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How to improve room acoustics in a Sydney Recording Studio

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How to improve room acoustics in a Sydney Recording Studio

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Acoustics in a Sydney recording studio

Often we try so hard to produce a good recording using technology when adjusting acoustics in a Sydney Recording Studio. This is essential to compete with sound quality in this day and age. However, if you have a home Sydney recording studio and are learning how to produce good recordings. Keep in mind the huge importance of acoustics. Very often we resort to the latest plugins, computer systems and equipment. We spend a fortune on microphones and guitars, Compressors and reverbs. This is all great but it can be undone simply because the acoustics of your recording space is not optimal.

Surfaces and reflection

First things first, you need to have a good look at the surfaces in your space. If you have a number of rooms to choose from in your Sydney Recording studio here are some things to think about: Larger rooms are generally better (where possible). NON-cube shaped rooms are also better. If you have the choice between a long room and a cube room, always choose the long room. The other thing to consider obviously is avoiding outside noises. In your little Sydney recording studio you may be battling traffic, children, kitchen noises. Do your best to make the space as isolated as possible.

The more reflection and bounce you have, the less clarity will come across in the sound. A suave, classical string section in an old Cathedral may benefit from such bounce in a larger room. But with spoken voice or anything more rhythmic there is just confusion. The word and the notes get confused wiht refraction. This is a particularly big problem in old churches. No matter how good the sound system is, without good acoustic absorption, the speakers words can be lost!

Put quit simply, hard surfaces are not ideal for most situations. They bounce and reflect sound in unpredictable interfering ways. You want to cover as many flat, hard surfaces as you can and replace them with soft contoured surfaces. If you are working in the living room, a big lounge chair or a bookshelf full of books can be helpful. Windows and big glass doors can be a serious problem, so make sure you cover those with thick curtains. Good old fashioned egg cartons and foam are always useful if you can get hold of them.

Keep in mind you are not just trying to absorb the sound. You want to diffuse the sound and spread the waves around. Variety of surface is better than just big flat panels. Also note that different thicknesses of foam absorb different frequencies. If you are having a problem with bass booming, you need thicker foam. Thinner foam will only absorb the higher frequencies.

The science behind sound absorption itself is quite fascinating. Music and speech create sound energy which travels through the air and other objects as vibrations. Believe it or not, it actually carries heat. So scientists actually classify the transfer of sound vibrations as a thermodynamic transfer. The shorter the wavelength, the easier it is to combat and absorb. Bass vibrations will travel through just about anything if it is loud enough. Basically the bass produces larger wave length. This is where the thickness of the panel or mattress (or couch) is helpful. Having said that, if a panel or surface is too too dense, though it will absorb bass better, high frequencies can bounce off it. So the answer is aiming towards “balanced absorption”.

Bass frequencies

Corners are a real concern when managing absorption in a room. When you are attacking the problem of acoustics in a room you should first deal with corners. Particularly where 2 corners of a wall meet the roof or floor. This are “three dimensional corners” Otherwise known as Trihedral corners. Place large absorptive objects in the corners. You can even cut foam into triangular prisms and place them in the corners if you have time. The other option is to place “bass traps” in the corners on the floor. Bass is notorious for bouncing in and out of these corners and booming. A good bass trap will use friction to change sound energy into heat energy. There are two types of bass traps: Resonating bass traps and porous bass traps.

A resonating bass trap is basically a box. It will absorb the waves at the fundamental frequency to which the trap is constructed. It has a narrower frequency cancelation capability. Research the bass sounds in your room with a spectrum analyser or a frequency counter. You can purchase and download basic spectrum analysers on your phone. This will give you a rough idea of problem frequencies that are dominating. You can then build (or buy) an appropriate resonating bass trap.

A porous bass trap is made from material such as glass-wool, mineral-wool, or open-cell foam. This is then covered with fabric. A super important thing about porous bass traps is that they need to be placed a little away from the wall to be more effective. If there is a space behind the trap before the wall you’re cutting off lower frequencies.

The science of acoustics

To be technical, the velocity is maximum at 1/4 of the wavelength away from the wall. Don’t ask me how to calculate that as I’m not a physicist…! However! You certainly can experiment with different distances. As a professional bass player, I cannot count the number of times I have slightly shifted my amp away from a wall and seen great results. Its just takes a bit of time and thought. I’m assuming in your Sydney recording studio you have time to listen and use your spectrum analyser.

Crash symphony production is a great example of good acoustics in a Sydney recording studio. It has the right acoustic absorption and balance. Its a great example of how to manage acoustics in a room.

