In this edition of Recording Dojo, our columnist sheds light on the differences between decibel measurements, and offers a breakdown of real-life equivalents of basic sound level values.
Starting this month, I’d like to bring some clarity to some widely misused audio terms that engineers struggle with, especially when it comes to mixing and mastering. Do you know what a dB is and/or how it got its name, or understand the difference between dB, dBu, dBA, dBSPL, and dBFS and how they inherently apply to your recordings? Tighten up your belts, the Dojo is now open.
I’m going to start with our old beloved friend, the VU (volume unit) meter. Officially introduced in 1939, the purpose of the VU meter was to provide a standardized way of measuring and representing audio signal levels, and it immediately gave audio engineers and producers an increased ability to make broadcasts and recordings with substantially more consistent loudness levels.
Once it was standardized by ASA (later, ANSI—American National Standards Institute), the VU meter became a cheap and indispensable tool for measuring how much signal was being sent to broadcast transmitters. Essentially, the VU meter works by having a calibrated response time (ballistic) of 300 ms and reflects an inferred average of any peak that occurred within that time window. While it reflects speech in an intuitive way, it falls short with accurately registering very fast transients (like drum hits, claps, fast staccato attacks, etc.). Thus, every decibel of change is not accurately reflected by the meter but averaged (Fig. 1). It wasn’t long until engineers realized that short bursts of +3 VU on analog gear wouldn’t trigger distortion or affect the overall perception of loudness.
In fact, the VU meter was really designed to help the engineer get their audio signals to hover around 0 VU (which equals to +4 dBu, or 1.228V RMS) and what most of us call “0 dB.” This is further reinforced by the design of the meter’s scale range since standardized VU meters range from -20 VU to +3 VU (23 VU entries, in all). However, the majority of the meter’s real estate deals with the last six entries at the top of the scale (-3 VU to +3 VU).
“It immediately gave audio engineers and producers an increased ability to make broadcasts and recordings with substantially more consistent loudness levels.”
Decibels, Decibels, Everywhere!
Let me define the decibel—it is one 10th of a “bel,” named after Alexander Graham Bell (which is why the “B” in “dB” is capitalized). But what’s a bel? It is just a logarithmic unit of measurement relative to something else. We don’t actually hear decibels; we measure them because they approximate the human ear’s logarithmic perception of amplitude (aka loudness). This is known as dBA.
So this is what we mean when we’re talking about how “loud” or “noisy” something is, and also what audiologists use when measuring how well we can hear. What?!
Here’s some basic values for you:
20 dBA: whisper
40 dBA: home computer fan
60 dBA: normal conversation
80 dBA: inside an airplane
90 dBA: lawnmower, hair dryer, blender
95 dBA: prolonged exposure can cause slight hearing loss and tinnitus
100 dBA: motorcycle, construction site, normal stereo at max volume
110 dBA: rock concert, jackhammer
125 dBA: pain threshold; prolonged exposure will cause hearing loss
135 dBA: air raid siren
140 dBA: pain threshold; permanent hearing damage possible
150 dBA: handgun
180 dBA: possible death, rocket launch
But wait, isn’t this also known as dBSPL? I wish! They’re so close but so far away. You see, sound pressure relates to the variations in atmospheric pressure caused by the sound, and SPL (sound pressure level) is the pressure level of that sound measured in decibels. The crucial difference is that dBSPL treats all frequencies equally because it uses Mother Earth’s atmosphere as the gauge for measurement, and dBA doesn’t. It focuses on frequencies that humans most easily perceive—thus, it uses our outer and inner ear to gauge and measure the SPL. To put a finer point on this, using dBSPL will give much different readings if there are frequencies below 1000 Hz, whereas they are both very similar for any frequencies above 1000 Hz.
Next month, I’ll continue down this path and we’ll be using decibels to measure watts, volts, and SPL to definitively answer the age-old question: Is a 100-watt amp twice as loud as a 50-watt amp? See you next time. Namaste.
Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.
“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
While it might be tempting to geek out and ask Albini about all the iconic albums that he’s recorded with the utmost finesse—and surely, there would be value in rapping about recording some of the biggest names in guitar music—that’s all been done.
What’s much more interesting is the work that goes on every single day at the studio. So, when he tells me, “My colleagues at Electrical Audio and I are constantly having to interrogate our methods and validate the things that we’re doing and come up with arguments for why we should do things this way or that,” that’s the stuff I want to know about. If you want to learn about how he recorded In Utero, go listen to Conan’s podcast. (Albini was a guest, along with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, on the October 23, 2023 episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and it’s a thorough discussion that is totally worth checking out.)
