Fray

Maybe they mean as opposed to the DXi version? If there is one, that is.

I'd say he's mostly right in describing what physically happens in clipping. The sound you hear (clicks, pops, other assorted nastiness) is the distortion from your waveform getting turned into something closer to a square wave when the peak amplitudes all get lopped off to the same max value. Fortunately there's a threshold of how many consecutive samples have to get clipped before we can actually hear the distortion (I think it's around 6 samples at 44.1kHz). And that's where the limiter comes in: it detects that the signal has gotten too hot and immediately turns it down, hopefully preserving the shape of the rest of the waveform (at least for the length of the release time). So it sounds a lot better than if you'd just let the signal clip. AFAIK there's really no difference between a 1:infinity compressor and a limiter. You also need to be aware of where the clipping is happening, and do your limiting before that. For example, if you're recording an external sound source and it's turned up too load, it will clip at input of your soundcard (the A/D converter specifically). Putting a limiter in your DAW of choice (ex. Cubase) won't do anything to help -- you need to turn the volume down or use a hardware limiter (just turn the damn volume down though). Most recent DAWs use a floating point representation for audio, so usually you don't have to worry about clipping happening within the DAW itself, ex. when going across effects or busses. Never hurts to keep your levels reasonable, though. But when you actually bounce your mix down to a .wav file, clipping will occur if the level ever goes over 0dB, so it can be a good idea to put a limiter on the main bus. If I understand right, a hard limiter with instant attack and release would have the same effect as clipping. You can distort the signal more by making your release time too short on either a compressor or limiter.

Yeah, you definitely have to understand chords to play good leads. You don't necessarily have to be able to play chords on the guitar, but I'm splitting hairs now

100% agreed on both items. I did apply the flange to the whole track, and it sounds great on the Cookie Monster parts but not so much on the dying screams and demon snarls. I wanted to hear your comments -- see if I was going in the right direction and all

I think it's pretty universal... if you try to learn an instrument and tell yourself "I don't need to learn X", then you're not going to be able to do "X". You're limiting yourself, but maybe that's okay for you. If all you ever do is practice metal guitar leads, you'll get good at them and nothing else. But if that's all you ever want to play, who gives a shit? No, you probably won't be able to get into a good band, and you'll certainly never be a session musician, but if all you want to do is add metal leads to your remixes without having to manhandle a multisample into sounding realistic, you'll have accomplished your goal. So figure out what you want to do, and practice it. There is such a thing as having a good foundation (chords are a good foundation), but I think people can put too much emphasis on "what" you practice and not enough on "how much".

Oh, I probably only understood about 30% of the lyrics, but that was enough to get the gist of it. Probably helped that I'm vaguely familiar with the plot of Valkyrie Profile, having played part of the 2nd one. Thanks for posting -- I think it's good to know what's being said for mixing purposes too

Do you live in one of those capsule dorms in Japan or something?

Man, the RIAA is probably going to go ballistic trying to sue them. Either that or the musicians' union -- they sure like to get their panties in a wad about Karaoke-related issues. That's probably why they're only offering it as a component, that way at some of the legal maelstrom will be directed at whoever uses it... I don't think you'd really need to know the Windows API to work with this. You'd more need to get the SDK from Izotope and then roll it into a DXi or VST, or you could just make a dinky command line app that accepted an input and output filename.

Jeez, way to go me. I forgot to check the link! It's fixed now.

Thought it might be fun to post progress and talk about what we did. http://www.winter-light.net/nbmont/Valkyriemix_Fray_v2.mp3 - Bumped up the volume on all the cymbals and hats. Toms too. - Fed all the percussion as a group through the Cakewalk tape sim effect with medium saturation. It kinda helped take some of the "fake" sound out the drums and put them in the same space, meaning I could bump the volume up on them a bit without exposing anything unpleasant. - Bumped up the low mids on the guitars to give them a more thick sound - Swept along the EQ to find the nice growly parts of the vocals and boosted them a bit - Put a high cut on the vocals to help disguise some digital clipping. I think the recording levels were set a bit too high when Chipp did the vocals, which I imagine can be tough not to do when you're screaming bloody murder into the microphone - Put delay on the lead guitar parts to roughly match the original mix (it sounded pretty good). - Compression on most of the pre-recorded parts to even out the levels. I used it pretty liberally because we're going more for ass kicking than subtle dynamics - The usual dose of compression on the kick and snare. - Tried to EQ the kick to get a little more "thud" out of it, but it's still a little too trebly I think. - Put some of the standard death metal flangy stuff on the vocals. I plan to give them some more detailed treatment later, but I find once you do a bunch of automation and such it makes the track harder to deal with later. - Put some light amp distortion on the bass to mask the syntheticness. P.S. The lyrics are fucking hilarious P.S.S. Fixed the link.

