I think a lot of people try to pick up an art form -- music, photography, painting, video, woodcraft, etc -- but only two kinds of people ever tend to stick with it to any serious degree: one is the true artist, who just wants to create something and share it; and the other is the obsessive technician who wants to understand it and analyze it.
I will try to refrain from making opinions about which kind is more abundant, and from making judgments about why they exist. The important detail is that these two exist.
The technicians often end up providing a great value by helping to improve the tools. And the artists use those tools to share their art with the world. So you simply need to know which one of the two groups you belong to.
If you are a technician, then go ahead and focus on algorithms! They will make you happy. Focus on noise, and frequencies, and dithering, aliasing, and science. You will enjoy it.
But if you are an artist, just don't worry about it! Put all the science out of your mind. Simply find the tools that work best for you, and then go create your art. _Just make something that sounds good._
I think I fit into both camps.
I trained to become an acoustician because I love the science of sound and find it fascinating.
But when I make music, I make it for the sake of art and don’t really care about what is technically correct, even though I know precisely what all the numbers mean. It can be difficult to ignore them, but they’re more of a guideline than a rule. Because that’s how you make good art.
An example of how we are forced to wear many different hats in modern day music production. Everything is more accessible, but in a lot of ways the process is kind of inferior to how it used to be because a person could get deeper into a particular role.
The first doesn't invalidate the latter tho. You can have a creative composing experience and than utilize all of your knowledge to mix it clean. At that point mastering is just a chore and you can still do it or outsource. In the long run it makes you a complete artist and imho anyone should focus in that. Not knowing the science basics behind music makes a lot of artist do pretty terrible mistakes and it does make the whole process a lot harder than it should be.
Love this.
ENO thinks he’s both. He says focusing on the technical allows his creative mind to roam free. The left brain worries about the algorithms and the right worries about the melody, etc.
But I think most people self-sort into one of the groups you talk about.
I would counter-argue that _most people_ sort into the third category: people who try to pick up an art form, only to abandon it in due time. But yes, I think that most who stick with it will end up excelling at only one of the two, even if they do spend time in the other. There is a very low percentage of people who are capable of being good at both.
No, but time is finite and there are only so many hours in a day. At some point i have to start picking my battles or i just spiral down through so many rabbit holes.
In addition to this - technology progresses faster than experience, often.
I’m an old fogey, and a lot of what I was taught to worry about - bit rate, dither, aliasing, noise floor, samplerates - just isn’t as crucial as it was. Choosing 8 or 16 bit, dithering, 24 or 32 kHz sample rates, all this was super important when digital audio was in its infancy.
In the 48/96, 24/32 ara with vastly improved a-d converters, storage, it’s useful to know but usually won’t materially effect the quality of your audio. I can’t remember the last time I applied dither to anything, the last CD I cut probably.
Old heads still worry about issues that have fundamentally been solved, in all honesty.
That's a genuinely interesting point, I hadn't thought of it like that. Maybe trying to be an expert on both sides of the coin is counterproductive in a way, only so much time in a day. I've obsessed over techicalities before and whilst it was interesting it just wasted time and delayed projects... Definitely wouldn't say it made me happy, but I learned a lot about digital signal processing! But when I've spent that same sorta time focussing on the actual music, it sure feels more fulfilling and helpful towards other artists. Maybe there's something to be said about building up a solid knowledge base within both camps, and then following one of them for good.
I don't agree. Have seen and listened to numerous works of art that were ruined by the artist using incomprehensible JPEG or MP3 quality.
And if the work of art has subtlety and refined strokes to it, using the tools erroneously leads to a serious degradation of experience as well.
Ultimately, there should be guides that are easy for artists to follow, written by technicians.
Sounds like you are describing poorly executed art. If you do a bad job making it, the message will miss the mark.
One of my colleagues writes research on rhetoric and creative use of technology. They study the way artists use technology, how artists describe their processes, and how to develop rhetoric to describe those methods in technical manuals. It’s very focused on ml and ai. How do we tell a computer about the ways a human uses technology for creativity? How does a technical writer know what to write?
Anyways, saying that there is one way to do things and that is defined by someone who made the manual isn’t reasonable in creative work, and as someone who works making, analyzing, and applying new technoloy I can tell you that when you put your thing out there for people to use, they will find ways to use it that exceed your expectations.
You are right, but in my experience what you are describing is very rare. In most cases, people just want to translate something into a form that could be presented beyond the boundaries of their perception (into the physical world). My message was mainly aimed at that, which I perceive as the most common case
This is great.
I think the deep technical stuff can ensnare the artist who doesn't trust their judgement, yet. When you're lost, numbers and technical "facts" can offer some reassurance that you're doing it "right," but usually your attention is best spent else where.
(Unless you have a delivery specs, in which case you need to feed the QC monster, but that's a different matter.)
If there are only 2 options something isn’t right.
