Joe The Engineer’s Glossary Of Recording Terms, Part II

A couple of months ago, one of our favorite AnonIMous interviewees, Joe the Engineer, helped us out by giving us a glossary of terms used in recording and production. As is the problem with defining technical terms, definitions beget more definitions, so Joe is back another installment of his guide. Part two, after the jump!

Overdubbing: The process of recording new tracks to preexisting material. Because of the relative ease of recording and virtually unlimited amount of tracks in modern recording, many sessions only involve recording one or two instruments at a time. For example, while recording a rock band, the engineer will often start by recording just the drums, or the bass and drums together. Anything you added after that initial recording (typically called “the basics”) would be considered an overdub.

Tracking: When used as a verb, synonymous with “recording.” A recording session is often referred to as a tracking session, to record vocals is to track vocals, etc.

EQ: Short for Equalization. This is one of the main tools that engineers/producers use to alter sound. To apply EQ is to either increase or decrease a signal’s content at a given frequency. These can be digital, analog, in a computer, on a console, in your car, or even in iTunes. The most natural way to think about frequency is in terms of highs and lows. Basses and kick drums have lots of low-frequency information, while cymbals and flutes have more high-frequency information. Another way people often refer to EQ is in terms of brightness or dullness, higher frequencies being “bright” and lower frequencies being “dull.”

In practice, there are all types of reasons an engineer will reach for an EQ. Some are more practical, like boosting the low frequencies of a bass track so that it has some more boom; others are for effect, like taking all the highs out of a vocal so it sounds muffled. I could write pages on EQ, but honestly the best way to understand it is to open the equalizer window in iTunes (or whatever digital-music program you use) and pull frequencies up and down, then listen to how that affects the song you are listening to.

Limiting: A type of extreme compression. When you put audio through a limiter, it grabs the loudest portions of your song and pulls them down in volume. Because it is a compressor (defined in the previous installment), a limiter shrinks the dynamics, bringing the loudest portions of a song closer in volume to the quietest. The difference: A compressor usually pulls down the loudest signals gently, while a limiter is designed to slam them down. Limiters are often used in mastering to make a song sound louder overall; they pull down whatever sounds are loudest (say the snare hits) so that a song’s other elements can be brought up without causing distortion. When limiting is overused, it can create an audible pumping sound, which most people find unpleasant.

Gate: A piece of equipment that will only pass audio that you put through it if it is at or above a specified volume. So if you set your gate’s “threshold” at a level just above a whisper, and you put a vocal through it, it will let all the singing pass through it (because it is loud enough); if the vocalist starts to whisper, the gate will not pass it through (in essence, the gate “shuts”). Gates are commonly used when recording electric guitars because of their inherent buzz. Used properly, the gate will be closed while the guitar player is smoking American Spirits and eyeing the drummer’s girlfriend, but when he begins playing his epic solo, it will open. The listener hears none of the buzz, and all the guitar parts.

Reverb: A common effect used in modern recordings, reverb is best described as the sound of a certain space. A sound’s surrounding environment has a large impact on the way that it is heard because of that sound’s reflections (or lack of reflections) of the material around it. (Think about how voices sound different in, say, a large church as opposed to a small room.) On records, there are a variety of reasons to use reverb, which again can be digital or analog, in a computer or out. For example, it can be jarring to hear music that was a recorded in a studio space with little or no reflections; adding a little reverb can make the sounds more similar to those in a “normal” environment. On the other side of the spectrum, sometimes it’s fun to totally drown something in reverb so that it sounds completely unnatural. (See: The entire 1980s.)

Autotune: Autotune is a pitch correction plug-in made by a company called Antares for use in Digital Audio Workstations (often called DAWs; basically, they’re computers with audio programs installed). At this point, Autotune has become synonymous with pitch correction—much the way Xerox has with photocopying—but it should be noted that it is actually a proprietary program, and that there are many others that perform a similar function. Basically, Autotune “corrects” the pitches that you send it based on either a scale that you select, or chromatically (all notes). If you sing or play a note that is in between an A and an A flat, but closer to an A, the plug-in senses this and pulls the note up to the A.

