OTHER HEADPHONE STATION TRICKS
Another drum trick where these stations are useful is in the mix. We set up a snare drum in a live
room without the rest of the kit. We place a pair of drum sticks about 4 inches apart across the rim. Then
we put an Auratone facing down on the sticks. We mic the bottom of the snare and the room. Then we
feed the original recorded snare into the Auratone. We mix the mics we have set up with the original snare
and smile. The Langevin station will drive the Auratone loud enough and you have control of level and
tone while you are setting up the snare acoustically. Besides you are probably all set up to feed the stations
easily and you don't need to drag in a power amp and a pile of adaptors. This trick works wonders on both
tired sounding snares and drum machines. No one will stop you from EQing, gating and automating this
once you have gone this far.
A similar mix trick is useful on some synths, guitars and vocals. Use your Cue system to send
some sound back into the studio and mic the room. If the room is live you have the instant live chamber.
You might even use the station's built in mic. If the studio is deader this trick may still yield some magic
character because you still get speaker and room sound. You can even drive it till it distorts but watch
out for the station overheating (it mutes) just as you lay the mix to DAT. Play around with delaying either
the send or returns. Delays from a few milliseconds to 60 milliseconds are normal. If the room is not too
live try adding some digital reverb to the sends. The room should add a touch of realistic stereo spread
to the digital reverb. Experiment if you have the time.
This hint is important. If you expect that you will be recording 5 musicians how many headphones
and cue stations should you have ? Probably at least 8 pairs of phones and maybe 10 or 12. Headphones
get abused in studios. Oprah could do a program on it. The phones get stepped on, the cords get yanked,
and the transducers burn out. Most studios have a few broken sets in a box or a box full of broken phones
that rarely seem to get attended to. Musicians usually avoid mentioning that they broke a set. All this adds
up to the occasional shock when you thought you had enough pairs. Unless you check each set before
the session, we guarantee the occasional nasty surprise. Do you have a spare headphone station for
emergencies? Did you remember the headphone needs in the control room? Most producers and
engineers like a method of hearing what the musicians are hearing. Some producers coaching vocalists
wear headphones in the control room and sing into a real mic with the vocalist in the studio. Sometimes
the vocalist is in the control room and everybody has to wear phones. All these methods work if you are
ready for them. One place a session can avoid at least one pair of headphones is when bass player or guitar
player play from the control room. Then you probably need real good set of big wall monitors and that's
a topic for another day.
During the mix, don't forget to set up a station and a pair of good or trustworthy headphones.
Because many record buyers only listen to phones this means you gotta check your mix on phones if you
care. You may be pleasantly surprised how useful they are when you need to set up a subtle effect and
the effect device is behind you and out of the sweet spot. Good phones help zoom in on some tricky
balances and layered effects. The Langevin station is great for these applications because it is easy to
MUTE when your not using your phones, it has the MONO, SIM and STEREO switch on the stereo
channels and you can check either side of a mix thru the mono inputs, and it has balanced inputs that are
probably wired to the patchbay by now. Because it has multiple inputs you can "cue up" tapes or samples
quite a bit easier and faster. Come to think of it, you might want a station in the machine room, the lounge,
and the office and the ......