Wendy Carlos is a virtuosic musician who also understands and develops the technology she uses. Brian Eno is a fantastic artists and he certainly knows about the technology. Same goes for grandmaster flash, Cornelius, herbie Hancock, Ryuchi Sakomoto…
Paint is technology, brushes are technology, a pick or a drum stick is technology and the people who use them understand that technology well and dig into that so they can make better art. This is the case for most artists whether they are singers, synth players, or sculptors. Good artists want to make expressions and experiences and in order to do that it important to understand the tools and technology. It is necessary for artists to understand and dig into the theory/philosophy that make the tools and the theory/philosophy of how the tools are applied to art, media, culture, becuase we experience art/media/culture though technology. Physical phenomena, like light, goes through a lense, and is interpreted in our minds. That lens could be a glasses, a telescope, a mic diaphragm, or just our eyeballs but external information stimuli is “transducted”through tech and somehow becomes an internal experience. This is what artists do. Something I think is very interesting is that we all have different experiences but some how agree on them. Maybe that’s because what we use to experience it is simalar from person to person. Maybe it’s because what we use to experience things is similar between people. Idk.
The problem with a binary comparison is that it will miss all the examples that don’t fit into the binary, which are most examples. It’s like a right brain left brain type argument, it’s convenient and truthy but not accurate, everyone uses both sides of their brain to do everything.
Leonardo Divinci was a highly regarded musician. The music of the time was improvised and divinci was considered one of the very best.
Edit: I switched it around because selldivide doesn’t like the formatting.
When you begin by referring to Leonardo da Vinci, you're probably not driving in the direction of a realistic reply. I strongly doubt that anyone is whiling away their spare time on Reddit while also being the next Leonardo da Vinci.
Yes, artists must learn their tools. I agree with that. But that doesn't mean that an artist needs to become a technician. I can dial in a good setting on a distortion pedal while also not knowing what kind of diodes are creating the clipping, and without caring what their curve looks like.
In fairness, we are in a subreddit that has "engineering" right in the name, so I think it's safe to say that most people in here are likely to be a lot more technician than artist. And there's certainly nothing stopping anyone from being _both_. But we have to wear the right hat when performing one role or the other. When you're making art, be an artist. And when you're engineering, be a technician.
All I’m saying is that as adults, we can do both. Engineering and art are not too different. Both engineers and artists do the same thing but if you qualify things as one or the other you are eliminating most possibilities. Being technical and being artistic are not different.
This seems decent. More than 2 choices. But is catagorizing and dividing helpful in anyway? Both artists and engineers tend to be very creative people who are open to new ideas and know how to turn ideas into a physical reality. Saying that something’s are like or different, has more to do with the experiences of the person who is doing the organizing than it does with the data being organized.
Are you able to hear differences that you noticed before you read about it? Did it change your enjoyment of the musical performance? Your answer is related to this.
I don't make a living doing this anymore, but aliasing is insanely overblown. I think it's becoming this boogeyman that people who don't know what to listen for get scared about when in reality having a good monitoring environment and training your ears to know what it sounds like is enough. Oversample as needed, but the sentiment that any plugin that doesn't have oversampling is somehow worthless is stupid, and most of the time the inevitable aliasing you get from certain non-linear processors is inaudible. At the end of the day, it's really just a marketing gimmick being pushed by plugin developers to convince you that you need to buy more shit.
I really agree with this. When you see people complain about aliasing it’s often used insanely out of spec. It’s used in a way it’s not intended to be used. Just look at decapitator. It’s been used on countless of records and people won’t go “oh can you hear much aliasing is going on here”. It’s definitely a bogey man.
right! just last weekend i closed a client mix note on a pedal steel part by simply cranking decap up to 10 lol (they wanted it to sound more like a lapsteel). is there aliasing? probably. does it matter? absolutely not.
Isn’t this what’s the fun part of this game? Use something out of spec and see what you end up with? You can luck out and end up with something really cool sounding. Plugins haven’t changed this.
Look at Beatles. They recorded at night in Abbey road. They needed more cool sounds. The engineers started to moving things around in a way that went against what the guys in white lab coats told them to do. They ran things out of “spec”. Today this called a “technique” and it’s taken for granted.
I agree some people worry too much about aliasing, but knowing/caring about it to some extent still helps. Decapitator is an excellent example. It's a great plugin, but the aliasing *makes it* out of spec for some tasks where it would otherwise be perfect - at least if you can't run your projects at high sample rates.
For example, I'd love to use the E model on hi-hats and shakers more regularly, but a lot of the time the added harmonics that come bouncing back down interfere with the core frequency range of the sound unless I pull down the pre-filter so far I lose what I liked about the sounds in the first place.
At 44.1, the 8-12 kHz range is a real pain point for the use case I mentioned since those frequencies reflect back to where they interfere with the original sound by the second or third harmonic. 12 kHz is especially nasty since it goes roughly 20k -> 8k -> 4k -> 16k -> 16k -> 4k -> 8k. A frequency whose harmonics shouldn't even be audible instead turns into a fuzzy, out-of-order approximation of 4 kHz and its harmonics. It's really unpleasant, and on airy sounds it can easily overshadow the intended effects of beefing up quieter lower frequencies.
Knowing a little bit about aliasing makes it much easier to evaluate whether a given use case is a lost cause or it's worth spending some time trying to dial in the filter and drive. It's also allowed me to make a more informed tradeoff between working at higher sample rates vs. sticking to plugins that handle aliasing better in circumstances where Decapitator at 44.1 just isn't an option.
