Recording sounds rubbish on the radio

[Kousteau]

Hey,

Hoping someone might be able to offer some advice on this...

I record at home, recording in mono and mixing down in stereo, but when I recently had a song played on local radio, certain elements of the mix (most notably a violin track that had been panned to the right) didn't come through at all.

Could just be me being dense, but how can I fix this? Would a mono mixdown be a solution for radio?

 

[Jim Lad]

You need 2 radios!!

Just kidding.
Hey!
It sounds like the problem originates in the radio station.
Is it community radio?

 

[Kousteau]

haha!

Well, it's BBC local radio, if that makes any difference...

 

[Jim Lad]

Not really.
BBC local could be running on low budget and dedicated but inexperienced staff.
Are you happy with the results on your CD?
Meaning, the stereo is fine?
If so, they buggered it up.

 

[Kousteau]

Yeah, the CD sounds fine, so I thought it was odd it sounded so bad on t'wireless. It did make me doubt my recording know-how, and make me think twice about sending any more stuff to them.

Anyway, thanks Jim Lad!

 

[mattr]

Congrats on the airplay, even if you weren't happy with how it sounded Was that through BBC introducing, or did you approach the station directly?

Have you listened to the song before through the speakers / setup that you use for the radio? Are you sure its not just that it doesn't translate well on those speakers, and that you would meet the same result if you listened to the song on a CD on them?

Is the radio station broadcasting in mono? Are you listening on a mono radio (some of the small tabletop ones only have one speaker)?

The station also probably ran it through a limiter during broadcast, which might have something to do with it.

Next set of questions are more broad... how do you check mixes before you're happy with them? How many different playback setups do you test them on? What is your monitoring chain like? Were you confident that this mix would sound good on the radio?

It was probably just a combination of many factors (many out of your control) that led to it, but to be honest I'm sure no-one listening thought any worse of it because they didn't hear a part that they didn't know was there Most people will be listening to the radio in their car or as background music whilst doing something else at home anyway, so they'll be enjoying the song as a whole and won't be bale to hear (or won't be listening to) the smaller details.

 

[Kousteau]

Hey, thanks for that.

>Was that through BBC introducing, or did you approach the station directly?

It was through Introducing, yup. Hoping to get a spin on 6Music, but just achieved local radio status so far

>Have you listened to the song before through the speakers / setup that you use for the radio? Are you sure its not just that it doesn't translate well on those speakers, and that you would meet the same result if you listened to the song on a CD on them?

I listen to the radio through my PC, and the CD (and MP3) of the song sounds fine on this system.

>Is the radio station broadcasting in mono?

No idea I'm afraid...

>The station also probably ran it through a limiter during broadcast, which might have something to do with it.

Yeah... this was something that had occurred to me, but it was just annoying that everything else broadcast on the show sounded normal (presumably)...

>How many different playback setups do you test them on?

I test them on pretty much anything and everything I can lay my hands on - stereos, MP3 players, car hi-fi etc

>Were you confident that this mix would sound good on the radio?

As confident as I could be, yup. But I guess this is why I wanted to throw the question out to you folks here who are more likely to have ideas about what might and might not work in this respect. When mixing down, are there additional factors to bear in mind in terms of potential radio play? I mean, my music isn't 'polished'-sounding, very much falling into the DIY-indie scheme of things, but I'd like to think it's recorded to a decent standard that hopefully comes across on whatever medium it's played back on.

>but to be honest I'm sure no-one listening thought any worse of it because they didn't hear a part that they didn't know was there

Haha! Yeah, you're almost certainly right!

 

[mixsit]

>Is the radio station broadcasting in mono?

No idea I'm afraid...

Every once in a while over here in the States you hear a station where one side of the track is missing -could be the case here.
But what about in general- does any of the music they play come out stereo?
You know, stereo.. Like when ya listen to it?

 

[Kousteau]

Yeah, everything else generally appears to come out in stereo. Maybe they just had a minor blip....

 

[moresound]

How did you send the tracks to the station?

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Not really.
BBC local could be running on low budget and dedicated but inexperienced staff.
Are you happy with the results on your CD?
Meaning, the stereo is fine?
If so, they buggered it up.

It'd bet strongly on this. Local, smaller radio stations are notorious these days for not having any staff that actually jockeys their signal with any quality.

G.

 

[mattr]

The local BBC radio stations are generally very well run. By 'local', they usually cover either a city or an entire county or so. They're big enough to have teams of people, rather than just one or two presenters running the whole show. Apart from the inevitable smashing into a limiter that occurs with most radio stations, I shouldn't think was overall a huge problem

 

[Keyster]

I've heard songs like 'Eleanor Rigby' (amongst others) sans most of the vocals on Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin Radio) here in the UK, if that's any comfort.

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

The local BBC radio stations are generally very well run. By 'local', they usually cover either a city or an entire county or so. They're big enough to have teams of people, rather than just one or two presenters running the whole show. Apart from the inevitable smashing into a limiter that occurs with most radio stations, I shouldn't think was overall a huge problem

While I don't doubt that may be true, I can't think of a single good reason why a song that sounds perfectly good on CD should not also sound perfectly good on the radio - especially in the area of dropping an instrument - unless there's something goofy going on at the radio end of it.

One possibility would be if the station were broadcasting mono, and there were either phasing issues or some masking going on. The same could happen if the radio on which he listened were a mono playback radio. But it sounds like the OP has already eliminated those possibilities.

