Recording is Hard

[Rudy4]

Originally Posted by 3notes

Thanks everyone.

I want to put my mic on a stand. I can't find an "adapter" that can screw into the recorder which looks to be 1/4'' female. ...

How do I attach the recorder to a mic stand.?? It's a Tascam DR-40.

This:

https://www.amazon.com/Zoom-Tripod-S.../dp/B0032D0P84

[3notes]

Yes. That's what I need.

Thank you Rudy4.!!

[H165]

having your career hinge on completion of the edit sitting before you.

Most succinct comment this year.

[Brent Hahn]

Originally Posted by H165

Most succinct comment this year.

On the other hand, for most folks the do-or-die razorblade edit went away around the same time as the guillotine.

It was probably around 1998 when I got called into the dub room to repair an edit that had fallen apart on an old master. The recent Full Sail grad said, "I'd do it myself but I was out sick the day they covered tape."

[Rodger]

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

On the other hand, for most folks the do-or-die razorblade edit went away around the same time as the guillotine.

It was probably around 1998 when I got called into the dub room to repair an edit that had fallen apart on an old master. The recent Full Sail grad said, "I'd do it myself but I was out sick the day they covered tape."

Now that's funny right there!!

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

On the other hand, for most folks the do-or-die razorblade edit went away around the same time as the guillotine.

It was probably around 1998 when I got called into the dub room to repair an edit that had fallen apart on an old master. The recent Full Sail grad said, "I'd do it myself but I was out sick the day they covered tape."

Thats hilarious and what great comedy song hook "I was out sick the day they covered tape." with the chorus "You can cut and cut but it still comes up short"

[ChapinFan]

Originally Posted by jim1960

That's exactly what I'm saying. It's essentially cutting and pasting although doing so does create "pops" that will have to be fixed by cross-fading but that's not a difficult thing to do.

Is there a visual way of doing that? I can edit video, no problem. But trying to find the right place in an audio track seems like trying to change the wheels on a moving train.

How do you find your spot? By eye, by ear? Or "By gosh and by golly?"

[Bob Womack]

When I'm editing in the middle of music I just about always edit by ear. I do need to tell you that easy navigation is absolutely necessary to good editing, meaning that you need to have good control of your transport and the ability to scrub over the edit area. From there, you learn to scrub back and forth and coordinate hand and ear to find the spot.

My first job out of recording school was at a facility that had Ampex ATR-102 tape decks in each control room. It's the one on the left below:


Notice the splicing block on the head stock. My wife would sometimes bring me lunch and find a hundred chunks of tape hanging off every flat surface around me as I worked on editing.

To this day these machines are considered the finest transports on the planet. People are rebuilding them and making a killing in the pro market. I can't believe we sold THIRTEEN of these when we moved on to higher technology. On the right of the head stack where the capstan usually was sat a "biasing" motor that the transport electronics used to apply pressure either backwards or forwards to make the other two transport motors stay in sync. On top was a knob:



You could take two fingers and spin the transport back and forth to hear the tape passage you were trying to edit. It was a rock-solid connection to the transport that allowed you to forget it and think only of the music. No-one has duplicated it since, and that is one of the reasons that these transports, with rejuvenated electronics, now sell for over five times what they did in the '70s.

Why am I telling you this? That ability to rock back and forth and aurally locate the edit point made things extremely tactile within the process. I've compared every system I've worked on since to these transports. I've got an ATR cue knob sitting in my home studio to remind me. These days at the studio I use Steinberg's Nuendo DAW program that has the ability for you to click on a location in the transport and then move the mouse left and right by degrees to "rock the reels" very much like I used to with the ATR. If the motion feels natural to you, you simply stop thinking about it and get on with the job. If the interface is tentative, hesitant, or if the transport has any tendency to run away, you'll find yourself lost in the interface.

The other element is your familiarity with the interface. You need to fritter with it and become so facile with it so that it is no longer an impediment but a comfortable tool. Burn some music into the system and practice taking out verses or choruses and/or measures. Throw some spoken word in and practice changing sentences.

You'll be integrating pin-point editing with musical knowledge and feel, because it doesn't matter how good you are at pin-point editing if you aren't making musical edits.

I've talked too much. Let me now if I can help.

