Not any more. We were doing ok, mixing with the right people and playing some good gigs, but the singers ego kinda became a problem and that brought an end to it. Shame really, we played to 15,000 people in Coopers Field Cardiff with Snow Patrol, did a gig in London with Brett Anderson from Suede, played Reading Uni with The Magic Numbers and Zane Lowe and a few other great shows. We still have stuff on Spotify and iTunes - have a listen if you have time : There's some phone stuff on youtube as well I think.
From what I've heard of your music you could have easily been commercially successful. Fine margins I guess. Thanks for posting. Are still playing with anyone else? Hope you don't mind me asking but I think you posted previously you work professionally in audio? I need someone to explain compression to me I just can't get my head around it. I'm currently remixing an album I did years ago (just for fun, no delusions of grandeur!). EQing is blatantly obvious. Sidechain compression (kick/bass) I get, I can hear it but general compression is befuddling me! I've watched a ton of Youtube video but it's not helping. My DAW is Mixbus, by the way.
Compression is primarily used to even out the peaks so to speak. You set a threshold, and any signal above that level is 'squashed' down. The amount it's squashed down by is set by the ratio control. You can use it to get more energy to a mix or stop distortion of the signal. Anything over 0dB is theoretically distortion although it may not be evident, so if you have a spiky guitar part for example where the loudest part is going +3dB but the rest of the part is say -9dB , without a compressor you could reduce the input gain by -3dB to avoid the loud part going above 0dB. However the knock on effect is that the quiet part has now also dropped by 3dB down to -12dB, which may end up making the part sound weak and lacklustre. The difference in levels between the loud part(+3dB) and the quieter part(-9dB) is 12dB. If instead you put a compressor across it, with the threshold set at -6dB and a ratio of maybe 3:1, every time the signal goes above that threshold (-6dB) the signal above will be divided by 3. (the ratio). So the loud part was +3dB - which is 9dB more than the threshold chosen (-6db). So the 9dB divided by the ratio (3:1) is 3dB. That 3dB is added to the level of the threshold - the threshold was -6dB, but after compression the level of the signal will be -3dB. So now the guitar part at it's loudest actually should be -3dB. The quieter part should not trigger the compressor as it's level (-9dB) is below the threshold. The difference in levels between the loud part(-3dB) and the quieter part(-9dB) is now 6dB - half of what the uncompressed signals were. It's not just a level thing, compression doesn't just reduce the volume like pulling a fader down, it manages to keep the energy in the signal. I'm not familiar with Mixbus sorry, but most compressors have a very graphic user interface these days so you can easily see what each control is doing (threshold, ratio, attack, knee, release). Just have a play with the settings and listen with your ears not the numbers on the screen. If it sounds good to you then it is. Hope I haven't bored you with the theory, especially as I never use the maths anymore - I just look at the meters and adjust until I like what I'm hearing. If you have any more questions - feel free to ask - I'm happy to help if I can.
Excellent That makes sense, now I have a reference point to play with. Mixbus is a proprietry fork of the open source Ardour. It's from Harrison Consoles and has their DSP built in (they contribute back upstream and support Ardour, so I like that). Out of the box every track has their EQ, leveler/compressor/limiter built in. You can of course add any other plugin you want (and I do) but I find I can to do a quick mix with all the built in stuff and get something sounding good fairly quickly (especially as I'm currently exporting all my old stuff from Cubase3 inside a WinXP Virtualbox container - it's a tricky process!) There's also their "Tape Saturation Drive" built into the dedicated buses and the master strip, which I believe adds some kind of compression (if you use it). I tried Reaper and Bitwig but couldn't get along with them. I don't have the patience I once had so Mixbus is nice from my perspective. I'm on Linux, so something like ProTools isn't an option anyway. Certainly haven't bored me (maybe some others reading ), I love this stuff, fascinating. Thanks very much, that's been a great help. I totally agree with you about not getting obsessed with the GUI and use your ears. My hearing isn't perfect by any means but it's fun trying.