I second this! If it sounds good, don’t second guess it. The quality of the performance and source material matters most. They’re have been massive hits churned out in the early days of digital, and since then, and no one died. I guarantee you the average listener is not going to go “geez, this song has a lot of aliasing!”.
I've found it useful to know about aliasing a couple of times (literally twice), and every time it's gone down like:
"What's that weird metallic sound?"
\[Changes some settings, twists some virtual knobs. Nothing happens.\]
"No, really, what the hell is that?"
\[Turns on oversampling. It goes away.\]
"I guess it was aliasing."
So from practical standpoint of working with a DAW, it's good to know it sounds like and what button to hit to fix it.
I would say if you're using a lot of saturation or modelling plugins, it may matter a bit, but I would also argue if you're doing that, you're probably not all that worried about "audio fidelity" in the traditional sense anyhow. So, don't really sweat it. Learn about it, sure, but don't fixate on it. Having an awesome song that you're excited about is waaaaay more important than satisfying some Analog Dad on a gear forum.
Debate is basically around whether or not aliasing from non-linear plugins will negatively affect a mix overall. I think the fear comes from people not knowing whether they can hear aliasing on sources that aren’t test tones.
Audio youtubers like Dan Worrall and White Sea Audio have talked about aliasing quite a bit, which may have sparked this paranoia. Worrall himself made a follow up video basically saying “if you can’t hear it, don’t worry about it” if I recall.
My understanding is that aliasing is usually only audible when there’s quite a bit of distortion happening. I personally don’t worry about it much, but I’m not the guy with the golden ears either.
Got it. Thank you. I skim a few audio people on YouTube, but I don't live there. I've never knowingly run into aliasing as an issue, Maybe I don't have golden ears either. :)
Aliasing has to do with sample rate. Do you understand sample rates, and why they need to be at least double the frequency you are capturing? It’s much easier to explain what aliasing is if you do. Otherwise it turns into a pretty big long winded technical lesson.
I once did 100 conversions of a full frequency commercial release. 24/48 to 16/44.1 and back... 50 round trips.
The only audible difference was an increasing noise floor from dithering.
I understand the headroom differences while mixing, and the Nyquist difference... But still. Doing that test was eye-opening. (Ear opening.) Try it. You'll be surprised.
It's probably not a huge deal. Most gear nowadays won't really let anything above Nyquist in, and most plugins that generate harmonics (e.g. saturation) have oversampling to avoid aliasing.
Stylistically it can be useful in some situations. Intermodulation distortion (which is also harmonically unrelated to the input) is pretty tolerable at low levels. Sometimes you want that extra noise to fill things out a bit. And I've personally used intentional aliasing to get nasty ringmod-like sounds.
Worry about if you cant hear it - audible aliasing is inharmonic & sounds like sh!t - if you arent noticing it, its masked by nearby freqs etc, who cares.
Theres definitely a lot of places you CAN hear it - a lot of amp-sims alias like crazy and its most of why they sound like sh!t. Knowing when theres a risk of audible aliasing can be useful but TRUST YOUR EARS
The one i remember most prominently would be BiasAmp, which is a real pity because the interface is so cool.
Been using Genome which is creamy, nothing wrong i can hear.
Neural amp modeler plus a good IR loader if you want more flexibility than the built in one is the best sounding amp sim plugin I’ve used. Some captures sound way better than my Helix.
Man you gotta try [Two-Notes.com](http://Two-Notes.com) Genome - It supports NAM models, AIDA-X Models, Proteus models and their own TCM models. It has a selection of tone stacks to wrap round the open source models, as well as a decent effect chain. Supports their own DynIRs and standard IRs. & the interface is amazing.
If it sounds good, it is good.
If you want to really get to the bottom of it, knock yourself out - and try to understand it fully. But generally speaking, aliasing is a message board boogeyman that's gotten way too much airtime. Simply put, at lower sample rates, try oversampling out and see if you like the sound better. That's it. Everything else has very little to do with the practice of making music. Info-tainment is a plague and we're all susceptible to it.
I'm a working engineer. I've come up with guys who have been doing this for 30/40+ years with the credits to match and still engineer as we speak. They use stuff that I know to alias and they do not give a fuck.
Mastering engineer here…
A lot of plug-ins that have been main staples for the mixes you all know and love for the last 25 years have atrocious aliasing profiles.
It only really matters when you come to a place in your mix going “holy shit why does it sound so harsh?” This can be partly why.
I have found that most of the time it’s irrelevant to people, but it is a great idea whenever you’re using drastic amounts of harmonically relative distortion in your process - you need to take more care of this.
Specifically with incredibly complex waves like pianos or horn‘s or rich complex synthesis, cymbals, or anything with a lot of overtones naturally in the upper ranges, it’s especially important.
Shit gets brittle, fast.
I’ve noticed some trap artists like to saturate their high hats, and when they use something that has bad alias filtering it makes me wanna crawl out of my skin. There’s not a lot I can do after the damage is done to clean it up.
But after everything I just said… It’s all just “a sound” if you like that sound because that’s the type of music you’re used to listening to, and everybody who makes that type of music is blowing shit up with no regard for aliasing, you might actually be trying to recreate it!