The fact is, Albini has recorded countless records. I’m sure he has a tally in his books somewhere, but it would be exceedingly difficult to know for sure how many albums he’s engineered. That’s because, as extensive as his credits are in various record-collecting resources, he’s also impressively accessible as a for-hire engineer. All levels of artists—from superstars to harder-to-track, mostly unknown road dogs—have carved out their time with him. Plus, he’s been at it since he started renting four-track demo packages on the weekends during his high school years in Missoula, Montana.
The body of engineering work that Albini has amassed is monumental not just in size, but also in musical scope, which extends further than from Sunn O))) to Magnolia Electric Company, Cheap Trick to Neurosis, or Low to The Thing. And with those artists, he often helps capture a landmark album, or at least the record that fans refer to as “the one they recorded with Albini.”
Aside from his day job, there’s also his guitar playing. Albini serves as the compass for cutting, brutal tone in the punk and underground rock scenes. Since his early days in the hard-hitting Big Black through his continuing work alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer in the band Shellac—whose soon-to-be six (no info yet, but a new one is confirmed to be on the way) full-length albums and some other recorded odds and ends are maybe the purest documents of his overall sonic aesthetic—he’s used a fairly concise rig of well-suited esoteric gear to shape his incisive, metallic, and esoterically personal guitar sound in the creation of angular riffage and gnarly feedback.
Albini’s sonic mastery seems to know no bounds: He’s probably the most-cited proponent of analog recording. His live-band-in-a-room sound is unparalleled. And his drum sounds are peerless. But, while it’s not as if he never talks about guitar, it’s rare to see him dive deep on his guitar-specific processes.
So, we called up Electrical Audio and had a chat about his methods on recording guitars and how they’ve evolved, his take on modern guitar culture, and the definitive details of his sound.
In addition to his gear collection, Albini is also a good-bandname-T-shirt collector. (If this isn’t proof enough, go look up a photo from when he won his first gold bracelet in the World Series of Poker.)
Photo by Daniel Bergeron
When you’re going to record a guitarist, what’s your process of deciding how you’re going to choose a microphone, and how you’re going to mic their amp or cabinet?
Steve Albini: You have a conversation—what kind of sound are they shooting for? Who are some guitarists whose sound would be appropriate for their music? That sort of thing. And sometimes that’ll give you a clue about how to get started.
If they like a thick, bass-y, chewy, distorted sound, you want to make sure you’re using mics that capture that low-frequency stuff with good definition and not get muddy or soft. If the kind of guitar sound they’re shooting for is very bright and very crisp and dry, you’ll want to make sure to avoid using mics that can have some resonance or bloom to them that will soften that sort of precision.
I think it’s a bad idea to have a standard method where when whatever guitarist walks in you stick an SM57 on it and call it good. A lot of people do that as a default just because it resolves the issue quickly, and they can get on with their day and do more fancy stuff. But I think it’s absolutely critical to pair the microphone with the actual sound that’s coming out of the amp.
After having a conversation with the guitar player, understanding what their aesthetic is, I have them set up their gear and just play a bit, to get a feel what their playing style is like. Are they using a lot of feedback and sustain or are they hopping on a bunch of different pedals all the time? Is the sound derived from their playing style or from particular layering of pedals? Getting intimate with the exact specifics of the guitar style and sound and aesthetic guides you on what microphones to use and physically where to put them.
The main thing is not to have a preconceived notion about what mics are good for guitar. I’ve used everything from vocal-caliber condenser microphones to quite limited electret microphones to high-quality ribbon microphones to pawnshop junk microphones—I’ve used absolutely everything you can imagine on a guitar amp, and that selection is always based on the aesthetic of the person playing and then the actual sound that’s coming out of the cabinet. In your mind, you might have an idealized notion of what a heavy guitar sounds like or what a clean guitar sounds like, but until you get down on all fours and listen to the sound coming out of the speakers, you don’t really know what you’re dealing with.
“When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.”
How do you interpret what you’re hearing then?
Albini: When you’re down on all fours listening, you need to be forming a mental image of what that sound is like. Are there spikes and dips in the frequency response? Is there a lot of granular treble detail? Is it a really smooth sound? Does it have a sort of billowing quality, like a trombone-like fundamental, or is it really dry and raspy? Even using wine-tasting words like that, it helps you form an internal image of what that guitar is supposed to sound like when you hear it on playback, and from your experience with your mic collection, you’ll know what microphones are best suited to sounds like that, or you’ll know where to start anyway.
