why does my sound quality suck?

[Eclepto Funk]

my recordings seem to hiss and be lo-fi and not matter what i do generally sound like crap

 

if you could listen to a couple of my songs on SoundClick (link on my signature) and basically tell me what you think is wrong and how you would fix it, that would be greatly appreciated it

 

thanks in advance

[Chicken Monkey]

If you're getting hiss from your sources, you'll have to apply a noise gate to eliminate it. Otherwise, you probably don't know how to use reverb, echo, compression, and limiting. I wish I could help you, but I also don't know how to use reverb, echo, compression, or limiting.

 

I'm getting better and better at getting a clean source sound, though, so I could, conceivably, learn how to do those things, and apply it to all of my great-sounding source tracks.

[stickboymusic]

Hi

 

I had a quick listen to a couple and they didnt sound like they had a load of background noise etc... i think a lot of the lo-fi ness in your sound is down to a few technical issues that could/should be sorted out.

1. your guitar often sounds out of tune (if its saying its in tune on the open strings using a tuner then maybe take it to a guitar shop for a set up)

2. timing.... very important... its ok to be a little bit out here and there if its a live feeling song but if youre using programmed dums (are you?) then its basically like playing to a click so when you're a bit out it just sounds sloppy (lo fi?)

 

This is where i would start then yeh knowing about about how to use dynamic processing (limiters, compressors etc) and fx (reverbs, delays etc) will all add to a more polished sound

 

I dont know your set up.... are you recording to a computer based program or a stand alone multi track? are you in an echoey room?

 

There is a lot to take into consideration.... personally i kinda go for that lo-fo sound but at the same time make sure my techniques, timing and most importantly tuning is all good.

 

Hope this helps a little

[Eclepto Funk]

i run my electric guitar through a Roland MicroCube, then mike the Cube. i also use just a mike for my voice or the acoustic guitar. all mikes go into a RadioShack three-track mixer. that then gets plugged into my sound card, an M-Audio Delta. i mix with N-Track Studio and master with Audacity.

 

the "low fi" i'm talking about is the piss-poor sound quality i hear. it sounds crackly to me, and it's always so much lower in terms of final volume than most of the finished songs i hear on the net.

 

i then have to crank up the volume to make the sound level similar, and that makes the "crackly" effect even worse

 

also, there's a "dull" un-clear "film" on my songs, which i have to combat by lowering bass and raising mid and high frequencies, which also makes the sound "fried" and crackly

 

anyway, it sounds like crap to me

 

oh, another thing i've noticed is that most songs out there sound the same no matter what site they're playing through. for example, i've heard the same song by Paramour on IndieCharts, Number One Music, and One Sixty Music, and it's basically the same sound

 

wheareas my songs tend to sound fairly different in all three places. fried, too dull, and way too low, in that order.

 

am i doing something in the mixing that makes this happen?

[Chicken Monkey]

I'd get off Audacity--it's more of an LP-duplication program with a few added features to make it function as a multi-track recorder.

 

You can try Reaper for free, and I think it's under $50 if you decide to commit. I switched over from Audacity, and it's far better--it also eliminated a lot of my timing issues, since there was a lot of lag in Audacity.

[Eclepto Funk]

hmmm ... i don't record with Audacity

 

i record with N-Track, then mix a wave file, switch over to Audacity and basically nip the ends of the song, perhaps speed up the track a little, or raise the volume a little, but that's it.

 

is Reaper worth it for that, do you think?

[blue2blue]

I dropped the needle on the first three on your SC page.

• "May for a Very Short Time" -- where's the bass? Not just why's there no bass guitar or stand up or other bottom-holding instrument (which is a good question), but where's the bass on the bottom of the drums...

   

  I think there are some toms over on the right but they sound like the shell of the drum is missing... really, really thin. Also, I'm figuring you were trying for something by splitting the drums to the two extreme sides but whatever you were going for, it's not working.

