Musical Gazpacho to calibrate your ears

In the Mixing Tips & Tricks thread, Cantdosleepy proposed a truly awesome way of both calibrating monitors and getting your ears tuned up and ready to mix. Now I just need some suggestions for ingredients for his musical Gazpacho.

Short version: make up an audio file of twenty second clips of twenty different songs that you love the production of, and play it through your production system before you start mixing and when you need to freshen your ears (but read the long version).

So, what tracks would you put in your twenty-song mix? (Doesn't have to be twenty... one will do).

As a bonus I might make up a couple of mixes if we get some decent suggestions, especially if they can be roughly segmented into genre.

posted by unSane (18 comments total)

Yes, hats off to Cantdosleepy. This is a great concept.

At first glance, you think: "Well, this is easy - I'll just type in my favourite 20 songs."

Alas, it is not like that at all!

This list could include some really annoying little ditties that were touched by the magic of a very gifted producer.

In absolutely no particular order, then:

Manhattan Transfer - Capim
Elvis Costello - Everyday I write the book
Massive Attack - Inertia Creeps
Yolanda Cool & DCUP - We No Speak Americano
Michael Buble - Everything
Britney Spears - Toxic
Chicago - Hard to Say I'm Sorry
Robbie Nevil - C'est La Vie
Aerosmith - Pink
Robert Palmer - She Makes My Day
Rod Stewart & Jeff Beck - People Get Ready
Herbie Hancock - Rockit
Michael Bolton - Time Love & Tenderness
Stevie Wonder - You are the Sunshine of My Life
Ruben Studdard - Shining Star
Earth, Wind & Fire - September
ELO - Shine A Little Love
Quincy Jones - Soul Bossa Nova
Snap - The Power
Michael Jackson - Black Or White
Lou Bega - Mambo No. 5

Well, that seems to be 20-ish and I now realise that it's hardly scratched the surface.

This is fun, and I'm really looking forward to going through everyone's list.
posted by Zenabi at 3:04 AM on December 4, 2010

1) Pra Machuchar Meu Coração from "Getz & Gilberto"
2) Blue Angel from "Hot"
3) Amor de loca juventud from "Buena Vista Social Club"
4) Comadi from "Vagarosa"
5) El pescador from "La candela viva"

Of course the quality on the youtube links is terrible, but you get the idea.
posted by micayetoca at 7:35 AM on December 4, 2010

I have one of these - but I think i included more than 20 songs. haven't listened to it in about a year though. never did use it muhc.

I do remember it had some Fleetwood Mac and Wilco on it though
posted by mary8nne at 2:00 AM on December 5, 2010

I think an interesting thing would be to do this exercise using some of the most celebrated producers -- Glyn Johns, George Marts, Steve Albini, Butch Vig, Chris Lord-Arge and all the rest. I'll try to pull together a list of songs using this as a concept.
posted by unSane at 5:30 PM on December 5, 2010

*Lord-Alge, sorry
posted by unSane at 5:43 PM on December 5, 2010

This is a very good idea. Some off-the-top-of-the-head suggestions:
Robin Trower - Too Rolling Stoned
Rolling Stones - anything from Sticky Fingers or Let It Bleed
Chess Records - just about any of the classics, particularly by Etta James
Motown - ditto
Miles Davis - Kind of Blue or ESP
Any number of Columbia Studio B recordings of the 50's - Sinatra, Ella, Billie Holiday
Weather Report - virtually anything from "Heavy Weather"
Michael Jackson - Rock With You and/or Human Nature
Pink Floyd - DSOTM
David Bowie - anything from Aladdin Sane or Hunky Dory or Station To Station
Supertramp - anything from Crime Of The Century (Ken Scott - unsung genius producer)
Steely Dan - anything from Aja or The Royal Scam
Bob Dylan - anything from Love & Theft
Killing Joke - anything from Brighter Than A Thousand Suns
The Ruts - anything from The Crack
U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For or New Years' Day or the "October" album
Simple Minds - C-Moon Cry Like A Baby
David Sylvian - anything from Secrets Of The Beehive
Talking Heads - anything from Remain In Light or Fear Of Music
posted by MajorDundee at 2:33 PM on December 9, 2010

Awesome list, Major. I'm still trying to figure my list out. I think mine is mostly about trying to find things that sound as different as possible to sort of map out the possibilities...

The Go-Betweens -- Cattle & Cane
The Blue Nile -- Tinseltown in the rain
Portishead -- Mysterons
Booker T & the MGs -- Melting Pot
Buffalo Tom -- Taillights Fade
Chuck Jackson -- Any Day Now
ELO -- Mr Blue Sky
Elvis Costello -- Alison
Glen Campbell -- Wichita Lineman
Hope of the States -- The Black Amnesias
Loretta Lynn -- Van Lear Rose
Matthew Sweet -- Girlfriend
Band of Horses -- Funeral
Sleater-Kinney -- The Fox
Smashing Pumpkins -- Cherub Rock
Stars -- Your Ex-Lover is Dead
Sufjan Stevens -- John Wayne Gacy Jr
Thom Yorke -- The Clock
The Wrens -- Everyone Choose Sides
The Zombies -- She's Not There

And about a trillion others
posted by unSane at 2:58 PM on December 9, 2010

PS I particularly agree about Supertramp, along with pretty much anything from the Blue Note era.

