Dubstepforum.com

Er, basically, if you want to know A LOT about EQ, compression, mixing, mastering, all that sort of stuff, go to DOA, go to the Grid, and read the Macc Q&A that they're doing at the moment. This isn't an internet know-it-all repeating half remembered stuff that someone once told them that they'd heard on a forum or something (like I do), this is someone with a physics degree and 15 years of recording experience who knows his stuff in a big way...

And obviously it's a Q&A so if there's other stuff you want to ask him you can...

sounds good, will check it out

Thanks a lot.

that thread makes me want to cry

elgato wrote:that thread makes me want to cry

nice one for that

Slothrop wrote:

elgato wrote:that thread makes me want to cry

cos i am so far away from understanding how the majority of it relates to what i do, and i don't find anything close to compulsive desire to :/ which makes me worry about prospects for my productions!

Link?

elgato wrote:

Slothrop wrote:

elgato wrote:that thread makes me want to cry

cos i am so far away from understanding how the majority of it relates to what i do, and i don't find anything close to compulsive desire to :/ which makes me worry about prospects for my productions!

A lot of it is pushing out into the geekosphere tbf, and looking back, a fair bit of it is semi dnb specific (ie related to sampled breaks) or random banter, but there's good solid advice in there too.

Cryptic:
http://www.dogsonacid.com/showthread.ph ... genumber=1

elgato wrote:

Slothrop wrote:

elgato wrote:that thread makes me want to cry

cos i am so far away from understanding how the majority of it relates to what i do, and i don't find anything close to compulsive desire to :/ which makes me worry about prospects for my productions!

i wouldn't stress about it tbh. most of it is fairly mastering specific too.

basically i think if you're not (yet) an uber technical producer, the thing to take away from it is that everything you do from EQ to compression or whatever can change the sound of stuff - so just listen closely whenever you tweak a file/channel. does this do what i wanted it to do / does it make it worse / are there any side effects?

in general though i think that stuff only really becomes relevant when you're at a level to notice it: you have to practise listening, as weird as that sounds. 2 or 3 years ago i was getting a track mixed down by a mate who noticed that i had basically boosted around 3kHz all across the mix, and it sounded better even if he just did a little cut with a low Q on the master out. i would never have noticed at the time, although now, with a couple more years production experience, i can spot stuff like that a lot more easily...

these days i've released a couple of dozen singles and an album, but i still don't think i'm good enough to spot the difference between EQ plugin A and EQ plugin B. so just keep pluggin' away, it comes with time!

Cheers Slothrop

is this the mastering engineer who works in headphones

setspeed wrote:

elgato wrote:

Slothrop wrote:

elgato wrote:that thread makes me want to cry

cos i am so far away from understanding how the majority of it relates to what i do, and i don't find anything close to compulsive desire to :/ which makes me worry about prospects for my productions!

i wouldn't stress about it tbh. most of it is fairly mastering specific too.

basically i think if you're not (yet) an uber technical producer, the thing to take away from it is that everything you do from EQ to compression or whatever can change the sound of stuff - so just listen closely whenever you tweak a file/channel. does this do what i wanted it to do / does it make it worse / are there any side effects?

in general though i think that stuff only really becomes relevant when you're at a level to notice it: you have to practise listening, as weird as that sounds. 2 or 3 years ago i was getting a track mixed down by a mate who noticed that i had basically boosted around 3kHz all across the mix, and it sounded better even if he just did a little cut with a low Q on the master out. i would never have noticed at the time, although now, with a couple more years production experience, i can spot stuff like that a lot more easily...

these days i've released a couple of dozen singles and an album, but i still don't think i'm good enough to spot the difference between EQ plugin A and EQ plugin B. so just keep pluggin' away, it comes with time!

big up

in terms of that, 'practicing listening'... can you think of any specific approaches that can help with refining your ability to hear these things?

also, thanks for posting Slothrop, didnt mean to be so negative!

I know exactly what you mean el gato

for example:

''Of course. Linear phase eq preserves phase relationships between/at all frequencies. This is done by means of several processes. Most simply, a linear phase eq delays the entire signal by a certain amount. This allows it to time/phase align those freqs which are delayed by more than others.

One of the upshots of the (highly boring) physics of achieveing phase linearity, is that you end up with smearing of transients forward in time - you get a little 'fade in' or backwards kick drum before your kick drum, for example. They call this pre-ring.

It depends upon the approach of the designers to some extent I think - some are doing the filtering backwards and forwards in time before recombining and presenting the result but this has other problems. Anyway I ain't had my coffee yet so bollocks to physics...

At rational eq levels pre-ring's not a problem, but the harder you work it, the more prominent it becomes, and a minimum phase eq might do better. It is always about making sure the cure isnt worse than the disease, as it were.''

The above might as well be written in Chinese, in invisible writing.

