Pavarotti ain't got ^#$* on me

As we had only one additional instrument to record, I will quickly discuss this here and for the rest it'll be vocals, baby, all vocals.

The additional instrument which we recorded was a didgeridoo. The song we were recording required a D-note. However, the didgeridoo supplied, as it seemed later on, a whole other note. This was easily fix with Auto-tune from Anteres, but we are getting way ahead of ourselves here! We had the condeser mic placed under the didgeridoo and placed a popfilter in front of it. We pressed record, our guitarplayer took a woof of air and played. End of sequence. That's it!

Vocals however seemed to require a bit more work to record. Because of all the noise reflection of the room we had a blanket placed over a speaker in front of us. Like this:



Furthermore, we placed a popfilter (or in our band called "spitscreen") in front of the condenser mic and had a closed pair of headphones on. Because vocals need power on actual recordings we took a bit distance (a tiny bit of distance though, or else you get a lot of ambient room sound with it) and sung a bit louder that we usually do. Also, this condenser mic was very sensitive, so we pressed the headphones a bit more to our ears.




That's it. Just sing and remember to press record. That's it for my view on the subject. I've invited another band member with whom I recorded to join this blog and post his adventures and views concerning the recording process. I, on the other hand, will continue to the mixing part of this journey. That's when the fun starts.

Jimi Hendrix is a wuss

Guitars. Terrible instruments. Well, to record in my opinion. As we recorded our guitar parts in multiple sessions, we got 2 different sounds. How the hell did this happen? Well. If you mess with the EQ on your amp, you mess with the recorded sounds. But that's an all other thing.

How to record such a thing? Well, we as a rock band have a lot of distorted parts. It seems that when you record a distorted sound too loud, you get a signal with a lot of flat tops. So first of all you turn down the gain/volume knob. It has to be relatively soft as compared to the sound that you are used to in the space used for band practice. Then we placed our condenser mic in the same way we placed the mic for the recording of the bass. Slightly to the side of the cone, but pointing directly towards it.
N.B. Because of our budget trouble we aren't in the possession a great tube amps, so therefor we had to work with transistor amps. It worked, but the sound gets a lot better if you use a tube amp, a lot warmer.

We only recorded the guitar in two ways, clean and distorted. Any other effects, such as tremolo, chorus and flanger, are put over the tracks during the mixing, so that you can get the perfect sound that you are looking for. Later a bit more about that.

The problem while recording this "soft" is that you easily can get some room noise to go along with it. So what you need at first is a closed pair of headphones and simply to be very, very quiet (like you're hunting wabbits). As we were going for the strumming noise as well, we needed to remain in the same space as where the amp was, other wise you can easily solve this problem by putting the amp in another room, or yourselves for that matter.

Another problem we encountered is because of the fact we've got two guitar players. Our other guitar player started complaining about the fact that he couldn't hear himself no matter how loud his signal was. This is very easily solved by muting his signal so he understands that he's out of his mind.

Don't mind the sound you get scraping over the strings to get another chord. It isn't annoying and even the best guitar players have that trouble. Even Jimi.

Deep thoughts for deep sounds

A lot of sound engineers record the bass by plugging it into a DI and work with that sound. Some sound engineers prefer the miking method. We did both.
We always like the strumming sound with our string instruments and therefor we had no other choice but to mike the bass amp. We miked the amp using the bassdrum mic from our drummic kit. The amp we used could be a little tilted, we did that and then we placed the mic slightly to the right of the cone but pointing to it.
However, this particular bass amp, Ibanez Soundwave 100, had an option to DI it as well as there was an XLR direct out port. At first we thought to use either one of them to look which one sounded better. Well, too bad. They both sounded great.

Now we decided to use both of them simultaneously, but I'll get back on that when we get to the mixing part. That's it for bass already. Press record and play.

Note :
If you try to use a bass-distortion pedal it totally messes up the sound while recording through a DI. You get a big, fuzzy, distorted and relatively high buzz in stead of a deep distorted bass sound. It is recommended if you want the true distorted bass sound as it appears on other recordings, you have to mike the bass amp. If you have an effect unit on bass which produces an analog sound, you can DI that. On other sounds I haven't got a clue, but these things were noticed during our recording session.

Hit it

How to start recording?