There are calculations and formulas you can apply to most aspects of this but don't be intimidated when seeking good acoustics in a sydney recording studio. Basically you should be experimenting with a number of materials and using your ear. Just the same way you would mix a track in a Sydney Recording Studio, you are in a way "mixing the room" when you deal with acoustics in a sydney recording studio. Home studios generally need around 40 % of surfaces covered.

You can calculate the amount exactly by dividing the total area of your flat walls by three. Then add a little extra. Again, keeping in mind the different densities required and also focussing on the corners. You can even use building insulation material. Though not designed specifically for acoustics it can certainly have similar effects. You can also glue sheets of foam, fiber-glass and rockwool together. The aim here is to create a variety of densities.

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Don't drool on your keyboard: Equipment rundown Hold on to your seat

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Don't drool on your keyboard: Equipment rundown Hold on to your seat

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A warning before reading this blog. Don’t get too excited. Make sure you’ve had no coffee and please please for gods sake do not drool on your keyboard. After this equipment rundown you may do some serious damage!

Basically you’re about to hear a rundown of one of Sydney‘s most popular Sydney recording studios. For a Sydney recording studio with all the tools you need to Take a serious look at Crash Symphony productions.

The gear

In this equipment rundown, lets see exactly what is used by our expert engineers that may make you. What goes into the desk is vital for a quality product. Crash Symphony Production studios boasts not one but 2 LA-2A compressors. Constructed by the chief producer James England from original parts. The LA-2A is so popular because it has a slow and multi-staged release time. It is very gentle with any signal you put through it. It actually responds and adjusts to any source signal you put through it. The LA-2A can also be used as a pre-amp on account of the 40db of gain at the input stage.

At the centre of this incredible machine is the T4 - optical attenuator. This is one of the main factors in its unique operation. The optical attenuator uses an electro-luminescent panel and photo resistors. For the dummies, this basically means it uses light. As the light gets brighter, the resistor's impedance increases which reduces the gain. And yes, vice versa. What it all comes down to for a vocalist and instrumentalist is that it is psychologically inspiring to sing or play through. Its quite fair to say that the output is almost always better than the source. It wraps up the signal in love and produces gold on the other end.

Microphone bliss

Speaking of input source. CSP boasts the ultimate industry standard microphone in the Neumann U-47. Arguably one of the most sought after microphones in the business. It is a large-diaphragm condenser mic made by the master himself - Georg Neumann back in the 50's and 60's. It has recorded more famous voices around the planet that we could count. It's famous for its super clear sound with an emphasis on the upper-midrange frequencies. This gives it a beautiful presence without sacrificing warmth. Georg Martin used it often with the Beatles recordings.

Software versatility

Of course in this day and age in the year 2019 as studio is no equipment rundown is complete without the best software. We are 20 years ago they would’ve been a room full of equipment just listed, things have tightened up and become more precise In this digital age. Logic is the platform which is used by our chief engineers and produces. Every pocket imaginable to create all the sounds that will polish off your project are stored on this computer. From the latest reverb and effects plug-ins to unbelievable synths and huge sounds.  All the best on board compressors, drum machines, sample banks as well as huge variety of modern keyboard and guitar sounds.

But again a reminder not to drool on your computer. Why? Simple because a equipment means nothing without the right people to operate it.

The staff

CSP engineers between them have over 50 years experience. The ears and ideas required to bring your project to life are ever present in the studio and keeping watch over every creative details. They not only function well in studio but can get out and about to film on location. One of the most unique recent developments pioneered by CSP is the VIG. This is the capability to live stream from YOUR GIG the best quality audio and video to your Facebook wall or any other website.

Only the best

Apart from the full-time workers in crash Symphony productions, CSP hires and brings in the top session musicians from Sydney as well as other technical consultants. It takes a great team to make a company as great as Crash Symphony Productions. CSP also utilises all the best marketing advice to make your product as shop ready and relevant as possible in today’s market. If you want to stand and be noticed, Crash Symphony Productions is the place to be.

Cameras, filming and all that jazz

But that’s far we’ve only covered audio recording and mixing.  Crash Symphony productions also has a tonne of amazing gear that will make any videographer drool. Here is an equipment rundown of some of our video and camera equipment:

Two Sony A7 ii cameras for filming musicians and corporate videos. This is a very versatile full-frame 35mm digital camera. It is the most sensitive low light camera and results in amazing low light shoot results. One of its best features is the new 5-axis stabilisation which compensates for movements made when the shutter is open. In other words, it rarely even needs a tripod to operate. If CSP is on site at your corporation or in a creative location for a music video. The A7 can be moved around and man-handled to get the best angles possible. In other words - its worth its weight in gold out in the field!