When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.
Steve Albini's Gear
Hands on faders, Albini and his team at Electrical Audio are “constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
Photo by Kevin Tiongson
Guitars
- Travis Bean TB500
Amps
- Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp
- Fender Bassman
- Custom homemade speaker enclosure based on Electro-Voice TL Series plans with 10" and 12" Celestion Greenbacks
Effects
- Interfax Harmonic Percolator
- MXR Smartgate
Strings and Picks
- Ice picks with the points cut off
- D’Addario XLs (.012–.016–.020w–.028–.038–.048)
Once you’ve chosen a mic, what’s next in the decision-making process?
Albini: One thing that I do that I think is probably distinctly different from what a lot of other engineers do, I tend to have whatever microphone I’m using on the guitar in the middle of the speaker cone, and I don’t generally use microphones pressed up close to the grille cloth right next to the speaker. I tend to use microphones at a working distance of between eight and 14 inches from the cabinet.
A lot of engineers made their bones as live engineers, where they’re trying to get isolation on stage, so they have the mics as close as possible to the speaker cabinet, and that practice translated into the studio. I experimented with that technique because I saw everybody else doing it, but I just never got good results with it. It always sounded slightly tweaked and muffled and weird. I found that when I put the microphone dead center on the speaker, then the sound hitting the microphone sounded more like what I heard when I was down on all fours listening to the speaker myself.
Working distance has a big effect on the sound quality. If the microphone is choked up tight on the speaker, you get a lot more low-frequency energy. You get a lot more muscular pumping low end from the proximity effect of the microphone, and, especially with ribbon microphones that are bi-directional and have a fairly exaggerated proximity effect, you can really use that to tune the response of the microphone. So, I say that I use a working distance of between eight and 14 inches. If I’m in the closer part of that range, six to eight inches from the speaker, there’s going to be a lot more of the sub low end emphasized in a bi-directional ribbon microphone, and that can be great to add weight and heaviness to a heavy guitar.
Then, if the microphone is backed off more like 12 to 14 inches, then you get much more of an overall picture of the sound of the cabinet, where it’s not emphasizing any particular region, for lack of a better word. It’s a flatter representation of the sound coming off the speaker. Being able to tune the behavior of the microphone by moving the microphone in and out just by a matter of inches can make a noticeable difference in the sound quality.
At this point in your career, do you know what mic to use as soon as you listen to someone’s playing?
Albini: It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius. That’s really satisfying. That means the first 30 years of your career weren’t wasted, but it doesn’t happen often.
Often, you have to move the microphone, or sometimes you have to swap the microphone out completely, like this microphone just can’t handle that much high end, it sounds too raspy, it’s just too midrange forward, it starts to sound nasal and different parts of the playing vocabulary can sound different as well. Sometimes, you’ll have a setup that sounds amazing when the guitarist is just playing rhythm stuff, but then when they go up the strip and start showing off, it can be too piercing or too woolly sounding, so it’s often a good idea to have a complement microphone.
“It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius.”
You’ll have a couple of microphones in the same position, one that is maybe a brighter, drier sound and one that’s maybe a fatter, darker sound. And that way you can either balance those microphones against each other for a composite sound or use them in stereo to synthesize a stereo image. Or when the lead kicks in, you can nudge the brighter microphone for a little bit more bite and attack.
I think having an ambient character available on the recording often helps with the sense of realism. If you’re just using a single guitar, for example, then having an ambient microphone that you can use to create a stereo image helps add to the sensation of hearing the sound in a room, even if it’s a very dry room. Having close mics on the amp and then also having a distant mic out in the room eight or 10 feet away gives you a little bit of air on that secondary mic, which you can then use to create a stereo image to help localize the guitar in the stereo image of the whole thing.
All of those little things, if you don’t have it set up so you have those kinds of options available, then you can’t make those choices down the road. I have been in sessions where some engineers have an array of microphones around a speaker cabinet. They’ll have eight or 10 microphones in a sort of swarm around a speaker cabinet. And that, to me, just speaks of really poor decision making. If you’re recording eight or 10 microphones at once and with the idea that you’ll sort it all out later, that just puts all your critical decisions off until the last minute and means that you’re going to make those decisions poorly. I think it’s much, much better to listen to it on the first playback and decide if you are on the right track or not. And if you’re not, just stop and fix it. Don’t just carry on with the plan to deal with it later, because when you get to later, you just have way too much shit to deal with.