Well somehow we learned to start in a particular order :
1) Drums + Percussion
2) Bass
3) Guitar
4) Additional instruments
5) Vocals

So at first we recorded the drums. We had 7 drum mics, i.e.:
1 Bassdrum mic
1 Snare mic
3 Tom mics
2 Overhead mics

Because we had another XLR port left in our firewire mixer we decided to use the extra port for a hihat mic. Placed from the above to get the stick hitting the hihat in our sound, like this :




Only it seemed we could've used the extra XLR for something else. The hihat is heard pretty good in the OH's and therefor the hihattrack is muted or else it would've been too much hihat in the drumtrack. Our other problem this way is the absence of a real snaredrum hit. If you remove the snares from the drum, hit it and the sound you get then is almost the sound that we have. That sucks. We should have used the extra port for the snare bottom to get that real hit-effect. No harm no foul. Thank god for VST instruments.

We placed the overhead mics about 60 - 70 cm above the drumkit on both sides. Because our drummer has a lot of crashes (11!!) we had to spread the mics pretty wide to get everything at the same level. Although a lot of crashes we're picked up by other mics as well, we couldn't help but spread those two because of all the gating which was going to be done when the mixing started.




The other mics were placed as usual and therefor, the recording could begin. Oh one other note to remember!! If you going to record with the artist this close to the mics, make sure the headphones are closed. We had to gate almost everything because of the clicks from the clicktrack. It's a pity, cause gating isn't always the way to go!

We also recorded a wooden block being hit by our guitarplayer. This time we used our Audiotechnika condenser mic. I have to say, condenser sounds awesome. We intended it to be played the entire song, but there is an invention called copy and paste.

How would the drummer know what to play and where to play it?

Good call! It seems that usually the bassplayer and/or guitarplayer plays along with the drummer to give him the perfect idea of where the song is. Because of technical difficulties we decided to go another way and give him the vocals as well. Before we started to record the drums, we made a few pre-recordings of the guitar and vocals simply DI-ed these and used a VST plugin amp to make it at least sound a little like a guitar and vocals. This however requires a skilled guitarplayer who can stay on the beat. If you got that I recommend that you do it this way IF you are going to use a clicktrack. If not, then record the whole bunch live so you at least have a good feel for it.

But why this way? As a musician you always listen to the rhythmic part of the song for the tempo, so the musician just plays along with the drums (unless there is a quiet part for the drums of course) and the drummer has to concentrate on both things. In my experience, which isn't much I acknowledge that, drummers find that pretty much irritating. Therefor if you pre-record this stuff, the guitar player minds the clicktrack, which, in his subconscious, he always does while playing, so there's a lot less trouble for your guitarplayer. The drummer can play on the clicktrack and if he doesn't know where he is anymore, he listens to the guitarpart. In any other way, it results in pure chaos. Trust me, I've seen it. It ain't pretty.

Mastering, Myths and Mystery

Today I've recieved a book called Mastering Audio by Bob Katz. Before I ordered it, I thought : "Sure I know a little about equalising, noise reduction, compressing, declicking and limiting. But how hard could it all be, right?" Later on I realised, a rookie error. Damn this is hard, but the mystique surrounding it is all a bit over the top as I've read on sound on sound. Well, sod off. It is hard.

I've been browsing around on the internet and mastered my first track this weekend. It sounded awful. Well, not that terrible, but not as good as I had hoped. Actually it sounded the same as before I mastered it. I feel like I have some good mastering plugins (the Virtos plugin set) and I manage EQ pretty good, but I'm doing something wrong. I can read. I'll find it out.

All audiophiles like miked amps

At least that's what I think. I'm starting this blog cause I want to share my adventures on homerecording. What to use best, what to do if all else fails in a mix, how to record a certain instrument, how to mike an amp or drumkit and what if I use [enter plugin here] on [enter instrument track here]?

In all honesty I have to say I'm an amateur with a capital A. I've just dove in the world of homerecording and therefor don't have much knowledge and don't have much equipment. That doesn't matter though. I notice that the most important key to learn the procedure of producing a "commercial sounding" mix is to just do it. And we did.

I'm the lead singer and bassplayer in a band called HardlyEasy and we've recorded around 15 songs in July and August. We did this in 2 loads of 8 and 7 songs and the funny thing is. Our second load sounds a lot better then the first load. We did a few things differently and that's our result. We're in the mixing phase right now so as soon as we've got something. You'll know it.

Let me tell you what we were using to record these sessions :
- Phonic Helixboard 18 firewire;
- Audiotechika condensor mike;
- Superlux drum mike kit;
- Behringer DI 100;
- Cubase SX3 recording software.

So you can see, it's not much but we've got some fairly good results right now. And now, it's off to work. Or else I wouldn't have anything to talk about!