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Doing Music Differently***Performance***Microphone Placement***Unspecialized***Our Instruments
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In 2000 when we first started thinking about recording our music, we realized we would need to do it ourselves and at home, because when anyone else was around we got uptight, played it safe, and our music lost its magic.
( Performance )

However back then we knew absolutely nothing about recording.  We didn’t know the difference between a condenser and a dynamic microphone, we didn’t know what a “sound card” was, we’d never used a mixer, and we’d never even seen a sound file, let alone tried to edit one. Only recently returned from our sweet neo-ancient life in Varanasi, we were still more comfortable with charcoal and candles than with electrons.  ( Doing Music Differently )

Even worse, when we started to shop for gear with which to record our first CD, “huhnandhuhn”, we soon discovered we would not be able to afford equipment that was even close to “professional” quality, that we would need to make do with a setup which would never satisfy a serious recording engineer.

But we proceeded anyway, and in the end produced a surprisingly clean and lovely first CD.  Of course in line with our general preference for figuring out things by ourselves, to do this we didn’t first enroll in a recording course or read any how-to-record books, instead we just took our time, were very careful, let the process speak to us, and tried very hard.
( Unspecialized )
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Our Basic Kit for huhnandhuhn and Sweet Heresy
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When we bought our equipment we were living in a tiny rented trailer, and so needed a computer quiet enough to be running right next to where we were playing.  This meant we couldn’t go for the cheapest one that worked and instead ended up getting a somewhat expensive but almost silent, “Stealth” computer from ARM systems.

However since we were counting our pennies, we settled for a midrange consumer grade sound card, a Sound Blaster Platinum Live 5.1 which didn’t do as good a job of digitalizing as some current onboard sound, but which was the best which we could afford.

For our mixer, we chose a Mackie with 6 preamplified channels, a dependable but less than exalted machine which is more often used for mixing loud live performances than for recording soft music.  In the same spirit of frugality we bought Shure SM57 dynamic and AKG C-2000 condenser microphones that were far from top of the line models.

While for software, we used the light version of Steinberg’s WaveLab, a program that just happened to come bundled with our sound card.

These were all decisions that just kind of happened.  A little advice from here and there, some poking around a bunch of sites looking for information, a choice, and finally a quick purchase on the web….

So probably it was fortunate that back then we didn’t understand that by making these decisions the way we made them, we were locking ourselves into a primitive digital recording style involving just 2 channels, “left” and “right”.  Indeed like much of what we’ve done it was pretty much a “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” kind of operation, but as has so often happened it worked out for us, and in the end using this limited ( but carefully chosen ) equipment, we made not one but 2 lovely CDs.

Because it turned out that five years later when we wanted to record a second CD we had even less money, and had no choice but to do it with this identical kit.  Still we were very pleased that though we were working with exactly the same equipment, by being cleverer with microphone placement and our mixer settings, we were able to record files for Sweet Heresy with less noise, more ring, and a richer sound than anything we’d managed to get down for huhnandhuhn.
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Our New Recording Setup

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Not until early in 2009 did we get around to upgrading our recording setup.  At that point we were poorer than ever and our translation business had just started to crash for the first time ( Doing Music Differently ), but rather than grimly saving our remaining funds for rent and food, incurable optimists that we are, we decided to invest in new gear.

We figured that if we were going to be broke, we wanted it to be with more up-to-date recording equipment that would at long last allow us to overdub and explore true multi-track recording.

Thanks to this, Work In Progress was recorded with a much more sophisticated and powerful kit set up in what we refer to as our “recording shrine”.

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The cubby holes at the bottom are for microphones and their cables, the three units in the middle compartment are M-audio dual mike preamps, the silver thing in the top is an Echo Audiofire 8-channel digitalizer, the hanging headphones are Koss PortaPros, while the firewire cable running up the wall goes over the door and into the next room where it’s connected to our new quad core computer ( purchased from “End PC Noise”).