Onstage with Shellac, Albini wields “Old Ironsides,” his Travis Bean TB500. Behind the guitarist lurks his customized amp head, which contains a Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp and Fender Bassman, and his homemade speaker cabs.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
It’s like it creates option anxiety, and at that point, you’re just making the mix all that much longer.
Albini: Yeah, it’s not even the amount of effort that it takes. I don’t think it’s possible to make 10,000 critical decisions simultaneously and have them all be as valid as if you were to make those decisions one at a time as they came up with all your attention and full consideration. So, while you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.
I also feel like over the course of working on a record, you get acclimated to the sound that you’re listening to, and then that becomes the basis on which you make other decisions. If you pull the plug on that by changing the sound around at the last minute, then all of those predicate decisions that were made based on that original place keeper have somewhat been invalidated. And I think that’s a dangerous thing as well.
In one of the videos on the Electrical Audio YouTube page, you talk about developing your practices through an iterative process of trial and error. Is experimentation still a part of your process?
Albini: I actively question myself and verify my preconceptions or challenge my preconceptions. One nice way to do that in a kind of a programmatic way is something I stole from Bob Weston, the bass player in the band Shellac that I’m in. He’s also a fine recording engineer and mastering engineer. I read an interview with him maybe 15 years ago where he said that on every session he does, he tries to do just one thing that he’s never done before. It might be the choice of microphone or positioning a microphone or a processing choice or a routing, just something, and that seemed brilliant to me. Just a very simple way to make sure that you’re always expanding your repertoire and always expanding your knowledge base. You don’t get set in your habits. And so, I stole that, and I do that to this day.
“While you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.”
Also, microphones come in over the transom. There are microphones being designed and invented every day, and we get a chance to hear a lot of those either as trial or because people want our opinions on them. They’ll send them to us to put them in use for a while and play around with them. So, I get to play around with stuff that I’ve never heard before pretty regularly, and I like to try microphones I’ve never heard before.
This has proven enormously valuable over the course of the last 15 or 20 years. My routine behaviors have changed quite a bit as a result of these little, tiny experiments that I’ve done one at a time.
With Shellac bandmates Todd Trainer (drums) and Bob Weston (bass) in view, the most legendary Harmonic Percolator is at Steve’s feet, next to his MXR Smart Gate. If you’re wondering, Albini uses a waist strap for his guitar.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
I would imagine that, making as many records as you do, that’s like constant revision.
Albini: I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.
I did an album with the group Sunn O))). Their music is really slow-moving, impossibly heavy riffs, but the sound is really minimal. It’s just two guitars most of the time. In the studio, they added a few guests. One of is Hildur Guðnadóttir; she plays the cello.
There’s an instrument that was invented for her by a friend of hers called the halldorophone. It’s an electric cello that has built into it an amplifier and loudspeaker, so it’s a self-resonating, self-feeding-back, infinite-sustain cello. It’s a super bizarre thing, but she’s an expert. There’s one in the world and I’m staring at it and I have to figure out how to record it.
The fact that I am confronted with these new and different things all the time means that my vocabulary and my skillset and my facilities are constantly being tested and improved. And that’s one of the great joys, for me anyway, of doing what I do for a living, that I do get to do these freakish things once in a while.
You use a small pedal setup as a player, but you’re engaging with different kinds of players all the time. What do you think about modern pedal technology?
Albini: The stage that we are at now, where every player in every band has a pedalboard and have this sort of a curated collection of sounds that they come up with, I actually got a preview of that in the late ’80s. The first time I went to Japan, most guitarists that I worked with had a pedalboard with a half a dozen pedals on it, and that’s how they would craft their sound. They could bring that anywhere and plug it into any amp and they’d be happy.
Something very similar is happening now in the U.S. where a lot of people are doing demo recording at home through modeling amps or through interfaces, and rather than using an amplifier for its inherent qualities, they’re kind of defeating the amplifier by using pedals as the principal source of their sound. It’s a trend. I don’t really have an opinion about it.
“I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.”
There are some people who are more adept at it than others, but it’s absolutely the case that most players in most bands now have multiple pedals that they’re using, and the songs are arranged in a way where you use this combination for this part and this combination for this part. And nothing about it seems bad to me. It’s a little more cumbersome, especially when you’re in the studio and you’re trying to track down problems. But when you see somebody who’s really put some thought and attention into it and they’re really using the pedals in an expressive way….