I think I'm going to have to do a course or something, I have literally no idea what the fuck anyone in the world is on about at any one time.

Interesting reading, though. How do you get to the other q+as?

what worries me more than my lack of understanding though is that i positively don't want to understand that stuff. i don't want to hear music in those terms. but is it possible to produce the fattest dance music in a purely software environment without that kind of understanding? i constantly improve, but still my mixes sound odd and lack largeness. it must be possible though still... i hope!

El Gato, it is completely possible. Going along with what Setspeed said, time and practice. Really focusing on all elements of the mix. Going through each sound and making sure its comming out as clear as it can or as subtle or huge as it can. This is all just practice of EQing and listening. I dont do math or physics problems to figure out the best way for my kick to come through. Its aesthetics, you sit there and listen and EQ it till you like it and believe its at its best.

I personally will listen to a song about 15-20 times over and over again, slightly changing certain parts, adjusting levels, and final staging compression which is another 5 or 6 listens, making sure you arent muddy-ing up the mix. Dont be discouraged by physics buffs, just gain knowledge because all you are doing is just that, gaining. You aint losing shit. Plus I think its kinda neat to think how I am really physically effecting sound.. I am magician.

elgato wrote:what worries me more than my lack of understanding though is that i positively don't want to understand that stuff. i don't want to hear music in those terms. but is it possible to produce the fattest dance music in a purely software environment without that kind of understanding? i constantly improve, but still my mixes sound odd and lack largeness. it must be possible though still... i hope!

I dunno, in a lot of areas it seems like some people learn best by just accumulating shedloads of experience, other people find it easier to use a bit of technical theory to make sense of their experience. It's like you could learn how to use a subtractive synth by just twiddling knobs with no idea of what 'cutoff' and 'decay' and 'pulsewidth' mean and just getting used to how the knobs effect the sound, whereas other people find that it helps them to make sense of what they're hearing if they know that lowering the cutoff takes out more high range from the oscillator and changing the decay will have an effect on how fast something falls away.

I find it most helpful to keep trying stuff and dip into the theory every now and then to see if it helps. Plus I'm a maths / physics geek so I find a lot of the details of how things work kind of interesting in itself.

That bit above is basically just saying that if you use EQ too heavily it'll smear the sounds a bit eg turn a snare from a nice quick 'tap' into more of a 'utarp', and that different sorts of EQ (linear phase, minimum phase) try to minimize that effect in different ways with different side effects. Although he goes on to say later that this is pretty irrelevant unless you're going for really hard EQing. You might well figure that out for yourself by just playing with different EQs and going with what sounds best or it might be helpful to know what's happening and why...

edit: plus of course this stuff is all less important than actually coming up with something musically interesting. Listening to Bob's tunes, he's bloodly lucky in that he can do both...

james fox wrote:is this the mastering engineer who works in headphones

Yeah, and unsuprisingly there's a bit of discussion of why he goes for that option...

I guess the ultimate test is to listen to his stuff. Seems to work okay afaict...

cheers for the positive words MK2!

Slothrop wrote:

elgato wrote:what worries me more than my lack of understanding though is that i positively don't want to understand that stuff. i don't want to hear music in those terms. but is it possible to produce the fattest dance music in a purely software environment without that kind of understanding? i constantly improve, but still my mixes sound odd and lack largeness. it must be possible though still... i hope!

I dunno, in a lot of areas it seems like some people learn best by just accumulating shedloads of experience, other people find it easier to use a bit of technical theory to make sense of their experience. It's like you could learn how to use a subtractive synth by just twiddling knobs with no idea of what 'cutoff' and 'decay' and 'pulsewidth' mean and just getting used to how the knobs effect the sound, whereas other people find that it helps them to make sense of what they're hearing if they know that lowering the cutoff takes out more high range from the oscillator and changing the decay will have an effect on how fast something falls away.

yeh of course, i guess i just wonder whether one approach is ultimately limiting when it comes to achieving really top-level mixes. my path has very much been a matter of just playing, and often deducing the more basic theoretical stuff afterwards. i just wonder whether this approach limits what i will ultimately be able to achieve

no i don't think it will. it's really just a case of time and practise - one of the best engineers i know can barely turn a computer on and has surprisingly little technical knowledge; he just learnt his trade by spending years in the studio. 20+ hours a week for a decade or so should see you right!

also bear in mind that

- a lot of people don't mix their own tunes down. the label pays a hundred odd quid to a decent engineer instead. i don't know about dubstep but it's really very prevalent in breaks and house

- a lot of dubstep is really not that clinically produced anyway. take 'night' for example - a brilliant tune but really nothing remarkable in its production. it's all about the hook and the idea. i'll bet you a million billion pounds that benga and coki didn't spend hours agonising over whether there was excessive pre-ring in their linear phase EQ