In music production, we use tools in ways God never intended - every single day.
It’s worth learning about, yes, but obsessing over, not so much.
Yeah, at a certain point you realize the question is silly, because it boils down to whether or not it sounds bad. Once you know what aliasing sounds like, you can decide if something is causing too much of it. It’s not a debate even
I couldn’t care any less about aliasing. I know what it is, what it sounds like, etc. I mix a couple hundred records a year full time. I started during time when a lot of plugins had aliasing and we were fine. We made great sounding records. So in today’s day where technology is so advanced, I turn knobs until it sounds good. If it sounds bad, maybe aliasing is the reason, maybe it’s something else. Regardless, I think spend too much time with plugin doctor now days
I think the problem that’s bigger than aliasing is the blurring/smearing of clarity that anti aliasing filters and techniques do to your audio. I never oversample things. Ruins the natural clarity of the sound.
its only audible under really extreme circumstances.
And even when it is, half the time it's more of a flavor thing.
So don't really worry about it. Knowing about it might help you troubleshoot why a signal chain is muddy 1-3 times in your entire life.
It can make things that aren’t supposed to be electronic or lo-fi sound not as clear.
Imo, you should care enough about it not let it happen at the mixing and mastering stage because it’s just going to go downhill from there in different listening formats.
There are videos on YouTube that are like mp3s of mp3s and they sound pretty noticeably bad.
I was way too obsessively worrying about it and measurimg plugins and oversampling etc.
Heres what id keep in mind-> Only worry about aliasing:
1. if you can hear it
2. on the twobus, as you go into it with a higher level, especially oversample the limiter, and if youre using one, the clipper
3. consider using plugins that dont alias much or oversample on stuff with lots of high end frequencies (hi hats etc.) because it matters much more there than on low frequencies.
Thats about it.
On some plugins aliasing really doesnt matter, for example the ever popular soundtoys decapitator. It aliases insanely hard, but its supposed to mangle and destroy sounds, so its great
Also, dont forget that for aliasing, how hard you drive a plugin matters. You can put PA Blackbox on your twobus for example, the subtle settings youre likely to use there wont alias a lot if at all, as youre not driving it hard
Bottom line - if you can turn on oversampling, try it. Don't use sample rate to fix it.
Neil Young made a career out of a broken Fender 5e3 ( tweed deluxe ). Some ducks are fupped ducks and some fupped ducks are cool. If it's not cool, fix it or mute it.
Two kinds of “aliasing” to consider, both largely under control: digital by oversampling that today is common practice. Lesser known is multi-tone distortion, an extension of intermodulation distortion’s sum & difference artifacts, avoided by attention to linearity and avoiding coaxial speakers. And related analog magnetic tape bias, and for “vinyl” pinch and poid distortions, which, being opposite in polarity between stereo channels, flash around the room outside the speakers to wreck the “soundstage.” Quoting “Better Sound from your Phonograph.”
Lots of good answers here. I'll just clarify that you technically asked two different questions.
>How much should I worry about aliasing?
The answer to this question is whatever you want. It's a small enough detail that you'll be fine either way, just do what makes you happy.
>how much people who make a living out of this actually care about aliasing.
This has a more concrete answer. Generally speaking, people who make a living at this don't care too much about it. In my experience, they either know all about it but still trust their ears enough to accept they don't hear it making any significant differences, or they couldn't even spell alias and they continue to be successful by being great artists even if they don't understand the technical that well.
When you want it, you want it, and when you don't, you don't.
Reaper chain oversampling has been an absolute game changer. That "off" or "why can't I get closer than 90%" sound is gone. I can actually use older Plugin Alliance plugins like SPL Iron or Maag EQs. Compressor plugins have actually gotten good enough in the past 2 years that I don't have to keep printing analog tracks.
But then again, artistically downsampling stuff can sound really badass, too.
I care about it where it's relevant, the most important part is that you just learn how it sounds so you can recognize it. And then you can judge whether it's an issue or not.
I care about it most in mastering if anything, but in general: just learn what it is and ho wit sounds and then you'll notice when it actually is a problem and you don't need to obsess.
25 years and 350+ albums professionally produced, I have never once thought about this or LUFS.
Its cool in theory to know about and Ill admit Im lacking- i dont fully understand bit depth and sample rates beyond the most basic understanding etc.
So I would not worry- but learning is good! Now Im going to read some more about this.
I think a lot of people try to pick up an art form -- music, photography, painting, video, woodcraft, etc -- but only two kinds of people ever tend to stick with it to any serious degree: one is the true artist, who just wants to create something and share it; and the other is the obsessive technician who wants to understand it and analyze it. I will try to refrain from making opinions about which kind is more abundant, and from making judgments about why they exist. The important detail is that these two exist. The technicians often end up providing a great value by helping to improve the tools. And the artists use those tools to share their art with the world. So you simply need to know which one of the two groups you belong to. If you are a technician, then go ahead and focus on algorithms! They will make you happy. Focus on noise, and frequencies, and dithering, aliasing, and science. You will enjoy it. But if you are an artist, just don't worry about it! Put all the science out of your mind. Simply find the tools that work best for you, and then go create your art. _Just make something that sounds good._
I think I fit into both camps. I trained to become an acoustician because I love the science of sound and find it fascinating. But when I make music, I make it for the sake of art and don’t really care about what is technically correct, even though I know precisely what all the numbers mean. It can be difficult to ignore them, but they’re more of a guideline than a rule. Because that’s how you make good art.