Considering the quality of the sound we’ve been able to record with it, the whole setup was remarkably cheap ( about $1,200 not counting the microphones which we already owned, and the new computer which we had to purchase anyway to continue doing the translation work which was paying our bills. )

The M-audios are far superior to anything we’ve used before.  Compared to the pre-amps built into our old Mackie mixer, they give 15 db more amplification and seem to introduce no noise until they’re cranked way up.  In fact connected to them, our old microphones sound like entirely different critters.  Our “bottom of the line” ( or perhaps it’s better to say our “cheapest we could find that worked” ) old condenser mikes, which before sounded warm only when we were close enough to start getting proximity effect, now pick up sound from anywhere in the room.  While our Shure SM-57 dynamic mikes, which we often use as pickups by placing them directly in contact with our instruments, now generate way more signal and add even more resonance than they ever did before ( Microphone Placement ).  Also these dynamic mikes, which for decades have been a classic choice for shouting rock singers, connected to the M-audio preamps now produce enough signal so that we’ve been able to use them to record our vocals even though we both have small voices.

The Echo for its part does a squeaky clean job of digitalizing.  True the two mike preamps built into the front of the unit don’t match the quality of the M-audios, but we don’t need them since we are using only the six digitalizers with line-in inputs in the back of the unit ( that are connected with patch cords to the M-audios ), and it’s difficult to imagine that we’ll ever need more than that ( six tracks already makes the file size huge, but since we have a 500 Gig internal hard drive and a Terabyte external drive, there’s room ).  If one wanted to be picky one could also complain that the headphone amp built into the Echo machine is a bit weak, but still it’s plenty good enough for our purposes, and in any case what counts is the quality of the digitalizing, and that seems to be impeccable.

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It took us a while to realize all digitalizers are not created equal.  I guess like many others we were hypnotized by the “digital sound is noiseless” mantra which one so often heard back when digital recording was new.  What this mantra left out was that even though a digitalizer might not introduce extraneous hiss, it could still do a terrible job of converting the analogue sound information into a digital signal.  That is it could still miss the highs and lows, mush sounds together, and in general produce an inaccurate distorted image of the sound.

Since the digitalizer ( or sound card ) is also responsible for converting the digital signal into an analogue audio signal,  this is another place where poor quality ( i.e. cheap ) equipment can do a terrible job.  That’s why inexpensive players often produce thin sound.  It’s also why it’s silly to waste money by choosing a particular brand of cheap self-amplified speakers because they have a SPDIF input.  Used this way their built in “sound card” is doing the conversion to analogue, and since there’s no way a maker of cheap speakers can afford to include a proper sound card, such units inevitably produce hissy low quality sound even when they’re handling a very clean digital input.

In any case, we were absolutely blown away when we started using our Echo and discovered that its sound was light years better than from our old sound blaster.
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While the PortaPros are amazing for being so small and cheap.  They have ample bass, they’ve yet to produce even a hint of buzz, and they’re so light we forget we’re wearing them.  Also since they’re open, when we have them on we can still talk to each other and hear the wind, which means we’re much less likely to crank the volume and ruin our ears.  As an extra bonus the PortaPros come with a lifetime guarantee, so if one breaks you can just send it back with six bucks, and Koss will ship you a replacement.

We also have a pair of M-Audio AV-40 speakers which put out remarkably rich and accurate sound considering that they’re small ( 14 lbs. for the pair ) self amplified units.  They’re connected directly to the line out jacks of our Echo by ¼ cables which snake down the hallway to the living room, and we listened through them to make the final decisions about our sound files.  If something sounded OK through the AV-40’s, we knew that even demanding audiophiles would probably be satisfied with the quality.

However since we knew many people would be using less exalted small computer speakers when listening to the new music we were then posting on our blog ( or now when listening to the finished CD or to its individual cuts which are still available on our Work In Progress Frozen mp3 blog ), we also made sure to check how it sounded through an antique pair of tiny self amplified speakers which had been with us while we were living in India ( The Indian Music Scene ).

These had been pretty terrible when we first bought them, and after a decade of killer wet heat and dust in India, and then another decade of cold damp back here in storage, they have become truly bottom of the line.  But for this reason they’re useful, since we know that if we have engineered our files ( by doing things like fiddling with high and low pass…) so they sound acceptable even through them, then people listening through laptop or tiny self-amplified speakers will still be able to enjoy our music.  We know then that even such marginal speakers won’t buzz too badly, though of course they will still fail to reproduce all of the rich lows and the clear highs that are actually in our files.

