Glossary - Production Glossary T - Z (End)

T

TAPE HEAD: The part of a tape machine that transfers magnetic energy to the tape during recording, or reads it during playback.

TEMPO: The rate of the 'beat' of a piece of music measured in beats per minute.

TEST TONE: steady, fixed level tone recorded onto a multitrack or stereo recording to act as a reference when matching levels.

THD: Total Harmonic Distortion.

THRU: MIDI connector which passes on the signal received at the MIDI in socket.

TIMBRE: The tonal 'colour' of a sound.


TOSLINK: See "S/PDIF".

TRACK: The term dates back to multitrack tape where the tracks are physical stripes of recorded material, located side by side along the length of the tape.

TRACKING: The system whereby one device follows another. Tracking is often discussed in the context of MIDI guitar synthesizers or controllers where the MIDI output attempts to track the pitch of the guitar strings.

TRANSIENTS: An element of a sound where the spectral content changes abruptly. Most natural sounds start with a transient element before settling into something more steady-state, and it is often that transient element that provides most of the recognisable character of the sound source.

TRANSPARENCY: Subjective term used to describe audio quality where the high frequency detail is clear and individual sounds are easy to identify and separate.

TREMOLO: Modulation of the amplitude of a sound using an LFO.

TRANSDUCER: A device for converting one form of energy to another. A microphone is a good example of a transducer as it converts mechanical energy to electrical energy.

TRANSPOSE: To shift a musical signal by a fixed number of semitones.

TRIANGLE WAVE: Symmetrical triangular shaped wave containing odd harmonics only, but with a lower harmonic content than the square wave.

TRS JACK: Stereo type jack with Tip, Ring and Sleeve connections.

TRUSS ROD: A metal bar within a guitar neck which is tensioned so as to counteract the tendency for the neck to bend under the tension of the strings.

U

UNBALANCED: A 2-wire electrical signal connection where the inner or hot or +ve (positive) conductor is usually surrounded by the cold or -ve (negative) conductor, which forms a screen against electrical interference.

UNISON: To play the same melody using two or more different instruments or voices.

USB: (Universal Serial Buss) A high-speed serial communications protocol which allows (theoretically) up to 127 hot-swappable peripherals to be connected in daisy-chain fashion. USB devices can be unplugged/plugged in without having to reboot your computer. Popular on modern PCs and associated computer peripherals (printers, scanners etc) but also adopted by Apple on their iMac and blue G3 machines onwards.

V

VALVE: Vacuum tube amplification component, also known as a tube.

VELOCITY: The rate at which a key is depressed. This may be used to control loudness (to simulate the response of instruments such as pianos) or other parameters on later synthesizers.

VOCODER: Signal processor that imposes a changing spectral filter on a sound based on the frequency characteristics of a second sound. By taking the spectral content of a human voice and imposing it on a musical instrument, talking instrument effects can be created.

VOICE: The capacity of a synthesizer to play a single musical note. An instrument capable of playing 16 simultaneous notes is said to be a 16-voice instrument.

VIBRATO: Pitch modulation using an LFO to modulate a VCO.

VU Meter: Meter designed to interpret signal levels in roughly the same way as the human ear, which responds more closely to the average levels of sounds rather than to the peak levels.

W

WAH PEDAL: Guitar effects device where a bandpass filter is varied in frequency by means of a pedal control.

WATT: Unit of electrical power.

WARMTH: Subjective term used to describe sound where the bass and low mid frequencies have depth and where the high frequencies are smooth sounding rather than being aggressive or fatiguing. Warm sounding tube equipment may also exhibit some of the aspects of compression.

WAVEFORM: A graphic representation of the way in which a sound wave or electrical wave varies with time.

WHITE NOISE: A random signal with an energy distribution that produces the same amount of noise power per Hz.

WORD CLOCK: The precise and accurate timing of digital audio samples is critical to the correct operation of interconnected digital audio equipment. The 'metronome' that governs sample timing is called the Word Clock (sometimes conjoined to 'Wordclock', or abbreviated to 'Wclk'). However, word clock does more than merely beat time; it also identifies the start and end of each digital word or sample, and which samples belong to the left or right channels. Digital interfaces such as the AES-EBU and S/PDIF embody clock signals within the data stream, but it is often necessary to convey a discrete word clock between equipment as a square wave signal running at the sampling rate. Dedicated word clock inputs and outputs on digital equipment generally use BNC connectors (the kind of terminals commonly used for video).

WRITE: To save data to a digital storage medium, such as a hard drive.

X

XG: Yamaha's alternative to Roland's GS system for enhancing the General MIDI protocol so as to provide additional banks of patches and further editing facilities.

XLR: Type of connector commonly used to carry balanced audio signals including the feeds from microphones.

Y

Y-Lead: Lead split so that one source can feed two destinations. Y leads may also be used in console insert points in which case a stereo jack plug at one end of the lead id split into two monos at the other.

Z

ZENITH: Parameter of tape head alignment relating to whether or not the head is perpendicular to the tape path, and aligned so as to be in the same plane.

ZERO CROSSING POINT: The point at which a signal waveform crosses from being positive to negative or vice versa.

ZIPPER NOISE: Audible steps that occur when a parameter is being varied in a digital audio processor.

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