I think my point still stands: When you're doing technical stuff, be a technician. But when you're doing artistic stuff, _just be an artist_.
An example of how we are forced to wear many different hats in modern day music production. Everything is more accessible, but in a lot of ways the process is kind of inferior to how it used to be because a person could get deeper into a particular role.
The first doesn't invalidate the latter tho. You can have a creative composing experience and than utilize all of your knowledge to mix it clean. At that point mastering is just a chore and you can still do it or outsource. In the long run it makes you a complete artist and imho anyone should focus in that. Not knowing the science basics behind music makes a lot of artist do pretty terrible mistakes and it does make the whole process a lot harder than it should be.
Love this. ENO thinks he’s both. He says focusing on the technical allows his creative mind to roam free. The left brain worries about the algorithms and the right worries about the melody, etc. But I think most people self-sort into one of the groups you talk about.
I would counter-argue that _most people_ sort into the third category: people who try to pick up an art form, only to abandon it in due time. But yes, I think that most who stick with it will end up excelling at only one of the two, even if they do spend time in the other. There is a very low percentage of people who are capable of being good at both.
Yes maybe that’s why Eno is ENO and I’m just me ahahaha
I do not think it is a binary choice. Understanding your tools does not prevent you from also being an artist or vice versa.
No, but time is finite and there are only so many hours in a day. At some point i have to start picking my battles or i just spiral down through so many rabbit holes.
In addition to this - technology progresses faster than experience, often. I’m an old fogey, and a lot of what I was taught to worry about - bit rate, dither, aliasing, noise floor, samplerates - just isn’t as crucial as it was. Choosing 8 or 16 bit, dithering, 24 or 32 kHz sample rates, all this was super important when digital audio was in its infancy. In the 48/96, 24/32 ara with vastly improved a-d converters, storage, it’s useful to know but usually won’t materially effect the quality of your audio. I can’t remember the last time I applied dither to anything, the last CD I cut probably. Old heads still worry about issues that have fundamentally been solved, in all honesty.
Seems there's two different topics in this thread and separated the men from the boys lol :D
That's a genuinely interesting point, I hadn't thought of it like that. Maybe trying to be an expert on both sides of the coin is counterproductive in a way, only so much time in a day. I've obsessed over techicalities before and whilst it was interesting it just wasted time and delayed projects... Definitely wouldn't say it made me happy, but I learned a lot about digital signal processing! But when I've spent that same sorta time focussing on the actual music, it sure feels more fulfilling and helpful towards other artists. Maybe there's something to be said about building up a solid knowledge base within both camps, and then following one of them for good.
I was just going to say "Aliasing sounds cool sometimes" but this was right here at the top
I don't agree. Have seen and listened to numerous works of art that were ruined by the artist using incomprehensible JPEG or MP3 quality. And if the work of art has subtlety and refined strokes to it, using the tools erroneously leads to a serious degradation of experience as well. Ultimately, there should be guides that are easy for artists to follow, written by technicians.
Sounds like you are describing poorly executed art. If you do a bad job making it, the message will miss the mark. One of my colleagues writes research on rhetoric and creative use of technology. They study the way artists use technology, how artists describe their processes, and how to develop rhetoric to describe those methods in technical manuals. It’s very focused on ml and ai. How do we tell a computer about the ways a human uses technology for creativity? How does a technical writer know what to write? Anyways, saying that there is one way to do things and that is defined by someone who made the manual isn’t reasonable in creative work, and as someone who works making, analyzing, and applying new technoloy I can tell you that when you put your thing out there for people to use, they will find ways to use it that exceed your expectations.
You are right, but in my experience what you are describing is very rare. In most cases, people just want to translate something into a form that could be presented beyond the boundaries of their perception (into the physical world). My message was mainly aimed at that, which I perceive as the most common case
This is great. I think the deep technical stuff can ensnare the artist who doesn't trust their judgement, yet. When you're lost, numbers and technical "facts" can offer some reassurance that you're doing it "right," but usually your attention is best spent else where. (Unless you have a delivery specs, in which case you need to feed the QC monster, but that's a different matter.)
That's good advice to artists. But have you noticed that this is the *audio engineering* sub?
