How to create high volume vocals on iPad

At your own risk.


70's mono cassette recorders can do many things that modern equipment can't, like instantaneous peak limiting (analog recorders in general can do this) etc.


Another thing that those mono cassette recorders can do is playing with their speaker the original signal in real time. If one is recording with a microphone and is not careful feedback can occur as in a live concert. And if rec had been been pressed the feedback sound is recorded too.


Positive feedback may not lead to oscilation if the volume is reduced but it's beautiful effect can now be heard. It was an important ingredient of the Wall of Sound - Phil Spector.


When a microphone prepreamp is connected to the iPad's headphone-mic socket unfortunately the iPad speaker is disabled.


The way round this is to connect a speaker to the headphone socket and enable the monitoring option.


It will not sound very loud but it may be adequate and it may be decided not to connect an external power amplifier or connecting a high quality class A (electrons flowing in the electronic amplifying device all the time) amplifier. A single ended class A electron tube or transistor amplifier for example using just one electron tube or one transistor.


As we sing to the mic because of the digital circuitry there is a delay of a few milliseconds for the sound to appear to the speaker. There are also a few milliseconds for the acoustic signal from the speaker to come back to the microphone (due to the finite speed of sound).


If we record in a live area there is reverb fed back. In fact it is echo room or echo chamber reverb.


And the send to reverb is delayed as explained above.


And once the reverb picked by the mic comes afterwards out of the speaker it is acoustically fed back to the reverb chamber.


With digital latency delay again.


This is what Phil Spector was doing.


Delaying what was going to the chamber by analog tape delay. And the output from the chamber back to the tape delay back to the chamber creating a loop. The feedback was controlled before oscillation occurred. In our case the volume control of the iPad should control this.


One can play with microphone speaker distance, indoors or outdoors etc.


A setup could be as follows:


Omnidirectional moving coil mic such as Beyer M55 or Sony F-96 - Pleiades K117 cable prepreamp - iPad - Garagband - a full range speaker connected to the other pins of the headphone socket (bridging stereo to mono) - the recoding room - acoustic sound back to microphone


There is artificial double tracking involved (ADT). The microphone hears you singing and at a few milliseconds later it hears you as processed by the room and the rest of the setup.


Reference:


http://tapeop.com/interviews/64/bones-howe/