Now I'll try to keep this section fairly brief, I could really spend a whole semester here, learning just what audio is and what it consists of. But this part is very, very important it because if you know what sound consists of, and what its nature is that it makes it so much easier to capture it and manipulate it. I mean, if you're a professional photographer, you better know what the nature of light is, right? Actually, when you think about photography is really at the same place that we are with home recording. The tools are getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper. But I would always take the photographer who knows what exposure is, aperture light temperature is over someone who just has the latest digital SLR and no knowledge.

No, I mean, basically, the right equipment with the right knowledge is an unbeatable combination. I really believe that. So let's look at the three elements of sound and break them down. If we were to capture sound, we better know what this animal is. list and we'll break it down into its three main elements which is volume, title, content and environment. Now at its core sound has changed in air pressure if I snap my fingers it sends out waves in all directions of air pressure those waves of pressure make their way through is and vibrate your eardrum in sympathy with those waves, and then you perceive that as sound if there were no air in here, we wouldn't be able to hear a thing because sound is changing air pressure.

That's why in space no one can hear you scream. That's a reference to the original alien movie if any of you are old enough to remember that trial. Anyway, get this your is so sensitive to differences in air pressure, you can hear me at whisper and a yell, just rub your fingers there. And can you believe your ears can pick that up and a massive rock concert in fact, you can perceive about 11 or 12 trillion Different levels. In sound, don't miss what you said that is a so powerful they can see about 11 or 12 trillion different levels of volume, it'd be almost like designing a scale that could way better at an apartment block at the same time. At is extraordinary.

I'm a big fan, we then have a ton of content at is can also detect the right of those ways. If I was to play this sound, that a string of an acoustic guitar, then we perceive it as an E on the musical scale. But what really happened was that your eardrums were pushed and pulled back and forth in sympathy with that sound and your brain get this callate as happening at 2.41 times a second. Can you believe it counted those ways and you perceived it as an either an extreme has your brain counting it at exactly 10 times the Civil War and then these are the rights for all the other strengths that by the way shortcut the same hundred and 10 compressions of air pressure waves. The second is just to say 110 hertz. So whenever you hear, say 110 hertz, for example, I'm saying the sound wave is vibrating 440 times a second.

Once we get into thousands of hertz, we call them kilo hertz, okay for short, humans hear roughly from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz, or waveforms that cycle from 20 times to 20,000 times per second. We tend to lose our top end as we age. But to hear some of those pictures, and kind of get an idea of how they sound let's play a sweep from 20 hertz to 20,000 hours. Listen to it. It's kind of like what we learned at school. Remember when we broke up light in a different color through a prism or you know what you see in a rainbow.

It's basically the same thing here. So but it's also important to realize that we're talking about fundamental frequencies here. Like we saw an A string retires. 110 hertz, that's the fundamental frequency. There are overtones of harmonics above that, that give the Saturday guitar its character, but right now we're just talking about fundamental frequencies. Now, the third of the Elements we'll look at is the environment.

This has nothing to do with alcohol, nothing, I have anything against I'll go up, it has nothing to do with him. Okay? This talks about the audio clues that we have. That gives us an idea of where a sound lives. Now if I was to speak to you out in the middle of an open field, then you would hear the sound of my voice direct going directly from my mouth to your ears. But if we're indoors, then you not only hear the direct sound, but you also hear the sound coming up the walls, and all of that stuff coming up here.

And depending on what that environment is, when you just listen to a sound, you can kind of get clues to where that environment is. Let's listen to some examples of a drum kit. Listen, this first one that sounds pretty clean, right? It sounds like we're very close to the kit and there's not a lot of reflections off of the wall. Things like that list is another one. Okay, now we're getting a little bigger.

Right, you can hear this in probably some sort of room system another one. Okay, now we're in a lot larger room, right? And you can hear those reflections, a lot of different reflections rather than just a distinct echo. You're hearing many, many complex echoes which give you that reverb which gives you an audio clue where that's coming from. Now, this next one will be very interesting because it has a pre delay, let me talk about the speed of sound as reset. And you guys don't go in Okay, Okay, here we go.

