Ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore records the song of Mountain Chief, head of the Blackfeet Tribe, on a phonograph for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1916.
Once used as a way to preserve American indigenous culture, field recording isn’t just for seasoned pros. Here, our columnist breaks down a few methods for you to try it yourself.
The picture associated with this month’s Dojo is one of my all-time favorites. Taken in 1916, it marks the collision of two diverging cultural epochs. Mountain Chief, the head of the Piegan Blackfeet Tribe, sings into a phonograph powered solely by spring-loaded tension outside the Smithsonian. Across from him sits whom I consider the patron saint of American ethnomusicologists—the great Frances Densmore.
You can feel the scope and weight of theancient culture of the indigenous American West, and the presence of the then-ongoing women’s suffrage movement, which was three years from succeeding at getting the 19th Amendment passed by Congress. That would later happen on June 4, 1919—the initiative towards granting all women of this country the right to vote. (All American citizens, including Black women, were not granted suffrage until 1965.)
Densmore traversed the entire breadth of the country, hauling her gramophone wax cylinder recorders into remote tribal lands, capturing songs by the Seminole in southern Florida, the Yuma in California, the Chippewa in Wisconsin, Quinailet songs in Northern Washington, and, of course, Mountain Chief outside the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Author of more than 20 books and 200 articles, she carefully preserved the rich cultural diversity of Native Americans with over 2,500 field recordings.
Why am I writing about this? Firstly, to pay homage! Secondly, because it serves as a great reminder to seek and cultivate sound outside the studio as well. We live in a time of great technological power and convenience. Every week a new sample pack, plugin, pedal, or software instrument hits the market. For all the joy that these offerings bring, they deprive us of the joy of creating our own instruments from scratch.
This month, I’m advocating for you to make some field recordings of your own—nature, urban, indoor, outdoor, specific locations, animals, or anything that piques your interest! Bring the material back to the studio and make music with it! I’ll show you how to make your own sample libraries to use in your music. Tighten up your belts, a multipart Dojo is now open.
What do you need to get started? Quite simply, you just need any device that is capable of recording. This can range from your cell phone to a dedicated field recorder. The real question is: Do you want to use mics housed in handheld units or have more robust mic pres with the ability to power larger live/studio microphones using XLR connectors found with the larger units? Let’s look at three scenarios.
The Cellular Approach
The absolute easiest way to get started is with your cell phone. Take advantage of a voice-memo recording app, or use an app that records multitrack audio like GarageBand on iOS. Phone recordings tend to sound very compressed and slightly lo-fi—which might be exactly what you want. However, the method can also introduce unwanted noise artifacts like low-end rumble (from handling the phone) and phasing (moving the mic while recording). I recommend using a tripod to hold your phone still while recording. You might also want to consider using an external mic and some software to edit your sample recordings on the phone. I like using a Koala Sampler ($4.99) on iOS devices.
Upgrade Me
The next step up is to use a portable recorder. These have much better mic pres, and offer true stereo recording with pivoting mic heads. This can give you the added benefit of controlling the width of your stereo image when recording or helping isolate two sound sources that are apart from each other. You sacrifice the ability to easily edit your recordings. You simply import them into your computer and edit the recording(s) from there.
Pro-Level Quality
I would recommend this scenario if you want to record multiple sources at once. These devices also have SMPTE time code, 60+ dB of gain, phantom power (+48 volts), advanced routing, and a 32-bit/192 kHz sampling rate, so you’ll never have a distorted recording even when the meter gets unexpectedly pegged into the red from a loud sound source. I recommend the Zoom F8n Pro ($1099). Now you can use your microphones!
Best Practices
Try to safely record as close to the sound source as you can to minimize ambient noise and really scrub through your recordings to find little snippets and sound “nuggets” that can make great material for creating your own instrument and sample library—which we’ll explore next month! Namaste.
Dojo Columnist Bryran Clark at the helm.
A few small organizational tricks can set your digital workspace up for success.