I did a session with Reba Myers from Code Orange. She has this really expansive pedal setup where she’s got a main soundboard where the general tone for a given song comes from, and then she’s got a kind of an expression board, which is just all the crazy shit, and she’s constantly going back and forth. She’s an example of someone who’s put a lot of thought and attention into the specifics of the pedalboard and is using it as a creative tool. I’ve seen other people where it’s kind of pro forma—like, Kiss wore funny outfits on stage, and so for a while a lot of bands felt obliged to wear funny outfits on stage.
I know some old school guys are like, ‘Plug the guitar straight into the amp, and if you can’t get it done with that, you’re not a real musician,’ or whatever. That’s horse shit. That’s just boomer shit. I’m not into that at all.
How Steve Albini Gets His Guitar Sound
How did your personal guitar sound develop over the years?
Albini: When I was in Big Black, that band was predicated on the do-it-cheap, do-it-quick, take-no-prisoners approach. That was very much the cornerstone of the behavior in the punk rock scene. Don’t try to get it perfect, just get it. So, everything about that band was done sort of extemporaneously. I made the first Big Black record on my own in my apartment, so I needed an amplifier that I could use for either guitar or bass. I stumbled onto this bizarre preamp called the Tapco/Intersound IVP. It had a clean channel and a distorted channel. I didn’t find much use for the clean channel, but the distorted channel sounded great on either bass or guitar—or great toward my aesthetic at the moment, which was a pretty brutal one.
When Shellac started, I was looking for a fatter, fuller sound than the scrabble-scratchy sound I had with Big Black. I eventually gravitated toward the Fender Bassman as the perfect tube amp for me. But when I would play just the Bassman, I missed a little bit of the bite and the sizzle from the old transistor days. So, I ended up making a hybrid setup with the Tapco IVP preamp, typically recorded direct. And then on stage, I’ll have a monitor cabinet for it that has a horn in it, so it’s like a full-range speaker, and the Fender Bassman going into a fairly bass-y cabinet, typically a 4x12 when we’re on tour in Europe and we’re using backline.
The cabinets that Bob and I made for our amps—I have two Celestion greenbacks in that, a 10" and a 12"—are based on the TL series cabinet that are the published plans that Electro-Voice made available for using their speakers in an enclosure. If you just built a cabinet along those published plans, you would end up with exactly what Bob and I use for our speaker setups.
When you record yourself for a Shellac album, do you always use the same gear?
Albini: No, it has been different on literally every session. I often use the amp that I use on stage. Often, I do not. Often, I’ll use some other transistor amp and some other tube amp as the two complement signals. It’s essentially always two amplifiers, a transistor amp and a tube amp. The transistor amp is typically being recorded direct, and the tube amp is always recorded acoustically through a speaker cabinet with microphones and stuff.
But I have used an Orange OR80. There’s an amp that was made by a company called Sam Amp, and I believe there are very few of them in the world, but I ended up with one of them, and I’ve used the Sam Amp. I’ve used the Traynor YBA-3, Traynor YBA-1, a Marshall JTM-45. I’ve used a lot of different amplifiers for the studio recordings.
The Travis Bean that I use is such an indestructible sound. It’s weird that I’m so fussy about my amp because I’ve demonstrated myself that it kind of doesn’t matter what amp I play through, I can always get something that I like out of it.
We did a tour of Japan very early in the band’s tenure, right after we started. In Japan, it’s normal practice for the venue to have a backline. Every night it was a different, quite crappy by our standards, amplifier on stage. One night, it was a Roland Jazz Chorus. I used a Guyatone amplifier several times, and other Japanese brand names that I was unfamiliar with. Every night sounded fine. As specific as I am about what I like and don’t like, I have sort of taught myself that it’s not that important and that I can zero in on what I like and don’t like about even an imperfect setup.
For pedals, do you use anything other than the Harmonic Percolator, which you’re most known for using?
Albini: I’ve used a noise gate since I first started playing on stage. For many, many years it was just one of the original old-school MXR noise gates. They’ve all crapped out and been repaired and crapped out again many times. There’s an updated version of that MXR called the Smart Gate. I switched over to that. It’s set so that I can just touch the guitar and it opens up, but if I’m not actively playing it, it doesn’t open.