In terms of speed of sounds, but it's a little like 1100 foot per second. at sea level at 70 degrees. It's different. If you're a different elevation, different temperature, it changes slightly, but here's the way around it down 1100 feet per second then I can basically let's round down to 1000. That means that the sound to get from me to hear what is basically a millisecond output. So therefore, if someone speaks to me from 50 feet away, I'm going to hear history Actually, I'm going to be hearing what they said 50 milliseconds ago, you know, that's not going to happen, just 50 feet away.

But when you go to a ball game, you see the batter hit the ball, right? You see that and then you hear it maybe a second or two later, depending on where you're sitting within the field. And certainly the difference between lightning and thunder right now, light travels a whole lot faster. 186,000 miles per second I believe is can go seven and a half times around the world in a second. But sound will only get you know about 1100 feet. So here's the point.

In the next one you hear check out the difference between your your hear a snare drum hit, and then this is actually modeled off of Madison Square gardens that you're here. And Madison Square gardens a big big place right? You'll hit a snare drum and then you'll hear like it. It Go to the And then come back, you know, I don't know, say, maybe half a second afterwards. So you hear that pre delay before the reverberation start. So it'll tend to kind of breathe.

Like that, check it out. Okay, so in all those examples, you could play it to anybody that the person listening to that doesn't need to know about reflectors need to know the nature of sound or whatever. But everybody knows that one was on a sound close the other one sound like it was in this big echoey place. So we need to kind of know how to tame that environment. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. I just wanted to introduce you to that idea.

That sounds live in environments and they can either be natural environments, or we can recreate those environments later on. Okay, we've learned that the three basic elements of sound are volume term content and environment. What's in it for you? Why am I even bringing this up? Why do we have to break this down? Well, let's take one at a time here.

In terms of volume, volume is supremely important as it allows you to blend different sounds together. I mean, what's the most obvious thing that you see on a sound console faders right faders allow us to mix, the relative volumes of all of our tracks will bring one part of the band up above the others. It's also important to know in terms of volume, in terms of how loud you can push a signal before distortion, how low to go while also being out of the noise floor. How to Set recording levels of volumes is a big big one. Second one title content that has consequences. Check this one out.

The pitch or range of pitches where an instrument lives it's very important unless your instrument is a tuning fork, your instrument will have a range of pitches that will it will play. For instance, the human voice ranges from about 80 hertz to 1100 hertz this equates to about the low end guitar all the way up to the top of the top string. It's about three and a half octaves, check out this video and sing along to see to kind of find out where your vocal ranges I'm really sorry to subjection to that, but you can hear it I have a range of descended three octaves Mariah Carey can apparently hit five octaves. That is a whole lot, but let's go with the average. The singers range for about two and a half octaves like that. That means that your average vocalist, fundamental frequency range or the band of frequencies that kind of lives in is between 80 hertz to 1100 hertz.

We have over hones either sorry, overtones or how to go much higher. But if you know where all the instruments that you're recording kind of live, then you can mix a whole lot better. If the three instruments that you're recording, say bass, guitar, vocal and zap and then life, life would be pretty easy. And they all live in different parts of what we call the audio spectrum. Now to kind of hear what all of these instruments are all these tones sound like through the audio spectrum, what I've done is taken a bandpass filter that split this up, splits the audio spectrum up into about eight different bands and we'll take a song and play More out and listen to each one individually. Check this out.

Day even the next day got some chances sometimes to turn your back to win this world outside epic dark indoors. Still, these guys just one at a time, very, very low. So almost nothing. In terms of tuning down here it's just sort of the kick drum and some flap of some bass guitar but carry Even she had a training event. Next slide. Okay, now was done hitting the baseline, right?

That's a pretty raggedy kind of baseline without that sort of overtime, it just sounds very, very boxy. This is a really kind of boxy band right here. Low mid range here. coming in here All the power interesting when you pull apart or a slice of the frequency spectrum I mean some of them when you Listen to them just by themselves sound horrible. you'd imagine, why is that even in there? Well, we need every one of those classes.