Added to this equipment rundown of camera beauty are the G master series lenses. These have extraordinary MTF plots and result in the highest resolution in the market. The details captured with G master series lenses are breathtaking.

And as far as editing software goes for video presentation will use the top of the line programs and equipment. CSP is well and truly equipped for film and television shoots. You tube adds, corporate inserts and short demo videos for up and coming artists.

Versatility is a must

The sheer variety of this sort of project the crash Symphony productions does is what staggers most people. From demos and CDs for bands and artists who are starting out. To full-fledged musical projects that involve the recording of large choirs, orchestras and bra sections. Contact CSP today and get your dreams in motion.

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How Technology and the Recording Studio Impact Pop Music Trends 190203

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How Technology and the Recording Studio Impact Pop Music Trends 190203

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In this article we are going to take a look at how technology and practices in the recording studio can impact the compositional choices and trends in popular music. We will explore famous examples in music history, like the transition from the mono-dynamic harpsichord to the piano through to the infamous loudness wars in audio mastering. We will finish by taking a look at where things are likely to go from here and what elements are going to influence that shift in direction.

The Harpsichord and the Piano

The transition from the baroque harpsichord to the piano was one of the most famous examples in music history of how technology impacts the trends in composition. For those who are not familiar with the harpsichord, it is a keyboard instrument that appears similar to a piano but differs in some important ways. Firstly, the strings are plucked by small plucking-tabs on the harpsichord. On the other hand, a piano is categorised as a percussion instrument because its strings are hit by hammers Crash Symphony.

The critical point to understand here is that harpsichord strings can only be plucked at one volume. This means the instrument is mono-dynamic. There are no volume dynamics available to the composer on the harpsichord. The piano, in contrast, had a spectrum of volume dynamics available. This key difference between the two instruments had significant implications on the musical direction of the day. Composers were finally able to explore dynamics on a keyboard instrument like never before. Dynamics became the new trend in music composition. The transition from harpsichord to piano was as result of a technological leap known as the “Industrial Revolution”. This revolution marked the change from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture. This process began in England in the 18th century and spread to other parts of the world. It marks the period of transition in musical terms from the Baroque period to the Classical period in music,

Advances in technology that further influenced music production

Clearly two of the greatest technological developments that have influenced music production occurred at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. These were the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, allowing the electronic transmission of the voice, and the development of recording by Edison Recording studios sydney.

During the 20th century these techniques became refined to create high quality reproduction of sound. All production and recording up until the end of the 20th century was analogue. The development of digital technology towards the end of this period marks the beginning of the current revolution in which we find ourselves. This development has given the music industry remarkable ability to produce and manipulate music. However, these great powers have come with some significant problems and challenges.

The LOUDNESS wars – What it is and why it occurred

Allow us to fast forward in time to the making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. As the story goes, Quincy Jones (Michael’s talented producer and record executive) was aware of the psychoacoustic effect of ‘louder is better’. You can learn more about the psychoacoustic effect of loudness in an interesting article by Dr John D. Cook (PhD) here: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2016/05/11/loudness-and-sharpness/.

Put simply: play two songs one after the other in quick succession, and if one is played louder than the other the average listener will likely consider the louder song to be more attention grabbing, and somehow, a better audio production! This had implications when songs were played on the radio. The louder songs were more likely to get noticed by the listeners, and thus, this would translate into higher record sales for that song. As a marketing tactic Quincy chose to make the Thriller album louder than any other record on the radio at that time. After 750 million record sales it’s hard to argue against it not being a winning factor.

It wasn’t long before Bon Jovi came along with his newest record and his producers decided to try their luck at the same ‘loudness’ approach. This trend continued. As the volume on records became louder and louder the mastering limiters got pushed harder and harder. As the music started get pushed into the ceiling at ‘brick wall’ ratios producers learned that the next best way to push their songs louder was by reducing instrumentation in the song. This meant productions that were sparser with few layers. This became known as the loudness war and you can learn more about it on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) and on our website here at https://www.crashsymphony.com.au/recording-studio-loudness-war/.

How did this impact the compositional trend in music? Well, when a track is highly compressed the various layers of instruments start running into each other because the volume difference between each layer becomes less significant. These layers of instruments begin competing with each other. The resulting trend in popular music was to move towards fewer layers and moving parts. This way, the tracks could be mastered even louder than before. This is why many electronic music tracks are much simpler than the more elaborate productions of yesteryear.