The output of the noise gate goes into the fuzz tone. And the fuzz tone has been a Harmonic Percolator [made by Interfax] since, I want to say, 1986. My friend Jay Tiller from Milwaukee worked at a head shop, record shop, and pawn shop combo in Milwaukee called Record Head. When I was there one time, he said, ‘We have this cool fuzz tone this guy made here. You should try it out.’ And I loved it. So, I bought one from him, and then over the years, I’ve bought a couple more when he stumbled across them at record swap or whatever, or at guitar fairs or whatever, he’s picked them up and I got ’em from him.
I’ve referred to the Percolator as a labor-saving device, because as soon as you hit the switch, the guitar just starts playing. I don’t even need to tell it what notes or anything. It just goes, and that’s my favorite thing about the Percolator, how it’s completely unhinged using it for feedback or whatever. It will choose little melodies that it wants to play, and it’ll just whistle them for you. But you kind of need to be physically moving. I’ve noticed that if you stand in one spot, it just squeals. But if you’re moving around, if the distance between you and your amplifier changes, then the fundamental frequency changes from the physical distance, and you get these really great psychedelic melodies that it creates.
Have you played any of the Percolator clones?
Albini: They all sound very slightly different, but they’re all basically the same. Chuck Collins made a complete, meticulous resurrection of the Harmonic Percolator [through his company, Theremaniacs] a few years ago—those are absolutely perfect. They respond exactly the same way. They sound the same. Almost all the others that I have seen—people send them to me because they feel like I should pass my hands over their Percolator or whatever, I’ve had maybe six or eight others—I can’t use any of ’em. They all behave differently somehow.
I think one of the perversions of my setup is that coming out of the noise gate, the signal into the Percolator is buffered, so it sounds different if you just plug your guitar straight into it, and I never do that.
Learning the differences between various cables can greatly improve the quality of your recordings.
Hello, and welcome to another Dojo session! This time I’d like to drill down to some audio bedrock and unearth the differences between balanced and unbalanced cables. I want to help you understand the differences and give you some strategies to greatly reduce noise (hums, buzzes, and static) in your recordings. Tighten up, the Dojo is now open.
There are many different connection types and gauges of balanced and unbalanced audio cables, and both are used to transmit audio signals from one device to another. However, they differ in their construction and performance, and understanding these differences is essential for achieving optimal audio quality.
Tipping the Scales
Unbalanced audio cables are the most common type of cable used in consumer audio equipment. This includes our beloved 1/4" TS (tip-sleeve) instrument and speaker cables, RCA, and TRS (tip-ring-sleeve) 3.5 mm and 1/4" headphone cables. The first two kinds of cables consist of two wires—a signal wire and a ground wire, while the headphone cables are in stereo, with three wires: left, right, and ground. Signal wires carry the audio signal, while the ground wire acts as a reference point. At the cable’s end, the tip (and in the case of headphone cables, the ring) of the plug carries the signal, while the sleeve is the ground connection.
Unbalanced cables are very limited in the distance they can transmit audio signals cleanly (preferably less than 20 feet). The longer the cable, the less high frequencies, and the more susceptible it is to noise and interference from external sources—like electromagnetic fields created by other electronic devices nearby (amps, synths, drum machines, outboard gear, cell phones, computers, televisions, etc.) and radio frequency interference.
Balancing the Scales
Balanced audio cables, on the other hand, which include XLR and balanced 1/4" TRS types of connectors, are designed to reduce interference and improve audio quality. They always consist of three wires—two signal wires and a ground wire. Note that while some unbalanced cables have three wires, the two signal wires in balanced cables carry the same audio signal, with one flipped 180 degrees out of phase, making them balanced mono as opposed to unbalanced stereo. Balanced cables are ideal for use in recording studios and live sound because they are capable of transmitting audio signals over longer distances (several hundred feet) without introducing noise or hum.
How? Without getting too technical, when the audio signal is split into two separate, identical paths across the two signal wires (with one being out of phase), and then recombined in phase once again, the resultant signal is amplified, and any noise that was present is canceled out. This includes 60 Hz buzz, hum (ground loops), white noise (thermal sound), digital clock jitter, and more.
They Look the Same, but Are They?
One mistake that’s easy to make is to confuse an unbalanced stereo headphone cable with a balanced mono TRS cable, as they both look the same and both have three wires. But if you tried to connect your unbalanced stereo cable output from your smartphone or tablet to a balanced input of a mixer, anything from the center of the stereo field (most likely the main vocals, kick, snare, and bass instruments) will be canceled, because the balanced input will sum both the left and right from the stereo cable, and anything common to both will be 180 degrees out of phase. Essentially, the balanced input will treat the center image as “noise” and remove it.
Can I Convert Balanced Into Unbalanced and Vice Versa?
