Articles by Bill Gibson

Plug In Properly

Did You Know That…Your Soundboard and Effects Should Be on the Same Circuit?

After you’ve surveyed the venue, the staging is in place, and the stage lay-out is solidified, find a good power source and set up the AC distribution system.

This is a very important part of the setup—it is often overlooked, poorly planned, or performed in random response to immediate needs.

In a small setup, the soundboard and effects should ideally receive AC from the same circuit (the same outlet from the wall).

This will help eliminate hums and noises caused by ground loops.

In a large set up in a professional venue, there should be designated circuits for all audio connections.

Often, these AC outlets are a different color than generic AC outlets.

In North America, if you find a set of orange outlets and a set of white outlets, it’s likely the orange outlets have been specially configured and verified to provide exact phase and conditioned power.

They’re often run through power conditioners to help eliminate noise and unacceptable variances in voltage.

Ask the venue manager whether there are clean AC outlets specifically for audio connections.

-Bill Gibson

Bill Gibson, president of Northwest Music and Recording has spent the last 25 years writing, recording, producing and teaching music. Bill is a best-selling author and has written over 30 books on audio recording. His recently released 6-volume set, The Hal Leonard Recording Method is already receiving high praise for its user-friendly approach.

You can check out Bill’s books here.

Condenser Mics: First Choice For The Studio

Did You Know That…Condenser Mics Are the First Choice For Recording in the Studio? -asks Bill Gibson

Condenser microphones are usually the first choice for studio vocal applications.

Commercial sounds may vary, but most professionally recorded hit vocals are recorded with a good condenser mic set on cardioid pick-up pattern, from a distance of 6 to 12 inches.

A vocal that’s recorded at this distance sounds full and warm on most condenser mics.

Recording at this proximity provides the recordist with the option of including the inherent sound of the acoustical environment in varying degrees.

Most lead vocals blend better in the mix when recorded with the microphone about a foot or so from the vocalist.

Close mic technique (form a distance of one to three inches) typically provides a sound that is a little too thick and cumbersome, especially when using a condenser mic.

-Bill Gibson

Bill Gibson, president of Northwest Music and Recording has spent the last 25 years writing, recording, producing and teaching music. Bill is a best-selling author and has written over 30 books on audio recording. His recently released 6-volume set, The Hal Leonard Recording Method is already receiving high praise for its user-friendly approach.

You can check out Bill’s books here.

Vocal Phrasing and Interpretation are King

Did You Know That…Vocal Phrasing and Interpretation are King?

The more you understand about vocal phrasing and interpretation, the better you’ll be at recording (and performance) – period.

We can spend a fortune on gear to get great vocal sound and we can figure out what to tweak and where, to capture the finest resolution digital or analog signal, but if we record bad musical phrasing and interpretation, we’re left with nothing but –should I say it –crap!

The vocal tracks must capture the appropriate emotional and musical feel for the song.

For most styles, it’s important that they’re understandable, in tune, and that the lyrics are sung in a way that gives the song meaning.

Conveying the meaning of the lyrics usually takes precedence over other factors. Small flaws in technical presentation can be justified by an authentic, emotional, heartfelt performance.

-Bill Gibson

Bill Gibson, president of Northwest Music and Recording has spent the last 25 years writing, recording, producing and teaching music. Bill is a best-selling author and has written over 30 books on audio recording. His recently released 6-volume set, The Hal Leonard Recording Method is already receiving high praise for its user-friendly approach.

You can check out Bill’s books here.

Your Headphone Mix is Crucial

Did You Know That…Your Headphone Mix is Crucial?

Often a singer is out of tune in the studio simply because the headphone mix is providing an inaccurate pitch reference or a pitch reference that’s hard to pinpoint.

Always listen to the headphone mix when you’re getting set up.

For pitch reference, the best instruments to include in the headphone mix are piano and clean guitar.

