Hello everyone!

Today, I would like to introduce you my Yamaha MT3X 4 track cassette machine and some of my nostalgic items! 

I bought it 2 years ago from eBay, it was in very good condition, and still in perfect working order.
The reason why I bought such thing was to transfer some of my early works (well, more like messing around with mates!) to the computer, 4 tracks simultaneously. MT3X has 4 direct out.
Back in 90', the actual machine I had was Tascam Porta 7. It gave me a great insight of multitrack recording, and soon after, I was syncing with my Roland JV1000's onboard sequencer (MC500) using SMPTE box. I still remember the noise of the timecode on track 4!
Then I purchased my first ever computer 'Apple Performa' 75MHz with 8MB RAM! But it was more than powerful enough for Emagic Logic 2.5. The operating system was something like 7.5-8.
I still kept those disc/disks!

Who remembers those dongles dangling behind your computer?

To summarize today's post, if you require transferring 4 track cassette data to digital files, please contact me! There could be a future hit buried in your storage, dig it out!

Thanks for looking and have a great day!

YS Sound Production

Hello all!

Khiyo's new music video 'Bareer Kachhe Arshinogor' is out now, please check it out!
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10153021640400390&set=vb.153064630389&type=3&theater
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3JqMmVA7XA&feature=youtu.be

As I did with 'Murshidi', I would like to do some mix analysis to show you what I've done during the mixing, things like choice of plugins, effects and master bus processing etc.

19 audio tracks, 39 including AUX, parallel processing, effect return, sub mixes and main master bus.
It's relatively a small session compared to some of other songs from their debut album.
I recorded the drums and tabla at London School of Sound, and all the rest were recorded by Dave Mountain at the Attic Sounds. All the session were kept 24bit 48kHz throughout.
My choice of DAW was Pro Tools 10. If you want to know the basic setup of my mixing template, please see the previous post of Murshidi mix analysis.
You will notice that on this mix session I've used Focusrite's Liquid Mix 32 quite a lot.
Let's start from looking at the kick drum.  


Kick:

Kick was recorded with only one mic. It sounded good during the recording session but once I started mixing, I felt that it needs more definition/clarity especially when the song hits choruses.
I didn't have any re-triggering plugins in RTAS/AAX format at the time of mixing, I had to export the kick audio file to Logic, use their audio to MIDI function, then brought back the MIDI file into Pro Tools, using NI's Kontakt to audition my kick samples and finally I chose one that blends well with the original kick. I know it was a very tedious and time consuming work... but worth it!
The original kick had a gentle compression from Liquid Mix (LM), the second kick (sample one) had Massey's Tapehead driven moderately to add some dirt since it was a very clean sample. Then both kicks went to Kick bus and processed together. Gentle compression (LA-2A emulation) and EQ (EQP1 emulation) from LM, another compression form NI's VC76, very tiny adjustments from Digirack EQ3 and peak control from Waves L1.
On this song, the difficulty was to control the frequency relation between kick, tabla and bass to be heard nicely without over crowding the low-end. More on this later.
Small amount of kick bus were sent to drum reverb.
 

Snare:

Snare was also recorded with only one mic at the top. During the mixing I divided into 2 separate tracks, one for normal hit, one for rim hit (shot) so that I can set the EQ, compressor and reverb send differently.
As Murshidi, there were too much hi-hat and cymbal bleed on the snare track so first insert was the Digirack Dyn3 expander/gate to clean it up. Then I used Dyn3 compressor to shape and even out the dynamics of each hit. EQ3 was used for HPF and a small cut at 284Hz. API 550A adding nice top end at 12kHz by 4dB in shelving mode since they weren't cutting through the mix enough especially at those busy part of the song. L1 to control some of the peaks during fills. Both tracks were sent to drum reverb with some automation; snare send increases during the chorus.


Hi-hats, Floor tom and OH:

Just a HPF for the Hi-hat. For the floor tom I've used Massey's CT4 to enhance the sustain of the sound and also to control the dynamics. CT4 is one of my favourite compressor.
For the OH, LM with Joe Meek SC2 emulation selected doing very gentle compression and Neve 1073 EQ emulation, DDMF 6144 to cut some low-mid, then L1 for the peak control.