Yes, you can, and that’s exactly what DI (direct injection) boxes and reamp boxes do. A DI box will convert unbalanced instrument level signals to balanced line level signals and reamp boxes do the opposite—balanced line levels to unbalanced instrument levels. If you’re unfamiliar with these devices and how they work, check out my Dojo video on how to reamp your guitar.
How to Reamp Your Guitar | Recording Dojo
Until next time, namaste and keep making your music!
Your favorite stomps are real-time, tactile sound processors. Plug them in and expand your DAW’s options.
Welcome to another Dojo. This time I want to help supercharge your creative process by advocating for a hybrid approach to effects processing. Specifically, I want you to embrace using stomp pedals as real-time, tactile effects processors and combine them with your favorite DAW effects and plugins.
You should be deeply familiar with how to insert plugins directly on your DAW tracks’ aux sends (for serial processing with modulation and time-based effects, like reverbs and delays) or aux buses (for parallel processing, like compressors). But what about guitar pedals? Yes, they’re typically used in live performance settings and get a lot of abuse on the stage and studio floor, but with the explosion of modern, programmable, MIDI-capable pedals on the market and their ever-increasing processing power, “lowly” stompboxes are long overdue to be elevated to the same level as rack effects and kept within arm’s reach on your mixing desk.
Pedals can add analog warmth, hands-on control, and modularity, are easy on your computer’s RAM and CPU resources, are always OS compliant, and retain their value.
Turning Knobs vs. Mouse-Clicking
When it comes to tracking and mixing, turning knobs on a physical, controllable surface, such as a pedal, mixing console, or MIDI controller, can provide a more tactile and intuitive way to make adjustments to your sound, compared to using a mouse to click and drag on virtual knobs and sliders within your DAW. Let’s face it, in the heat of a session this can be tedious—especially if you run out of trackpad or mousepad space while recording or mixing.
But what about exploring some hybrid approaches that take advantage of both formats? After all, plugins provide flexibility, precision, consistency, automation, portability (nothing to lug around), cost-effectiveness (cheaper than outboard gear), and compatibility (the same plugins can work on multiple DAWs). Pedals can add analog warmth, hands-on control, and modularity, are easy on your computer’s RAM and CPU resources, are always OS compliant, and retain their value (how much are original Klons going for now?!). They can also help you achieve a unique and personalized sound that can be difficult to replicate with digital plugins and their stock presets. Many modern foot pedals can also handle both line level and instrument level inputs.
Builders—Strymon, Eventide, Boss, EarthQuaker, Empress, Meris, Chase Bliss, and many more—have a wide range of pedals that are MIDI capable and, quite frankly, have processing power that far surpasses many classic rack effects units.
So, I’d like to offer some creative ways to use pedals, in addition to your regular plugins, in your next session or mix:
Getting Ready
Before starting, remember to be aware that some pedals are looking for instrumentlevel and not line level inputs (the latter is what typically is output from your interface). You can find helpful info by reading my September 2022 Dojo column, “What You Should Know Before Using Guitar Pedals with Other Instruments.”
To start, duplicate the track(s) you want to process with your effects pedal(s) in your DAW and route the output of those tracks to one or two of your line outputs on your interface. Depending on the pedals in question, you may have options for mono in and out, mono in/stereo out, or stereo in and out. Connect all relevant cables and connect the output of the last pedal to the input of your interface. If your incoming signal is low, switch from line to mic on your interface for each input.
Next, in your DAW, create one mono or one stereo track, depending upon how you are going to return the processed signal from your interface and record-enable the track(s). Now you’re ready to record new, processed material (from one pedal or your entire pedal board!) in real-time and take advantage of every parameter on each pedal.
You can now use your pedals to adjust distortion levels, reverb, and delay times in real-time (with all the glorious artifacts, glitches, and smears), as well as adjust tremolo rates and chorus depths on the fly. Get creative! Take chances and invite any and all happy accidents!
One particular approach I love is throwing loop pedals into this equation, after all the other pedals, for some wild, abstract processing. My signal flow usually goes from overdrive to mod-based effects (chorus, phaser, tremolo) to time-based effects (delays and reverbs) followed by a looper. At present, my favorite looper pedal for this by far is Habit by Chase Bliss ($399 street). It has three minutes of loop time and can take user-definable snippets of your loop, play them back asynchronously, feed that back into the loop itself, and record all modifications as well (and this is just scratching the surface). Highly recommended!