And we need to have our instruments balanced across that. So we have some instruments don't overlap with others and you get maskings. About, we'll learn all about that and mixing and EQ. But it's, I just find it very interesting. Listen to those guys. And once you start getting familiar with those different bands, then life is you know, a whole lot better.

Actually, let's do a quick pop quiz here. If we have a ton of spectrum going all the way from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz here. Where would you expect mid range to be assessed to make this kind of easier? Let's just round this down to basically zero and this is 20 K. So where would you expect the mid range to be? between zero and 20 k? expects to be 10 K, right?

But here's the deal. Have you guys ever seen one of these guys here? Some people call a third band equalizer, a 31 band equalizer. And here's the deal. We can hear basically 10 octaves across the range of human hearing. And so if there's 10 octaves, we noticed before that every time we go up an octave, we double the Hertz, right?

So an octave about this would be 20 would go to 40 hertz and 80 hertz, then 160 hertz, and so on. And so here's the deal. This is not a linear line here at all. It's an exponential line. And, in fact, let me kind of digress here and we'll go through a very old story where maybe you've heard this one with a young man goes to an emperor, and the Emperor says, Look, I'll either give you a penny on the very first check and then I'll double that on every every one of the squares in the checkerboard and you can have a Have a million dollars, or you can have a penny double on each of those. And just the way the question is expressed, it kind of brings up your curiosity and saying, well, I thought it would be my interest, but it's actually not check it out.

So if we double that or go to two pennies for 816 3264 at the end of the first row, we're back 28. We're already off the top of the slide right here. So let's just round that up. Instead of a back 28. Let's just make that say $1. Okay, so at the second row, then we go for 816 32 is the pair of exponential numbers still running 128 bucks.

The million dollars is looking like a better deal. But check out what happens the next one we're at 32,000 on the next row. The next one, we're up to $16 million. So halfway across the board. Already $16 million. And then we go to the next one of the $8 trillion.

And if we fill the next square can actually pay up the US debt, which would be a pretty good, good thing. And I won't go through all the rest, but it's basically over 12 sorry, over 92 quadrillion dollars is just a ridiculous amount of money. So how does that play with what we had in the towel spectrum? Well, here's the deal with the tunnel spectrum. And I'll go back to this highlight here. So it's the same thing with here.

This is not a linear line. This is a curve that goes Whoa, straight up like that. And here's how you can prove it is each one of these guys. Every time you hit three of these sliders, that's one octave. And we know that when you go up an octave it doubles. Another way to look at that is if you went down one octave, it would have this so tenncare would actually live about here and by Kevin live about here and so on and so on, it ends up being that mid range is actually 1000 hertz.

Now in terms of environment, why does that matter? Why does that have consequences? Well, if you've ever recorded from a distance, if you had a microphone too far away, then your audience doesn't even know anything about the nature of sound reverberations, or any of that they just listen to it and perceive it as sounding horrible. So you really need to know how to time basically two things. First, you need to learn how to tame your environment, in terms of say acoustically treating your room or mic position. And then that's to kind of take the environment out of the mix.

Or On the flip side, you may want to add some environment artificially using some reverb and delay so that's very important, as well. So there you have it, your three parts or three characteristics of sound, volume, title, content, and also environment we'll learn how to massage those guys. and deal with them in mixing, mastering everything throughout this course. Now we have just one more thing to understand here before we get really practical and see some examples of recording, but I just kind of want to lay down the groundwork of just one more fundamental idea before we get there. Okay, the signal path, we basically know what sound is, but what path does it take from our mouth to a recorded track and and finally out of the speakers here, kind of goes like this sound waves from a mouth or instrument go into a microphone, and at this stage, the electrical signal that is produced is tiny it needs to get boosted up by going through a preamp.

Now we have a healthy signal to work with. And then it goes into a channel, which has a few knobs and sliders. If we wanted to maybe change the sound and then that signal goes out to a track where it's recorded. Man some old studios actually looked like this with separate disciplines. preamps and mixes and recorders in a lot of your machines. It's just basically plug a mic in a little box and away you go.