Drum bus and parallel process:

Gentle compression by McDSP's 6030 in MOO TUBE mode and L1 to control the peaks.
For the parallel channel, Dyn3 compressor to squash quite hard then Tapehead driving quite hard to add more saturation. The drum reverb was PSP's EasyVerb, one of favourite drum ambience plugins.


Tabla:

Tabla was recorded in 2 track one mic for Baya, one mic for Daya.
I have used standard Digirack delay to make Daya stereo by adding 38ms delay to only right side, then both tracks were routed to Tabla bus. First plugin was Massey CT4 doing nice mild compression, EQ3 for some minor cuts, HOFA IQ-EQ in dynamic EQ mode to tame around 79Hz.
API 550A to boost 10kHz and cut 100Hz. Then Dyn3 compressor was used with side-chain key input from Kick bus to duck whenever kick hit happens by small amount (2-3dB max). 
Then the usual L1 to control the peaks.
Only the Daya track was sent to the room reverb.


Upright Bass:

Recorded by Dave Mountain at his Attic Sounds and came in 2 mono tracks, bass bottom and bass top. I assumed one near the bridge/f hole area and one up the neck somewhere. Both track were routed to Bass bus. Tapehead for adding some thickness and compression, EQ3 cutting 75Hz also cutting at 416Hz to clean up some room resonance. LM dbx 160S emulation doing moderate compression. IQ-EQ in dynamic mode to tame further at 75Hz, and Expander mode at 114Hz to boost that particular note. It looks like there was a strong peak at 75Hz and a weak bass notes at 114Hz. Then 6030 in Opto-C doing another mild compression and L1.
Some notes were sent to drum reverb with automation.


Acoustic guitar:

Also recorded by Dave Mountain. came in 2 mono tracks, one brighter sound (AKG C414) and another one slightly darker sound (it was labelled Ribbon mic). After tried many configurations (2 mono tracks at same panning position etc), I've decided to pan them 100L and 100R plus delaying the C414 track by 1472 samples (approx 30ms) to create a placebo double effect.
Both tracks had CT4 to reduce the dynamic range before they were sent to AGtr bus.
At the AGtr bus, LM LA-2A was used to control the dynamic range and 1073 EQ for general tonal shaping. Brainworx bx_control to reduce the stereo width and used mono maker to collect the low frequency to the center of the mix. The placebo double effects made the guitar sound too wide on the stereo field so bx_control will bring the width back but the delay effect is still audible. IQ-EQ was used on 3 frequency areas to reduce some sharp whistling resonances. IQ-EQ is great for this kind of job, then L1.
At the second chorus, instrumental section and the last chorus, a parallel channel will come up via automation adding more excitement. On this parallel channel, heavier compression, heavier Tapehead were used. Please note that the pan pots were both set to 0 (mono). This is to fill up the center space during the instrumental secion and also to compensate the signal loss caused by the placebo double effect when it's played in mono, though, I did tweak the delay time sample by sample to choose the least loss delay amount when it's combined to mono.
AGtr bus was sent to room reverb.


Viola:

Viola was recorded by Dave mountain. It looked like they had 2 separate sessions for Viola.
One session was recorded with 2 mics (second half of the song), one session was recorded with only one mic (early part of the song). I duplicated the single audio and made a double for the early part. On the duplicated track I have delay the signal by 1497 samples to create a placebo double (just like the AGtr) and used Tapehead to change the tonality to beat the mono summing issues. The other viola session were fine as they were and sent to Viola bus. R compressor was used to gently control the dynamic range, EQ3 for minor sculpting, API 550A adding some air at 12kHz in shelving mode.
Viola was sent to room reverb and also to a longer reverb (see effects section).