   

  (Maybe you read something about the trend to LCR [left-center-right, aka, 'virtual 3 channel' or 'virtual center channel' style mixing], but that's really oriented to bigger productions -- and can be a mixed bag, anyhow. But used senstively in the right situation, it can help keep certain mixes from getting junked up with distracting elements, even without necessarily throwing them out. But that situation is not this situation. )

• "Supernova" has a sort of Byrds demo kind of feel, it's pretty engaging -- except for the fact that it's really painful to listen to because of the piercing high frequency boost in the range over around 6-8K... it's brutal.

   

  I'm thinking you mixed this (and the previous track but esp. this) with the bass cranked on your playback rig, or the playback monitors in the corner of the room (which boosts bass) or with a subwoofer turned up too high -- and/or with a blanket over the speakers.

   

  Seriously, if your monitoring situation was giving you an accurate idea of what this sounds like, I think there'd be some bass on this and a whole lot less treble.

• Probably the best sounding of them was "Six AM After the End of the War." There was a little bit of treble nastiness in the tambourine (clipping maybe or just overly bright) but overall the balance was much smoother, the rhythm guitar had some warmth and pretty good tuning.

Take your favorite CDs that you think of as good sounding (it doesn't hurt if other folks think they sound good, too, fidelity wise) and play them over your playback rig. Use those to calibrate your ears.

 

If you've got decent monitors in a reasonably decent space -- and small rooms are notorious for having sonic problems unless you work with them some, avoiding early reflections (dead sides and back can help) and standing bass waves (a standing bass wave will often result in areas where the bass is boomy as well as areas of the room where the bass diminishes from cancelling itself out.

 

You may be sitting smack in the middle of a standing wave node that makes for boomy sound at your monitor spot, causing you to overcompensate with treble. Kind of like a fat middle aged divorced guy buying a red sports car. Give or take.

[stickboymusic]

good advice on reaper.... go try that

 

but this probably wont eliminate crackle if thats what you're hearing..... maybe update the radioshack input.... if the first stage going into the computer isnt clean then you will never get a clean sound.... what mic are you using?

 

in terms of loudness and things well mastering is very important if you want that loud sound.... its gone a bit crazy these days with songs getting louder and louder and more and more compressed..... you can do some basic mastering with plug in and im sure reaper will have some great tools...stereo wideners.... limiters etc which used carefully will all help give you a "louder" final song

[Eclepto Funk]

i use a Shure SM57 mic

 

sounds like updating from Audacity and perhaps the RadioShack mixer might be the way to go

 

do you guys have any reccomendations for what to plug the mikes into and then feed into the sound card?

[blue2blue]

Oh, yeah... and... you'd probably get more answers over in the recording forum. If you want me to move the thread, just say the word. However, since many of us are familiar with your music, it may be helpful for you to collect our opinion here.

 

I can't remember N-track, though I think I crossed paths with it somewhere, but it's not exactly a household name in recording at this point. I just checked out the website. It's cute enough, but of course, you can't hear cute.

 

Reaper does have a lot of admirers. It's been some time since I sat down with it, but I'm told it's very competitive in major functionalities with the 'big boys' of the DAW world, your PT, Cubase, Sonar, Logic, DP, crowd. Some folks don't like it's out-of-the-box look, but it can be skinned and there are so many looks-obsessed recordists out there that I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't some nice skins for it now.

 

I wouldn't imagine that your sound issues were coming from your choice of DAW, however. But to the extent that your soundcard driver and your DAW don't see eye to eye over latency and lining up overdubs -- it can be a significant problem that lots of folks do not immediately recognize, even as they moan about how "digital doesn't sound good when you get a bunch of tracks up."

 

Many interfaces, even relatively expensive ones, misreport their latency and, unless the DAW has a way of compensating for that (and hopefully testing for and measuring the problem as well as offering automated calibration/correction), your overdubs will be out of time with the previously recorded tracks. If the delay is very tiny, a microsecond or two max, then it may not be a problem.

 

But if it's more like 8-12 ms, as many devices are (like my MOTU 828mkII Firewire interface, which is not a cheap device), then there's likely to be some resulting rhythmic vagueness -- if not outright trainwrecking -- particularly as more and more tracks get stacked on and as the overdubber may no longer be listening to the original timing reference (drums, click) but may be listening to other instruments, which are off the mark... the more that happens, the worse things get.