But no matter how you record, try to imagine it as these four stages, mic preamp channel, then track. So if you have any problems in terms of, say distortion or noise or anything else, anything else that's bad, then if it's bad back in the first power signal, it'll follow you all the way through try to always visualize that signal path, as it will make it a lot easier to diagnose, diagnose problems later, as I say, garbage in, garbage out. So let's look at the three basic rules of recording, getting the basic the sound into recorder and data, capture it clean, get the best possible signal noise ratio, and then isolate the sound. Let's look at the first one there. Rule number one is captured it claim I want to look at the whole signal pass from source all the way through to record a track and make sure it's as clean as possible.

That means a good cables Watch out for hum and buzz and interference from, say, light dimmers and also fluorescent lighting record by candlelight. If you have to, if you're getting a problem there, check the source by using headphones, crank it up, and make sure that signal is nice and clean. If there's junk on that original signal, there's gonna follow you all the way through to the recordings and through the mixing process. Now Rule number two is get the best possible signal noise ratio. This is related to rule number one, but you really need to get a grasp of the dynamic range of any sound. The range of levels that a recorder can capture is known as its dynamic range.

That's the limit on what's the most quiet and the most louder sound that it can record. The ad job is to set the levels of that input so that we get close to but not exceed the maximum limit. The both of these extremes down here Here have dangers of their own. Down here is the inherent noise of any signal path, the low level hissing hum of, say your mic cable, for example, I wouldn't set my level way down here because it is down and what we call the noise floor. Then if you let it want to amplify this recorded audio, you would bring up the noise floor to giving you a horrible signal noise ratio. I also don't want to set my levels up here so that it peaks at the top because I'll get distortion section level so that average at around minus 12 to minus 16 db.

So you have a little headroom for occasional peaks. There's a limit on how high you can set your recording levels, right. If you hit them too hard, you'll get that distortion, right. However, sitting level is way down here so that you're safe from that stuff is not a good move here. As we just saw in that video in a signal chain. You have a certain amount of money Down here from your mic preamp cables and appearance and from lighting so on, could be basically anything your jaw Rob, your job role number one is to get a clean signal.

But imagine that noise floor is down here. If you set your levels down here, you're going to have to pull it out and guess what out comes up there too. If you're too afraid of distortion, putting it down here might not be a good move, because you'll bring when you boost it up, you'll bring all that noise up as well. We're not only boosting the good signal, we're boosting that bad signal there. So the solution is to record a signal is as high as possible without actually distorting. Just go ahead and make some test recordings.

Watch your meters and listen with headphones. Now one note I'd like to make in this section is understanding how high a bit resolution recorders actually help kind of give you some wiggle room in this in this area. Many recorders and in fact the city standard ar 16 bit that means The amplitude of the waveform is plotted at any particular point at over 65,000 different levels. If I was to make up something like a 17 bit recorder, that would be twice the resolution of that. It's kind of like the checkerboard that we saw a moment ago at a bit and it doubles the resolution. Well, if you do the math, then a 24 bit recorder has over 250 times the resolution of a 16 bit recorder.

But you might say So what? Well, let's take an analogy that we're all familiar with, and that is digital cameras. Back in the day, the first round of cameras were around one megapixel, and they look fine on a computer screen. But do you remember when you tried to blow them up? Right? They got really blocky, there was really no way that you could afford to take a picture like this from way back with your subject far away, you had to get in close.

This is like making a recording with your vertical you know, way down here. In both instances, you have to amplify the signal which will bring up the junk packet, which is called the junk factor. But let's imagine you have a brand new 10 mega megapixel camera, you can now afford to capture a picture that has your subject further away because blowing up that picture won't add any junk due to the high resolution of the product. There's so much information that you can afford kind of not to zoom in on the subject. so closely. Same thing with a 24 bit recorder with so much resolution at 250 times that of a 16 bit one you can afford to record at a slightly lower recording level because amping it up later won't bring in as much junk as a 16 bit system.

