lets get even more confused: ever mess around with limiters?

Compressors almost always include a limiter.

tboatprod, fucking word. you went into detail about everything more than i did, then went further!

as far as mastering compression, and mixing it in well. you really have to experiment and play with it on your own.

it helps, to have a desired sound (goal) that you want to achieve, and aim for that by means of mxiing and compressing, and using ewffects, and stuff and things.

Hey, I'm glad you guys appreciated that last post on compression. I'm in the middle of recording my band so I'm in the right mindset to talk about this crazy stuff. I might be wrong about some of this, as I never took schooling for audio engineering, but after about 6 years of trying to make music sound good, I think I'm pretty on about most of it. So here's my take:

#1 Gain vs. Volume.
If you think of the audio as an electric current (which in the old analog days is what it was), gain is used to, well, gain more current. In effect it amplifies the current from it's original state causing it to increase in loudness. What volume does is takes the same current, amplified or otherwise, and output a percentage of the signal (hence the "volume"). Really in modern digital recording the two have come to mean just about the same thing as digital signal isn't electricity being passed over copper anymore, but the real application lies in sound reinforcement... live sound.
What happens is when you get the mic into one of the mixing board channels, you need to bring the signal up to an optimum gain level. This is where your signal is as loud as it will get without distorting. Then you adjust the faders (the volume control) to mix everything without distortion. Pretty strait forward stuff, it actually sounds moronic, but you wouldn't believe how many " sound guys" have no idea how it works.

# 2 Limiters vs. Compression

As opposed to what a compressor does, which is reduce dynamics, what a limiter does is put a "top" on a signal. While it does reduce dynamics as a by-product of it's process, what it's really there for is to prevent the signal from exceeding a certain dynamic level, while leaving everything underneath that level untouched. This is of course if it's used to do what it was designed to do. A strange kind of effect can be obtained by using a limiter kind of backwards, which is called expanding. This takes the same level, but brings everything under the line up to it. The best example I can think of is on the song Morwar off of the ass sorrid demos. The weird swelling sound was made by (I'm guessing a little here) combining the snare and keyboard effect, then sending the combined signal through the limiter, which capped the snare, but swelled the key thing up to the same volume... Whew!!!
Lastly

#3 Mastering advice
I use Sound Forge 6.0 for all of my track editing, a lot of track processing, and most of all for mastering. In sound forge I use Waves's L2 ultramaximizer plug in, which is nothing more then an over glorified limiter, but it does it's job flawlessly. Some mastering studios prefer to use multi band compressing to master out a recording, but really all this does is compress and limit certain frequency ranges. You can accomplish the same thing by using the 20 band eq that comes in sound forge and the L2 plug in. In SF there is a spectrum analyzer that you can use to actually monitor what frequencies are prevalent in the mix. Usually it's the bottom end from 200 hz and lower. This wouldn't be a problem except that the lower the frequency, the more energy it takes for the speaker to get the signal out. If you drop from 35 hz and down, you can make a recording a hell of a lot louder by eliminating this useless energy. Generally speaking the rest of the process would involve eq'ing the track to level out the rest of the frequencies to attain an equal prominent frequency range. After that (and a tylenol or 4), then you go to the L2 and drop the release down to it's lowest level (.001 ms) and crank the threshold down until the track starts to distort, then back it off. This point is usually around 6 to 8 db below the average peak line. Keep in mind this methodology only works about 95% of the time, but for the most part should be more then sufficient to bring a recording up to it's peak level while remaining clean.

#4 How to speak Greek...

Sorry if this post is a little overwhelming, but hey! So is audio engineering at times. And Music? It's just entertainment folks!!!
If you want to check out my recordings to hear all of this applied (one's my band, the other is a project) here's the urls
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/2/disusextrememetal.htm

and

http://www.soundclick.com/coldshovel
or
http://www.coldshovel.com

Ok there ya have it, and there ya be.

Awsome.

