Ed Driscoll

It’s always fun to talk about microphones, but the reality is that the room you are using it in, and the context of how you are recording is equally as important as the mic itself. Based on its Amazon page, and the fact that Alan Parsons, in his book, The Art & Science of Sound Recording, has raved about its big brother, the AT-4033, as “a great general-purpose mic. With a higher output level than many other condensers and a slightly enhanced top end response, it’s great for many vocal applications,” the 4020 could be fine for your application. But are you recording with a full band? Are you building up something track by track yourself, with say, drum loops or a drum machine, individual guitar and bass parts, and then the vocal on top of the layer cake? In either case, It depends on the quality of your room. If the acoustics allow for it, a condenser mic like the AT-4020 and a decent pre-amp will give your voice a bit more high-end. But condenser mics are often akin to the wide angle lens on a camera. Back in 2015, when I wrote a product review on the Reflexion portable vocal booth, I transcribed a quote from David Stewart of Sweetwater, when he interviewed Mitch Gallagher about how he built his product studio in an hour-long YouTube interview: You don't need a project studio as elaborate as Gallagher's just to record vocals if you're, saying, laying down guitar tracks via something like the Pod or amp modelling software. But when it comes time for vocals, a condenser mic, if not recorded in an acoustically treated room, really needs something like the Reflexion filter or the GIK “PIB” portable isolation booth and a couple of duvets behind it to minimize the room. If you're not prepared to treat your room to reduce reverb and slap, consider a dynamic cardioid mic. It won't have the same high-end bite, but it's a much more narrow-focused beam and will minimize room nastiness. The "lowly" Shure SM58, or the Shure SM7B Dynamic Vocal Microphone going into a Cloudlifter pre-amp might be much better choices than a condenser if recording in an untreated room.

I usually have a pretty good sense of when a recording is complete, but getting a mix that translates on all systems, particularly its low-end, is still often frustrating.

When you're talking about songwriting, are you talking about someone never writing or recording a song's lyrics and music, and simply carrying it around permanently in their head? Or do you mean a crude demo recording that goes no further? In any case, Sisyphus strain in some cases -- the fear that once I'm done with this one, I'm obligated to get the boulder up the hill again with a new song. For many, it's a fear that of being be told how much their song sucks if they share it with the band/their friends/YouTube, etc., and taking rejection personally. (Lots of songwriters refer to songs as "their babies." If that's your analogy, it's understandable why you don't want to see them thrown to the wolves.) But artwork never seeing the light of day is true in all genres -- how many articles, books, or screenplays are started and then abandoned permanently into a drawer or a hard drive? How paintings are begun and then never completed?

Seconding Ozone; though I would recommend experimenting with the presets. It's very easy to overdue it, and completely brickwall a mix at maximum volume, which can become fatiguing on the ears.

Studying what guitarists can and cannot do on their instruments will go far in making guitar patches on synths sound realistic. From the mid-1970s onward, including his mid-'80s Miami Vice soundtrack days, Jan Hammer has made a very good living as a keyboard player by using a Minimoog through a guitar amp to sound exactly like a rock lead guitarist (Jeff Beck has called Hammer his favorite "electric guitarist") by very carefully emulating the licks that guitarists do on their instruments. It's a very different technique than say, playing grand piano (which Hammer can also do extremely well), and involves a completely different mindset and finger skills. Even if "all" you want to do is play low-note riffs and power chords, a bit of study of the actual instrument will help immensely.

I would highly recommend singing lessons, or at the least practicing arpeggios with your voice against a keyboard (a piano patch works great) -- or ideally both. It will quickly strengthen your intonation. Your voice is an instrument just like the keyboard and guitar, and needs practice to improve hitting pitches dead on. Also when overdubbing vocals, I'm a big fan on the one headphone on, one headphone off approach so that I can hear my voice in the room. There are various methods you can read on the Internet for recording vocals with the music on speakers with minimal bleed into the mic, which might also be worth experimenting with to improve intonation.

Thanks all!

There are lots of books on mixing, but if I had to name just one, Mike Senior's Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio is the most straightforward book I've read on the whole process, from the importance of room acoustics, to choosing monitoring speakers, to setting levels, EQ, and plugins. The selection of monitor speakers he suggests aren't insanely expensive, and he frequently recommends free plugins, for the budget conscious.

As "Just1L" said above, rather than play to a metronome, I'd rather practice to a drum loop or drum pattern of some sort. It's much more inspiring than simply a ticking metronome.

It looks like a fantastic collection, but I wonder what sort of message this is sending about Gilmour's future as a musician. I've long given up hope for a Pink Floyd reunion (plus Rick Wright is off to the Great Gig in the Sky), but I hope Gilmour has a few more albums and/or tours in him. But putting many of his favorite tools up for charity doesn't bode well.

Hi Peggy, Thanks for the kind words. Yes, blowing past the ten post minimum was a breeze, and I've already posted my first song for critique. Regards, Ed

I love the sound of the Abbey Road Chambers, but it seems very RAM heavy. It's something you'll put on a bus and run the majority of your tracks through it. It's not an effect that you can pop individually onto multiple tracks and tweak each one individually. I have no doubt that there are relatively similar sounding chamber effects without the Abbey Road imprimatur that are much less of a memory hog.

As I mentioned in my introduction, I was inspired to write songs by Pete Townshend's 1983 double-album Scoop, and its liner notes, where Townshend explained how he wrote songs on a multi-track recorder. This was during the same period in which the first cassette four track recorders, drum machines, and affordable digital synths debuted, so it all fell into place. I'm not a very good sight reader of music, and can write even more slowly, so using the cassette, both as a sketchpad, and then to develop more polished demos was a great introduction to the process. It was also during that period that I was reading about how the Beatles and George Martin honed their craft. I used to read books such as The Beatles Recording Sessions, which discussed the mics, pre-amps, and effects the Beatles used, and thought, "I'll never own gear like this." Due to the ubiquity of DAWs and project studios, good quality condenser mics and pre-amps are much more readily available than they were in the 1980s, and many of the plugins from Waves and Eventide replicate the hardware effects the Beatles used. It's a great era for the home songwriter/recordist!

I think you can feel it internally when a song works. You can compare it to material you've material already written to see if there's any musical growth or progress. But even when a song doesn't work, it's always worth studying what went wrong to avoid doing it again. Or steal the bits that work and combine them with something new to avoid having to start from zero.

I started off writing on a cassette four-track in the 1980s, so once I got over the learning curve of how to operate a DAW, I found it increased my songwriting potential astronomically. (But those years from 1999 to 2001 of learning how to operate the bloody GUI was quite a challenge!) To me, it's the process of finding new* riffs, new chord progressions, new melodies and new structures that makes it so fascinating. It's a bit of a search in the dark, but when it all comes together, it's a great feeling. * Well, new to me!