I mean, does that make sense that now I'm not advocating recording at a really low level of at 16 bit systems a jack No not at all. But whatever system you have, make sure that the recording levels are as hot as possible that you can go without clipping, understanding You can afford to leave a little bit more breathing room on a 24 bit system or a 16 bit one, I hope that I kind of made that clear, in the same way that you don't have to sweat the framing of a subject on a 10 megapixel camera as much as you do on a one megapixel one. A rule number three is isolate the sound. Let's follow the example of recording your time. Imagine we plug the guitar into an AMP and then mic that app from a distance. What are we actually recording?

You hit the guitar, the app and the sound of the room and the sound of the room will depend on what kind of environment in it might be is that Holly reflective room or Adele hole? Whenever you record like this, you're recording all three elements. But what about if we screwed up that mic. Now we've taken the room kind of out of the equation. It's gone, but that relationship has certainly changed. We're hearing mainly all AP in the room.

And finally we could just record it directly tracks this game. And now, the question which of these three scenarios gives us the most flexibility later? The last example? Absolutely, we can add the sound of an app to a drag a time, you bet, we can do that with a plug in or a built in effect. Heck, we could even take the line out of the recorder, plug it into an app and then record that back onto another track, right. But what about the sound of the room, I mean, we could do that it's very easy to drop reverb onto a track and place it in any environment that you want.

In the scenario of recording the guitar through an app with a mic from a distance. I have seen no knob on a console that is labeled take off reverb right will take off distortion. If you want maximum flexibility, think hard about what you are actually recording right there. Now, an exception to this might be when the marriage of two elements are almost like a sound unto themselves. example I can think of as like a Hammond organ and a Leslie cabinet, we kind of think of them together with 335 guitar with a Hot Rod Deluxe. You know what I mean?

If the sound you want is a marriage of two different sounds, and you know, I don't mind recording them together because they'll always kind of live together. Now, think about this question when you record your vocals along these lines of isolation, what do you want to record, if you're more than a foot away from your vocal mic, you're not only just capturing your vocal, but you're capturing the sound of the room as well. In that same vein, as the guitar example, a moment ago, you probably want to isolate your sound as much as possible. So you'll have more flexibility later on. Remember, it's always easy to add something to a cell versus taking something out. And here's another tip in terms of isolating vocals.

Do you remember that we said that the fundamental frequencies of vocals don't go below 80 hertz about 80 hertz unless you're Barry White There's basically nothing down there in terms of vocals. Now imagine that some low end rumble of the air conditioner or some distant street noise making its way into that microphone. Why would you record any frequencies below 80 hertz, if your vocal is not down there, it's no coincidence that on many mics, and also mixes, you'll see a low frequency roll off at about 80 hertz, activate that switch, and it'll cut out all those frequencies below 80 hertz, and just ditch them, then you might not think this is a big deal. But imagine if you record a lead vocal, and then double that and then three doubled harmony, that's eight tracks of vocals where the low frequency rumble of your air conditioner or street noise just builds up and builds up and robs that part of the frequency spectrum.

That should only be reserved for your kick drum and bass guitar, synth bass because that's where they live. That make sense. I'm always thinking of trimming this stuff out. But I don't need so that other tracks can shine through. So let's talk briefly about dynamic range for a second. And really how it can can brings a ton of problems.

And that's it. And the question basically, is this. How do you capture big dynamics into a finite dynamic range? In a recorder, we said that before the human ear is magnificent in terms of its ability to hear but very soft and very loud sounds. Our recording equipment, on the other hand is a bit more limited. Check out this video.

Okay, imagine we have our microphones set up just perfectly exactly the way we want it. And we're going through and recording a vocal tract. And everything's working out fine, except there's a big note right in the middle of the song and whenever the vocalist hits the note, you get big distortion. That is a problem. Probably the first thing you think of his account, let me pull down the gain of that input channel. On mic preamps.