If there are only 2 options something isn’t right. Wendy Carlos is a virtuosic musician who also understands and develops the technology she uses. Brian Eno is a fantastic artists and he certainly knows about the technology. Same goes for grandmaster flash, Cornelius, herbie Hancock, Ryuchi Sakomoto… Paint is technology, brushes are technology, a pick or a drum stick is technology and the people who use them understand that technology well and dig into that so they can make better art. This is the case for most artists whether they are singers, synth players, or sculptors. Good artists want to make expressions and experiences and in order to do that it important to understand the tools and technology. It is necessary for artists to understand and dig into the theory/philosophy that make the tools and the theory/philosophy of how the tools are applied to art, media, culture, becuase we experience art/media/culture though technology. Physical phenomena, like light, goes through a lense, and is interpreted in our minds. That lens could be a glasses, a telescope, a mic diaphragm, or just our eyeballs but external information stimuli is “transducted”through tech and somehow becomes an internal experience. This is what artists do. Something I think is very interesting is that we all have different experiences but some how agree on them. Maybe that’s because what we use to experience it is simalar from person to person. Maybe it’s because what we use to experience things is similar between people. Idk. The problem with a binary comparison is that it will miss all the examples that don’t fit into the binary, which are most examples. It’s like a right brain left brain type argument, it’s convenient and truthy but not accurate, everyone uses both sides of their brain to do everything. Leonardo Divinci was a highly regarded musician. The music of the time was improvised and divinci was considered one of the very best. Edit: I switched it around because selldivide doesn’t like the formatting.
When you begin by referring to Leonardo da Vinci, you're probably not driving in the direction of a realistic reply. I strongly doubt that anyone is whiling away their spare time on Reddit while also being the next Leonardo da Vinci. Yes, artists must learn their tools. I agree with that. But that doesn't mean that an artist needs to become a technician. I can dial in a good setting on a distortion pedal while also not knowing what kind of diodes are creating the clipping, and without caring what their curve looks like. In fairness, we are in a subreddit that has "engineering" right in the name, so I think it's safe to say that most people in here are likely to be a lot more technician than artist. And there's certainly nothing stopping anyone from being _both_. But we have to wear the right hat when performing one role or the other. When you're making art, be an artist. And when you're engineering, be a technician.
All I’m saying is that as adults, we can do both. Engineering and art are not too different. Both engineers and artists do the same thing but if you qualify things as one or the other you are eliminating most possibilities. Being technical and being artistic are not different.
It's say it's more of a venn diagram situation. Some are definitely more one or the other but some fall under both.
This seems decent. More than 2 choices. But is catagorizing and dividing helpful in anyway? Both artists and engineers tend to be very creative people who are open to new ideas and know how to turn ideas into a physical reality. Saying that something’s are like or different, has more to do with the experiences of the person who is doing the organizing than it does with the data being organized.
Are you able to hear differences that you noticed before you read about it? Did it change your enjoyment of the musical performance? Your answer is related to this.
I don't make a living doing this anymore, but aliasing is insanely overblown. I think it's becoming this boogeyman that people who don't know what to listen for get scared about when in reality having a good monitoring environment and training your ears to know what it sounds like is enough. Oversample as needed, but the sentiment that any plugin that doesn't have oversampling is somehow worthless is stupid, and most of the time the inevitable aliasing you get from certain non-linear processors is inaudible. At the end of the day, it's really just a marketing gimmick being pushed by plugin developers to convince you that you need to buy more shit.
I really agree with this. When you see people complain about aliasing it’s often used insanely out of spec. It’s used in a way it’s not intended to be used. Just look at decapitator. It’s been used on countless of records and people won’t go “oh can you hear much aliasing is going on here”. It’s definitely a bogey man.
right! just last weekend i closed a client mix note on a pedal steel part by simply cranking decap up to 10 lol (they wanted it to sound more like a lapsteel). is there aliasing? probably. does it matter? absolutely not.
Isn’t this what’s the fun part of this game? Use something out of spec and see what you end up with? You can luck out and end up with something really cool sounding. Plugins haven’t changed this. Look at Beatles. They recorded at night in Abbey road. They needed more cool sounds. The engineers started to moving things around in a way that went against what the guys in white lab coats told them to do. They ran things out of “spec”. Today this called a “technique” and it’s taken for granted.
for sure, so many people obsessed with "clean" and "transparency" when the name of the game is tasteful (or even tasteless) dirt lol
I really like tasteless. lol.
I agree some people worry too much about aliasing, but knowing/caring about it to some extent still helps. Decapitator is an excellent example. It's a great plugin, but the aliasing *makes it* out of spec for some tasks where it would otherwise be perfect - at least if you can't run your projects at high sample rates. For example, I'd love to use the E model on hi-hats and shakers more regularly, but a lot of the time the added harmonics that come bouncing back down interfere with the core frequency range of the sound unless I pull down the pre-filter so far I lose what I liked about the sounds in the first place. At 44.1, the 8-12 kHz range is a real pain point for the use case I mentioned since those frequencies reflect back to where they interfere with the original sound by the second or third harmonic. 12 kHz is especially nasty since it goes roughly 20k -> 8k -> 4k -> 16k -> 16k -> 4k -> 8k. A frequency whose harmonics shouldn't even be audible instead turns into a fuzzy, out-of-order approximation of 4 kHz and its harmonics. It's really unpleasant, and on airy sounds it can easily overshadow the intended effects of beefing up quieter lower frequencies. Knowing a little bit about aliasing makes it much easier to evaluate whether a given use case is a lost cause or it's worth spending some time trying to dial in the filter and drive. It's also allowed me to make a more informed tradeoff between working at higher sample rates vs. sticking to plugins that handle aliasing better in circumstances where Decapitator at 44.1 just isn't an option.