Vocal:

Recorded by David Mountain and came in 2 mono tracks. One I don't know what mic was used and another one was labelled SM7B. After auditioning those 2, I've decided to use the first one as the main and SM7B as a parallel boost. First plugin was Waves RVox. I don't usually do this but probably it felt good! But then there is CT4 after it. I must felt it wasn't enough dynamic range control done by RVox so I inserted CT4 for further control. EQ3 for some minor cuts, DDMF's 6144 doing some nice high-mid to high boost adding some nice air to Sohini's voice. IQ-EQ doing some frequency control on low-mid to mid range.
Vocal was sent to a dedicated vocal reverb (Waves TrueVerb) and a stereo delay (Waves SuperTap).


Effects and side-chain ducker:

Lead vocal was sent to TrueVerb. It looks like I chose New York Plate preset and I tweaked from there. Also sent to a stereo delay and this stereo delay is also sent to Trueverb to blur the delay sound. IK's CSR Room was chosen for the short ambient type reverb, Air Reverb was chosen for the longer reverb adding some tails to viola. Side-chain ducker was setup using Dyn3 expander/gate. AGtr and viola were sent to this AUX and whenever Sohini is singing, AGtr and Viola ducks down in level by whatever I feed to this AUX (please see Murshidi analysis for more details on this technique).


Master bus:

Throughout the mix I've used Slate Digital's Virtual Collection in Brit 4k. Then LM with SSL FX G384 emulation doing some 'Glue' compression 2-3dB max. bx_control making anything below 152Hz in mono, and finally Slate Digital Virtual Tape Machine doing the final finish touch.


Mix summary:

This was one of the longest songs on the album and the dynamic range was very wide throughout the song so I had to be careful not to lose the natural dynamics that musicians intended in the studio.
There are some favourite plugins that I tend to go to but as you can see, I like to try many different plugins to see how they sound. In this session Focusrite's Liquid Mix 32 was heavily involved despite there are some known issues with the low frequency with impulse response problems, but I really like the sound and didn't hear any artifacts so I guess all is good! Also when I started the mixing on this song, I was still using a Mac with dual core 2.16gHz so the DSP on Liquid Mix really helped me getting the mix to progress.

Thanks for looking!

YS Sound Production

Hello and happy new year!

Khiyo's debut album is available at Bandcamp here:
https://khiyoband.bandcamp.com/

YS Sound Production was involved from the early stage of recording sessions to mixing the whole album.
Please check them out!

It's been a pleasure working with the band members,
great recording from David Mountain at The Attic Sounds
http://www.theatticsounds.com/

Beautifully mastered by Jon Astley at Close To The Edge
http://closetotheedge.biz/biog

Big thanks to London School of Sound for your generosity!
https://www.londonschoolofsound.co.uk/

Thanks for looking!
YS Sound Production

Murshidi by Khiyo -Mix Analysis-

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since I posted last.

I would like to take this opportunity to post an analysis of one of a song 'Murshidi' from Khiyo's debut album.

You can check the song at below links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHTYjxGk9ek

https://soundcloud.com/khiyoband/khiyo-murshidi-kachhe-nao-na-dekha-dao-na 

I'm sure some of you will find it interesting to see what is inside the mix!

First, let me explain the basic set up of my mixing session.
As you can see, my choice of DAW in this session was Avid Pro Tools 10.
I bus things (drums, bass, E.Gtr, violin, vocals etc), then there are 'Music’ bus, 'Vox’ bus then those 2 goes into the final 'Mix' bus. Depend on the project, some times I don't have those separate bus for music and vox.

When I receive files from the client and if it's a rock/guitar oriented material, I usually process each audio using either Slate Digital VTM or PSP Vintage Warmer in Audio Suite. Nothing major alteration are made at this stage, very basic tone and gain control is the aim. I've learnt this from a great Japanese engineer Yoshiro Kuzumaki. For this song, I chose VTM, tape speed and other setting changes depend on the sound source.

The first slot for most of the channels were Slate Digital VCC. For this song I chose Brit 4K with moderate drive. It could well been US A setting but I just felt right with Brit 4K. The effect of this plugin is very subtle, at least to me!

Drums and percussion:
The kick was slightly too soft and too much sustain so first thing I did was to shorten the decay using Native Instrument 'Transient Master', the rest of chain was Dyn 3 compressor, bit of saturation from Nomad Factory SC-226, HPF and some low-mid cut with EQ 3 and ddmf 'No Limits' for the final peak control before it leaves to the drum bus.