It's possible something just temporarily sneaked by the boys at the station, like switching from player #1 to player #2 and the right channel lead from player #2 was temporarily loose or something.

One test would be if the OP could somehow get a second airplay to happen, either on that station or another. It would not definitively track down the problem, but if the problem did not repeat itself, that would probably indicate a temporary glitch at the station. And, OTOH, if he cannot or does not get any more airplay, then it's an academic question .

G.

 

[ez_willis]

not reading all this, but am radio=mono. fm radio=squashed to hell.

 

[XLR]

when I recently had a song played on local radio, certain elements of the mix (most notably a violin track that had been panned to the right) didn't come through at all.

I had a similar, though less severe, experience with FM radio. Solo guitar... CD was close mic'd in wide AB, and had a distinct left/right difference. On one local FM station, everything below around 1 kHz was completely mono, and the highs were extremely wide in a different way than the original CD. I've read that it's common for FM stations' multiband processing to mono-ize parts of the spectrum and widen others. I'd make sure than any mix you think might be on FM radio have good mono-compatibility. With a complex mix that wasn't mono compatible it would be easy for things to get weirdly filtered if processed as mentioned above. And for AM radio of course, it's gotta be mono compatible 'cause it's mono only, as has already been said.

 

[Jim Lad]

A couple of things to add.
Did you normalize your CD?
and
Very often, the smaller shows are put together in a side studio and the product handed to the station management for airing.
Accidents do happen.
also
Most commercial music is compressed within an inch of its life as are the airwaves.
In your case, it looks like one side of your recording was missing.
That's why someone asked what format you gave them the music on.
All of this is extremely disconcerting f or you but as long as you can play your music alongside similar albums, to your satisfaction then I'll say "Human error".

 

[Kousteau]

How did you send the tracks to the station?"

Via the BBC Introducing Uploader: http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/introducing/uploader/

It then gets listened to by various people from local BBC stations, and if you're lucky might end up on Huw Stephens/Tom Robinson etc shows.

Alternatively, stations' websites usually have a postal addy (certainly BBC Humber does), and so sending stuff directly to a show producer is a good move too.

I've heard songs like 'Eleanor Rigby' (amongst others) sans most of the vocals on Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin Radio) here in the UK, if that's any comfort.

Haha!

One test would be if the OP could somehow get a second airplay to happen, either on that station or another. It would not definitively track down the problem, but if the problem did not repeat itself, that would probably indicate a temporary glitch at the station. And, OTOH, if he cannot or does not get any more airplay, then it's an academic question .

Sadly I'm not sure there's a way of guaranteeing that!

With a complex mix that wasn't mono compatible it would be easy for things to get weirdly filtered if processed as mentioned above. And for AM radio of course, it's gotta be mono compatible 'cause it's mono only, as has already been said.

Interesting... can you clarify what you mean by 'mono compatible'? I think this might have been what I was initially wondering (although possibly didn't articulate it) - do you mean mixing down to a mono master rather than stereo?

A couple of things to add.
Did you normalize your CD?

All of this is extremely disconcerting f or you but as long as you can play your music alongside similar albums, to your satisfaction then I'll say "Human error".

Normalizing? Well, the CD was mastered by a pro, so I'm guessing so.

I'm just finishing some new material, and so will probably end up sending some tracks to the same station. That may well test the theories once and for all...

 

[XLR]

... can you clarify what you mean by 'mono compatible'? I think this might have been what I was initially wondering (although possibly didn't articulate it) - do you mean mixing down to a mono master rather than stereo?...

Mono-compatibility means a stereo file being able to be summed to mono without problems. As you're mixing, just hit the mono switch on the mix bus occasionally to check how it sounds.

Let me add that it wouldn't have to be a complex mix, as I worded it in your quote, to be drastically affected by the comb filtering that can happen to non-mono compatible stereo files that get mono-ized. Even a solo guitar could be messed up totally if two mics were set up just right (or wrong), then summed.

A simple way to hear mono compatibility is to record a solo acoustic guitar with an XY stereo mic configuration. Record each mic to a separate file. During playback, first listen with one mic panned hard left while the other's hard right. Then pan them both center. If you used an exactly positioned XY config, there'll be no loss of sonority in mono - no comb filtering causing thinness, volume reduction or weird EQ balance problems that weren't there in the stereo playback. You just lose the stereo image. So those two mic'd tracks are highly mono compatible. Now move one of the mic's a little further from the guitar than the other mic is. Record and listen back as above. When you have the mic's panned hard L/R during playback, you probably won't notice any difference compared to the previous take. When you pan to center, you can get some very weird sounding comb filtering - thin, phasy, etc. The worse it is, the less mono compatible the two mic'd files are. If you get the further mic set just right, the guitar can practically disappear.

Even simpler, just take any mono file, duplicate it, put one instance of the file panned hard R and the other hard L. Then invert the polarity (also often called phase) on just one of them. Listen with the panning hard L and R. It'll sound OK. Then pan both to center. It'll totally disappear. And it can be interesting to play with the comb filtering... flip the polarity back to normal on that one file, then slide just one of the files a few milliseconds one way or the other in your multitrack mixing app. It'll change the sound, a little or a lot, when you pan the files to center, depending on exactly where they're positioned in time relative to one another. If you zoom in closely on the waveforms it's an interesting physics lesson on phase coherence.