Also, Fleetwood Mac's RUMOURS is one of the best engineered albums of all time.

Is there any interest in me trying to put these mixes together?
posted by unSane at 8:34 PM on December 9, 2010

I think this could be a very useful tool indeed - even if just a few of us use it.

But there's something else I think we should maybe try to explore. Several years ago now I got hold of piece of software that allowed me to copy the EQ of a record and then apply it to one of my own efforts. At the time my master recordings weren't that great, so I never found it all that effective although there was a noticeable difference (so I don't think is was total snake oil). What I'm getting at is - if we can not only put together a "hitlist" of reference records but also give some direction as to master EQ settings to achieve something approximating those sounds that might be cool? I'll see if I can find that software - it was developed by some Dutch geezer if memory serves....

If I can't find the software, surely Metafilter with its large cohort of IT professionals has a few people who might look at developing something like this as a pet project? (how's about that cortex??).

PS I very nearly cited "Alison" and some of your others too - agree completely about Rumours btw. Main thing with the reference list is to cover a lot of stylistic ground - and we're a wee bit light on black music at present. Some Sly Stone, EWF, James Brown etc wouldn't go amiss? Also not a lot of heavy stuff - maybe Van Halen 1 etc??
posted by MajorDundee at 1:17 AM on December 10, 2010

The whole mastering process is a bit of a black art really, isn't it? I'm (very) slowly getting better at it. It makes a massive difference to the final sound. I currently use a bus compressor set to about 2:1 with about 3dB of gain reduction, then one of the Waves limiters again set to about 3dB, then (sometimes) an imager and a shuffler to widen the spread a bit, then a master EQ.

Logic comes with some master EQ presets which are not a terrible place to start. The one thing that I do think helps is thinking about EQ frequencies as notes on a piano. Middle C is close enough to 256 Hz and each octave above or below is double or half that, with the overtones going up another two octaves roughly. So a piano playing an octave above and below Middle C is going to be occupying two octaves from about 120 Hz to 500 Hz with the overtones going up to about 4KHz. That's the congested middle which usually causes all the trouble.

I usually completely roll off the bottom end (there is nothing below 30Hz in my tracks that anyone needs to hear - YMMV) and push the octave the bass is playing in (2 below middle C -- 60-120 Hz roughly) a bit. Then the three or four octaves from middle C upwards are either left flat or dipped slightly -- this is where everything is playing and you can usually see how busy it is on the meters -- and then finally I put a shelf on starting about 5 KHz and reaching its full extent at about 8 KHz. This puts a bit of the sparkle back into cymbals and guitars.

If you put a frequency analysis meter on the master bus and play a commercial track through it you can get a good idea of the EQ curve. Or you can even look at the meters on iTunes, which are surprisingly useful for just checking a bunch of tracks.

The other thing I've been using is a tube saturation plugin from Wave Arts which I feel helps to glue the mix together when it's all been recorded in the digital domain. You basically have all these instruments which are either digital in origin or were recorded in different rooms with different mics and different settings and I feel you really have to do something to get them all feeling like they belong in the same track. Sometimes I put a tiny bit of reverb on the bus instead, to locate them in the same space, but that tends to clutter up my busy mixes.

You're right about the funk/soul thing! I will put up a list of stuff... maybe others could too.
posted by unSane at 4:45 AM on December 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

(sorry -- I got my order wrong above -- the Limiter obviously goes last).
posted by unSane at 4:46 AM on December 10, 2010

It is indeed a black art - but one that you seem to be mastering (heh). Pretty much all of what you're saying there is spot on imho.

My approach is idiosyncratic in the Dundee tradition - evolutionary in a way, and it started out as accidental. When I start a new song on my DAW (Yamaha AW2400) it retains the last master EQ etc as the default unless I zero everything. Once I'd hit on a good sound, I decided to use that as a template (why reinvent the wheel every time). So I have this kind of EQ continuum that has gradually evolved over time and that I now fiddle with less and less. And simultaneously I find I'm also messing around less and less with individual track EQ - except for vocals, which generally do need to be shaped in a "bespoke" way to suit the track.

I think my end-state with this approach will be that there will be no EQ or compression on any individual tracks, and it'll all be down to the amp settings, mic placement, room sounds - the only EQ and comp will be at the mastering stage. I remember watching a very interesting interview with Ken Scott who emphasised that you only need to tweak things in a very minimal way to get big results - which makes sense if you think about the logarithmic nature of sound pressure level measurements etc. Anyway - when Ken speaks, I listen good. Can't find the interview but you might find this interesting (I certainly did) as well as this.