The Role of the Computer

The Digital Audio Workstation had a significant impact on the way music is made in the recording studio. In contrast to recording music on tape machines, digital audio platforms allow us to copy-and-paste sections of music and visually edit music to the metric grid. Unfortunately, some of the human feel of playing music is lost when we copy-and-paste sections and edit music rigidly to the metric grid. However, this has become the trend in pop music. It used to be that ‘Indie’ music was identified as not being ‘gridded’ and commercial music was gridded but these days it seems that all music released has had some amount of time editing done to it.

Similarly, programs like Celemony’s Melodyne (https://www.celemony.com/en/melodyne/what-is-melodyne) allow pitch and time correction of music material like lead vocals. It’s now possible in the recording studio to take even the most questionable musical performances and make them sound ‘passable’. These are all wonderful capabilities to have as a producer but for the average listener it does make identifying the good performer from the bad very difficult. The difference between whether someone can actually perform live or not, based on his or her recordings, is bigger than it ever has been before. In general, maybe this is a good thing for creative people because we all now have the ability to make our music sound the way we had originally dreamed. We’re not limited by our own virtuosity, or lack thereof. However, it does mean that the world is now completely awash with musical material: we’re completely saturated with online content.  Everyone has access to sites like Youtube, Spotify and more. Previously only the very best musicians could pull it off in the recording studio and engineers were limited in what they could do to fix bad performances. A small group of powerful music industry executives were the gatekeepers to who would be heard by the world. Nowadays everyone has a voice but how does someone choose the music they want to hear?

One way is that companies like Spotify now have an AI that chooses what it calculates as being the music you would like to hear. This is a questionable concept. I can see how it would be helpful for some people. Albums are no longer the way listeners consume their music. It is a single song world now. Listeners can choose to stream a single and they may only choose to hear one song by any one artist. The AI will put together its choice of playlist, or song compilation, based on all the previous songs you have heard on the platform. Too bad if you’re a wedding singer that uses Spotify to learn songs that you’re never going to hear again after the wedding gig is over. It will put together song compilations and suggestions that are similar to those songs that you have been learning and not necessarily what you want to hear for pleasure. The possibility of discovering new and stimulating music is could be significantly reduced by AI intervention.

MP3s and the Degradation in Audio Quality

The impact of the MP3 has been significant on the audio business. Engineers have long been up in arms about the quality of MP3s. There is significant quality loss in the data compression that occurs when a high-resolution file is converted into an MP3. You can learn more about this here (https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/what-data-compression-does-your-music). So why do we use them?

They’re small enough so that they can be easily managed on websites and transferred throughout the Internet. Their ease of use has been preferred over quality. However, we now have a generation of music listeners who don’t know what it is like to hear a high-definition recording. So what happens when the ease of use is no longer a problem?

Live Streaming and Internet Bandwidth

The 5G mobile network is poised to come into use over the next few years and with it comes a lot of hope and expectation. The data transfer rates that are being quoted are around 6GB per second with latency approaching 1 millisecond. If we have an online capability that is anything close to these rates it will likely have a huge and positive impact on how music is consumed. Learn more about the 5G network here: https://www.techradar.com/au/news/what-is-5g-everything-you-need-to-know.

If 5G delivers what we expect then low quality lossy audio files, like MP3s, will no longer be necessary. We will inevitably see a return to higher quality music files. The radio is becoming less significant in feeding consumers with the latest popular music, and so the loudness-factor may no longer be as crucial as it once was. Songs may once again start taking advantage of dynamics. This can only be a good thing for music.

Furthermore, now that video accounts for 80% of the content on the Internet (https://www.webmarketingpros.com/internet-video-to-account-for-80-of-global-traffic-by-2019/), and Youtube is one of the leading music consumption platforms, we will see video and music become increasingly wedded. When 5G brings such huge data transfer capability, the demand on music artists to have video content attached to their music will become more significant than what it already is today.

In summary, we are likely to see an increase back to high-resolution music material as the bandwidth limitations become increasingly inconsequential. The trend we are seeing in the editing of music to the nth degree is not likely going to wane. We will, however, see more live material becoming available as live concerts become viewed as live streams in real-time. There is likely to be resurgence in live sounding music, which is not aggressively manipulated and edited, as the equipment and capability of live streaming becomes more accessible to musicians. This trend back to the presence of live music that is steamed will have an impact on the compositional direction that begins to shape the popular music being made at that future time. As is so often the case musically creative people will react to the technology that becomes available to them and it will inevitably shape their compositional direction.  Ultimately, only the future will tell but it is an exciting time to be in the music and record studio business.