Recording Headaches

[darren]

I seem to have been stuck on the recording merry-go-round for a good few years. I've tried four-track, garageband and now Logic and it seems the more options an application has the more hampered I am in trying to produce a satisfactory recording.

Obviously there's a real craft to producing multi-tracked songs, but I'm wondering how detailed I should try to go in getting an adequate demo as I haven't produced one I'm really happy with yet (and I have quite a backlog of songs to get through).

I've often wondered what would be better: a straight live video recording of the track on either piano or guitar, or trying to persevere with multi-track recording?

Any suggestions would be gratefully received as I'd like to maybe set up on you tube and even post something on songstuff to get critiqued.

[john]

you could also do live multitrack... then overdub where needed.

would you say that your expectation has changed? Or that the arrangements of the songs has evolved into something more complex.

These days its all too easy to be drawn into complexity even if only because the technology made something possible. Of course, just because you can doesnt mean you are obliged to.

I have felt similar to yourself before.. for the reasons above. I found a few things helpful the biggest being getting the basics down for yhe emotions etc i wanted to convey and then building complimentary parts. Generally it resulted in simpler more honest sound. I I nailed the main performance there was also less need for embelishment.

just a thought

[darren]

John,

I guess my expectations may have changed slightly with the advances in technology but I always felt there was an expectation to get my songs to a certain production level in order to demo to people in the business. And while I've been toiling away on something that is not my strongest skill, it appears the landscape has changed and people are pitching their work themselves, via you tube, Facebook and sites like this.

Really, what I'm trying to get at is that a web presence seems to be an alternative to the old way of sending demo tapes out (I may be wrong as I never even got to that point), and if that is the case is their a standard in production that needs to be attained, or like you say, should I go for live recordings with a single instrument accompaniment?

Tom,

The main problem is probably drum tracks, not that there aren't enough loops to choose from in Logic (or on my synth for that matter), but getting in and breaking up the rhythm so it doesn't sound...well, looped.

And indeed, the list goes on for other problems, especially where to place different tracks in the mix and getting the levels right. I don't have anything I finished with too many tracks but I might have a simple three track song I can post if I can find it.

Anyway, thanks for the replies

Darren

[darren]

Thanks Tom, and yes it helps.

I think what I need to do is get some songs posted and heard by people other than my own immediate family/ friends. Maybe in the future I could buy some studio time to get some songs recorded properly but for now maybe videos of me live from my bedroom will suffice. Actually, that sounds rude - good job there was no mention of my organ, I mean synth!!!

[Ferry0123]

The main problem is probably drum tracks, not that there aren't enough loops to choose from in Logic (or on my synth for that matter), but getting in and breaking up the rhythm so it doesn't sound...well, looped.

Hi Darren,

Like I got the advice to listen to what a drummer does in songs I like, I advice you to do the same and buy a drum plug-in, like Superior Drummer 2.0. (http://www.toontrack...cts.asp?item=30) and a keyboard to play those drums on into your computer. It's an incredible plug-in and I've heard the sounds out of which you can choose: great sounds (hi-hats, snares etc) and a lot too. Listen to songs and listen what the drummer does and get the hang of it by playing the sounds on the keyboard. I'm told there's not much difference in hearing sounds from this plug-in to a real drummer.

Ferry

Edited March 7, 2012 by Ferry0123

[TapperMike]

The problem with drum loops isn't lack of availabiltiy. It's over availablity and not being suited properly. Drum loops are by nature too short and too busy. Unless by happenstance you get enough loops with similarity that you can build into a song for things like fills, breaks and....rests you'll be constantly searching out loops or being drained by the process of placing them in a usuable fashion that supports the song.

Another thing to bring up is everyone wants to hit the big red button even when they aren't prepared for it. I have an expression "dawful" something that's awful becaus it was composed in a DAW.

