![]() Now the phase makes a difference! These signals are similar enough so that adding the two together (and that’s all that mixing is, really – adding signals together) will cause a lot of important info in the combined signal to be canceled out. For some reason, the D12’s phase is inverted in relationship to the D112. Those two tracks are two separate mics on the kick drums, a D12 and a D112. You’ll see that the track “bass box” (highlighted) is muted, but the two tracks below that are active, and they don’t line up very well. Have another look at the picture above (click to enlarge). Anyway, that is the “absolute phase”, for our purposes “Does it go up first, or down”. But I do need to pick some sort of reference, and why NOT have the drums start with an outward speaker motion, instead of inward. Can I hear the difference between a single kick drum track with the initial motion as “positive” instead of “negative”? No. That looks like “upwards” in the DAW display, and translates to an outward motion of your speaker in the physical world. Phase is a relationship between two signals, but you might also want to be sure that the first “motion” of the wave is in the positive direction. Let’s clear up what “absolute phase” means first. Granted, the wave is not perfectly periodic as, let’s say, a sustained synth note would be, but over a short time, it is close enough to that to make or break your drum sound, so bear with me. On a very short scale (that is, zooming in close on some kick drum or snare drum hits, for example), we see a sort of periodic wave: Such a signal has both positive and negative values that change over time. What does this mean? And what about that “phase invert” button on many console preamps, and even on plugins?įirst of all, you have to understand that an audio signal represented by a voltage over time. You may hear things like “out of phase”, “sounds phasey”, or “set phasers to stun” (when dealing with the real studio geeks…). Hope you dig it!Īlthough all the tech-speak is not necessary for someone producing tracks entirely in a home studio, understanding the nomenclature of audio engineering is important for those of you who may work in a professional recording environment. Below the video is some more info on the technical side of things. Here is the first video in this series of recording blog posts we’re doing on “Mixing Your Home Recordings”. These first videos are actually fine in mono, because we want to be sure that the sound works in mono! You’d think this is easy, but 5 trial programs later NOTHING worked, and we decided to push ahead. It is surprisingly buggy and annoying trying to capture not only the voice over, but also the output of Pro Tools. We’ve gotten started putting up some video tips, despite some rather annoying technical difficulties. ![]()
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