For the snare, there was a fair amount of ride/hat bleed so I went with Dyn 3 Expander to reduce those ride/hat. There is Massey Tape Head and Klanghelm SDRR to add some harmonics. HOFA IQ-EQ in dynamic EQ mode to control some of the low-mid peak.

Nothing special for the Hat track, HPF and gentle compression using Avid Channel Strip.

Floor Tom, gentle compression with Massey CT4 to enhance the sustain, then EQ 3 for minor clean up.

Over head, SDRR into McDSP 6030 'SST '76' then EQ 3 for minor clean up.

At the Drum bus, 6030 is waiting in 'U 670' mode doing very gentle compression.
Drum reverb were only used on snare and floor tom channels. PSP EasyVerb was picked on this song,  it's my favorite drum reverb/ambient plugin.

Tabla was recorded with 2 mics, one for baya and one for daya. Usually I would prefer to work with stereo daya but in this case I went with brainworx bx stereomaker to make a mono channel into stereo. After that, gentle chorus was used to give a slight movement. Those 2 channels were bus to Tabla bus. 6030 OPTO-C was used to tame some of the peaks.

This was my first time dealing with Khomok. This file arrived at very final stage of the mixing. The file was in mono. It sounded very nice on it's own but at this stage where everything else was already mixed nicely, I had to make it much smaller sound to avoid conflict with other instruments. HPF, moderate compression and this time, I've used the classic 34ms stereo short delay, one side muted to make it wide stereo track. Of course there is a bit of mono compatibility issue on this kind of stereo technique but I went ahead with it. Aiming to go even wider than those guitars.
Khomok was routed straight into Music Bus.
In case if you are interested, this is Khomok.

Bass:
There were 2 electric bass tracks, amp and DI. Only VCC on amp track, VCC and Klanghelm IVGI on DI track to add some grit, then those 2 goes into Bass bus. Klanghelm DC8C for moderate compression, Tape Head to add some thickness on low-end, SDRR to add some upper harmonics, EQ 3 for minor cut around 420Hz, then 'No Limits' for controlling some peaks.
From this Bass bus, I sent to another 2 AUX channels in Pre-Fader. One for the bass solo section at 2:11 to add further upper harmonics and grit using PSA-1, another one to enhance the low-end using Waves Renaissance Bass set around 75Hz and mixed-in at very low level.

Electric guitars:
All the electric guitar parts were recorded by Dave Mountain at his studio The Attic Sounds. Dave is a very skilled and knowledge guy, those are absolutely great sounding guitars! Also he kindly pre-mixed all the blend of multiple mics, thanks Dave! As a result, not too many processing going on at individual guitar tracks. At the E.Gtr bus, SDRR for adding some harmonics to control the tone, maag EQ 4 for some Air band, bx saturator for further harmonics and thickness, and one band EQ 3 for HPF.

Violin:
Violin was also recorded by Dave, came in 2 mono tracks, probably 2 different mic-ing position but both sounded quite close mic-ed.
I tried spreading them wide apart with pan pot, delaying one side etc but I ended up bussing to a mono Violin bus then bx stereomaker to make it stereo. The stereo expansion knob was automated according to different sections of the song.
Parallel processing was set up from here to add some movement on the violin. I originally had some hand written panning automation as an auto pan plugin, but fortunately one of my Melda Production's bundle became available in AAX format around summer time so I just tried for this post and it works very well!

E.Gtr and Violin were sent to Valhalla Room and Super Tap. V Room was set to 0.85s, Super Tap was 8th note on left, quarter note on right with no feedback though, this song wasn't done to the click (apart from the first few bars) so I had to tap and guess to get the natural delay timing. Super Tap was also sent to V Room to help blend the delay sound into the sound field.

Lead vocal:
For the lead vocal, 6030 OPTO-C doing a fair amount (6-8dB) of compression, EQ 3 for minor cuts, IQ-EQ in dynamic mode to control some high-mid peak, mild DeEsser then Trim plugin doing the fader ride. Those plugin order varies and it's different every project. I often have Trim (or clip gain) early on in the mixing to control the dynamics of the vocal then EQ, compressor/DeEsser and so on. The vocal was also recorded by Dave.
The spatial effects used on Sohini's vocal were Valhalla Vintage Verb, Nomad Factory ECHOES, Waves Doubler. Each of Send level were automated to give some movement during the song.

