My review was first published on The Home Recording Show episode 161 with guest Sean Costello (ValhallaDSP). The discussion after the segment is equally geeky and entertaining.

Valhalla UberMod is a unique multitap delay and modulation plugin. The various algorithms allow from 2 to 32 modulated delay taps. Ubermod can be used to create lush choruses, tape and bucket brigade style echoes, reverbs and many strange other effects. Ubermod costs $50 and is available for OSX and Windows, VST, RTAS and AudioUnit; 64-bit ready.

After my gushing review of ValhallaRoom on The Home Recording Show # 147, I got in contact with the creator Sean Costello and dove head first into UberMod. I’ve been trying out Valhalla UberMod for over a month now, and it is surprisingly hard to get my thoughts on it written down.

UberMod looks simple but its really a very deep plugin. I spent a few evenings just getting used to how it works and trying things out. I eventually gave up trying to control it completely and just let it do it’s weird and wonderful things.

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double-neck guitar optional

Double tracking is a very common recording/production technique for almost any genre of music. When it comes to rhythm guitars, this technique is almost a standard method of recording with single tracking used only for solos.

This is also a technique that is often confusing for beginners.Double tracking simply means recording the same part twice and panning each to opposite sides. This creates a wide stereo spread based on the unique nuances in timing and dynamics of each performance. This is the guitarist playing a section of the song perfectly, then repeating it as closely as possible on a second track.

This isn’t the same as recording in stereo, using two mics, using a chorus effect or duplicating and delaying one side. Some of these techniques are ways of ‘faking’ or ‘automatic’ double tracking, but are simply no substitute for an expertly performed double track. There must be two separate performances for the effect to work.

How To double track guitars

1. Record mono rhythm guitar, with either a microphone on a real amp or virtual amp. This track would be panned center.
2. When a good take is achieved, and any punch ins are finished, go through the recorded track and tighten up any timing issues.
   Here’s how it sounds with the first guitar along with drums. The guitar is in the middle.

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   (warning heavy metal!)

3. After editing, pan this guitar (and any extra mics for this performance) to the left.
4. That was perfect, now play it again! Make a new track and pan it right.
5. Repeat steps 1 and 2 using the same guitar, pickup selection, amp, microphone and any other variables unchanged. Making a change will increase the stereo width but will often result in an unbalanced tone.
   Here’s the same part with the doubled guitars.

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This repeats for each section of the song and if there are multiple guitar parts written or two guitarists in the band, usually each will be double tracked. If there are two guitarists in the band, there could be some confusion. Guitarist 1 plays all his parts twice, guitarist 2 plays all his parts twice. In a simple song this would mean 4 tracks for the rhythm guitars. Often this gets up to 12 or 16 tracks pretty quickly. Guitar solos are usually right up the middle or ‘stereoized’ with other techniques to make them pop out.

You have to be careful playing the doubled part, if it’s too far off from the original it will make a unwanted ping-ponging effect especially in headphones.
Quad Tracking is exactly the same, but you record each part 4 times. Each take has to be perfectly in sync or it just sounds like a terrible mess.

Poor alternatives
So why can’t we just duplicate and delay/shift the recording a little for the same effect? Well, simply because it sounds like crap and I’ll show you.

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This is what happens when you copy the original mono recording, delay the copy by 20ms and pan each hard left and right.

Similarly, why not use a stereo chorus?

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Still sounds really bad compared to double tracking. I’m not saying don’t ever use Chorus, just don’t use as an alternative to the big wide powerful double-track sound.

I hope you have found this article useful.
Any questions? Let me know in the comments below.

This guest post comes from Barry Gardner, mastering engineer at Safe And Sound online mastering.

Equalization is an incredibly powerful tool used in virtually every area of audio production including music recording and mixing. A lot of people initially feel equalization is a complex process but I would like to explain it as simply as possible but embellished with enough technical information to make it useful and valuable. At it’s most basic implementation an equalizer could be described as a tone control such as that on a hi fi amplifier. On an amplifier there are just 2 tone controls, bass and treble, as you turn the knob in either direction you either get an increase or decrease in the amount of bass or treble in the music, this is known as altering the tone.
When thinking of eq it is useful to imagine a horizontal line with the audible audio spectrum running from low frequencies (left) to high (right). Adult humans can hear from around 25Hz to around 20kHz (best case scenario). An equalizer allows specific frequencies of the spectrum to be focused upon and amplified or attenuated (reduced). Continue Reading

The Scarlett 2i2 caught my attention right away. Compact, striking appearance and simple layout. I have recommended the interface to dozens of people.
While I appreciate the extra i/o my TC Impact Twin provides, its just too big and bulky for a mobile interface. At a third of the size of the Impact, and less than half the cost, the 2i2 jumped to the top of my gear wish list, and made the purchase last week.

