AudioRoger

Ok, I’ve got to be honest.  Growing up in the 80’s, I love reverb.  There, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’m going to address something in this issue that I refer to as Phantom Reverb.

Everything was huge the back in the 80’s:  huge drums, huge guitar solos, huge hair, and so…huge reverb.  I suppose the mix had to make room for the band’s big hair.  But, alas, gone are the days of expansive, cavernous ‘verb in favor of a more natural room sound, focusing more on early reflections rather than long decay times.  Today’s trend is to make the listener sense as though the band is right in his or her face.  But some novice engineers, as well as some of us more experienced ones, can unknowingly fall into the trap of adding too much reverb, simply because they don’t hear it yet.
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Audio Mastering is an extremely popular and scientific means of transferring and preparing recorded audio from the source to the data storage device, referred as the master. The process is mainly applied in the post production stages and involves high end sound processing techniques. The Audio Mastering process has experienced a series of transformations which started from the 1950s until the advent of digital recording in the late 1970s. During this stage the studio recording was completed in multi-track tapes and the final mix of the source was dubbed and prepared to the master tape in single or mono track form. Before cutting the master disc, the tape underwent electronic treatments which were performed by specialized mastering engineers. As days passed this technique became more popular and during the pop music boom Audio Mastering became a sought after profession.

During the 1990s the digital technology came into prominence and largely superseded the different electro- mechanical processes that were practiced before. DAW or Digital Audio Workstation became the new popular technique. The main purpose of DAW is to manipulate the recorded audio via the GUI or Graphical User Interface. It combines various high quality audio hardware and multi track software for Analog-to-Digital conversions or vice versa.
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Sound mixers, also known as sound boards or sound consoles are the most general type of audio equipment in the audio production world. Each sound operator should know about the different sound mixers available and the correct way to use them. A sound mixer take two and even more signals, merges them together and offers more than one output signal. In addition to mixing signals, sound mixers enable to adjust levels, improve sound with effects and equalization, make monitor feeds as well as record various mixes.

Mixers are available in wide variety of designs and sizes from massive studio consoles to little portable units. Mixers are generally described through the total number of channels they sport. For instance, a 12-channel mixer includes 12 input channels. That is you can put in 12 individual input sources. You may also notice a specification like “24×4x2” that signifies 24 input channels, four subgroups and 2 output channels.
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Hard Disk / Computer-Based Recording
One of the biggest trends in recent audio production has been to merge digital audio with computer technology to create a sample based approach to sound recording. The encoding of audio data into digital memory or onto a storage medium provides us with a means for storing or manipulating defined blocks of digital data. This data can be stored as a sound file such as .wav, .aiff or SDII.

Perhaps the most important difference that can be distinguished between a tape-based system (digital or analogue) and samplebased recording system is random access. Random access production refers to the fact that digital audio can be stored within a random access memory (RAM), or a disk based memory medium in such a way that the data can – virtually instantaneously – be accessed, processed, or reproduced in any order at any point in time.

Once developers began to design updated sample editor software, it was discovered that through additional processing hardware, digital audio editors were capable of recording digitized audio directly to a computer’s hard disk. These devices, sometimes known as digital audio workstations (DAW), serve as computer based hardware and software packages that are intended specifically for the recording, manipulation, and reproduction of digital audio that resides on hard disk.
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Continuing the audio effects series, again, we all know of audio effects and what they generally are supposed to do. They are used to manipulate audio in ways that are not available with traditional playing and recording techniques. If you’re like me, and enjoy dabbling in audio production, you’re probably familiar with all the basic effects and maybe some other types. Noise gate will be one of the topics of discussion today. Noise gate, what the heck is that? If that was your first reaction, you’re not alone. Please don’t worry; we will be demystifying this subject later on in the article. We will also be discussing flange, which is a more standard and widely used audio effect. So, in today’s article we will be discussing both noise gate and flange effects, how they work and why they work the way they do.

Noise Gate

Basically, noise gate is a device or software logic that is used to manage the volume of an audio signal, in recording studios and in sound reinforcement. They are also used by musicians, in a portable form, to control amplification noise. At its most simple form it controls noise by only allowing sound to pass through it at a certain set threshold. Think of it as a literal gate; when the gate is open sound can pass, when the gate is closed no signal is allowed through. More robust noise gate units have extra controls, I.E. attack, sustain, decay, release. This is so that you can further control the gating of your audio. Say you’d like to have the gate applied in a hard fashion, you would set a short attack and a short release, so on and so forth. Noise gates are often used to isolate background noise from live recordings in order to eliminate them from the final copy.

Flange

Flange is related to the phasing effect produced by a, well, phaser effects unit. It is produced when two identical signals are mixed together, with one of the signals time-delayed by a small and gradually changing amount. The amount is usually equal to or less than 20 milliseconds. Peaks and notches are produced in the combined frequency spectrum, related in a linear harmonic series. Part of the output signal is fed back in and resonates, intensifying the peaks and notches. This effect was originally generated with 3 three headed tape machines. Two of the tape machines would play the signal, obviously somewhat out of synch, and the third tape machine would record the output. The modern version of the effect is created using DSP (digital signal processing) technology.

This is the second part in my continuing series on audio effects. Today we discussed noise gate and flange, we’ll be moving on some more advanced effects later on. I hope that this helped you all understand the basic functionality of these two effects, ultimately making your next foray into audio editing a bit less intimidating.