In my humble opinion timing and rhythm is important. Strong timing, good rhythm are by products of practice. focus and attitude. Some people don't feel they need to practice anything. Just hit the big red button and go. Honestly you should work out your compositions/arrangements before you record. I worked the big boards back in the 80's Bands that came in pumped and focused and well rehearsed though not over rehearsed always tracked better. Those with the "lets just get this done so I can go" usually put out crap.

These days usually when a song is in it's infancy I'll try to work it through in OMB I'm just looking for a fit of chords and style. It forces me to work all the way thru the song. Then I'll do a mock up in band in a box. I'll define the chords work out alternative basslines. When I'm done with that stage and I know where everything is going to sit. Along with lots of practice I'll export my biab arrangement and open it up into something I can polish things up such as realband or cakewalk. I'll try out different vsti's for the midi tracks. I play guitar, bass and ztar currently. By now I've got my practice time down. I'll only strip away a few of the midi tracks like the bass one backing part and the solo. Sure I could strip them all away one at a time and add drum loops but....that gets back to my point about drum loops. And I want it to be still somewhat fresh all the way through. If I try to play everypart it will drain me to much. If you've (or I) have done everything write the music is already listenable even before mixdown. I'll wait a day before I tackle mixdown. I studied under the motown masters and the one thing they beat into my head is that for every hour of recording you should spend two hours mixing down.

[Prometheus]

Another thing to bring up is everyone wants to hit the big red button even when they aren't prepared for it. I have an expression "dawful" something that's awful becaus it was composed in a DAW.

DAW's are like any other tool. You can do wonderful things with them as long as you bother to learn how to use them.

To be a Jedi Knight in sound engineering parlance, you need to learn how all the equipment works and then do a thousand studio sessions, which will give you around ten thousand hours of experience.

DAW's do not and cannot make things sound awful, big red buttons or no. A DAW can't make a single decision for itself. The person operating the DAW manipulates the controls and the DAW responds accordingly. In short, it's people that make things sound awful.

Trent Reznor, for example, has composed some wonderful pieces using a multitrack recorder as a composition tool.

[TapperMike]

I use DAW's as well. and I've produced a lot of electronica stuff with Abelton Live. But moreover I hear a lot of crap being produced by would be producers who walk in blindly and think the program will make it happen for them.

[Prometheus]

I use DAW's as well. and I've produced a lot of electronica stuff with Abelton Live. But moreover I hear a lot of crap being produced by would be producers who walk in blindly and think the program will make it happen for them.

To be fair, the only way to learn to produce good work is by producing shit work. I must say though, compared to the equipment around when I started out twenty years ago, DAW's really are a joy to work with...

The first tape loops I made in the days when the digital domain was in it's infancy were produced on a little yamaha four track, by a painful process of recording the loop onto a tape and then recording the tape onto other tapes again and again and again and then getting out scissors and glue.

A loop that could be produced in sixty seconds in this day and age took the guts of a day's work back then, unless you were lucky and could afford a fancy reel to reel recorder, which would allow you to join a piece of tape with your loop on it end to end and then play it round the flanges and out and back round a couple of microphone stands. Even that was far more of a pain in the arse than using a DAW to do it.

Add to that the utterly puny dynamic range that tape has compared with the Digital Domain. The maximum dynamic range ever achieved on tape without noise reduction was 75dB. Even bog standard 16 bit digital gives you a theoretical 96dB and an observed 90dB of dynamic range without noise reduction. As decibels are logarithmic (base 10) this gives you better than a ten fold increase over the dynamic range of tape.

On a 16bit system, the quantization errors are too tiny to be perceptible, and with the 144dB range of 24 bit audio, the quanization errors are tiny on the atomic level. In terms of alaising errors, as long as you can sample above 40,000 Khz, which even the kids toy soundcards that ship onboard with PC's can, you're never going to hear one. Hooray for Harry Nyquist!!!

Digital is definitely where it's at...

[TapperMike]

20 years ago...

20 years ago I was a session guitarist and we were still doing things mostly live. At home I had a few drum machines/ With 4 tracks and midi back then you could use one of the tracks as a sync for midi. If you slaved it properly you could have 3 analog and more sequenced. I used to sequence everything but guitars and vocals. Then I'd mix my 4 track analog with my midi sequence on to a hi fidelity vhs tape which was the same quality as dat back then.

