Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

I’ve been doing some mixing on headphones and getting awkward results.  To try to get to the bottom of it I thought I should see how bad the phones are coloring the sound I’m getting.

First I tried recording a white noise sample played through mac speakers and headphones thinking that there would be some pretty big differences.  There are, but mostly what you see is the loss of low-frequencies (<600Hz) and anything about 12kHz.

It turns out that a chirp is easier to measure and repeat.  Here are two spectrograms, first the mac laptop speakers:

Followed by the response of the headphones:

Both are flatter than I would have expected, with deviations under 10dB.  The phones actually have a pretty big notch near 2kHz, while the mac speakers are more erattic.

Here’s the prius:

The verical scaling is a little weird.  Iztope reads out the delta band as +/-2db or so, but I can make 10 or 20db changes in the input faders and not move these meters much.  Hmm…

Bottom line:

• Headphones drastically underestimate the amount of 2kHz and have some other weird frequency holes.  Mixing in the car might be a good solution.
• Checking peak hold plots might be a good way to tell what is happening.

So we went through our final pass of mastering last Monday and have been letting the album sit for a while.

Here’s quick preview of ‘The Scar’ after mastering.

Does this song work for you?

Should we include it in the album?

What about the details of the sound?  Anything we should re-track or re-mix?

“The Scar“ (mp3 4:30)

Please leave comments down below, text
or email me directly.  :)

Just got back from Tycho’s first “festival” show - Lilith Faire at Shoreline.  The crowd there was decent sized though not sold out and the music was pretty good.  We heard a couple of new acts and some older ones as well.  Here are some thoughts on the show, what worked and what didn’t.

Ann Atomic - an older songwriter turned singer.  We only caught a few minutes of her in the ABC lounge after her main set.  She was ok - nothing special.  I thought her guitar player and band seemed to be putting on a good show of being in it, but the vibe wasn’t really happening for me.  Clean sound, but no soul.

Kitten - flips side of Ann Atomic - she’s like 15 or something and jumps around on stage like she’s high on pop-rocks or something.  Twice she stood on amps and had to be pulled down by roadies, and then while she was doing spinning jumps she fell and twisted her ankle, which I am sad to say, was a little funny.  A few minutes later she was up again like nothing happened so maybe it was just a World Cup moment.  All that crazy energy worked with the crowd and the band was pretty tight.  She had a pretty good voice, and a sound that could be compared to Paramore.  I’m sure all that energy and attitude will get her somewhere, but again, the soul seemed lacking.

Colbie - I was actually not looking forward to her set much, but was pleasantly surprised.  She’s got a fair number of hits that I forgot about and her sound is so mellow and poppy it’s the perfect compliment to a sunny afternoon on the grass.  Also, her voice and comments seemed to convey that she was totally into the gig and her and the band blended really well.  Hats off.  :)

The Bangles - their first number (one of their rockier songs which I dont remember) sounded great, but the set was uneven.  When they were relying on their hit songs with nice vocal harmonies and support from keys things sounded good, but the stripped down punkier songs just sounded harsh.  Part of that was that the kit sounded bad - a snare that was too bright and no warmth from the kick, toms or cymbals.  They were in good form over all considering how long they’ve been around, and the vocals were solid all around.  But again, for some of the songs, the soul was missing.

Heart - We only caught a few tunes, but I was impressed by the band and the girls can still sing just like 20 years ago.  Wow.

All in all a great afternoon on the grass with mama Anne and baby Tycho.  Happy days.