Krist asks:
How do you work with a band or artist that can’t play to a click track? How do you edit if it’s not “on the grid”?
You probably don’t run into that too much at your level, but most of us are working with folks of much less skill.
It’s true. I do get to work with some killer musicians. But that ain’t always the case.
Sometimes people can’t play to a click (i.e. metronome), and the best thing for the song is to kill the click and just let ‘em play.
Come editing time, though, you’re in a pickle.
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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.
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If you hang around recording circles long, you’ll probably ask this question I got from Andrew:
Hey Joe, when should I use linear-phase EQ and why?
Linear-phase EQ is essentially a highly-accurate, “surgical” EQ.
Regular EQ’s have phase shift between the different bands. When you boost or cut 250 Hz, that frequency range is technically delayed by a tiny amount, which causes some…”smearing” is the word, I think.
Linear-phase EQ keeps all the frequencies 100% in phase. In other words, all the frequencies pass through the EQ at the same speed, resulting in zero phase issues between bands.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Some things just don’t make no sense.
I interact regularly with lots home studio owners.
And the more I hear from them, the more “don’t make no sense” things I hear.
For example…
- People who complain that they can never find any paying clients, but they don’t have a single song in their portfolio to show of their chops.
- People who can’t get good mixes, and they blame it on their gear.
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