You are so right Ryan and thank you too. I use to try to and participate in groups but there were always spoilers who weren't interested about being on topic or were more about just being mean. This group of folks, (I hope you guys can handle my NC expressions:-), just speak what they feel, provide the details, and keep the conversations going.
I like a good laugh as well as anybody and it won't offend me, if we, (meaning Avant Electronics), can't be liked by everybody. It's a fact of life that some people will always have a different opinion and that's that. Now, I've got to tell you my engineer story (talking about going off topic).... It's a long one but I think it makes a good point....
For years, I owned a 24 track recording studio and I had 3 guys that worked for me. One was my assistant engineer, the other specialized in micing. He could find the sweet spots, detect all the noises coming from a drum kit and deal with them before the 1st mic had even been brought up on the board. My other guy was the 2nd engineer, running SMTPE time-coded machines to other time coded devices, handling punch-in and outs, and was learning our Neotech console also. Being in a small town in NC, you had to be creative if you were going to make a living as a studio. While we had a really great facility, being successfull was really going to be a challange and this was around the early 80's. But successful we became almost immediately. What really did it for us was the fact that I had been a booking agent in the Southeast for many bands. Once I left that job, I had all of their names and once the studio was up and running, I called the bands and explained how often the better groups had lost gigs because of a recording. It was true!
There were many times when the agency that I had worked for had booked our usual 150-200 bands out on any given weekend. But occassionally, a major club would be in danger of having a huge crowd on a Friday night without a band if not for the booking agents. For example, I remember getting a call from one of our most popular bands called "Whipstick" and they were stuck in Tennessee in heavy snow and would not be able to make it to their gig in Asheville, NC. All the bands that we knew and trusted were booked and it was 2:00 in the afternoon. Well, good booking firms always have a room much like a lounge with a nice playback system to handle just about any kind of format of those times (reel to reel, cassette, etc.). The booking agents, (there were 12 of us), would gather into the listening room while a secretary would start pulling out tapes of bands that were hoping we would book them. (We required a tape, picture, info). We always filed based based by state and then type of music, so we knew who could handle a job even as late as 2:00.
We went through about 4 tapes and I heard an incredible band and I started telling the rest of the agents that we didn't need to look any further. I was met with mostly puzzled expressions. Back then, lots of agents weren't even qualified musicians at all ,(I have a degree in Piano), and they mostly all agreed that the band "just didn't sound right". What they were hearing was a really horrible recording. Noisy, mixed poorly; but the talent was there... Around the 8th tape, a nice clean sound came up from a band that I wouldn't let play in my backyard in a hurricane and they were all loving them. For the life of me, I couldn't get it across that they were judging the bands by the quality of their tape recordings, not by the quality of their musicianship. I raised such a fuss that the president of the firm said to "bring the girls in"; referring to our 6 secretaries. They played a song by each of them and every single one of the girls chose the high quality tape by the poor band! I really learned something that day and it served me well with my own bands later on!
So, for about two weeks I called bands and I told this story to each band that I spoke with and then offered them a day in the studio for $200 or two songs. Little did I know that we were going to book up almost instantly! We recorded over 300 bands (and often worked days and nights to get two groups done), and needless to say, we became quite proficient at having a "standard setup" that we knew would sound good.
Now, here's where the story finally starts moving along...[/We had been doing this for a month or two and once we had the headphones set for aband we would ask them to just play through the song one time. Of course, we would be recording the track and tweaking a great sounding monitor mix in the control room so they could come in and hear the basic sound and hope to inspire them too. On this particular day, all 3 of my guys as well as myself was especially pleased at how great the bass guitar sounded, full, rich, thumping and the band was cooking. We were fascinated because it was a Peavey guitar and we could be shocked also since we had a Rickenbacker 2002, Fender Jazz, and vintage P-Bass in the studio. (Still, we couldn't wait for the session to end so we could check out that Peavy guitar).
After they finished the tune, we rolled the tape back and just played a minute of the music because we had learned that it was always a thrilling time when the band heard their selves back on the headphones. I pushed the talkback button and told them to come on in for a minute to hear how it was sounding. They literally ran out of the studio....
Once in the Control Room, we played the tape and within 20 seconds, I could hear "high 5's" being giving and excited talking and so on. This was music to our ears because it meant that now we could relax and concentrate on getting proper levels, tweaking compression, EQ if necessary, in other words, the real engineering process could begin. But I happened to turn around and there was the bass player with a very concerned look on his face. I lowered the music and asked him what was wrong and he told me that something wasn't right with the bottom end of the bass and to add more bass. Well, it didn't need more bass because collectively my group of engineers, who all liked different kinds of music and very good engineers, felt that the bass was also "in the pocket", just like me. So, I glanced at all my engineers to get their attention to let them know that we were going to the "monkey button". The "monkey button" was channel 32 on our console that we used for tweaking nothing because nothing was coming through that channel. It was a FAKE CHANNEL. So, I enabled EQ, popped on some other LED's and then starting slowing turning a knob. All of a sudden, the bass player goes "Whoa, that's too much. Bring it back just a little bit....That's it, that's it...Stop right there....Now, gimme a bit more top end". Once more to additional EQ LED's and knobs I went and I watched him listening intently, again getting something like "that's better, a bit more....yes, OK, just a tiny bit more". All of a sudden he started grinning, looked at me, slapped me on the back and said, "I'll take it". Immediately he joined the celebration that really revved up once he was happy so I told them to get out there and "kick". All my engineers looked at me, slightly grinning and I told them that the simple fact is that "you can never underestimate the power of the human mind". I mean he heard the tone changing. For all I know so did some of my engineers! It's strange but true...
For better or worse, the bass player raved about the sound all night and they did a great recording...! My point? People often do the same things with microphones as well as foods (I bet you can ask someone if they want more salt when you're actually putting in sugar and they won't notice), music, you name it. Long story, but a good one to mull over the next time an "authority" tells you that only his ears really discern true quality. (He might be that bass player:-)[/font][/font]
glen
