EQ Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 30)

by Bruce Bartlett Today’s recording tools—low-cost digital recorders and mixers, soft synths, and good-sounding cheap mics—make it affordable to record with sonic purity and accuracy. But now that anyone can record high-quality sounds, it’s not such a big deal anymore. While there’s always a place for clean, accurate recordings, in many of today’s records you’ll hear lo-fi sounds: fuzzy vocals, tinny drums, and humming guitar amps. Lo-fi is the opposite of hi-fi. Technically, hi-fi sound implies a flat frequency response with no noise, distortion, or other imperfections. In contrast, lo-fi sounds might have a narrow frequency response (a thin, cheap sound), and could include artifacts such as aliasing, hiss, distortion, or record scratches and vinyl surface noise. Lo-fi really took off with rap music, in which the drum sound was the opposite of the usual polished studio sound. Instead of a tight kick, we heard a boomy kick; wide-range snare sounds with a full thump and crisp attack gave way to tinny, trashy snares that were all midrange. Lo-fi is also a component of some dance music and of course, punk is not about polite sounds, either. No matter what type of music you do, though, lo-fi can add extra textures and colors that make a song stand out from the crowd. So, let’s look at a few ways not to take out the trash, but put it in. LO-FI FREQUENCY RESPONSE You can easily make a lo-fi effect simply by messing up a signal’s frequency response so it’s anything but flat. Cut the highs and lows, boost the mids. Or create a raggedy response with lots of bumps and dips. Some ways to do this are with EQ, mic choice, and mic placement. Here are some specific tips on obtaining lo-fi frequency responses: • Play a snare track through your mixer, and turn down the low frequency and high frequency EQ. Boost around 1kHz or nearby frequencies. Your snare sound will change from high-budget to bargainbasement; Beck’s “Soul-Suckin’ Jerk” from the album Loser is a good example of a lo-fi drum set. • Find a toilet paper tube, or a flexible plastic tube that extends gutter downspouts. Put the tube in front of a mic and sing through the tube. The resonances in the tube will color the sound in a wild way. • Plug a set of headphones into a mic preamp, crank up the gain (preferably to the point of distortion), and yell into the phones: You’ll have a sound unlike any “real” mic. • Record a child’s drum set with its small heavy cymbals and boomy kick drum. You might loop a hi-hat beat made from this set, and mix it with a full-range recording of a quality drum set. • Track down some cheap old mics at a garage sale, on eBay, or from vintage mic collectors. Record a few tracks using those mics. Their frequency response tends to be a complex series of peaks and valleys that you can’t duplicate with EQ. • Unusual mic placements are fun: Record a guitar amp or vocal with the mic placed in a wastebasket (Figure 1). Hit a cymbal with a cheap mic while recording its signal. Mic a snare drum from underneath for a thin, zippy effect. If you mic a crash cymbal at its edge, pointing toward the center, the sound will waver as the cymbal tilts when struck. DISTORTION Distortion adds harmonics that didn’t exist in the original sound. An obvious way to create distortion is to drive a piece of recording gear at very high levels— well beyond what it can handle. For example, record drums on a cassette recorder with the meters pinning. Or yell into a “bullet”-type harmonica mic so that the mic distorts. In a DAW, use a distortion plug-in such as iZotope Trash (Figure 2; www.izotope.com). Guitar effects are, of course, great for adding distortion. Run a drum track through a guitar stomp box, or through a broken vintage compressor. Feed a vocal through a Line 6 Amp Farm plugin, or their POD processor. Also consider recording some instruments on a cheap cassette recorder (Figure 3); the Rolling Stones did that to create the beginning of “Jumping Jack Flash.” NOISE AND MORE iZotope’s free Vinyl plug-in adds record scratches, hum, rumble, and other noises. Another way to have noises in your mix is to record noisy instruments! When the tubes in your tube guitar amp start to go, don’t throw them out but keep them in your “Lo-Fi Tools” drawer. Tubes on the verge of death often produce very interesting sounds (as do ripped speakers). Fig. 1. Fig. 2. Fig. 3. 30 EQ MARCH 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.izotope.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - March 2008

EQ Magazine - March 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Tool Box Dream Theater Nick Drake LO-FI Recording Tricks Guitar Trax Bass Managment Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Tascam Gigastudio 4 Cakewalk Sonar 7 Crane Song Avocet Cad Signature Series Mic Packs Waves GTR3 Kjaerhus MPL-1 Pro SE Ableton Live 7 Centrance Micport Pro, Tapco LINK.midi 4x4, Multi-Gigabyte USB 2.0 Memory Sticks Digital Redux Electrotech, Nine Volt Audio Action Drums, Big Fish Audio Hadeeth 2 Room with a VU

EQ Magazine - March 2008

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