So that that way, we don't distort the track. But here's the problem, the rest of the track is kind of living down here. And that occasional big note is peeking up here. If you pull it all down to accommodate that big note, then the rest of the track is going to be lower. And it's going to be closer to the noise floor. So therefore, if you ever need to bring that back up, the noise floor is going to come back up with it, you really don't need to pull it down to accommodate the rest of the average level of the vocal tract.

You just need to deal with that big night. How do you do it? Well, you've seen it a million times. If you ever watch award shows, you see the diva at the end of the big song. She screams and what she do pulls a mic back when we're not going to pull this mic back but we'll pull her head back so that we can accommodate the big note. And that way, we can still have the energy of that big note we can add the emphasis without going into the red.

So coach vocalist into using a little bit of mic technique doesn't need a whole lot, but it's just a great way to even out the levels of that recording from eyebrow hada level. But even when using that diva move right there, you can still end up with a vocal like this can have a hard time punching through a mixer. Now let's put some secret sauce on the vertical, if you wish he had that popped out of the secret sauce is dynamic, you know, we need some kind of technique that allows both parts of the vertical the big stuff and the little stuff to sit within a mix. Let me give you kind of a visual analogy that I hope you'll never forget here. Now, imagine we had three people set up in this way one guy standing on a chair, another sitting another laying down with a small business card and we're trying to take a bite out of all these guys to get The picture would look something like this.

We all get into the picture, but you really can't see any detail. Certainly you can't see the detail on the business card down there. Now how do we fix that? We do this all the time. With family reunions, right, we move people around. Obviously, we're trying to capture too much of a span, we'd have the tall guy squash himself down, so that we can then get into the pitcher and then zoom in.

Now we have all of us together, we can easily read that business card right there. This really is compression in a nutshell, it allows you to set a threshold so that once the signal passes above that threshold, the signal is squashed down by a certain ratio. So you guys kind of get the idea of compression. Now it's a way to squash the dynamic range of a signal and then raise all that up to get a better average level. You can do this by using a rackmount hardware compressor like a dbx 166 something that we can do in software. So a little digital studios have compression built in.

Now, you don't want to overdo this or she'll get a very squashed sound. A good rule of thumb is to set a ratio of about four to one and reduce the threshold until you're getting between three and six dB of gain reduction. I've actually placed some examples in the, in the, in the bonus dis with compression recipes, good trying different instruments. So depending on what kind of compressor you have, you may want to place it in line with your mic to compress it on the way into your track if it's a hardware thing, or you may want to compress the resulting track later on if it's all done in software. There are good arguments for both. But we'll look later on in the next session.

I just kind of wanted to touch on dynamics because it's probably the one effect that I might use on the way into recording to to compress that before it actually gets into your recording. So here are the points to remember. We have learned that in the history Recorded Music Wow, there is no better time to be alive. multitrack recording has freed us to record different parts at different times. And that has afforded us the ability to correct individual tracks without affecting any of the others. We have the types of tools inside are recorded on a hardware or software that the Beatles could only dream up and things like Beck's automation, mastering auto punches, we are very, very, very fortunate.

And that the barriers to success and no longer really about the tools is about the training that we need, that is really going to make the difference. We learned that sound is made up of a number of elements, which is basically volume, tonal content and environment that the sound lives in a certain space or bandwidth in the spectrum of sound and that while instrument or voice can have fundamental pitch frequencies, it also has a lot of harmonics and other times above that together. Character learning where those certain instruments live in that audio spectrum from the lowest to the highest, can really help when those instruments are competing for Sonic space across that spectrum. We saw how reflections and echo reveal the environment in which a sound resides. We've learned that we need to follow basic few basic rules of recording which included getting a clean signal by taking care of the mic cables, bad connections, etc.

How to watch a recording levels and really isolate the sound. We've learned a lot but haven't really gotten practical yet. It's really about kind of setting the stage and setting the framework so we can move forward on solid ground. The next session will be about exactly how to position mics, how to get a killer, vocal, all that kind of good stuff. I just really wanted you to know the stuff so that we could move forward from here. You've got through the most technical part of the The course and we're going to get very practical in the next session.