The Telenator's Forum Page

Hey Lion! I saw your post the other day and finally got the chance to listen to your latest. I should qualify the following by saying that as a dinosaur Rock Blues performer and sometime Pop composer the whole Hip Hop genre is about as far away from home base as it gets for me. That shouldn’t matter really, though, for a long-time musician. It’s Duke Ellington who is normally credited with saying, “There are really only two kinds of music — Good and Bad.”

Thanks to you and a couple others, one of them being my oldest son, others from this forum, my appreciation of Hip Hop beats has really maxed lately — to the point that I’m currently working on finishing a half dozen guitar instrumental tunes with what I think might be best called a post-dubstep tempo and beat. Then I’ll probably head back to my regular thing.

About your stuff, though: I try to be a good listener, even to stuff that really isn’t my bag. And even if it isn’t, I think I can still tell good music. In your case, I thought first of all your lead vocals were probably as good as it gets. You did a great job of recording them, too — that’s for certain. I thought the stuff like your panning of the backup vocals when you used that effect came across real well, too. For the lyrics themselves, I’m not qualified enough to judge. You have to go to someone like levendis; he’s more the man to ask about that. I only listen for the tone and placement. And I haven’t heard all of what’s out there these days, but they sounded to me about as good as any I have heard recently.

Of course, I didn’t sit there and try to pick your beats all apart, but then I didn’t need to — I thought the rhythms, the beats, were all right on the money on these tunes. The drumset sounds good, and where I really focused in on it I thought the kick was just right. From tune to tune your levels were pretty well matched. Of all of them, I think there was only one or two where the level of the mix sounded a little higher than the rest, and I wanted to throw the album on a meter to check all the numbers, but no time at all for that this week. You know, I think that’s one of the hardest things for anyone to get perfect and glue a whole album together — the overall level of each tune compared to every other, a big reason artists may shell out up $50,000 to a mastering house.

Okay, everybody is going to dig your “creepy flute” as much as I did on, what, #6? Yeah, that made that tune. Are you planning to reveal what you used for that? Had the timbre sort of from a penny whistle, without the heavy slide effect. That was good placement at the album end. I think that will help folks remember your album after they get done. That’s what is charting some Hip Hop higher than others these days — aside from standout lyrics. I keep noticing how artists will include “a somethin’ extra” to keep it memorable.

I need to talk about your bass frequency zone on all this. Remember how I said you got the kick just right? That’s mostly ’cause it was kept tight. I think the bass frequencies overall could be tighter as well. I thought the levels within each tune were fine — in fact, nearly perfect balance against your lead vocals higher up the frequency spectrum. There are a bunch of plugins that help a lot with the tightness/definition thing. Some good ones are freeware too. I think one that might work for you is that plug called BASSLANE, free at toneprojects.com. It will really zero right in fine-tuned to the Hz cutoff you want, and what it does is mono-ize some of the bass to give it tight focus while keeping the full stereo spread and depth untouched above where you set it. They got others, too, but this one’s my fave and maybe easiest to use. I know that in this stuff and in Rock some also, this bass zone is the No.1 thing that can make artists tear their hair out trying to get right. I threw your album on a couple different speaker arrays and headphones, too, I’m not saying anything sounded bad, just saying I think you can make it kick in the gut a little tighter.

Last thing on tech talk is I check for IMD — for any inter-modulation distortion. That’s why I wanted to find time also to put it on a dynamics meter and check headroom and so on. You can’t hear IMD on some players, but on more and more new ones it shows up as little clicks, thumps and pops. The best MP3 players will not allow distortion between samples, but what happens instead is they ‘dump’ it into those little noises. Anyhow, not necessarily a make or break issue unless you are trying to win a Grammy for production. No matter what, IMD can be totally removed by never letting your mix go above -1dB at any time. That gives the file the space to peak between samples without clipping. IMD will stand out as soon as you convert to MP3. Then it will poke you right in the eye. MP3s always sound like total crap to me no matter what, but no worries — we’ll all be compressing to the better AAC format in a few years anyway.

Sorry to run long and don’t want to end on a negative note, so let me go back to saying that you’ve got some very fresh-sounding, very original-sounding tunes here. Like levendis was saying, some really clever turns of phrase lyrically, but I think I ended up most impressed with the vocal quality. So many still trying to break into rap and hip hop — seems like a new one every single day. That’s why you have a lot to be proud of here — because the voice tones are memorable and they have enough original style and character to them so you don’t end up sounding like the 10,000 others out there right now. The vocals sound better to me than some of the stuff I hear charting right now. Same idea and some examples: guitarists B.B. King or Santana — you know it’s one of them playing one of their tunes sometimes as soon as the very first lead note on their guitars. Lion, I need to know, I mean people need to know that it is YOU doing one of your latest releases by the 3rd or 4th word of your lyrics. That info is all in your vocal tone and character. To me, that’s what you got going on here with this release.

