Dear Sirs,
This question may have been asked before, and possibly you do not wish
to answer it precisely.
I listen to your podcast regularly, and both your spoken vocals
sound really great to my ears. Very clear, crisp and yet smooth sound.
Could you give a general idea of the soundchain you use for the podcast?
For instance LD condenser as opposed to smaller types, use
of a hardware studio preamp versus audio to DAW interface.
In any case the podcast is great, thanks for all the answers
and useful tips you bring.
Best regards,
Patrick

The signal chain varies from time to time, depending on what we have in to review and what PW has been doing in his studio previously! But there's nothing exotic or expensive involved.

We generally use some cheap capacitor stage vocal mics (LD D1011) with additional metal pop screens in front, although for the last podcast we used a couple of much more expensive large diaphragm capacitor mics because they were already set up following a music session. We record in PW's control room with his Mac and hard drives sat on the desk quietly whirring away...

The mics are connected to a M-audio profire 2626 preamp/interface, with the gain set to peak to about -10dBFS in Logic, which is used as the recorder. We record the two mics to separate tracks completely flat -- no EQ or dynamics. The recording typically takes an hour or so, depending on how many cockups we make!

After the recording I take a stereo audio file away on a USB flashdrive (PW on one channel, me on the other) and edit the podcast in SADiE. We could use any editor, but SADiE is ideally suited for this kind of work and I know it very well, which means I can complete the editing in a couple of hours.

I edit the the core voice recording as a stereo file to remove any fluffs, mistakes and so on, organise the various sections into the right order and edit for length. I then split the stereo track into two separate mono tracks and delete all the sections where one of us isn't talking because this effectively removes 3dB of room noise. I also adjust the relative levels of each clip at this stage to achieve a roughly consistent balance. I then insert any contibutions from my SOS colleagues and drop all the intro/outro music, stings and beds into place.

At this stage I have two tracks for PW and my voices, one or two tracks for other contibutors, and two stereo tracks, one for the beds and another for the stings. The stereo tracks are routed directly to the virtual mixer output bus, while the voice tracks are either grouped and routed through a VST bus compressor (I like the UAD Neve 33609 for this), or I put individual VST compressors on each voice (usually the UAD LA2A). I also have a mastering limiter on the final output bus (either SADiE's own or the UAD precision limiter) set to stop anything from exceeding -2dBFS... but it very rarely triggers!). I tend to mix while metering on Z-plane's PPMulator, set with PPM4 = -12dBFS, and I peak the mix to PPM6 in traditional BBC style!

I then tweak the balance and edits as necessary and export the finished mix as both a WAV for archiving and an MP3 for the web.

It's very rare that I EQ anything, and the dynamics processing is extremely modest -- never more than 4dB of gain reduction. So basically, it's appropriate mics placed appropriately, in an appropriate acoustic space... It's not really what you have so much as how you use it!

hugh

Hello Hugh,

Thank you so much for answering, and for all the precisions you give on the whole process.
I am sorry not to have responded before this, I was taken up with a deadline.

The choice of microphones is amazing, it proves you don't need a U87 or even a large diaphragm condenser mic for smooth, clean vocals. Thanks for the level settings on recording also, that's really interesting.

Following Jack Ruston's advice given as an answer to a previous post I have solved all clipping problems with my Shure SM 58. It was definitely the output of what I use as a preamp which was sending a far too strong signal to he line input of my soundcard.

What you say here confirms the minimum of 10 dB of headroom over the peak, I was so way off... It's so much more pleasant to work with tracks that stay away from the red and at the most border on yellow on the vu meter. The sound breathes some much better and mixing becomes far more natural.

Thank also for the Vu-meter info at mastering and the specific BBC metering method.

Unfortunately have little I can share to the readers in return.
But I do have a little EQ setting I came up with recently on the default ReaEQ plugin in Reaper, which I find cleans a lot of the mud off a Shure SM 58 vocal and makes it sound almost crisp... Almost At least it fits better into a mix, even without reverb or delay.
I have made window screenshots which display the settings for each of the four bands, here:
http://imageshack.us/g/580/58band4.jpg/

Many thanks again for your time and for all the knowledge you share. I have been reading Sound On Sound for a few years, and there's just no publication like it as far as I know. Whether it be in the magazine, on the site or here on the forum, I always learn something valuable that helps me understand recording better.

Best regards,

--------------------
Patrick
http://soundcloud.com/pnl-2/drizzle