Is there a certain part of the recording process that stresses you out? Recording? Editing? Mixing?
It’s different for everybody, but I can tell you, from personal experience, that whenever I’m stressed out in my studio, chances are it’s because of overwhelm.
In other words, my most stressful times in the studio are when I’ve got too much going on in a particular song. Too many tracks, too much editing to do, too many plugins, too many versions of the song…anything.
Stress isn’t always bad, and I always like to impose a little bit of stress (like creating a deadline and even using a timer) to keep me on task and productive.
Today I want to share with you one way to instantly remove one HUGE source of stress — too many takes.
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I was at a party a few nights ago at the home of a drummer friend of mine. He’s a killer drummer. He’s played with Keith Urban, Gary Allen, and others.
He was showing me his basement studio, where he does some drum tracking. He had some great Heil mics, Daking and API preamps, and a few other goodies.
I’m not a drummer, so I can’t tell you what kind of kit he had, but it sounded nice.
But there was one thing that caught my attention…and was really fascinating. I think there’s a lesson for us home studio folk here.
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As is my custom, I was listening to the Home Recording Show the other day. They mentioned a comment left on Episode 121 that I thought was awesome.
Here’s the comment, by Edward Mowinckel:
I used the steak analogy. You can burn a steak, but after you burn it, it’s burnt. You can cool it off, but it’s still burnt. If you cook it medium, you can still cook it more, or just enjoy a medium steak!
He was referring to the process of recording with levels too hot. Some people think you have to peg the meters to get a good recording. His point was that, when setting levels for recording, you don’t have to go in NEARLY as hot as you had to in the analog days.
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Home studios aren’t perfect.
In a perfect world, your home studio would be designed by a professional. You’d have a great-sounding control room, a couple of tracking rooms, and a nice, quiet vocal booth.
Raise your hand if your control room, tracking room, and vocal booth are all the same room. (Joe quickly…and sheepishly…raises his hand.)
That’s the reality we face. We’re weekend warriors, home studio recordists. Hobbyists. We’ve got to make the best of what we’ve got.
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I’ve got a recording session coming up soon with a fairly well-known bass player around Nashville.
As far as I know, he’ll want to record direct. What I’m planning to do is something I’ve not done before, but I’m fairly excited about.
I recently bought a Presonus FireStudio Project for my studio. It’s a simple, one-rack space interface with eight microphone inputs. One of the unique features of FSP is that the first two channels can be either microphone or instrument inputs.
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Everyone always asks how to get that big huge guitar sound. Unfortunately, there’s no single answer to that.
There are a million factors at play, and lots of things I couldn’t possibly cover in a single article, but I’ll give you three tips today to help you move closer to that goal of getting that huge guitar sound.
1. Don’t start recording too quickly.
This is an easy trap to fall into, especially when you’re really excited about recording the next big hit rock record, but slow down, take a few minutes, even 15 minutes, to really dial in the right tone for the session.
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In your recordings in your home studio, are you constantly worried about noise? Be honest, it’s okay if you are.
That is something that I have struggled with my entire recording career. Homes, apartments, houses — they’re just not very quiet. A professional recording studio is acoustically treated and isolated. If you walk into a pro vocal booth, it is dead quiet.
But the question I have for you is this — is that really that important? Here’s what I think: no, not really.
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Recently someone emailed me asking what the “best” mixer was for his home studio.
I replied back and asked him, “Are you sure you even NEED a mixer?”
People get hung up on the fact that a recording studio needs a mixer, or a console. Back in the analog days, of course this was true. You needed some way to play back all those tracks from the tape machine.
Nowadays, though, a lot of the big studios may still have a big console sitting in the control room, but there’s a good chance they’re mixing everything in the box and only using two channels on the entire console.
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Is there a certain part of the recording process that stresses you out? Recording? Editing? Mixing?
