It occurs to me I tend to the abstract in these missives, so this week I'll ponder on about something about actual recording. Namely, sounds, mic placement, and the wisdom of self recordation. Going in to a studio one would hope to get the sounds they'd like to hear. (well duh) Sadly it doesn't often happen. To get a sound you need source and capture. (well duh again) Where everything goes to hell lay in one of those areas. Source is amp, drum, voice, player, etc. Capture is mic, mic placement, room, and vast amounts of more etceteras. It's likely that many of you potential client types have delved into doing the recording yourselves. It's also likely you've checked the forums for best mic techniques and mixing tips. Self Proclaimed Recording Messiah (SPRM) at the Gearslutz forum sez put mic here and great things happen. SPRM sez 50 top engineers in a blind A/B test can't tell the difference between this 110$ A/D converter and a full blown Radar system. SPRM sez this way cool Flash Gordon looking 110$ LD chinese mic sounds ezackly like a Neumann 147. etc. and ad naseum. Omigawd you say! You guzzle the koolaid and rush off to Long and Mcquade clutching 350$ in your blistered litte fist. The sales guy gives you the special smile. He recognizes the newly converted look. You might even get a wink with a shot from the finger gun. He's quite impressed with your new found recording expertise and quite agrees that your purchases are most wise. You rush home and quickly set up your new studio, stopping now and then to just sit and admire the blinky lights on the gear. You hit the record button and nothing happens. You pour over the stack of 4 inch thick manuals for the next three days until you notice you forgot a cable or didn't arm the track. It's invariably something minor and stupid. Finally, you record something. You hit playback and utter crap comes from the monitors. You quickly realize it must be the cheap monitors so you rush off to L&M again to set up an account. The sales dude agrees it's definitely the cheap monitors. Seeing as you now have an account you grab a few more things. 11 grand and more blinky lights later you hit playback and utter crap comes from the speakers. Except now you can clearly hear it's utter crap. Leastways, that's what happened to me. It was 2 years before I could get anything resembling music to come out of the monitors. It took me another ten years of shedding prosumer crap gear and loading up my account at L&M before I was getting consistent pro level sounds. At my rebernation page ( http://www.reverbnation.com/cosmicpig ) you can hear the differences as I progressed. Out of the rain and Elliot by Ash Riot were done years ago, Set My Love Free by Murray Porter and I Believe by Brian Griffith are my more recent work. The statement "It's the ear, not the gear." is true. It takes years of ear training to hear different frequencies and how they affect other frequencies, or what compression sounds like. A simple example during mix: Too much top end on the guitar. Should you raise the lows, or drop the highs? or compress the top, or do combination of the three, or pull out a trade secret like distortion to smooth things out? Every time you run across that question there's a different answer, and sometimes there is no good answer because the source is bad. Sometimes from bad mic placement, sometimes from playing the dynamics wrong, or amps, or dead strings or a million other possible reasons. Trained ears and experience is what you need to even determine the problem much less fix it. And that's only during mixing. There's a standard maxim when recording: crap goes in, crap comes out. And don't even get me started about drums. If you put on new skins and tune for three hours every third take you might be extremely lucky and not wind up with sample replacement. There's also mic placement and a whack of other stuff to consider before the mixing stage that require a trained ear and experience. If you're a player or writer you'll need some kind of recording setup to get ideas down. Keep it simple and don't sweat the bad sounds. Basic recording is easy as long as you don't try to hard to fix things. Use it as a writing tool. If the bad sounds bug you too much, or it was the ultimate take never to be repeated in the history of rock, bring it to me and I'll see if it can be salvaged. Or chase it down yourself. Just know at first it's usually leads to black depression and self mutilation. It's the same dealio as that initial hump you hurdled when you first picked up an instrument. To point out the importance of the song and performance, and what happens when you leave well enough alone, check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0pxSmzz9V8 Bunot singing To Love Somebody. Sound is bad, but doesn't hinder the performance. It wasn't mixed at all, just karoake with what I assume is a phone mic. Now to point out how a bad mix attempt can hurt a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOLlzc-QE5Y. Bunot again, sans magic. He had a recording board and everything. Still a good song and a great performance, but the mix killed it. Mostly lack of reverb and over compressed, but dead is dead. As Homer so eloquently put it to Bart: "Always remember son, trying is the first step to failure." Either leave it alone or go for it, just know it takes a while, and as mentioned in a previous rant, pick one thing and give it 100%. Recording and music are two separate and full time gigs.
cosmictunes7