anomie life

One thing that’s almost a necessity, especially when recording multiple musicians/instruments simultaneously, is a headphone amplifier. Most mixers (such as the Phonic Helix 24) or interfaces have multiple auxiliary outputs on them, but the signals from these are unpowered, which pretty much means the audio is going to be nearly inaudible if listened through headphones. That’s where a headphone amplifier comes in.

The Behringer Powerplay Pro XL HA4700 is a 4-channel headphone amplifier, which means you can take 4 separate auxiliaries from your mixer and have 4 completely separate mixes. This is especially helpful when you’re recording a full band all at the same time because the lead singer probably wants to hear his voice really well so he doesn’t sing off key, the guitar player probably just wants to hear his guitar, and the bass player probably wants his bass and some drums in his mix.

So each channel has an “Aux in” input, but the whole amplifier also has a stereo XLR “Main in” and “Main out”. What this allows you to do is take say the Left and Right outputs of your mixer and run them through the headphone amplifier. One might think this is redundant, but its actually very useful. One reason would be if you had a main mix that everyone had and then people could boost what they want. But an extremely great reason I’ve found is to run the click track through this input.

Everyone having control of their click track volume is an amazing plus because the singer probably doesn’t want it pulsating in his ear if he can already hear the drums just fine and the drummer probably wants the click track blasting away so he stays on beat.

The way you adjust this volume is through the great set of controls on the front of the amplifier. Firstly, there’s a master level for all the headphones. I usually just keep this one in center. Next, you have 4 sets of controls for each mix. Each one of these has a treble and bass knob so you have a little control over your personal equalization. It also has a personal volume because the drummer probably wants his volume a lot louder than everyone else so he can hear over his own noisiness. The last knob is a balance knob which allows you to mix between the aux in and the main in (in my case its the click track). Lastly, there’s three buttons that are immensely useful because they allow you to select whether the aux in is stereo and if its mono, select whether its coming in on the Left or Right channel.

If you look at a popular music equipment store, such as American Musical Supply, for a headphone amplifier then you’ll quickly realize that the HA4700 is so far above everything out there as far as value. Yes, many music professionals shun Behringer because they make low cost equipment, but this piece of equipment is just amazing. If mine died after a year or two I wouldn’t care, I’d just go out and buy a new one. Its $120, but most Furman or Samson headphone is 2x the price and it only powers 1 channel!

Behringer’s Powerplay Pro XL HA4700 is an amazing piece of equipment, not just for its great value, but its quality and features. This piece of equipment is a great addition to any home recording studio.

When one hears the name Marshall Electronics, also known as MXL, they probably associate it with Marshall Amplifiers, but interestingly enough Marshall Electronics and Marshall Amplifiers aren’t associated in anyway. With all the trademark and copyright infringing lawsuits flying around lately it really surprises me that these two companies can co-exist peacefully. Maybe MXL found a secret loophole and are surviving because of it. MXL has actually been around for about 25 years. They make LCD’s, optical systems, cables, and, obviously, microphones.

When shopping for an affordable microphone the V57M immediately stands out because its one of the most inexpensive condenser mics period. One might assume that since its at such a low price point then it must be a piece of junk. However, from my experience with it, this is not the case whatsoever.

A second thing that one immediately notices about the microphone is that its actually constructed nicely. Its got a nice gold look to it and you can get a shock mount for about an extra $20. The diaphragm is 1-inch and it has a frequency response between 30 and 20,000 Hz. Since its a condenser mic it also requires 48 volt phantom power.

When I plugged this thing in and recorded a quick vocal I was floored by the sudden change and brightness of the sound. I had previously just used a $99 Shure SM68, but that always sounded muddy and flat. Seriously, the V57M just took that sound and lifted it right out of the mud. The only issue I first had was that I didn’t purchase a popscreen filter, so the ’s’s kept on messing up the takes. At first we improvised by singing through a shirt and then I got clever and we used two small metal colanders. Finally, a few months later I went down to Mars Music and forked out $25 for a nice popscreen filter that clamps onto the mic stand.

I also tried this out on recording an acoustic guitar. We recorded the whole Rain Song using just this microphone for both the acoustic and vocals (tracked separately of course). The acoustic we used was a Tacoma that has a really bassy, rich tone and it sounded amazing on the recording. While we were recording it was actually storming outside so we opened the window and recorded the sound of the rain and thunder. The sound of the rain has often been mistaken for static on the recording, but the mic picked up the low end from the thunder marvelously. It worked great for the Tacoma, but when recording Scott’s brighter sounding Breedlove acoustic a few months later for Standing Here it was possibly a little too bright sounding and we had to equalize in some more low sounds to compensate.

The only real disappointment I had with this microphone was recording a piano. We tried this mic on my mom’s upright Baldwin as well as her Kawai baby grand. Oddly enough, both of them sounded extremely muddy. Granted, one cause of this could possibly be the room, but the sound was still dissapointing.

Overall though, and for the price point of $70, this microphone is absolutely amazing. It will literally take your old dingy vocals and bring them to the next level of clarity. Obviously, a $600 condenser mic is going to sound better than this mic, but for $70 you just can’t beat it.

In a previous post I briefly wrote about the Phonic Helix 24 Channel mixer, but I didn’t really go into as much detail as I think it deserves. So I’m going to write a full blown write-up/review/whatever you want to call it about the Helix 24.

Phonic is a relatively unknown company, but they claim they’ve been around for 25 years. They make mixers, digital interfaces, amplifiers, and speakers, but don’t really have a name in the industry so I doubt many professional sound engineers, especially live engineers, would trust them.