15 years ago I invested in a Roland VS1680

I never actually used loops until 2000

[NikolaiArctor]

Darren, I've thought some similar things about the recording industry and where I could fit in as well. I too had a time where I was looking at DAW's and wondering, "ok now what exactly do I do with all this stuff?" So I studied how the recording industry worked in the past and then worked to replicate that with what I had available.

So, traditionally an artist or band would need to make a demo recording or play their music live to get noticed by a record label. They had or had access to all the cool recording stuff that was prohibitively expensive for the average person to own. There was no way around it you had to get a record deal or work for a studio to get your foot in the door of professional level recording, literally.

This day in age, that is obviously not the case. Quality equipment is within grasp of the average musician now more than ever. So now it's not so much a question if one can afford equipment (of course it's really easy to go broke) it's more of a question of does one have the skill and know how to make the most of it.

So what I'd recommend doing, and I'm trying to do the same thing, is to look at what a recording engineer, mixing engineer, mastering engineer does and study the process and then try the best you can with the equipment you have. Right now, I believe, a musician has to know more about the whole process of recording to remain competitive because it is so easy to record music with current technology.

I feel it's really exciting to be a musician right now. We just have to hit the books harder to make the best of it.

[TapperMike]

it's not about having the equipment as much as having the skills and the technology.

Do you have any idea what it takes to record a live band? First off it's rarely live. You need to isolate the drummer so the drums are not bleeding into the vocals. And you need a sufficient amount of quality mics to record it properly. They need to be placed in specific positions to capture the mix of the drums. The drums need to be away from the wall especially if you are recording in a basement with concrete walls. You need proper sound baffling. The drummer needs to record to a click track. dry. Which can be a real pain if he's never done that before. That is where it starts but hardly the end of it.

If you are going into a computer...unless you want to drop a few thousand on a presonus console or hard disk recording system You'll have to mix that down to stereo and record with only two tracks. which means if there are any problems with drum separation you aren't going to save them in the mix. I was recording quite often and to the best of my abilites before I went to school for recording engineering. I did the best with what I had but... had I had the skills my recordings would have been a heck of a lot better way back when. Technology and skillset walk hand in hand. It's useless to have one without the other.

It's a bitch when a band enters a studio. All you need is one member to be off and it can/does cascade to other members. It's also a struggle if the material hasn't been worked out or has been worked out too much. If you are tired of playing the same song over and over again when recording that is going to show up in the final cut. It'll sound tired. A good producer knows when to step aside and let the band do it's magic AND when to step in and mix things up so the song is fresh and slightly challenging.

There are four stages to recording. Recording Editing Mixdown and Mastering. I had a very short intership at a studio which skipped the three final stages. It was cheap recording for indie artists who didn't want to pay a lot for recording and they got what they paid for. No more and usually much less. It sounded horrible and it was a struggle for me being assistant engineer to find work at a reputable studio afterwards

Mucisians think the work is done when the first stage of recording is done. And if you think like that you are in serious trouble.

Session players usually take an hour to cut a 30 second track when they have isolation booths for instruments. Even the best bands are lucky if they spend one day on one well rehearsed song and have something at the end. It's work and it's stress.

Then patching through all the outtakes takes time. adjusting eq and compression. Putting the instruments in at the proper level and the proper time. Finally there is mastering. Which is where you try to bring back the life of the song and make it sound the same on various different amplifiers and speaker combinations. Expect to take three times as long to complete a recording thru editing and mixdown stage as you would recording it. Mastering is a bitch especially trying to dither down from 24/96 uncompressed to 16k 128 kps mp3 which is the defacto standard for soundcloud, flash and all other web friendly formats.

It's not just gear. I don't care if you are using Logic, Live, Pro Tools or whatever else. You can have all the tools in the world but if you don't have the skills to match it's all in vain.