Hi, and welcome to another Dojo. This time, I’m going to give you ways to cut the clutter from your sessions and help make your recording process more efficient—in short, more kaizen. This compound Japanese word is usually translated as “good change” but has morphed over the years to mean something closer to “continual improvement.” The concept is applied in multiple industries from auto manufacturing to healthcare, and it can certainly be effectively applied on an individual level.
The idea is that multiple small improvements over time will produce big results. Legendary British cycling coach Dave Brailsford called this “the aggregation of marginal gains.” His strategy was simple: Focus on getting one percent better in every area related to riding a bike. Within 10 years, the British cycling team went on 178 World Championship races and won five Tour de France victories and over 60 Olympic gold medals. Kaizen, indeed! I’m still amazed when I get sessions from other engineers who have no color-coded recording session tracks, haphazard organization within the session itself, and haven’t saved multiple versions. These are three problems that are easily solved with a bit of kaizen. Tighten up your belts, the Dojo is now open.
Color differentiation reduces your cognitive load and allows for faster, more efficient recording, editing, mixing, and overall session management.
Diversify Your Color Palette
Color-coding recording session tracks is a powerful tool for visual organization. It’s an essential, non-technical practice that can significantly enhance workflow efficiency and track management. In a typical modern recording session, there can be between 30 and 100 tracks, each representing different instruments, vocals, effects, and other elements. Without a clear organizational strategy, navigating through these tracks can become overwhelming and time-consuming.
By assigning specific colors to different types of tracks, producers and engineers can quickly identify and locate the tracks they need to work on, so establish a consistent color scheme for types of instruments.
Here’s mine:
• Drums are always slate blue.
• Guitars are various shades of green because they’re made from trees (of course, almost everything else is, too, but both guitar and green share the same first letter).
• Bass instruments are always brown (because they’re powerful and can make you brown your trousers).
• Synths and keys are various hues of purple (I think of Prince and “Purple Rain”).
• Vocals are always yellow because when you get lost in the stifling dark caverns of your mix and can’t find your way out, focus on the vocals—they will lead you toward the light.
An example of our columnist’s strict session color coding in his DAW.
Regardless of your choices, color differentiation reduces your cognitive load and allows for faster, more efficient recording, editing, mixing, and overall session management. Moreover, color coding helps in identifying groups of tracks that need to be processed together, such as a drum bus or background vocals, thus making it easier to apply group processing and adjustments.
Your layout of a recording session is another critical factor for maintaining organized and productive workflows. A well-structured session layout ensures that all elements of the recording are easily accessible and logically arranged. My tracks have a consistent order: drums at the top, followed by bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals, and effects. There’s no right way to do this, but whatever you do, be consistent.
“I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.” – Steven Wright
Consistency helps individual producers and engineers to work more efficiently, but also facilitates collaboration with others. When multiple people are involved in a project, establish a standardized layout that will allow everyone to quickly understand the session structure, find specific tracks, and contribute without confusion. Also, a clear layout helps minimize mistakes during recording, editing, and mixing, like possibly overlooking important tracks or processing the wrong ones.
Your layout of a recording session is another critical factor for maintaining organized and productive workflows. A well-structured session layout ensures that all elements of the recording are easily accessible and logically arranged. My tracks have a consistent order: drums at the top, followed by bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals, and effects. There’s no right way to do this, but whatever you do, be consistent.
Consistency helps individual producers and engineers to work more efficiently, but also facilitates collaboration with others. When multiple people are involved in a project, establish a standardized layout that will allow everyone to quickly understand the session structure, find specific tracks, and contribute without confusion. Also, a clear layout helps minimize mistakes during recording, editing, and mixing, like possibly overlooking important tracks or processing the wrong ones.
“Waste Not, Want Not”
One of the most important things to always remember is to immediately save a new version the very first time you open a project or session. That way, if something happens, and it will eventually (I’ve even had session data get corrupted on that specific sector of the hard drive), you’ve left the original session alone. Every time you work on the song, or project, save a new version. This practice safeguards the process and ensures project security.