Finally (and to pick up where I left off before I threw my wobbly), I think that a cooling off period is another key part of the process. Really need to create some distance between your ears and the track before you can have any kind of objective view of it - that's just a personal view, obviously.
posted by MajorDundee at 2:41 PM on December 10, 2010

Man, you'd have to be a really consistent player to get away with no comp on individual tracks!

One trick if you go this route is to normalize sections if you can. For example, you can get away with no compression on vocals if you simply chop it up into phrases and normalize them individually. This give you a really clean transparent vocal sound with only minimal fader riding required and no compression at all. That's what I did on Hundred Dollar Suit but there is a bit of compression in there as well. You could probably do this with instrumental parts too.
posted by unSane at 2:50 PM on December 10, 2010

Well - I very rarely use comp on individual tracks. That's not showing off I hasten to add - it's basically because I don't really understand how comp works! Except that it seems to make things louder!! I'm laughing as I write this btw. If you saw the VU meters on some of my mixes I think you'd have a heart attack.... My general approach is that so long as the master isn't in the red all the time and I can't actually hear any clipping, it's ok. My only defence is that I'm in the grand Brit tradition of the gentleman amateur, what?? :-))
posted by MajorDundee at 3:29 PM on December 10, 2010

Joking apart, there is a school of thought that compression is overused and not necessarily always a good thing to be applied generally or liberally. I tend to lean towards that view. Compression is, to my ears, usually quite noticeable on most pop records - particularly on guitars. Sometimes it's ok, sometimes it's not. If you want a more natural sound, uninhibited use of compression isn't going to help much in achieving that because it flattens everything out and makes the sound a bit squeezed or tight. So for all my joking about this, I very deliberately don't use compression much because I don't really like the sound it creates. I like records that breathe - even if the levels are all over the place.
posted by MajorDundee at 3:38 PM on December 10, 2010

Compression is a fundamental part of the sound of rock'n'roll though, Major -- all those tape machines, man. They compressed like billy-o. And pretty much every high end studio console from the 70s onwards had compression built right into the desk, and another on the mix bus. And then there's the natural compression of the tube amps that everything went through... and if you're driving your meters above 0, you're compressing too... and your ears compress as soon as it gets turned up! So I personally don't see it as an evil per se.

My feeling about it is that I don't like compression when I can hear it. Like that pingy clean guitar sound or the whole mix puming in and out around the kick. Most of the time I use 2:1 or 3:1 and about -3dB, unless it's something very specific like a kick drum or overheads.

Limiting is another thing that was really built in to the old tape/tube signal path. Things like the L1 limiter that everything gets squashed in nowadays work by limiting the very very brief transient spikes in the audio signal that are pretty much inaudible and would often get lost in the old-style signal path. So, obviously it's gotten massively over-used in the loudness wars but when you do about 3-5dB of it you are not doing much different than you would if you mastered onto tape through a tube pre-amp.

On the other hand I'm a huge fan of following your own nose in these kinds of things because it takes you to interesting places, so I'm fascinated to hear about your techniques and the kind of sound it leads you to. I'm kind of the opposite of you -- I'm not after a natural sound but mostly that kind of slick produced layered guitar pop vibe and it turns out you have to learn a whole bunch of studio tricks to get to that...
posted by unSane at 5:18 PM on December 10, 2010

My feeling about it is that I don't like compression when I can hear it. Like that pingy clean guitar sound or the whole mix puming in and out around the kick

Yup - with you there, and I guess that's what I'm really getting at. You are, of course, quite right to flag up the omnipresence of compression - good point, well made.

Following your nose is the right thing to do. My nose is leading me into trying to find a way to make records where you don't notice in an overt or obvious way that it's "a record". I know that sounds contradictory and not a little loopy. What I mean is that I really like the idea of all the tricks and effects being very, very subtle in their application - I don't want to hear the machinery or see the wires as it were, or be conscious of the hand of an enginer or producer. I really don't want to hear pitch correction or phasing or obviously sequenced phrases or anything clearly unnatural.

Some of those old 50's Columbia Studio B recordings have the kind of sound I'd kill for - it's big, it's warm, it's beautifully transparent, it has broad dynamic range, it lets the songs and performances breathe and there's no "technology" overtly on display or in the way. And what gear did they have then? Three track machines, maybe some tube compression, good quality tube mics, a great room, great songs and musicians and performers, and guys on the console who really know what they were doing. You know, for all our digital equipment and plug-ins and what have you, we've a hell of a lot to learn.......I think we've actually got too much equipment now and it maybe sometimes it gets in the way?

Polar opposite to the path you're following - but that's cool. We're in big trouble I think if we all try to make records the same way.
posted by MajorDundee at 9:34 AM on December 11, 2010

oh and if someone could explain how limiters work I'd be grateful. I've never been able to work that out, got frustrated, gave up. I don't do it except manually by riding faders. I guess what I want to know is how to set a stereo master so that nothing spikes above 0dB...
posted by MajorDundee at 9:52 AM on December 11, 2010