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oldintomusic

New member
Hello,
So I have iPad 10 with n-tracks daw and volt 276 interface with 2 condenser microphones and studio monitors presonus
So how can I get my monitors to give me an original sound meaning the sound I get in my studio is not the same sound I get in my car or an out side speaker. It’s all ways off. Is there any way to accomplish this?
 
Welcome to how audio works.

What is ‘real’? Have you not noticed that the same sound, is different when you move location. Your guitar played outside, sounds different from in your bathroom, and different from in your car? Acoustics works quite strangely. Outside, the sound from your guitar gets captured by your ears with no reflections of any kind, assuming you are in a field! Enclosed within a room or other space, you get reflections at some frequencies, and worse, maybe big chunks of sound absorbed by things in the space. In a cathedral, every strum of your guitar bounces off all the hard surfaces and one guitar arrives at your ears in maybe hundreds of directions, separated in time, by distance. Studio monitors try hard to put equal amounts of energy into sound at all frequencies. Car speakers might emphasise the bass and the high end and not bother with the stuff in the middle. Rap might sound great and a symphony orchestra might sound rubbish!

The answer to your question is that you need experience and perhaps different speaker systems that mimic your car’s system. That way you can assess better what you need to do to get better car mixes. BUT then your mixes will sound awful on others. A studio that specialises in certain styles may well have a system tuned to support that style, but most are tuned to sound the most accurate, so you really know what is in your music. Then you modify that for people in cars. Lots of my music is made for playing in theatres. My studio does not sound big, and does not have huge sub bass speakers, so my mixes have to be a bit weird to make them sound good in a venue. Most times I adjust correctly, but sometimes I still fail.
 
Inside a car is perhaps THE most unnatural acoustic place to be! A very small volume of air inside a pretty soundproof* skin.
I would guess some of the really high end car makers engineer speakers or/and EQ the system to emulate to a degree the "average living room" but likely none that most of us here can afford!

Your ear/brain system makes all spaces sound very similar. Yes, you notice going from street to swimming bath but very quickly you "tune out" the reflections. But microphones are dumb. They can only capture what is there and played back in another place WILL be weird.

*Unless of course you are "Subaru Man" when you have your windows open to let the boom out and to show the world what a tw*t you are!
Dave.
 
It's not just the spaces that make things sound different. As much as people go on about differences in amps, preamps, interfaces etc, I have found that the biggest variations come from two elements, and they are at both ends of the signal chain.

Microphones and speakers convert energy from one form to another, and are inherently nonlinear. IF you put 10 speakers in a room and flip between them, they will ALL sound different. I discovered this back in the early 70s when I first started to putting together a stereo system. EPI100s sounded totally different from Marantz 5s. The Akais sounded different from the Utahs. They were all 8" 2way speakers and they sounded different. It's the same as with people's voices. You don't sound like me, I don't sound like Billy Joel or Elton John.

To expect your studio to sound like your car or your outdoor speaker is unreasonable. If your studio speaker puts out sound at 40Hz and your car poops out at 60, you lose half and octave of sound. A bluetooth speaker might not even get 100Hz. The only way to get them to sound close it to eliminate everything from 100Hz down.
 
I have my primary 5" monitors at my computer workstation and I have a couple of different blue tooth speakers, and headphones that I can switch with my Drawmer monitor controller. I also have several different stereo systems that I use and other blue tooth speakers, earbuds, cars, etc. Since I don't have a good space, I listen in a wide variety of spaces and systems and use reference tracks. When it sounds good (or not bad) on all, I call it done. At that point I send it to friends or put it on here for critique.

A side note. If you have a song or two done by a professional artist that you like, try to duplicate the sound. I recorded a song I like, and tried to sound exactly like the artist. That helped me learn to better judge music when using a reference track. When you are preforming the same song as the reference, there's no confusion about the differences in performances and they sound different. Since they are the same song, it's easier to focus on why they sound different. In the future, you will become better at judging the overall sounds and details.
 
this is great information. All you guys are correct every time I change scenery indoors
Outdoors, car etc the sound coming from speakers is always different . I will try to put all this great information into use.
 
ecc83 said:
*Unless of course you are "Subaru Man" when you have your windows open to let the boom out and to show the world what a tw*t you are!
Click to expand...
My neighbour had a Subaru, with a big wing on the back. Useless on our roads of course.
 
Here’s another sound question, so again im using volt 276 audio interface with n-tracks and iPad 10 on iPad should the audio setting be on mono or stereo? Sorry if is a silly question im new at this.
 
oldintomusic said:
Here’s another sound question, so again im using volt 276 audio interface with n-tracks and iPad 10 on iPad should the audio setting be on mono or stereo? Sorry if is a silly question im new at this.
Click to expand...
Not silly at all, newbs often get confused with this. I don't have an iPad so I shall assume it works like a computer with an interface?
The Volt has two inputs so IF you connect two say mics you will have a choice. You can setup a stereo pair of tracks where they will be treated to any adjustments, levels, reverb etc together or two mono tracks that can be modified independently .

If you just plug into one input you just get one track left or right. Some software (DAW) allows you to set a single input as "double mono" e.g. Samplitude. They call it "mono mix". Things like USB mics almost always record mono to both tracks.

What "stereo" sound actually IS is a much deeper question!
 
Yea, makes sense. My usual set up is two mics. One for guitar and one for vocals
One track as it’s a live recording. I just got back into this music game after 25 years
A lot has changed so I’m trying to figure out. Thank you
 
For me, it depends entirely on the source. When you're recording an ensemble and you want a stereo recording, it's two mics into individual channels, each one a mono channel. You then mix and balance to get the spacing, or sound field you want. An acoustic guitar should be a relatively narrow source, but you might use two mics at different positions to capture different tones of the guitar. Then you blend the two into a mono signal to achieve a natural sound.

I've also use a Mid/Side arrangement on a guitar, which gave me a more realistic "guitar in a room" sound. A voice would be a complete mono track. A drum kit might require 8 mics if you close mic each drum and two overheads. Then they get balanced into a stereo image. The width can be narrow or wide. High hat on the right, floor tom on the left, snare and kick in the middle. Cymbals spread left and right.

On one track, I had 4 mics set up for my acoustic, a M/S and one on the neck, one by the lower part of the body. If you don't know what you want, you try to capture a couple of perspectives and then choose which you prefer.

I've worked with this fellow a few times and he just uses his two mics and his camera. It'a a very basic setup.

 
All great information and ideas. I only have two inputs and two microphones. So what you are saying is record one mic left one track second track right side microphone, right?
 
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