[Prometheus]

If you are going into a computer...unless you want to drop a few thousand on a presonus console or hard disk recording system You'll have to mix that down to stereo and record with only two tracks.

That's not actually true... Spend a couple of hundred quid in a Moto Unit and you can have sixteen tracks of simultaneous recording or even more if you want to open the purse strings. The unit I use is an MAudio Delta 10 10. It cost me £300 (around $500 US) and gives me 8 tracks of simultaneous recording. This MAudio Unit is by no means the cheapest on the market.

Alternatively, you can buy portastudios that let you record eight tracks simultaneously at better than CD quality for less than $500 and use their USB interface to transfer the tracks directly into your DAW. I use this method for location recordings, record the drums on the first eight tracks, bounce them into another session so you still have all the individual tracks for mixing and then individually track the bass, vox, guitar et cetera using the bounce. When you don't have Abbey Road at your disposal, one of the main skills a sound engineer has to develop is coming up with effective workarounds to push the limits of the technology.

Mastering is a bitch especially trying to dither down from 24/96 uncompressed to 16k 128 kps mp3 which is the defacto standard for soundcloud, flash and all other web friendly formats.

I think you're making that sound a lot more daunting than it actually is. As long as you configure your LAME converter to "Slowest but Highest Quality" you should get a decent result and it's the computer that does all the work. Same with dithering. The process of dithering consists of three or four mouse clicks in adobe audition or whatever mastering suite of your choice.

There's a good reason why recording and mixing an album takes weeks and then it's mastered in a few hours. It's because mastering is the easiest part of the process. The problem is that there's this ludicrous mystique around mastering that was built up in the days when mastering was done with very expensive cutting needles that could be damaged by phasing issues laid down at the recording stage. Obviously, in this case, no one would let a rookie engineer near their cutting equipment.

The skill set that a sound engineer requires to record and mix music is transferable to mastering and like anything else, if you practice mastering you'll become good at it. Of course, it suits mastering engineers to carry on the imposture that you need to have fallen from the sky to master a recording. As I no longer rely on sound engineering as my only source of income, I can now break the code and assure everyone that this is absolute bollocks. Anyone with a musical ear who can operate the equipment in a recording studio can learn the mastering process.

It's even quite possible to master songs that you've written yourself, despite huge amounts of uninformed anecdotal opinion to the contrary.

[TapperMike]

Most portable varieties only allow for two channel simultaneous recording.

BR from Roland, Tascam DP MR-8 Mk etc

The only one in that price range which allows for more then two channels at once recording is the Zoom R16

http://www.samsontech.com/zoom/products/multi-track-recorders/r16/

Edited June 17, 2012 by TapperMike

[Prometheus]

Most portable varieties only allow for two channel simultaneous recording.

BR from Roland, Tascam DP MR-8 Mk etc

The only one in that price range which allows for more then two channels at once recording is the Zoom R16

http://www.samsontec...-recorders/r16/

You're mistaken... I have a Fostex that allows 4 channels simultaneous that I got for around $300 two years ago. I also have a Yamaha MD8 that does 8 Channels simultaneous, although it was rather more expensive when I got it in 1999 at around $1,300.

http://www.zzounds.com/item--FOSMR8HD

http://www.dancetech...did=1799&lang=0

If 4 channels isn't enough, here's a link to an MAudio Delta 10 10 that costs around $500.

http://www.studiospa...390G3q9uxRGQ==

Here's a nice Motu Traveller as well, for under $1,000.

http://www.studiospa...vyFyOqHnFzpQ==

and an 8 Track Tascam for around $1,000.

http://www.studiospares.com/recorders-media-card/tascam-dr680/invt/228920/?htxt=XrgUJutFSUeXvykTtn35B9pr9k3QQu9ItDVYVzaeiZvarRaVnLFH06HRrotkr5oy8HXfYPg8%2Bx46%0AMiDq6CatJA%3D%3D

[garcarstive]

In recording production company headaches is most important for recording the voice of music. This is very useful for listening the song and you can also listening some best lyrics for recording the music.