The Helix 24 “channel” is effectively 16 channels and 4 sub groups. I think they get to claim the extra 8 from the Auxes or Main stereo channels. 16 Channels might be seriously lacking if you wanted to use it for live applications, but for recording, 16 channels is plenty. All 16 mic/line channels have a built in preamp with external gain control, so when you change the gain control it affects the signal that the computer receives. Every channel also includes a 3-band EQ which, once again, is kind of on the skimpy side for live audio, but plenty for recording. The signal that goes into the computer is pre-eq anyway so its really only useful for monitoring. Only the first 4 channels have a pad if you have something that’s really loud, but I haven’t found an instrument yet that requires the pad to keep from peaking.

As far as Auxiliary outputs, the Helix 24 is mediocre. It claims it has “8″ AUX Returns, but its really 4 stereo AUX returns and 6 AUX Sends. Effectively, you have easy control over 4 AUX’s for monitoring. So for monitoring you can have 4 different monitor mixes and, if necessary, one person can use the main headphone for their mix. One side note though, if you want to actually be able to hear from the AUX’s you need a headphone amplifier because they’re unpowered signals.

I’ve had this mixer for a little over a year now. The first thing that I used it for was recording Running Blind. I immediately fell in love with the ability to play like I’m in a live setting, but actually have every channel going straight to a computer which can be mixed later. It kind of gives the best of both worlds of digital and analog. The audio quality that comes through the firewire sounds great, but every once and awhile the connection will get a little flaky on me. Sometimes I have to restart the computer or mixer to get the recording software to start receiving audio again. One morning I spent over 2 hours trying to get it working and finally got it running by uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers. That was in Windows and was quite a pain. But I recently acquired a MacBook and I’m hoping it likes OS X a little better. Windows + Adobe Audition wasn’t bad at all, it just had a few reliability issues here and there. But when it works, it works nicely.
One thing that’s great about the Helix 24 is that you can also use it for live sound. Whenever we’re rehearsing we just plug everything into it and use a set of studio monitors to amplify whatever we need. Sometime we plug everything in, sometimes we just plug in a few vocal microphones.

Overall, I really enjoy and definitely don’t regret my purchase of the Helix 24. It does everything I want in a recording/live mixer. And one of the greatest things about the Helix 24 is it’s price point. $729 for a 16-channel recording mixer isn’t bad at all. Mackie has a very similar mixer which they sell for $1250. So you get practically the same thing, but for $500 cheaper. Thank you Phonic for making a very affordable recording console for the musician looking for a way to do multi-track recording without robbing a bank.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about the state of the music industry lately. Because of the rise of the internet the music industry is going through a gigantic change. iTunes, putting songs online, is just the first step for the music industry. Right now iTunes is mostly just a bunch of mp4’s of the major label’s music from their CD’s. The main reason you would be a track off of iTunes is just for convenience (a.k.a. you’re too lazy to go down to a Coconuts and buy the CD).

I think the future of the music industry can go two different ways, depending on how the major labels react to the change in technology. If the labels continue to oppose the change in the industry I think they’ll quickly be bypassed by the artists and replaced with organizations that only do specific functions like marketing, radio promotion, distribution, and tour production.

Or I think the labels can transform themselves into primarily a marketing and venture capital organization. The thing is that it’s become quite affordable to record an album. You can get very high-quality equipment for very low prices (now I sound like a car dealer).
Right now from my reading and observation I see the whole big label music industry as really, really bloated. It takes a huge success to ever recoup the amount of costs incurred by major label backing. Yea, in case you didn’t know it, when you sign a record contract they might give you a bunch of money (an advance) and they might let you record a huge music video. But pretty much all of your album profits are going to go to the label to pay back for ALL of those things.
So pretty much you’re just getting an interest free loan.

That’s why labels don’t sign a bunch of bands. Its a huge investment and risk. If they cut some of the bloat out they can afford to back more bands.

And back to the digital music thing, with the internet you can distribute your songs yourself on your own band’s website and make money. Then you don’t have to give iTunes a cut and you can even sell it DRM-free.

I envision a future in music where there are thousands of bands that are having fun doing what they love to do and making enough money to keep the dream going. Maybe there will be a few less “rock stars”, but a lot more variety. If you can make the cost of making an album go down then you can sell the album for less and that leaves people with more money to by other cd’s.

And then the radio…. well, I could write a whole other post on where I think the radio is going.

I was over at Digg and was reading the comments about a news story where the RIAA said that the price of CD’s should be higher for some stupid reason. It only reinforced my belief that the RIAA does nothing positive for the music industry. All the RIAA does is sit in between artists and consumers to tax every piece of audio they produce.

But what really caught my attention was that someone posted this article about over compression in today’s music. It’s quite long, but a very interesting read. There’s pretty much a constant war between albums to try to have the loudest CD possible. And they achieve this by using compression which pretty much just flattens the sound and destroys dynamics.

The problem I see is that different consumers want different things in a CD. So your typical ear bud listening teen will want something pretty flat and loud. But a audiophile wants something with a large dynamic range with some parts of a song being really loud and other parts being really soft. The typical driver with a CD in their CD player will want something that stays consistently loud too, otherwise they have to constantly adjust the volume to hear the song over the engine.

As a producer/mixer/mastering engineer/whatever I think it would be great to take the “high road” and not give in to the compression-loudness game. But I understand why people would want compression.

I’m very big into distributing music through online means and I realized that this could allow artists to release variously mastered versions of their songs. Although it might take a little extra work, when someone buys a song online they are given a couple different files that have been mastered differently. Then the person can pick which one best suits their listening habits.

When I release my first CD, thats what I want to do. We’ll see if it happens.