though I have found that I prefer the results with just the monitors and room treatment better as the ARC system seems to be giving exaggerated corrections some of the remaining problems it is finding.

Hopefully from now on I can spend a lot more time recording and producing new tracks and a lot less time fighting my equipment.

Total cost of this exercise - £154.00 + a good few hours DIY input.

Satisfaction with the result – Priceless!!

Thanks for Reading

-JD-

As I have mentioned numerous times on various web sites, I have been working on some acoustic cover songs lately. I am using predominantly just vocals and an acoustic guitar although on one track I have used just keyboards and vocals and on a couple of tracks I have overdubbed a second (electric) guitar. None of the tracks are strictly fully live and all have been through the studio recording process.

The songs themselves are intended as ‘unplugged’ style backing tracks for YouTube videos, the first of which I uploaded this morning to my YouTube channel at JustDave YouTube Channel for the purpose of self promotion. I have also made the MP3’s of the tracks available for free download in the ‘Members Area’ of my official website. (You can become a member simply by joining my mailing list at JustDave Mailing List – it’s all free).

Doing the cover songs is all very well but the question I am sure you are all asking is why, as an original artist, am I doing covers of other people’s songs in the first place?

Part of the answer is that it is quite good fun and provides a break from writing, rewriting, recording and rerecording original songs, with covers at least you know where they are going when you start one. The real answer is that I feel a large majority of people would prefer to hear something they are more familiar from a new artist to help them to assess that artist before they move on to listen to the original tracks.

Obviously this process isn’t necessary with commercially backed artists as the level of advertising and airplay they get by default makes people believe that they have heard most new releases before anyway (although many bigger artists have started their careers with a cover song and some still make a career out of cover songs!) Similarly a great number of commercially available tracks are written to template format anyway whereby the sounds, structures, melodies and production used are extremely similar to each other so that even new tracks have a very familiar feel to them. Obviously not being commercially signed etc, I am not privileged to these inbuilt advantages so I have to try to make my luck using other methods.

Another advantage of this is as I am not currently playing live, the videos give people a way of seeing me playing (live????) and to get a different angle from the promotional photos and words which is all that would be otherwise available.

Writing this I have almost convinced myself that this is a great idea.

Good idea/crap idea – you choose! I’ll let you know if there proves to be a method in the madness later.

Thanks for reading.

-JD-

I have been on a mission recently to try to define the type of music I make for the benefit of providing a description which will actually convey something useful to other web users if it comes up in a search. I am sure that this is a dilemma that every band experiences when they set up a page on the web.

I initially described my music as Pop/Rock but then added PowerPop to the description as my stuff can have a bit more edge to it in places than what most people perceive as simply Pop/Rock. The trouble is that a small group of words like this isn’t able to convey what a twelve song album is actually all about with any degree of accuracy and can tend to put you into a pigeon hole you shouldn’t necessarily be in and by that give potential listeners the wrong impression and therefore make them still only potential listeners.

The reason I say this is that while trying to define my own music I have listened to numerous other songs which are on the various charts or pages of other sites (most specifically GarageBand, MySpace and UnsignedBandWeb as JustDave is represented on each of them) to see what the common expectation is of the various available genres. What I have found is that very few of the songs in the various categories of Pop/Rock/PowerPop/Indie/Alternative or the various combinations of each etc. actually sound anything like what their short chart/genre description suggests. That is not to say that the songs aren’t good as most of them were excellent, it’s just that the description doesn’t fit the product.

One of the biggest oddities I have come across is the use of the word ‘Alternative’ which you seem to be able to attach in front of any other group of genres to change the overall meaning. For example there is:

Alternative - (MySpace and UBW, but on MySpace it can be used with any other two genres to make a different description)
Alternative Country – (UBW)
Alternative Metal
Alternative Pop
Alternative Rock – (All on GarageBand)

Not very long ago alternative music (before they invented the term ‘experimental’ as a musical definition) was when someone recorded a track playing a Gregorian nose flute with their arse to the rhythm of a drum kit made entirely of kitchen utensils, plastic pipes and a plywood box playing in a loose 16/43 time signature with sporadic animal noises in place of the vocals. In other words the musical equivalent of modern art where the guys playing it really believe there is no other form and anything different is crap and their ‘followers’ by and large don’t understand it but think it’s cool to be around these people.

Wikipedia Description Wikipedia

Alternative rock (also called alternative music, alt-rock or simply alternative; known primarily in the UK as indie) is a genre of rock music that emerged in the 1980s and became widely popular in the 1990s. Alternative rock consists of various subgenres that have emerged from the independent music scene since the 1980s, such as grunge, Britpop, gothic rock, and indie pop. These genres are unified by their collective debt to the style and/or ethos of punk rock, which laid the groundwork for alternative music in the 1970’s. At times alternative rock has been used as a catch-all phrase for rock music from underground artists in the 1980s, and all music descended from punk rock (including punk itself, new wave, and post-punk).

Not a bad description as far as I can tell and pretty much as I thought I understood it. Further down the same page it goes on to describe some of the common elements which make certain musical styles Alternative and on the basis of those descriptions, a lot of my stuff could be considered Alternative too.

I noticed the other day that on the Coldplay ‘Official’ MySpace site they define themselves (presumably) as ‘Alternative/Pop/Rock’. In my opinion Coldplay are about as ‘Alternative’ as Big Brother contestants are talented as are a vast amount of other acts who use ‘Alternative’ in their genre description. (Read the wording here carefully before you get all exited and start slagging me off)

If the Wikipedia description is accurate, then Indie and Alternative are much the same thing but from different countries of origin. So why do the sites also include separate ‘Indie’ references?:

‘Indie – (MySpace and UBW, but on MySpace it can be used with any other two genres to make a different description)
Indie Rock – (GarageBand)

‘Indie’ simply derives from ‘Independent Record Company/Label’, as in – not one of the majors, although strangely, in terms of a musical style, it is actually a better description as most true Indie bands had a style that was not mainstream hence why they were on an independent label. Given that these bands were actually signed and most bands on the aforementioned websites are not, this makes it very hard for Indie to be the correct description.

The thing I have found by listening to other peoples music is that if all that is described as Indie/Alternative is actually that under the current definition, then Indie/Alternative is actually mainstream. This is obviously the exact opposite of the definition above so one of them is wrong – which is it??????

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the music under the Indie or Alternative listings is exactly that by the current definition, it’s just an equal amount isn’t even close. Unfortunately the attitude I described in my own definition (anything different is crap…) still seems to apply to a lot of these acts (and I suspect mostly the ones who aren’t really Indie/Alternative).

On the basis that if everything else is crap if it isn’t Indie/Alternative – and a lot of these bands aren’t actually Indie/Alternative, does that make those bands crap by default.

No of course it doesn’t, but it doesn’t mean that their attitudes aren’t.

Anyway, nuff said about that as I’m still no closer to figuring out what my own definition should be. I’ll keep thinking and I’ll let you know where I get to in a future post.

If you got this far, thanks for reading.

-JD-