Ross wrote:The workshop at D4 page is very imressive. I'm interesting how to do it itself?
There are so many parameters that changed tembre in different directions, it's seems impossible to find proper settings by trial and errors method. Some settings are pretty intuitive, e.g. hammer hardness affects brilliance (from soft to hard). But mic settings (number of mics, placements, delays, blabla..), spectrum profile and some other parameters are non-intuitive: they change sound, but it's impoissible to predict how timbre will changed.
So, my question is: Are there any guidelines to change sound in more predictable way? Especially mic settings and spectrum profile.
Thank you Ross, I'm glad you like the workshop.
Regarding guidelines, I confess it is difficult to describe a detailed path, and as I guess it often happens in audio engineering, some intuition is involved. However, I would like to highlight here one point mentioned in the introduction: "[...] the most important being the order in which the settings are applied."
This is indeed very important, for example:
the choice of preset comes first, the idea being to start as close as possible to the target sound, hence to minimize the amount of work. Do not hesitate taking some time for this first step, you might spare a lot of time in the next steps,
it would make no sense to do some voicing and after to move the mics. The mic position has a dramatic influence on the sound, this is why all three workshops start with mic settings before any else (apart the choice of preset). Note that you don't want necessarily to move the mics, but maybe only change the stereo width, or the mic type, or the levels and delays in the mix matrix.
Do have a try by following the suggested path, and if you find anything unclear regarding the order, don't hesitate asking.
Regarding non-intuitive things like spectrum, I think the best is really to listen carefully to what happens when you augment or reduce individual overtones. After a reasonable time of experimentation, you will have some intuition of what happens when modifying say the first 8 overtones. You can work either by playing yourself at each change, or by listening to a given MIDI file which gives you a better insurance to reproduce exactly the same sequence of notes (velocity, pedals, etc.).