There are a number of settings that effect how the plug-in pulls the note; the most important is probably the “speed” setting, which determines how quickly it reacts to an out of tune note. Higher values result in slower correction; lower values result in faster correction. This is the setting that has spawned the well-known “T-Pain sound.” If you turn the speed down to a value of zero, the program corrects the note so fast that it is very audible, resulting in the sort of pulling back and forth between notes that you hear. (Quick tangent: for all those who bemoan the use of this effect, remember that when people started using distorted guitars there were plenty who felt that it was a misuse of the technology and only used by those who couldn’t really play. Those are the two main complaints I hear about Autotune.) The only other thing to note here is that the plug-in has an automatic mode, which you can put on a track as a way of correcting a whole performance, and a graphic mode, which allows you to view the notes and tune only the ones that need tuning by hand.

Note: People often say “vocoder” when they hear the Autotune effect, and while the two sounds can be fairly similar, the means of arriving at them are very different. A vocoder is a device that allows you to control a synthesizer with your speech. Using a microphone your voice acts as a sort of on/off swtich for the synth. The actual pitch information that is heard is coming from the keyboard; your voice is only dictating how and when the sound starts and stops. Marrying the unique patterns of our speech with sounds from a synthesizer can often have very interesting results.

Pitch-shifting: Simply raising or lowering a pitch. This can be done in a few different ways. Often times material is pitch-shifted by simply speeding it up, like when you change a turntable’s setting from 33 to 45 RPM, . As the table spins faster, and all the pitches are raised. This can also be done without changing the recording’s overall speed (usually with the assistance of a computer) but with this method the more a pitch it is raised or lowered, the more the sound quality is degraded.

MIDI: Short for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. This is a standardized protocol for all types of musical equipment and computers to communicate with each other. Most modern keyboards, drum machines, synthesizers, as well as some effects equipment and even some instruments (guitars, winds, etc.), have MIDI capabilities that allow them to send and receive data to each other and/or a computer. There are as many uses for this as you can dream up. The most common MIDI messages are probably note on and note off messages. When you play a keyboard that is hooked up to a computer via MIDI, you are sending the computer note on messages every time you hit a key, and note off messages every time you release it. Once you record this MIDI data into the computer, you can edit it in a variety of ways and use the performance information to play back the same, or any other synthesizer, the much like the way that a player piano works. Other performance data could be sustain pedal, pitch bend, modulation, program change, aftertouch, and so on.

Pro Tools: A Digital Audio Workstation made by a company called Digidesign. Pro Tools is essentially a program for Windows or OSX that, coupled with proprietary hardware, allows the user to record, edit, mix and do a whole bunch of other things with audio. It became the industry leader in digital recording shortly after the new millennium, and has pretty much held that distinction ever since, although there are other programs giving it a serious run for its money lately, such as….

Logic: A Digital Audio Workstation that was bought by Apple (to many users’ horror) in 2002, and is only available for OSX users. As with Pro Tools, Logic is a program that allows you to record, edit, and mix audio. Unlike Pro Tools, from its birth, Logic was designed to appeal more to the production/writing crowd. It comes bundled with many synth and drum sounds and features many functions that are handy in a writing situation. The most common complaint is that the program is overly complicated and harder to use for things like tracking a band, or mixing a record, although recent updates have helped lessen these complaints a bit. In my experience, more and more people are doing production and starting tracks in Logic, then exporting the files to Pro Tools to work on songs’ final stages.

If there are any more terms or concepts that confuse you, let us know in the comments! Joe is here to help! He’ll be back soon to answer some more of your questions.

Earlier: Joe The Engineer’s Glossary Of Recording Terms, Part I