I WILL MELT YOU!!!

in my humble experience, people mess around too much with mixing, as long as you get the levels right, compress the bass, and vocals (sometimes) and drums, dip the hi hats, and crash, get the snare so it feels like it punches you in the chest, compress the kick, so that it don't interfere with the bass,

most of the impressive end sound comes from mastering

the trick is to use a stereo compressor, set as sideband, so that it only compresses below say 200hz, (the bassiest parts).....then get that part sounding tight, then put a multiband compressor over the top of this, and compress some more, this way it doubles up as an eq in some ways helps you iron everything out to sound right.

then a limiter, and either limit gently, or squash the crap out of it, you decide.

Gain is the level of the signal entering the pre-amp and volume is the signal level entering the power amp.

This isnt really accurate.
A gain increase affects the volume of the sound.

Gain is an "increase in signal power, voltage, or current by an amplifier, expressed as the ratio of output to input".
Volume "is the amplitude or loudness of a sound."

Noun vs Verb.

JR

Well, to put it really simply:

EQ - Cut room for every instrument on their own range and cut those ranges from all other instruments
Reverb - Enough to make it full, little enough to not drown everything in the residue
Compression - Squeeze every bit out of the separate tracks, but not too much to make it sound squished

Then combine them all, and master it It's not rocket science after you get the hang of it.

Here's a pile of bricks, now build a house.

One thing I've noticed about Devin's music is he uses alot of compression and delay/reverb. I'm guessing those are the main distinct elements to his recording style.

7lights wrote:
Gain is the level of the signal entering the pre-amp and volume is the signal level entering the power amp.


This isnt really accurate.
A gain increase affects the volume of the sound.

Gain is an "increase in signal power, voltage, or current by an amplifier, expressed as the ratio of output to input".
Volume "is the amplitude or loudness of a sound."

I know the text book answers to the question, I was writing in plain language what the knobs on his amp does.

noun vs verb

I think alot of people forget about capturing a great sound at the source when recording any instrument. As you can read in the new DTB forum they have spent alot of time searching for a great guitar sound and another day or so fiddling with little things to capture the perfect drum sound. With drums you can also use triggers to help back up a great mic'd up kit. This helps to give "that sound" you hear on most quality modern metal / heavy albums.

wow, folx! that's amazing knowledge you're sharing here. i think i'll use some of it when producing a demo for my band. but can anyone tell me what sounds in dev's music are created with a guitar? - i think there's quite a lot of effect-guitar-sounds in the "atmo"-elements of his records, and i also discovered that on stage with SYL, jed does the most of the rhythm parts, and dev is surprisingly often playing some effect-stuff. (at least i think so, correct me if i'm wrong)
so, my assumption is that next to the real guitar tracks (those you can tab down und use to cover the songs) there's a large amount of additional, massively edited guitar tracks that are often not even identifiable as such. i think this is another key element to his productions, as you can find it at least on all his solo works and the SYL stuff.

I think dev uses a yamaha fx unit for his guitar. Mostly delay from what I've been able to tell. Due to the eqs that he tends to use in combination with the delay, yeah he gets some interesting sounds that are closer to a keyboard part then a traditional guitar part. Jed does play pretty much straight rhythm in SYL, and Dev does do the more lead oriented stuff. Emperor did it the same way with Samoth playing all rhythms and Ishahn doing more lead stuff, and all the while singing (or screaming). That shows what a good guitar team can really do as opposed to 2 dudes playing the same damn thing.

lets get even more confused: ever mess around with limiters?

limiters? they are like compressors....from how I use it...they limit and kinda normalize the volume...so the quite is as loud as the loudest loud, and the loud doesn't go any louder...like putting a glass ceiling on a bouncing kid on a bed....

i dunno if that makes sense. but I used limiters on slap bass and vocals. or things with too much POP.

Don't forget who the Dev apprenticed under... Vai, Daniel Bergstrand, and to an extent Fredrick Nordstrom.

so....he was an apprentice to the department store? I don't get it...