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Editing and Engineering
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Since when we purchased our lovely Echo digitalizer we didn’t know much about music software, we were happy to take a hint from the gods and to start recording with “Tracktion”, the program that came bundled with it.  But now after using Traction for more than 2 years we’re in a position to say that it’s more than good enough to do the job.  Sure some folks with infinite money may still sneer at it for being somehow less than “professional”, but we’ve been blown away by both its power and its easy to use intuitive interface.

This confirms what we read in reviews which were uniformly enthusiastic about Tracktion’s basic sound quality ( its “recording engine”? ), though some did note that Tracktion gave the user less control than other more expensive options like “Pro-Tools”.  However being able to play fewer tricks with our sound doesn’t bother us, since our previous recording had been with our prehistoric light version of  WaveLab, and compared to that Tracktion is rocket powered.

Not to mention that our one personal encounter with Pro-Tools left us very unimpressed.  We know that many folks swear by it, and that the soundologists are unanimous about teaching it in their classes, but the master made with it from our Sweet Heresy wave files was so piss poor that we had to have it redone by an ethnomusicologist friend who used his lovely antique “Sonic Solutions” system.

For us one of the exciting and useful things about Tracktion has been that it edits by applying “filters”.  Even basic things like volume, pan, and equalization are treated as filters, which means that these editing operations are non-destructive, or to say this differently, the original recorded signal stays the same whatever we do ( though of course as one edits, what one hears does change ).  And so right up to when we convert a Traction file to an audio file, we can just push the virtual sliders around with no fear of doing any irreversible damage.  This is perfect for ignorant folks like us, since even when we don’t really understand what a filter does, we can still take a trial and error approach to using it, and make changes based on the sound of the post-change file.

Furthermore Tracktion allows us to do all sorts of powerful editing that was impossible with WaveLab.  With it whenever we tried to make a cut in the middle of a continuous sound, it always introduced a pop, and in fact it was only because our music unfolds as “sound islands” separated by silences that we were able to make the cuts we needed by doing them between these islands.   ( When we first started doing this we did not realize that it was only the peculiar shape of our music that allowed us to proceed in such a straight forward fashion. )

But now with Tracktion we can make cuts almost anywhere.  Even if  a cut in the middle of a continuous sound  produces a pop, we can usually eliminate it by fading in and out for a few thousandths of a second, an interruption of the sound which is far too short for anyone to ever hear.  ( Though of course if the ring differs on the two sides of a cut, this may be audible when there is no other sound to cover it. )  Tracktion also allows us to use microfades to clip the noses of explosive sounds, and microdeletes to get rid of finger, lip and breath noises.  While Traction’s high and low pass filters and equalizers have finally given us a way of dealing with sections that are too boomy or that have too much ring.

All of these things must be standard procedures for experienced sound engineers, but before we moved up to Echo and Traction we were in no position to experiment with them, and so we feel they’ve now given us the chance to explore an exciting new world.
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For more about how we used Tracktion to eliminate hiss and discrete noises from our recordings, check out the “Polishing Our Files” section near the bottom of  Doing Music Differently.  While in the final section of that same page you’ll find quite a bit about our new understanding of “mastering”.
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Also setting up is so much quicker with our new kit and Tracktion, that we’ve been able to realize our old dream of always playing amplified.  Now there is no need to fiddle with endless knobs and sliders before we start.  All we need to do is put out our instruments and mikes, turn on the M-audio’s and Echo, open Tracktion, click on the appropriate project file, don our headphones, and we’re ready to go.  It’s downright magical and for most combinations of our instruments the whole process takes less than 10 minutes.  ( Not to mention that it doesn’t matter if the filter profiles in the project file are not quite perfect, since if we’re actually recording we can adjust them after the fact.  They only need to be good enough for us to hear and enjoy the sounds we are making as we are playing them. )
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This always being able to play our instruments amplified has turned out to be just as important as we had imagined.

For example one important reason we built a second quartertone kalimba ( Kalimba Family ) was we had a hunch that two of them played together would generate interesting music.