Some of the big keyboard sounds include chorus, reverb, and other effects; these effects tend to obscure the pitch center, so they can transform the search for accurate intonation into an impossible quest.

A clean, non-effected piano or guitar definitively identifies the tonal center, therefore showing the vocalist exactly where “in-tune” is.

-Bill Gibson

Bill Gibson, president of Northwest Music and Recording has spent the last 25 years writing, recording, producing and teaching music. Bill is a best-selling author and has written over 30 books on audio recording. His recently released 6-volume set, The Hal Leonard Recording Method is already receiving high praise for its user-friendly approach.

You can check out Bill’s books here.

Your Mic is a Unique Creature

Did You Know That: Your Mic is a Unique Creature? -asks Bill Gibson

Almost any microphone responds to all frequencies we can hear plus frequencies above and below what we can hear.

The human ear has a typical frequency response range of about 20Hz to 20kHz.

Some folks have high-frequency hearing loss so they might not hear sound waves all the way up to 20kHz, and some small children many be able to hear sounds well above 20kHz.

For a manufacturer to tell us that their Microphone has a frequency range of 20 Hz to 20kHz tells us absolutely nothing until they tell us how the mic responds throughout that frequency range.

A mic might respond very well to 500Hz, yet it might not respond very well at all to frequencies about about 10kHz.

If that were the case, the sound we captured with that mic would be severely colored.

-Bill Gibson

Bill Gibson, president of Northwest Music and Recording has spent the last 25 years writing, recording, producing and teaching music. Bill is a best-selling author and has written over 30 books on audio recording. His recently released 6-volume set, The Hal Leonard Recording Method is already receiving high praise for its user-friendly approach.

You can check out Bill’s books here.

Support Your Voice II – Technology

Don’t put up with a mix that leaves you up in the air with rhythm and pitch.

By the time I’m involved with a singer, its usually too late to say, “support your tone” or, “sing from your diaphragm” or other such vocal-coach stuff.

There are some singers and some situations where I can recommend those fixes to help a singer in the heat of battle, but I’m always trying to support them in a way that inspires them to sing better and helps them unleash a great performance that’s hidden within their soul.

So, I support a vocalist who should > read more

An Inspiring Mix

Great vocalists do their best work when they feel comfortable and inspired on stage or in studio.

I learned early in my career that I can get a lot more out of a singer by providing an intelligent and inspiring mix than I can by trying to get them to adjust their technique in the middle of a gig or recording session.

My goal when I act as a sound operator is to create a mix and an acoustic environment that will inspire the vocalist to sing beautifully with his or her best tone and most emotional performance.

Each singer is unique and a mix that is inspiring will be unique to him or her. There are, though, some things that I’ve found in common among vocalists:

The sound should be > read more

My Voice is Trapped on Cassette Tapes!

Dear Bill,

I have hundreds of cassette tapes that I would love to download onto my external hard drive. Lots of them are original music, and most of them very fragile as they are 15 to 20 years old—so the download has to happen on the first try. Is there a piece of equipment that a technophobe like me could use to do this?

-BettyJane

Hey BettyJane,

If you live in an area that is very humid and the cassette tapes haven’t been stored in a climate-controlled area, they might have a problem playing back on a cassette player. The oxide can become sticky and gummy. If the tape plays back it will probably make the heads severely dirty, causing the playback to become dull and lifeless over the course of a few minutes. In this case, you might make it through one side of a cassette but then you’ll need to clean the heads well—a Q-tip and 100% Isopropyl or denatured alcohol will do fine here. Dip the Q-tip in the alcohol and clean the head rubbing up and down the gap until you can start with a new Q-tip dipped in the alcohol and not see color on the cotton.

In the worst case, the cassettes will be in such bad shape that they won’t even play on the cassette player, no matter how good the player or how fancy the gadget. These tapes usually need to be baked—that’s right, just like baking a cake. There are commercial companies who will bake the cassettes for you or you can even bake them yourself in your own oven. The process depends on the kind of tape and how bad it is, but the cassettes are usually in pretty good shape for about a month and they can even be baked again in most cases if need be. Google “baking cassette tape” and start researching if you think your tapes are in bad shape.

