If I had a nickel for every time someone wrote these two words to me in an email…
These two words are especially popular with people who are just starting out in recording. They’re eager to learn, and I’m certainly on board with their eagerness.
To this day, I still LOVE to learn new recording tricks and techniques.
But these two words, while well-intended, can lead you down a path that’s simply…neither fun nor helpful.
What are the two words you should never say in the studio?
It’s President’s Day here in the US. Not sure exactly what that means for me, since I don’t personally know any presidents, but I’ll figure something out…
What it DOES mean is that I have a challenge for you. More on that in a second.
I’m reading through a book written by Paul White of Sound on Sound magazine. It’s called “The Producer’s Handbook,” and it’s pretty good so far.
One thing he talks about early in the book is that some of the first multi-track tape machines were 3-track recorders. That means they had a stereo track for the band, leaving a third track for the lead vocal.
Talk about simple.
A year or so ago, I was watching a video from Ronan’s Recording Show.
Ronan talked about how he’s getting more and more into video stuff. He had invested in a mid-level “prosumer” video camera, and he was experimenting with ways to capture high-quality video without a super-expensive camera.
He packed up his camera and went to a professional video set. There were several different “scenes” set up, each with really colorful props and all the proper lighting.
What happened?
Once upon a time, Joe made a stupid mistake.
I was recording a bunch of acoustic guitar tracks for an album project.
I was super-excited. I had set aside an entire afternoon to knock out all the songs.
Also, I had just gotten a brand new microphone, and was going to use it along with another mic to record the guitar in stereo.
All was right with the world. I set levels, listened through my headphones, and the sound was HUGE.
Jackpot. Let’s start recording.
You might get a kick out of this.
Tad, one of my subscribers, has a problem a lot of us deal with:
I love your posts and emails. Thank you.
Recently I recorded an artist playing acoustic guitar, and he wanted to use a click track. I had two large diaphragm condensers in an XY pattern at the twelfth fret.
My problem was that even though the player had over-the-ear closed-back headphones on and the click level was minimal, the mics picked up the click and you could hear it when the guitar would ring out and hold a chord.
Have you ever encountered this problem?
Yes. Yes I have.
I was hanging out in the VIP forums a few days ago, and the question came up about using compression while recording.
Adam commented:
Applying compression during recording scares me and is something I think you should only really do if you are very comfortable with what it’s doing… For me I rarely get the compression right on the first pass.
For a long time I was in the same boat as Adam. I didn’t really bother with outboard compression while recording. After all, once you add compression to the signal and record it, you can’t undo it.
When you’re starting out, you might not even own an outboard compressor, and that’s fine. You can always record everything “dry” and add compression plug-ins later as needed.
But there’s something fun about running the signal through a compressor before it gets recorded. Let’s face it, we all like twisting knobs, right?
Do you have noise in your recordings?
Do you hate noise?
Wish you knew some ways to deal with it?
This past Friday I spent part of the afternoon tracking acoustic guitar for a client. (He’s actually an HSC subscriber, too.)
It was a fairly quiet tune with a more finger-style guitar part. And since the instrumentation for the song was going to be primarily acoustic guitar, I decided to break out two mics and stereo-mic the guitar.
The problem?
Because I wasn’t strumming with a pick and playing nice and loud, I ended up having a fairly big amount of noise initially.
In yesterday’s blog post, I railed on the type of folks who are always floundering, waiting on the next piece of gear to come riding in on a white horse and save the day.
Today I’m going to give you a simple tip.
If you follow this tip, I guarantee you’ll get better recordings.
How do I know? Because it has worked every time for me.
I gotta warn you, though. The odds aren’t in your favor. Chances are you’ll read this tip but won’t ever do anything about it.
“It can’t be that easy,” you might say.
“He’s over-simplifying things.”
You shouldn’t just blindly believe me.