But before we were able to play them amplified, boxus-quartus with its resonating air chamber was so much louder than boardus-quartus with its resonating oak soundboard, that the combination was unworkable.  However amplified they fit beautifully, while as we had hoped, their sound qualities are so radically different that it’s easy to hear that there are two very different instruments being played together.
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Microphones

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When we recorded huhnandhuhn most of the time we used just one microphone for each instrument, but once we started working on Sweet Heresy we quickly discovered we could get a richer sound by using a mixture of dynamic and condenser mikes.  Somewhat mysteriously this was true even when adding a dynamic microphone did not appear to add much signal strength.
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Professional recording engineers must know this, but here as with so many other things that we do, we’ve proceeded without instruction, preferring instead to invent and discover our own techniques.  Furthermore we feel this is more than just a self-indulgent preference, since we’re convinced that this unspecialized approach is one reason why whatever we’re doing, we often end up with a very unusual product.
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What it feels like to us is that our dynamic microphones do a better job of picking up the ring and other subtle resonance of our instruments, while our condenser microphones are good at catching the basic meat of the sound.  This means that by using the two types together, we end up with both greater subtlety and sufficient volume.

When we first started double miking we were positioning our dynamic microphones close enough to get some proximity effect but not close enough to produce distortion, but though this gave our recordings more presence, we still were not completely satisfied.

So just to see what would happen, we tried using two big rubber bands to tie a dynamic microphone to the neck of one of our Bowus Family instruments, and bingo!  Suddenly we had a huge rich sound!  Soon we found that by placing a dynamic microphone directly on top of our Kalimba Family instruments, we could similarly improve their recorded sound.  ( We now understand that placing our dynamic mikes in direct contact with our instruments had in effect turned them into pickups! )

To record the music for Work In Progress, we followed the same general two-microphone approach, however we made major changes in the way we positioned them……..

Clearly this is yet another area where ingenuity and imagination has gone a long way towards making up for the shortcomings of less than exalted equipment.  ( Microphone Placement )
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Catching a Unicorn

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To record a good file, to catch the most time-stopping moments of our music, is a magical act that’s very much akin to catching a unicorn.  Or to say it another way, all recording sessions are not the same, and for us to get down something special everything must go just right.  Not only do our microphones need to be properly positioned and our various levels correctly adjusted, but we also need to have had a good night’s sleep, to be comfortable with the way our life is going, to not be too angry, and to generally feel good.  Otherwise the unicorns will stay away.
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For hundreds of years people have known that the only way to catch a unicorn is to station a beautiful maiden in a flowerfull meadow until a unicorn comes and voluntarily puts its head in her lap.  It’s just not something which can be done by force.
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Anyway, when we were recording huhnandhuhn it took many months of working with our new equipment before we started to catch even occasional glimpses of the mythical beast.  But by then we were so burned out by computers and recording that we were losing our music, and it was obvious we needed a break.  So we took 5 weeks off before going back to work with fresh energy and recording 8 of the 9 cuts for our first CD in the next 8 sessions.  Which made it clear we’d been correct to not try to force our way through burnout…..

Then when we started recording Sweet Heresy we were pleased to discover that we’d learned quite a bit about attracting unicorns, because after little more than a month we found ourselves recording music that was much more magical than anything we’d ever gotten down before.

Obviously in part this must have been that it was our second CD and so we were less terrified by the whole recording process.  Not to mention that between having three new monster instruments to play, and having had four more years of playing music together, our music had grown.  Also it must have helped that we’d learned to play music which was friendly to our severely limited recording equipment, that is we had learned to avoid making sounds that were just fine live, but which we were unable to record satisfactorily.  ( Performance )

But for attracting unicorns, perhaps the most important development was we’d become more skillful about organizing our life so that we reached our flavor peak on the days we recorded.  ( Unspecialized )

For all of these reasons, for Sweet Heresy we eventually succeeded in rounding up a whole herd of unicorns, or to say it another way, to us the whole CD still sounds like one big beautiful magical beast.

However when we started recording the music for Work In Progress, we were absolutely thrilled to discover that right from the beginning we were getting down music which was technically and aesthetically far superior to anything which we had previously recorded.

Indeed some days there were so many unicorns circling our house, it was downright exhilarating.
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Doing Music Differently***Performance***Microphone Placement***Unspecialized***Our Instruments
Home****Work In Progress Frozen mp3 Blog****Buy Our Music
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