Combine this “out-of-the-box” technique along with your normal “in-the-box” workflow and you should be creating some pretty amazing sounds. Let me know if you find a cool approach! I’ll share it in the Dojo channel.
Until next time, blessings, and continue to share your gifts with the world. It matters, and you matter!
Midrange is the guitar’s magic zone. An EQ pedal will help you sculpt a mix-ready tone before you hit record.
Hello, and welcome to another Dojo. This time I want to shine some light on a secret to great tone: midrange! I’ll be approaching this from the front end of the recording process, using an EQ pedal, but these ideas can be easily applied further downstream in your DAW by using outboard EQs, or EQ plugins. I encourage you to record your experiments so you can hear them and evaluate the differences. The Dojo is now open.
Let’s define midrange, loosely. Midrange frequencies are wide-ranging and are often divided into three sub-categories: low-mids, mids, and high-mids. Basically, it’s between 200 Hz and 4 kHz. That’s huge! It spans the range the human ear is most sensitive to in frequency (even though we can hear approximately from 20 Hz to 20 kHz). So, where exactly do the low-mids start and the high-mids end? What are the crossover frequency points between each band? Those questions are best debated over beer and pizza and will involve the EQ’s circuit design, like where the center frequencies are for each band and how narrow or wide each band is (aka the Q). For comparison, think of the color spectrum and then go and ask a group of painters when red fully transitions into orange and then to yellow, and you’ll get the idea.
For a standard-tuned guitar, I’ve found frequencies between 400 Hz and 2.6k Hz are adjusted the most often and where most of my tone sculpting takes place.
We should all be deeply familiar with the inherent timbral characteristics of single-coil (super articulate and responsive) and humbucker (full-bodied and powerful) pickups. At some point, you’ve most likely wished that your humbucker-loaded guitars could sound more like your single-coil guitars and vice versa. What if a simple 5- to 7-band EQ pedal could get us closer to dialing in the tone we’re seeking and offer more flexibility in the long run? That’s exactly why there are so many different types of EQ pedals on the market—each created exactly for these kinds of purposes.
For a standard-tuned guitar, I’ve found frequencies between 400 Hz and 2.6k Hz are adjusted the most often, and where most of my tone sculpting takes place.
Why not just use my amp? The mids in classic tube amp circuit designs are blunt instruments and don’t offer the surgical precision of a multiband EQ. In fact, many classic Fender amps (tweed Deluxe, Princeton, and Deluxe) are completely devoid of a mid control. One exception is the hallowed 1959 4x10 Bassman, with its mid frequency centered around 500 Hz. A Marshall plexi’s mid knob is centered around 800 Hz.
Before we start focusing in on midrange frequencies, you may be wondering about the most clearly audible range of the guitar. The low E (open 6th string) is 82.41 Hz and the highest fretted note on a Gibson Les Paul (22nd fret of 1st string) is around 1174.66 Hz. But there’s also an insane amount of frequencies above 1.2 kHz that really define the guitar’s clarity, presence, articulation, and sense of “air.” They are immensely important. Play your guitar and shave off everything above 1.2k Hz and you’ll immediately hear what I’m talking about.
Let’s quickly shape some tone. I’m going to make my Telecaster’s bridge pickup sound as close as possible to my Les Paul’s bridge pickup and vice versa. (Photo 1) shows I adjusted 400 Hz (+11 dB), 800 Hz (+8 dB), 2 kHz (+6 dB), and 4 kHz (+8 dB). This gave me the fatness and articulation of my Les Paul’s bridge pickup and sounded really close. To get my Les Paul’s bridge pickup to sound more like my Tele’s [Photo 2], I adjusted 400 Hz (-7 dB), 800 Hz (-4 dB), 1.6 kHz (-3 dB), 2 kHz (-6 dB), 2.5 kHz (+7 dB), and 4 kHz (+5 dB). This gave me the spank and chime of my Tele’s bridge pickup. Bonus: I like to reduce 400 Hz to 800 Hz when playing rhythm on my Les Paul’s neck pickup anyway. It really cleans out the bottom end clutter that never sits right in the mix.
Here are some additional thoughts for EQ pedal experimentation:
• Humbuckers have more low-mid information than single coils (300 Hz to 900 Hz).
• Single-coils have much more high-mids (2 kHz to 4.5 kHz).
• To increase pick articulation (1 kHz to 2 kHz).
• To reduce muddiness (250 Hz to 350 Hz).
• To reducing harshness (2.3 kHz to 2.7 kHz).
Until next time, Namaste!