Side-chain ducking:
There is one extra thing going on, Dyn 3 Expander/Gate with polarity flipped, side-chain key in from the lead vocal and output to 'Mix' bus. E.Gtr and Violin were sent to this Expander/Gate by small amount. What happens is that when the vocal is happening, E.Gtr and Violin ducks down in level by whatever the amount you sent. I've learnt this technique from one of Mike Senior's book!

'Music' bus only had VCC bus plugin, 'Vox' bus had VCC bus and HPF, then at the final 'Mix' bus I had VCC bus and VTM in 15ips. 
 
Another thing to note, this song and the next song in the album were meant to be connected with a long reverb tail so there is a fair amount of reverb send going on for the final 30 sec. It had to be the same reverb I used for the next song's intro (Koi Jao Rey). In this case, 2C Audio B2 was used and the reverb time was set to 17.2 seconds.

As you might have noticed, I’ve used Massey Tape Head, Klanghelm SDRR, Nomad Factory SC-226 quite heavily on this project. I like to play around with saturation, subtle tone shaping using those plugins. SDRR is a fun processor. I’m still learning how to use it and every time there are some new discoveries in those plugins!
I like using Digi stock compressor, expander/Gate and EQ as well.
And I do use a lot of automation.

Special thanks to Khiyo for allowing me to post this analysis and
hopefully I'll do another one very soon!
You can purchase the album from here.

Thanks for looking!
YS Sound Production

Apology post due to email server problem!

Big apology to those of you whom contacted us recently.
Due to a major server problem we have lost all the emails
of last 20 days.
If you are still interested/or require some work, please contact us again.

YS Sound Production

 I have made another HDD test for those of you who wondered [Why don't you connect those FW800 HDD before the FW400 audio interface?], so, here it is.
I now connected things in following order: PC-FW800 1TB HDD-FW800 2TB HDD-FW400 audio interface.
I have read somewhere long time ago that audio interface should be connected first in your FireWire chain so I obeyed this but it is always good to try a different configuration yourself to see if things improves without gaining any problems.
In this new configuration, disk usage reads 32% and for some reason the CPU usage has been dropped to 44%.
It is slightly slower than when those HDD were connected directly to PC's FW socket (26%) but it's definitely better than 53% when those HDD were chained after my FW400 audio interface.

Thanks for looking!

YS Sound Production

Hello everyone!
In this festive season, I have treated myself with a new USB 3 hard disk drive and I would like to write a little report in here.
I've been using 2 of Western Digital FW800/400 HDD (1TB and 2TB) for the past 3 years and I never had any problems with them but the disk has been filled up recently, so I've decided to purchase another HDD and use those 2 WD for backup purpose.
I don't want to go into too much details but you can see the differences in system usage meter below.
The left screenshot is my previous setup which: PC-Audio interface (FW400)-WD drive daisy chained. The disk usage reads 53%.
I changed the configuration slightly for the middle screenshot. WD drive is now connected directly to the PC's FW800. You can see that the disk usage is now reduced to 26%. I guess it's the full use of the bandwidth of FW800 instead of FW400.
The right screenshot is my new LACIE 3TB USB 3 HDD connected directly to one of my PC's USB 3 socket. The disk usage is 24%.
I was expecting a slightly better result compare to the one from FW800... Well, 2% more efficient.
The song is 24bit 48kHz, consists of around 60 Channels (audio tracks) including sub group bus and effect returns etc.
Those screenshots were taken at exactly same point where the song gets busy and most of the audio are playing.

One last thing, both of my WD HDD were 7200 RPM, my new LACIE is 5400 RPM. I have to say, I'm more than happy with 5400 RPM at the moment.

I used to own an Iomega JAZ drive back in 90', and 1GB cartridge used to cost £100 each. I am amazed to see how cheap HDD these days!
 
Thanks for looking!
 
YS Sound Production