Don’t know if it was mentioned above, but with any DAW you should optimize your PC so that things like Sleep Mode never, ever kick in and mess stuff up. Same idea with these power saver things that come on so many PCs now. Always employ full power. You never want anything to change while Podium is UP — if only ’cause you never want anything like AutoUpdate to phone home and suck CPU and power or, even more important, you never want to have something kick in which just very likely might place a nasty pop or click on your track while recording the most amazing awesome solo you will ever play in your entire life. Green footprints and saving the planet by running a hobbled PC are for desk jobs, telemarketers, pencil pushers and internet bloggers. You are an engineer, producer and musician and your existence and respect depends on a top-notch system that does it right the first time every time (we all hope).

Gtrldy, a RESCAN? as in “clear cache and rescan” in a DAW such as REAPER? Not exactly. It’s not really needed in this system, because Podium handles all of this in its own unique manner. It never loses anything from its database. Once understood and set up to your liking, you’re good to go and can add or delete plugins at any time. Furthermore, Podium offers a few other VST/VSTi handling abilities that no other system I know of employs. (You’ll find a dropdown menu list of all device options of this sort at top on the right where your devices are shown.)

I’m still a Podium semi-newbie, and initially, I found the setup of my plugins a bit time-consuming but is paying great dividends now. Part of what took me longer was that I am a perfectionist in how I arrange features and devices in a fully user customizable DAW, and also, Podium inspired me to do a complete overhaul and re-organization of all my plugins and folders when I got using it. Add to that the fact that I didn’t really know exactly how I wanted them set up when I began and decided this as I got to work.

Basically, here is the deal: Podium will allow you have a custom plugin setup for each and every project you are doing if you so desire. However, I almost always set things up universally and globally, so I may never use this option. And there is a way to do this as well.

First of all, you let Podium find all your plugs by linking in all their residence folders in your program files. You do this in your Preferences. MY next step was to click to open properties of each and rename there any plugs that had long, goofy names or version numbers, etc., that I just didn’t need to see. My next step was to decide and customize all in’s and out’s for each one. I rarely need 16 MIDI outs on my plugins, so I cut down most to exactly what I’ll use (can always change these later, if needed). Then I brought together by dragging the few instruments, for example, that had self-installed into their own Program Files folders to my main instruments folders — Synths, Drums — whatever system you’ve created that works well for you. Did the very same for my effects — Guitar Stuff, Delays, Reverbs, Mastering Plugins, etc.

Once you have things exactly how you want them — with every dang plugin you’ve got! — this is your complete Big Database. POdium stores this as a .pod file in AppData. You want to go to Explore Setup Folder. There, you will want to save (or re-save) all this as PluginDatabase.pod.

There! You now have all your current goodies (I have a tonne of free ones, mainly) saved safely just the way you named and arranged them. You can always add/delete plugs later to be saved in individually customized arrangements in any project pod file, but the main Database will contain everything you’ve got. Think of it as your generic full collection I guess.

That ought to go a long way in getting you going. Setting all this up is sort of a tedious deal, but I’ll tell you, once you’ve customized to your liking practically everything about Podium, you’ve got your self one lean and powerful monster of a recording/editing system. You control it, not vice versa, like some other brands. Ultra-efficient, super-fast future setups of each project, awesome workflow (because it is YOUR perfect and suited workflow now).

And Another +1

On Podium we can only mimic this ability by, as stated above, using markers. By mimic I mean employing about a zillion markers to give the illusion of having this effect. That’s a tonne of work, obviously. I’ll probably never dabble in the world of classical music composition, but rock and pop compositions can benefit from its use as well. A couple of old Moody Blues songs immediately come to mind. Requiring the use of markers for this to “fake it” is like trying to chart point analysis in Calculus or Quantum Mechanics!

I’d love to see this feature maybe bundled together and included with full time stretching capabilities. I’d also like to be able to use tempo envelopes when placing beat slices — a complete warping package. I feel like I’m asking for way too much, but having full abilities with all three able to work together would be simply incredible.

bladerunner, thanks for posting this topic. I can only add a second voice here by saying I’ve had the exact same thing happen both times I’ve tested this renaming option, but I’ve been so busy and had much larger fish to fry — no time to figure out what the problem is. Eventually, I will need to do some serious renaming on several plugins’ parameters and presets. IIRC, I may have observed the same issue with renaming plugin presets but will have to recheck that.