A cassette player can be easily patched into any computer with an audio card or interface and digital recording software—that’s probably what you’ll need to do. If you have a good cassette recorder, simply connect the line outputs from the cassette to the line inputs on the computer and set the recording software to listen to the inputs you chose. Recording is pretty easy but it takes time to cut each song into the right length and bounce them as MP3s to a folder on your hard drive. If you don’t have a cassette player that you can trust to playback at the correct speed and within technical tolerance of wow and flutter especially, you need to purchase one.

I’m getting other people writing to me about this – so watch my next entry: I will talk about some specific products you can get…

Bill

You can send your question to Bill Gibson’s “Gear Guts” through the VoiceCouncil editor
Bill Gibson is the author of 30+ books about recorded and live sound, including his most recent six-book series, The Hal Leonard Recording Method by Bill Gibson

That Airy Pop Sound: EQ and Compression

Hi Bill: I want to get that pop-airy sound in my home recording studio. I read your last column and I have a style suited to this. I also have a good, large diaphragm mic. Can you give me any tips about EQ and Compression?

-Daryl

Hi Daryl,

Proper compression is fundamental to an intimate and airy sound because it keeps the track right up in your face in those intimate moments and backs the level off when the singer’s volume exceeds the compression threshold. You’ll need pretty quick attack and release times, too, so that the listener can’t hear the compressor turning down and then back up again. Exactly where you set them depends on the singer and the song. Listen!

Using EQ can help create an airy sound by simply boosting the “airy” frequencies (typically somewhere between 6- and 10-kHz) but the real way to achieve a high-quality vocal sound has much more to do with everything else in this post than simply EQ boost.

Reverberation provides a cue to the brain that the sound is in an acoustical space. Applying more reverberation makes the sound feel farther away from the listener within that space. If you want the vocal to feel very close to the listener, either don’t use reverb or use a little of a warm hall just to add some subliminal polish. It should typically be just enough so that you can tell when it goes away but not so much that you’re aware of it. Also, don’t use a patch with much high-frequency content because it conflicts with the intimate components of the vocal sound wave.

In a live application all of the above considerations are in play. However, you need a mic with a condenser capsule that’s capable of reproducing the complexities of the vocal sound accurately. The mic also should not induce a lot of rumble, handling noise, low-frequency feedback. There are really great condenser mics available from all the major microphone manufacturers. The mic you choose depends on all of the variables that are unique to your situation.

Mics designed for live application typically have a presence boost somewhere in the high-frequency range and a roll-off in the lows. To accentuate the airy quality in an individual voice, the presence peak that is built-in to the mic needs to accentuate that individual—that’s why it’s important to try different mics.

-Bill

Bill Gibson is the author of 30+ books about recorded and live sound, including his most recent six-book series, The Hal Leonard Recording Method by Bill Gibson

I Want The Luther Vandross Sound!

I Want The Luther Vandross Sound!

I just heard a Luther Vandross song and really like that very airy sound—like his vocal cords are right next to your ear.  I’m doing my own recording: what do I need to do –and what equipment do I need to get to aim for this? Do I need to re-mortgage my house to afford the equipment to do this?

-Dave

Hey Dave. There are a few things that can help you:

1. The Source! For my answer I am going to assume that you can interpret a musical phrase like Luther Vandross, or create the vibe he creates. He knows how to get his voice to sound like that and when he performs or records, the sound he hears is very powerful part of the confidence it takes to do what he does so well. His mic technique and the sounds he can make with his voice work together to inspire him to do even better.

2. Gadgets! Although these don’t do much to give you the technique or artistry that Luther has, devices like the TC-Helicon VoiceWorksPlus have settings that turn that “air” component up in relation to what happens at the input. That’s very cool and can even help inspire your performance to a new level. > read more

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