This is also important during the creative phase when trying out different ideas and arrangements. If a new idea doesn't work out, it's easy to revert to a previous version without losing valuable progress. Furthermore, saving versions at critical milestones—such as after recording, editing, and mixing—provides fallback options in case of technical issues or unexpected problems. And lastly, saving versions creates a chronological historical record of the session's development, which is invaluable for reviewing the evolution of the track, project, or entire record!
A multiband EQ applied to reverb.
Learning the ins and outs of reverb can help you access a more creative approach to your mixes.
Hello, and welcome to another Dojo. This month I want to give you some creative ideas for using the oldest natural effect we have—reverb.
Reverb is a fundamental tool in every audio engineer’s arsenal, often employed to create depth, space, and ambiance. We use it to simulate the natural reflections of sound in physical spaces, like rooms, halls, or chambers, but the creative possibilities of reverb can extend far beyond that when used as part of a larger effects grouping, and can enable you to sculpt some downright captivating soundscapes.
One of the most common creative uses of reverb is to manipulate the perceived spatial dimensions of a reverberant sound. By adjusting parameters such as decay time, pre-delay, and diffusion, we can alter the size and character of the virtual space in which a sound appears to exist—like a gritty spring reverb imbuing a guitar riff with vintage charm or a shimmering granular reverb enveloping a synth pad in sparkling, crystalline reflections.
But what if we experiment with it in more creative ways by warping naturally occurring physical properties, or playing with pitch, or even side-chaining various parameters? Tighten up your belts, the Dojo is now open.
Reverb itself is the last of three basic events:
1. Direct sound: sound that reaches the listener’s ears directly without reflecting off of any surface.
2. Early reflections: Early reflections are the first set of reflections that reach the listener’s ears shortly after the direct sound, typically within the first 50 milliseconds. They contribute to the perception of spaciousness and localization (coming from the left or the right), and help establish the size and character of the virtual space. The timing, directionality, and intensity of early reflections depend on room geometry, surface materials, and the position of the sound source and listener.
3. Reverb: Homogenized late reflections comprise the prolonged decay of reverberant sound following the initial onset of reflections. The length of which is measured in RT60 (Reverberation Time 60). Think of RT60 as the amount of time it takes for the reverb to decrease by 60 dB or match the inherent noise floor of the space (whichever comes first). For example, most great concert halls have an RT60 of around 2.4 seconds before the hall is “silent” again. The reverb tail is characterized by a gradual decrease in intensity from the complex interplay of overlapping reflections. The shape, density, and duration of the reverb tail are influenced by factors such as room size, surface materials, and acoustic treatment.The beauty of digital reverbs is that we have the ability to adjust these parameters in ways that simply cannot exist in the physical world. Some plugins like Waves’ TrueVerb ($29 street) will allow you to adjust these parameters to unnatural proportions.“The creative possibilities of reverb can enable you to sculpt some downright captivating soundscapes.”
Now, let’s try to use reverb paired with other effects rather than an end result by itself. Put a short reverb (RT60 of less than 1.5 seconds) on any audio track, then follow it with a reverse delay with a small amount of feedback (around 30 percent) and around 1 to 2 seconds delay time. Hear how the reverb feeds into the reverse delay? Adjust to taste and experiment.
We can also start to modulate the reverb. On an aux bus, place a pitch-shifter like Soundtoys Little AlterBoy ($49 street), set the transpose to +12 semitones (up an octave), and mix to 100 percent wet. Adjust the formant to make it sound even more strange. Follow this with a reverb of your choice, also set to 100 percent wet. Now, route a selected audio track (perhaps a vocal or a lead guitar solo) to the aux bus and adjust your aux send level. Now you have a pitch-shifted reverb to add some octave sparkle.
Next, add in a tempo-synced tremolo or panner after the reverb and enjoy the results! I like doing things this way because you can easily switch the order of any effect and save the effect chain. For added bliss, try applying a high-pass filter to remove low-frequency mud, allowing the reverb to sit more transparently in the mix without clouding the low end.
To hear this in action, I invite you to listen to my new single “Making the Faith” (Rainfeather Records), especially the bridge section of the song along with my guitar solo. Until next time, namaste.