Roland RD-600 stage piano. I could make do with pretty much anything that had good key action and a good built in piano sound so I don't have to have my computer on to play. Computer on = too much temptation to screw around in the internet

Mind if I d/l it too? I'm curious to give it a try.

KRK Rokit 5, 6, or 8. This has come up in a few other recent threads.

Hehe, I think if you're SnappleMan, they do

Much agreed on the use of PA's instead of monitors. I would give up on the idea of having any kind of sound system that will fit in a suitcase (in agreement with Tweek). But you could probably manage to carry a smallish keyboard amp (would be nice if you could get stereo sound, but that's going to be hard for public transportation). You might check out the Barbetta amps, they're supposed to be pretty impressive in terms of giving you max power for max portability.

I don't think they really did use it. I think it's something some doofus typed into epinions that was subsequently copied all over the internet.

Heh, I have the opposite problem. I can come up with lots of melodies, but when it comes time to do the percussion it's really hard to come up with anything decent. The little bit of time I've spent learning to play the bodhran has helped though, so I think you're probably on the right track learning that there git-tar.

Wait, do these things actually use real ivory? I don't buy it, the product brochure doesn't mention this. I certainly hope they wouldn't use it. I do like the feel of the studiologics. Main reason I've never gotten one is that they seem to have poor reliability. That may have changed for the later versions, I have no idea.

Maybe you're trying to remix things you like TOO much? I say that because you mentioned that you just end up recreating. Maybe try picking a tune where you like something about it, but something else is missing or weak.

They're incredibly comfy, but AFAIK they don't really present an accurate sound. Seems to be a common misconception -- the speakers and headphones you want to use for mixing and mastering don't necessarily sound "good", because they go to great pains to make any flaws in you mix obvious. Triports are going to take the edge out of certain frequencies and boost others to give you a more pleasant listening experience. But if you make your mixing decisions based on those, in theory your mix might not sound so great on a different system. But I'd say they're a lot better than using cheap headphones, because they do have a much clearer sound. Honestly though, don't sweat the monitoring thing TOO much, people! Good monitors help you make a mix that transports well, but that's all they really do. If you haven't nailed the techniques necessary to get a mix sounding right to you on whatever system you're using now, new monitors aren't going to help much! Only bother spending $$ on them if the mix sounds great on your system but sounds like crap when you listen to it somewhere else. Or if you're a gear junkie with extra cash ^.^

With headphones, keep the volume as low as you can, and take breaks every 30 minutes or so. It's really not a good idea to do 5 hours straight with them.

No, you shouldn't, but they're a whole lot better for mixing than anything else you can get for $100. Sound on Sound, great purveyors of hojillion-dollar monitors that they are, still saw fit to write an article on techniques for it: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan07/articles/mixingheadphones.htm

You're welcome. You do have a choice though -- just EQ conservatively and get somebody else to check your mix or listen to it in your car. I haven't heard the first version (link is broken), but the "flat" one didn't sound bad. I didn't mean to make you think you HAVE to go sink a whole bunch of money right away -- it's just something to put on your birthday wish list or whatever. You can work with what you have as long as you're aware of its limitations. I too like your guitar playing

Yep, that's probably because $20 headphones tend to be pretty trebly...

By "monitoring" I mean the speakers and/or headphones you're listening on. Speaker systems and headphones are not all created equal -- the effectively apply their own EQ curve to the sound. The headphones and speakers that are better for monitoring deliberately try to have as flat of a frequency response curve as possible. This isn't easy to do, which is why pro studios spend $OMG,000 on monitors. So in your specific situation, Zircon (using dedicated monitor speakers I think) is hearing all kinds of wierd stuff on the low end: "The kicks have all this sub, but not a lot of 'punch'. There's a gaping whole in the lows and low-mids. . .". But your cheap headphones probably aren't capable of producing much bass sound anyway, at least not a very accurate one -- so you don't hear the problem. This can be tricky, because even good headphones have a tough time with low end since those frequencies are felt more than they are heard. So if it sounds good on $20 headphones, why don't we all throw away our fancy pants monitors and just mix on the consumer grade equipment that everyone is using anyway? Because not all consumer systems distort the sound in the same way. You can probably experience this -- most cars have too much bass response, so burn a CD of your mix and listen to it in your car. You'll probably hear all kinds of goofy stuff (particularly bass) that you didn't notice on your headphones. But if you then used your car system to change up the EQ, you'd screw up how it sounds on headphones. Good monitors (in theory at least) provide you the best middle ground -- they let you hear problems in all frequency ranges so that you can find the best happy medium for all the different speaker systems out there. I.e. creating a mix that "transports well". Your easiest solution? Save up about $100 for a good pair of mixing headphones (ones that have a flat response). There are a couple of threads already in this forum that talk about the best ones to get.