This will be a fairly quick review, sort of a ‘first impressions’ look at the interface as I’ve only had it for a few days, but I don’t want to put off writing something about it.

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Nick Lewis is mastering engineer at online mastering studio Brighton Mastering. Check his music production blog for more tips, tricks and opinions.

5 Tips for DIY Mastering

As a mastering engineer, I would always encourage home recordists to send their music to a professional for mastering. Aside from finely tuned monitoring set ups, ultra-high-end equipment and the benefit of experience, a professional mastering engineer offers a valuable second opinion.

However, if budgets don’t allow or if you’re really set on doing it yourself – here are 5 tips for DIY mastering.

Essential Mastering Tools

Reference exhaustively

One of the most difficult things about mastering (and mixing for that matter) is maintaining objectivity. Your ears will always get used to what they’re hearing and if you’re bogged down in the same track you’ll very quickly find you can’t see the forest for the trees.

The solution? Rack up at least one similar track in your DAW project to constantly refer to and give yourself a reality check. You’ll never match it exactly but it’ll give you a good idea if you’re on the right track.

Check, check and check again

Unless you’ve dropped a cashbomb on your monitors, and crucially, your room acoustics, you’ll need to compensate for a less than perfect monitoring environment.

That means every time you think you’re done, burn it onto a CD, check on your hi-fi, check it in your car, on your iPod, round your mate’s place, anywhere you can think of. If you can’t depend on your studio set-up to reliably translate you need to check the long way in as many real world situations as you can.

If in doubt, take a break

If you’ve been at it for a while, been checking against your reference track(s) and checking on as many playback systems as you can find, but still can’t tell if it’s right – take a break.

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes, listening to it again is not the solution. Leave it for an hour, a day, a week even and then come back to it. You’ll find that things become a lot clearer. And it’s remarkable how much louder things will sound when you haven’t been listening to them for hours on end.

Give the limiter an easy ride

One of the most common mistakes in DIY mastering is relying too much on the limiter. Brickwall limiters and loudness maximisers are not a magic bullet – they will not give you the loudness you’re after by themselves. Or at least, not in a pleasant way.

Achieving commercial loudness is by and large a matter of EQ, gentle compression, possibly some light distortion/harmonic excitement and finally the limiter. A good rule of thumb is to let the limiter impose no more than 3dB of gain reduction. In practice though, many mastering engineers use much less.

Leave the multi-band alone

Another common misconception about modern mastering is that multi-band compressors are essential. In actual fact, unless you have a good reason for doing so, you’re likely to do more harm than good with multi-band processing.

Break out your best broadband bus compressor and leave the multi-band for specific tasks. As long as your mix is good enough, you won’t even need to think about multi-band compression.

Multi-band processors are most commonly used by professional mastering engineers to target specific problems e.g. de-essing or taming the bass. Rarely are all bands used, and even rarer is using them for bus compression.

Mastering is about making a big change through a series of small changes. If you find yourself making radical changes with one processor, chances are you’re doing too much.

Nick Lewis is mastering engineer at online mastering studio Brighton Mastering. Check his music production blog for more tips, tricks and opinions.

Whenever I’m stuck in a project and don’t know how to continue I take a few minutes to try something different and generally opposite of what has already been done.

This could be making the long lush reverb really short, or running the vocals through all my guitar pedals at once, or making the drums really thin and lo-fi, or one of my favourites – copying and reversing a sound.

weird processing chain for a synth

Sometimes this little diversion from routine results in something cool that helps make the mix special or leads me to 2-3 other ideas and gets things exciting again.

If it doesn’t work, then I can feel better knowing that my first instinct was probably the right path already and I just needed a break.

This doesn’t have to involve effects either, changing to a different set of monitors, or headphones and continuing for a while this way can really help too.

Give it a try in your next mix.