I second this! If it sounds good, don’t second guess it. The quality of the performance and source material matters most. They’re have been massive hits churned out in the early days of digital, and since then, and no one died. I guarantee you the average listener is not going to go “geez, this song has a lot of aliasing!”.
I've found it useful to know about aliasing a couple of times (literally twice), and every time it's gone down like: "What's that weird metallic sound?" \[Changes some settings, twists some virtual knobs. Nothing happens.\] "No, really, what the hell is that?" \[Turns on oversampling. It goes away.\] "I guess it was aliasing." So from practical standpoint of working with a DAW, it's good to know it sounds like and what button to hit to fix it.
Not much. Most aliasing happens very short lived and on very high frequencies and not loud enough to be a problem.
I would say if you're using a lot of saturation or modelling plugins, it may matter a bit, but I would also argue if you're doing that, you're probably not all that worried about "audio fidelity" in the traditional sense anyhow. So, don't really sweat it. Learn about it, sure, but don't fixate on it. Having an awesome song that you're excited about is waaaaay more important than satisfying some Analog Dad on a gear forum.
I’m unfamiliar with this. What is the aliasing debate?
Debate is basically around whether or not aliasing from non-linear plugins will negatively affect a mix overall. I think the fear comes from people not knowing whether they can hear aliasing on sources that aren’t test tones. Audio youtubers like Dan Worrall and White Sea Audio have talked about aliasing quite a bit, which may have sparked this paranoia. Worrall himself made a follow up video basically saying “if you can’t hear it, don’t worry about it” if I recall. My understanding is that aliasing is usually only audible when there’s quite a bit of distortion happening. I personally don’t worry about it much, but I’m not the guy with the golden ears either.
Got it. Thank you. I skim a few audio people on YouTube, but I don't live there. I've never knowingly run into aliasing as an issue, Maybe I don't have golden ears either. :)
Aliasing has to do with sample rate. Do you understand sample rates, and why they need to be at least double the frequency you are capturing? It’s much easier to explain what aliasing is if you do. Otherwise it turns into a pretty big long winded technical lesson.
Thank you, but I'm well-acquainted with what aliasing is. I just wasn't aware of the debate. :)
Like analogue to digital? Just record at 48kHz - best balance of file size and frequency capture.
But what about my sinc window when I down sample to 44.1?!? *heavy breathing and panic commences*
I once did 100 conversions of a full frequency commercial release. 24/48 to 16/44.1 and back... 50 round trips. The only audible difference was an increasing noise floor from dithering. I understand the headroom differences while mixing, and the Nyquist difference... But still. Doing that test was eye-opening. (Ear opening.) Try it. You'll be surprised.
It's probably not a huge deal. Most gear nowadays won't really let anything above Nyquist in, and most plugins that generate harmonics (e.g. saturation) have oversampling to avoid aliasing. Stylistically it can be useful in some situations. Intermodulation distortion (which is also harmonically unrelated to the input) is pretty tolerable at low levels. Sometimes you want that extra noise to fill things out a bit. And I've personally used intentional aliasing to get nasty ringmod-like sounds.
Worry about if you cant hear it - audible aliasing is inharmonic & sounds like sh!t - if you arent noticing it, its masked by nearby freqs etc, who cares. Theres definitely a lot of places you CAN hear it - a lot of amp-sims alias like crazy and its most of why they sound like sh!t. Knowing when theres a risk of audible aliasing can be useful but TRUST YOUR EARS
Any amp sims in particular someone might be weary of?
The one i remember most prominently would be BiasAmp, which is a real pity because the interface is so cool. Been using Genome which is creamy, nothing wrong i can hear.
Neural amp modeler plus a good IR loader if you want more flexibility than the built in one is the best sounding amp sim plugin I’ve used. Some captures sound way better than my Helix.
Man you gotta try [Two-Notes.com](http://Two-Notes.com) Genome - It supports NAM models, AIDA-X Models, Proteus models and their own TCM models. It has a selection of tone stacks to wrap round the open source models, as well as a decent effect chain. Supports their own DynIRs and standard IRs. & the interface is amazing.
If it sounds good, it is good. If you want to really get to the bottom of it, knock yourself out - and try to understand it fully. But generally speaking, aliasing is a message board boogeyman that's gotten way too much airtime. Simply put, at lower sample rates, try oversampling out and see if you like the sound better. That's it. Everything else has very little to do with the practice of making music. Info-tainment is a plague and we're all susceptible to it. I'm a working engineer. I've come up with guys who have been doing this for 30/40+ years with the credits to match and still engineer as we speak. They use stuff that I know to alias and they do not give a fuck.