 

I've gone on* about this issue for some time but it seems like an issue that some people have problems grasping and so just don't think about. And that can lead to a vague but pervasive timing fog. I mean, in their recordings.

 

 

* I've also gone on about the ubiquitous problem of vocal editors who don't realize that the 12 Tone Equal Temperament grid in Auto-Tune and other graphic retuning plugs and devices is out of tune with the true, mathematically correct (and truly harmonious) intervals that a good vocalist will tend to sing (as opposed to whitebread equal temp vocalists who learned to pitch themselves from keyboards instead of listening for the proper harmonic intervals -- one of the reasons that singers who come up in tight harmony ensembles tend to be so much better at their pitch choices). But do people listen? Not most of them... Pity the out of tune fools.

[stickboymusic]

speeding up the tack! ( i assume you mean time stretching) well i suppose you "may" get a way with this (1 or 2 percent) but seriously this will add artifacts (bad ones) to your track... so maybe make sure you're happy with the tempo before recording and record at the right one!

 

mic - well a condenser mic WILL help your sound especially on vocals and guitar... a 57 is a good mic... but not really a vocal/guitar studio mic

 

you dont have to pay a fortune for one.... but get the best you can afford (you will also need phantom power - not sure if your radioshack input has this?)

[Eclepto Funk]

"May for a Very Short Time" -- where's the bass? Not just why's there no bass guitar or stand up or other bottom-holding instrument (which is a good question), but where's the bass on the bottom of the drums...

 

there is a bass guitar in the song ... but if i let the bass come out too much, it creates a kind of "flat" effect for the rest of the song, it deadens it somehow

 

through my monitor speakers and my car speakers, the bass is barely there, but i can hear it

 

on my iPod, i can't hear the bass at all ... all my songs on the iPod sound way too fried and trebbly.

 

so i am basically going by how it sounds on my monitors and my car stereo, where the bass sounds to me to be barely there

 

"Supernova" has a sort of Byrds demo kind of feel, it's pretty engaging -- except for the fact that it's really painful to listen to because of the piercing high frequency boost in the range over around 6-8K... it's brutal.

 

this one also sounded really dead and flat, so i tried to liven it up by adding more trebble.

 

sounds like i'm having a hard time listening to what is really there as i record.

 

I'm thinking you mixed this (and the previous track but esp. this) with the bass cranked on your playback rig, or the playback monitors in the corner of the room (which boosts bass) or with a subwoofer turned up too high -- and/or with a blanket over the speakers.

 

my speakers don't have bass adjusters. i use a pair of sony headphones to monitor, and they sound different from what it sounds like when i play the song over the computer speakers, so i try to basically hit the middle.

 

then i upload to a site (say Soundclick) and it sounds sort of ok through the spears, and sort of ok in my car, but horrible through the headphones and horrible in my iPod. but then i go to Number One Music and the same songs sound low and nasal and "flat" and murky

 

so back to more trebble it is. i guess that's why trebble is so overdone for me

 

thank you for your detailed response!

[Chicken Monkey]

 

i use a Shure SM57 mic sounds like updating from Audacity and perhaps the RadioShack mixer might be the way to go do you guys have any reccomendations for what to plug the mikes into and then feed into the sound card?

 

 

I used a pretty basic 2-channel mixer and updated recently to an M-Audio Fast-Track Pro. I got mine lightly used for $100, which is a pretty good price from what I've seen.

 

I don't know about your set-up, but I could only record one track at a time through the mixer, and the Fast Track at least lets me do 2 tracks at once. This allows such combinations as:

 

vocal and guitar

guitar (mic) and guitar (pickup)

and stereo recordings of keyboards and drums/drum machines

 

At first, being able to record two inputs at the same time was like going from B & W to color. If I had my $100 back, I might think about upgrading to even more inputs, so that I had room to expand into full-band recording, should that opportunity arise.

[Eclepto Funk]

 

(you will also need phantom power - not sure if your radioshack input has this?)

 

 

 

unfortunately no. i would have to buy a separate power unit, but they are not too expensive

[Eclepto Funk]

 

I used a pretty basic 2-channel mixer and updated recently to an M-Audio Fast-Track Pro .