[qbradley]

Just to throw another thought in...

Multi track recording is difficult when trying to create live energy because, well it's not live! Also when you think about close miking, direct inputs, and processing; it is a rather unnatural environment to be capturing a performance. Logic, GarageBand and multi track digital recorders are amazing tools and if you have Logic, you are set. I'd bet that one of the issues is within the non-tech process. Dynamics in Multi track recordings can be very difficult, especially when one track is being laid down at a time because if there is no lead to follow, then everything can come out real flat. The other thing, is that it's easy to forget the simplicity behind playing a single part and everything can get jumbled up. If there are too many layers of "fidgety busyness" then the arrangement falls apart. I was at a Hardware demonstration once and someone had loaded up the unprocessed original multitrack of "Superstition." What blew me away was not only stevie's talent, but the simplicity laid down on each track. Perfection through simplicity!

[Prometheus]

Dynamics in Multi track recordings can be very difficult, especially when one track is being laid down at a time because if there is no lead to follow, then everything can come out real flat.

It's meant to come out flat, that's what mutlitrack mixing is all about.

If you want a song to be broadcastable, you use compressors and fader adjustments to make the loud bits quiet and the quiet bits loud.

An excellent example of this is the Green Day song "When September Ends". When the song suddenly steps up in power, the peak volume level doesn't change. What happens is that the vocals and drums become somewhat submerged in the Overdriven Guitar and Bass.

The reason flat mixes are needed for radio play is because people would not be happy if they had to constantly keep readjusting the volume on their radio sets between each song, so broadcasted signals are heavily companded, so the loud parts would be made quiet and the quiet parts loud by the companding process anyway, and in a far less transparent way than a competent mixing engineer could do it.

Because of this, mixing and mastering engineers have gotten into a "loudness war" over the last few decades.

[qbradley]

It's meant to come out flat, that's what mutlitrack mixing is all about.

If you want a song to be broadcastable, you use compressors and fader adjustments to make the loud bits quiet and the quiet bits loud.

An excellent example of this is the Green Day song "When September Ends". When the song suddenly steps up in power, the peak volume level doesn't change. What happens is that the vocals and drums become somewhat submerged in the Overdriven Guitar and Bass.

The reason flat mixes are needed for radio play is because people would not be happy if they had to constantly keep readjusting the volume on their radio sets between each song, so broadcasted signals are heavily companded, so the loud parts would be made quiet and the quiet parts loud by the companding process anyway, and in a far less transparent way than a competent mixing engineer could do it.

Because of this, mixing and mastering engineers have gotten into a "loudness war" over the last few decades.

My bad, I should have clarified further. I am talking about the dynamics of the composition (pianissimo to fortissimo) and how they can get lost as tracks are layered on top of each other over time. Though the output levels of the recording are flat, the timbre of most instruments change when played at different volumes and our ears sense the changes as louder or softer, even when the output levels are squashed to the same level. Like the difference between hearing a compressed scream and a whisper; we think the scream is much louder even when it is technically the same level.

[Prometheus]

My bad, I should have clarified further. I am talking about the dynamics of the composition (pianissimo to fortissimo) and how they can get lost as tracks are layered on top of each other over time. Though the output levels of the recording are flat, the timbre of most instruments change when played at different volumes and our ears sense the changes as louder or softer, even when the output levels are squashed to the same level. Like the difference between hearing a compressed scream and a whisper; we think the scream is much louder even when it is technically the same level.

I see where you're coming from... I suppose it's down to skilled performers and a clever producer to avoid that happening. The advantage of recording each instrument seperately is that you don't get cross talk between the channels (for example the bass guitar bleeding into the overheads on the drum kit), which with current production trends is thought to outweigh the disadvantage you're talking of, losing some of the spontaneity of the performance. Multitracks that are recorded seperately are easier to mix.

The way a modern mix works, it's as if you're hearing the band as an alien with multiple prehensile ears. I actually do think we've become a bit too techno focussed nowadays. I kind of agree with your point.