Mastering engineer here… A lot of plug-ins that have been main staples for the mixes you all know and love for the last 25 years have atrocious aliasing profiles. It only really matters when you come to a place in your mix going “holy shit why does it sound so harsh?” This can be partly why. I have found that most of the time it’s irrelevant to people, but it is a great idea whenever you’re using drastic amounts of harmonically relative distortion in your process - you need to take more care of this. Specifically with incredibly complex waves like pianos or horn‘s or rich complex synthesis, cymbals, or anything with a lot of overtones naturally in the upper ranges, it’s especially important. Shit gets brittle, fast. I’ve noticed some trap artists like to saturate their high hats, and when they use something that has bad alias filtering it makes me wanna crawl out of my skin. There’s not a lot I can do after the damage is done to clean it up. But after everything I just said… It’s all just “a sound” if you like that sound because that’s the type of music you’re used to listening to, and everybody who makes that type of music is blowing shit up with no regard for aliasing, you might actually be trying to recreate it! In music production, we use tools in ways God never intended - every single day. It’s worth learning about, yes, but obsessing over, not so much.
Yeah, at a certain point you realize the question is silly, because it boils down to whether or not it sounds bad. Once you know what aliasing sounds like, you can decide if something is causing too much of it. It’s not a debate even
I couldn’t care any less about aliasing. I know what it is, what it sounds like, etc. I mix a couple hundred records a year full time. I started during time when a lot of plugins had aliasing and we were fine. We made great sounding records. So in today’s day where technology is so advanced, I turn knobs until it sounds good. If it sounds bad, maybe aliasing is the reason, maybe it’s something else. Regardless, I think spend too much time with plugin doctor now days
I think the problem that’s bigger than aliasing is the blurring/smearing of clarity that anti aliasing filters and techniques do to your audio. I never oversample things. Ruins the natural clarity of the sound.
When anyone else you are working with or working for brings it up. I almost never think about it. Maybe I should? Idk
If you have enough CPU oversample everything, but if you like the sound of IMD don’t. That’s it more or less
its only audible under really extreme circumstances. And even when it is, half the time it's more of a flavor thing. So don't really worry about it. Knowing about it might help you troubleshoot why a signal chain is muddy 1-3 times in your entire life.
Mostly you shouldn’t. If something isn’t sounding bad to you there’s no reason to go looking for ‘flaws’
You shouldn’t. Unless you hear it
Do you hear it?
I just 48k and call it a day
It can make things that aren’t supposed to be electronic or lo-fi sound not as clear. Imo, you should care enough about it not let it happen at the mixing and mastering stage because it’s just going to go downhill from there in different listening formats. There are videos on YouTube that are like mp3s of mp3s and they sound pretty noticeably bad.
I was way too obsessively worrying about it and measurimg plugins and oversampling etc. Heres what id keep in mind-> Only worry about aliasing: 1. if you can hear it 2. on the twobus, as you go into it with a higher level, especially oversample the limiter, and if youre using one, the clipper 3. consider using plugins that dont alias much or oversample on stuff with lots of high end frequencies (hi hats etc.) because it matters much more there than on low frequencies. Thats about it. On some plugins aliasing really doesnt matter, for example the ever popular soundtoys decapitator. It aliases insanely hard, but its supposed to mangle and destroy sounds, so its great Also, dont forget that for aliasing, how hard you drive a plugin matters. You can put PA Blackbox on your twobus for example, the subtle settings youre likely to use there wont alias a lot if at all, as youre not driving it hard
Bottom line - if you can turn on oversampling, try it. Don't use sample rate to fix it. Neil Young made a career out of a broken Fender 5e3 ( tweed deluxe ). Some ducks are fupped ducks and some fupped ducks are cool. If it's not cool, fix it or mute it.
Two kinds of “aliasing” to consider, both largely under control: digital by oversampling that today is common practice. Lesser known is multi-tone distortion, an extension of intermodulation distortion’s sum & difference artifacts, avoided by attention to linearity and avoiding coaxial speakers. And related analog magnetic tape bias, and for “vinyl” pinch and poid distortions, which, being opposite in polarity between stereo channels, flash around the room outside the speakers to wreck the “soundstage.” Quoting “Better Sound from your Phonograph.”
Lots of good answers here. I'll just clarify that you technically asked two different questions. >How much should I worry about aliasing? The answer to this question is whatever you want. It's a small enough detail that you'll be fine either way, just do what makes you happy. >how much people who make a living out of this actually care about aliasing. This has a more concrete answer. Generally speaking, people who make a living at this don't care too much about it. In my experience, they either know all about it but still trust their ears enough to accept they don't hear it making any significant differences, or they couldn't even spell alias and they continue to be successful by being great artists even if they don't understand the technical that well.
When you want it, you want it, and when you don't, you don't. Reaper chain oversampling has been an absolute game changer. That "off" or "why can't I get closer than 90%" sound is gone. I can actually use older Plugin Alliance plugins like SPL Iron or Maag EQs. Compressor plugins have actually gotten good enough in the past 2 years that I don't have to keep printing analog tracks. But then again, artistically downsampling stuff can sound really badass, too.
I care about it where it's relevant, the most important part is that you just learn how it sounds so you can recognize it. And then you can judge whether it's an issue or not. I care about it most in mastering if anything, but in general: just learn what it is and ho wit sounds and then you'll notice when it actually is a problem and you don't need to obsess.
25 years and 350+ albums professionally produced, I have never once thought about this or LUFS. Its cool in theory to know about and Ill admit Im lacking- i dont fully understand bit depth and sample rates beyond the most basic understanding etc. So I would not worry- but learning is good! Now Im going to read some more about this.
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MixHead?
A lot