Bob

We've still got analog transports in the house and I've still got my EdiTall edit blocks, splicing tape, wax pencils, and leader tape around, but I haven't made a physical splice in a while. I've fixed some splices on archived tapes that have been baked and treated while I restored or remastered them, though.

Oh, and this was my last significant restoration:



More about that, HERE.

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by ChapinFan

Is there a visual way of doing that? I can edit video, no problem. But trying to find the right place in an audio track seems like trying to change the wheels on a moving train.

How do you find your spot? By eye, by ear? Or "By gosh and by golly?"

With a DAW it can both ear and eye . If you are using a DAW that displays the waveform and has a Zoom feature. then you can listen to the aprox location, then zoom in look at the waveform then listen and watch the transport line to get an idea of where to cut.

[sdelsolray]

One nice feature with editing/splicing on a DAW is the opportunity to do it again if the first attempt did not quite work right.

[Chipotle]

Originally Posted by sdelsolray

One nice feature with editing/splicing on a DAW is the opportunity to do it again if the first attempt did not quite work right.

Yeah, tape has no "undo" function. :-)

Well, sorta. You could always put the splice back together and re-snip a millimeter away, but that could be done only a few times before you'd really muck things up in that spot.

[Truckjohn]

Wow. Actual tape? I didn't even know that stuff even existed anymore.

Advice wise.

Go digital. For the price of 1 reel of tape - you can get editing software. That way - you can roll through as many takes as you want and the only consequence is inconveniencing some electrons....

Next.

When you hit record - give yourself 15 seconds (or whatever) of getting settled and quieting down before you start playing. Its easy enough to delete it - just highlight and click and all the coughs, clicks, shuffles, balks, and such are gone.

When you start playing - go at it like you mean it from quiet stop. Don't slowly ease and slime your way into it. Just roll through it. If you make a mistake - just keep going.

Do several cuts and listen through them... You will find some stuff that worked - and some that didn't.. Cutting and pasting is easy enough.

It sure does give you a new respect for the old boys who got 1 take at a song on tape and nailed it.. I am amazed hearing the stories of those old albums.. They got an hour - maybe 2 in the studio and cut a whole album...

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by KevWind

With a DAW it can both ear and eye . If you are using a DAW that displays the waveform and has a Zoom feature. then you can listen to the aprox location, then zoom in look at the waveform then listen and watch the transport line to get an idea of where to cut.

Absolutely. And that's not just a good working method for those of us who are prone to mistakes in every take. Many years ago I wrote a really great (imo) blues duet. As a blues player, I'm poop, but back then I was always running into a certain blues guy of some renown (he posts on AGF pretty often) and I gave him a tape of myself singing the song ...no music, just me singing both the male and female parts. He liked the song and fleshed out an arrangement and some variations to fit the style and mood of the vocals I'd given him.

He comes over to my place and brings a couple of guitars. I did just what I'd do with myself had I been playing. We ran through the whole song 4 times. Then we ran through some slide work on his National steel body 4 times. Every individual take was great. Any could have been used in their entirety, but I put together a composite that I think really works well.

I still haven't found the right female vocalist to pull off the duet but I'll get around to that one of these days.

[Chipotle]

Originally Posted by KevWind

With a DAW it can both ear and eye . If you are using a DAW that displays the waveform and has a Zoom feature. then you can listen to the aprox location, then zoom in look at the waveform then listen and watch the transport line to get an idea of where to cut.

This.

I also recommend playing to a drum track or click track that is properly synced to the tempo of the project in the DAW. That way, when editing, you always know where the beats are an approximately where you should be looking to make a lot of the edits. That simple trick made my editing work so much easier. Of course, that means you need to work on your rhythm chops so your playing also matches that drum/click track!

I've also heard that you should zoom all the way into the waveform and cut at zero crossings. Much of the time, it won't really matter, but occasionally you'll get a weird click or artifact that can only be fixed by doing that.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by Chipotle

I've also heard that you should zoom all the way into the waveform and cut at zero crossings. Much of the time, it won't really matter, but occasionally you'll get a weird click or artifact that can only be fixed by doing that.

I use to worry about that but cross fades on Pro Tools are so easy now that I find I really only need to pay attention to the wave shape and placing it correctly in time.

The clicks are usually caused by anomalies in the wave form. In Pro Tools, I can sweep the wave to find where the problem is. Then use the pencil tool to rewrite the anomaly, smoothing it out. Usually takes under a minute.