 

 

 

do you then plug that into your sound card?

[Chicken Monkey]

This is a pretty cheap mic that works well for vocals. I'm really not a great pitchman, since I don't have a great recorded sound, but I use this one, and I think tamoore uses one, as well, and his recordings sound top-notch.

 

So, you're looking at $200-$250 to upgrade the equipment side of things. But you can start with Reaper tonight.

[Chicken Monkey]

 

do you then plug that into your sound card?

 

 

It goes into the USB drive, and does have phantom power if you're looking for it.

[Eclepto Funk]

ok, pardon my ignorance

 

does the USB drive bypass the sound card?

 

in other words, my sound card will be out of the loop?

[Chicken Monkey]

 

ok, pardon my ignorance does the USB drive bypass the sound card? in other words, my sound card will be out of the loop?

 

 

You will not get more ignorant than me. It's my understanding that the m-audio functions as the sound card.

[Eclepto Funk]

excellent, thank you

 

any suggestions as to monitor speakers that i can use to playback my recordings and get a fairly accurate picture of what i've recorded?

[stickboymusic]

few options really

 

1 - decent studio monitors in a decent room that is dampened if needed

 

2 - monitor headphones , for example these http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/806akg/ ( pretty expensive but mean your room doesnt need to be perfect)

 

3 - just some speakers that you "know" very well....ie you have listened to a lot of your favourite cds through and know they sound good, this way you can aim to match the sound as best you can

 

its a long expensive journey and you dont always need the best of everything, just need to find what best suits you and suits your sound...with monitors/headphones take a cd you know to a shop and try a few out

[blue2blue]

I may be losing track of the ongoing conversation but...

 

 

Quick proviso: you only need phantom power if you have a condenser mic that requires it. Your current SM57, like other dynamics, doesn't require phantom -- but most dynamics do have a lower output, so require more gain. And with lesser quality preamps -- and/or poor gain staging into your AD interface (for instance, having the analog input level [if it even has one] on the interface too low so that you have to turn the external preamp too high), the more gain the more the hiss (and, if things are really hinky, hum).

 

 

PS... Sony makes some mid-price (~$125-$150) that some folks like, but in my experience cheap Sony 'phones are some of the worst crap you can find, and usually way overpriced for what you get. I'd been buying $15 Koss phones (I don't mix on 'phones and, as far as I was concerned, these were fine for 'dubbing), at Target but then one day all there was was Sony so I bought some $27 Sony's just to see and not only do they sound terrible, they are absolutely the least comfortable headphones I've had on since junior high school language lab circa 1965.

[Eclepto Funk]

yeah, they were recommending a condenser mic to improve vocals/guitar recording

 

any thoughts on good but affordable speakers to hook up to my computer?

 

my headphones are Sony MDR V6's ... any experience with those? mine seem to drown out bass ... when it sounds good on the headphones and i then switch to the computer speakers or my car speakers, the sound sounds muffled and dull with way too much bass

[rsadasiv]

In order of importance:

 

1) Stickyboy

2) Blue2Blue

3) ChickenMonkey

 

Getting in time and getting in tune will yield the biggest improvements. Getting your monitoring situation straightened out will help, and will put you in a better position to be able to fix stuff when it doesn't sound great. Reaper will be nice in that you won't have to deal with different programs to record, mix and export, but it won't do much for your intrinsic sound quality (unless you are doing some kind of lossy compression from one into the other). Pitch shifting and audio stretching will also degrade your sound quality.

 

(Full disclosure - I spent my entire gear budget on preamps this year. Here is the preamp thread if you are interested. )

 

Now I do own the M-Audio Delta, and while it does an OK job on A/D conversion but it doesn't have any preamps or phantom power, so I haven't recorded through it in years (I do still use it to drive my monitors). I don't know what's up with the preamps on your mixer, but given my experience with products from Radio Shack I wouldn't rate it too highly. Not sure what the budget here is, but if you want to keep the Delta for A/D conversion and can swing $500 bucks for a preamp the RNP is a very nice unit.

[stickboymusic]

cant say i know them - i hate to say this but i recorded and mixed a whole album on a