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A friend of mine is a professional mix engineer in NYC. He's worked with several large artists, you've probably heard of. He strongly believes in setting numeri
by robbyt 10y ago
A friend of mine is a professional mix engineer in NYC. He's worked with several large artists, you've probably heard of. He strongly believes in setting numerically interesting values for things like eq, gain reduction, song length, delay time in ms, etc.
- seandougall 10y agoA not-insubstantial part of the engineer's job is to impress the artists. Mastering engineers even more so.
- ptaipale 10y agoDirectional audio cables are another example of such "making impressions" business. (Technically nonsense, of course.)
- hexane360 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/670/ https://xkcd.com/670/ I would take it a step further. I'd make up my own units based on seemingly natural things and then tune to numerically interesting values of those. "This next song's beat is 432 times faster than a cricket chirping at 50 degrees C."
- mikey_p 10y agoA lot of those are significant though, EQ maintains relationship to pitch and tone, delay is directly related to rhythm, etc. The main issue is that most of these are relative to inputs, etc, with a few exceptions. Edit: An exception would be trying to 'fatten' the sound of an acoustic guitar and using a 25-35ms delay, which puts it close enough that it's not perceivable as a delay, but will provide a noticeable effect on the tone of the guitar.
- anigbrowl 10y agoLike I said, I try to exploit interesting numerical properties all the time. I really am a mystic, I've made major life decisions based on a tarot reading and am glad I did so as such methods seem to work better for me than purely analytical ones. On the other hand, I'm analytical enough to not want to bullshit people with unreproducible results.