Recording A Great Album: The Golden Rules 20-26 of 37

The Recording Process 

20. Don't necessarily double track everything. Doubling a lead vocal can hide all the subtleties that make a song personal and likable. (Although it can work well for a chorus).

21. Know when to quit for the day, if your tired if will show.

22. Keep guest out! It's your recording. Guest will distract you can menu sway your opinion of how the music should sound.

23. Make backup copies after every recording session.

24. Turn-up often!

25. Singers: always bring water but don't use ice! Ice constricts your vocal chords. Hot tea with lemon and honey works well to relax your vocal chords.

26. Always get a track listing and accurate time log from the studio.

Recording A Great Album: The Golden Rules 14-19 of 37

The Recording Process

14. Remember, it's emotion and feeling that make the best song, not necessarily the best technical rendition.

15. If you mess up a part while recording, don't stop and start over. That can easily cause you to burn out. Instead, check to see if the engineer can punch in the correction.

16. You don't have to fill all the tracks on the tape - don't try to force something that won't fit.

17. Always keep in mind the focus of your music. If it's the vocals, plan to spend the most time on them. Don't waste time on things that don't highlight the focal point.

18. Get the sound you want while recording, never assume you can fix it in the mix.

19. Unless you have unique effects, record individual tracks clean and add effects later.

Recording A Great Album: The Golden Rules 7-13 of 37

Preparing to Record

7. Be early! At some studios, the clock starts running whether you're their or not. Find out about their cancellation policy.

8. Make the studio a comfortable relaxed place. If it's not, it will show in your finished product. Most studios will have your basic essentials, but if you need something special or special accommodation, it's up to you to make those arrangements.

9. Make sure you and your engineer have the same vision - go over your songs with him/her before recording. Before booking your studio time, ask to hear other material the engineer recorded. If artist/band and engineer are on different pages, it can be costly for who ever is paying for the studio.

10. Depending on whether the/you studio has 8, 16, 24, or 48 track capability, plan out how you will leave room for all of the essential parts. This should simplify the mix and eliminate the need for bouncing tracks later.

11. Use new strings, chords, drums sticks and heads - and bring spares.

12. Find out the hours of the local music store just in case. Most studios might be able to hook you up with some spare equipment, but you will want to use your style and brand for the perfect outcome.

13. Don't use new gear or different equipment that you haven't used before, "even if it's better than what you have." Surprises can cause problems and just because it's better does not me it will make you play better.

Rule of thumb - if you wait till the studio clock is running to tie up loose-ends it's like throwing money in the garbage. And one more misconception: hangovers and efficiency do not mix.

Three Quick Tips for Excessive Cymbal Noise

Drums are an important part of just about every song, like the guitar and bass, almost every song will have these components. As an audio engineer , one of the biggest problems you will face when recording drums, which you won't have when recording a bass or a guitar, is too much cymbal action and too much high frequency. Basically all this means is the sound of the cymbal hit is just too loud and last longer than what is wanted or needed for the action.

Since there is no volume knob for a cymbal and asking the drummer to take it easier on the cymbals is probably not going to be an option, here are three things as an engineer you can try to fix this problem.

Try a De-esser Plug-in. Yes, in most cases this is supposed to be used for a vocal, but I haven't seen that written in stone anywhere. This plug-in might just take away that high frequency and on-going ringing that you need to tame down the unwanted sound without affecting the initial sound too much.

Use a Compressor. Using a compressor plug-in might help keep some of those tones in check. A 10:1 ratio with a threshold of -10 might give you some amazing results. In fact, a slight compression after the De-esser program might really give you a sound that sounds great without using a whole lot of EQ.

Remove the Overhead Mics. If your drummer is hitting the cymbals so hard that the sound is too over powering, it might be time to rethink your microphone set-up. For most drum mic set-ups, you will have a left and right overhead mic. But if your drummer is hitting the cymbals hard enough to ditch the overhead mics, you should do just that. If this is the case, you can possibly just get away with using the individual mics that you are using to pic up the other components, or if you still need a good overall sound from your drum kit, you can try setting up a room mic to capture the drum kit at a whole.

I know as an engineer myself, it's easy to say I don't completely like the way those cymbals sound but I will fix the problem later during mix down. This is a big no-no. What happens if you record five or six songs with the set-up the way it is, later the band packs up and goes home and then when you get ready to mix these songs, you find out that the cymbals just are not fixable without re-recording the drum tracks again, how do you explain yourself? Remember, one of the most important rules in recoding is doing it right the first time.

Get Serious About Your Studio: Create a Patch Bay

If you have a Home Studio and you are running a lot of outboard equipment, then you need to invest in a patch bay. Think of the trouble you probably go through unplugging one piece of equipment and snaking out the cord and then running it to another piece of equipment. Think of the spaghetti mess of cords and knots that you have to fight with and trip over on a consistent basic.


With a patch bay this could all be avoided. Quick and easy access to all of your equipment will help take the stress off of you as the engineer and can help you and your studio look professional.


You will also find that if you have a signal flow problem, finding where the problem is at will be a lot easier with a patch bay. With one patch wire, you can stand or sit in the same place and check everything one plug at a time, it's that simple.

Unfortunately, I wish I could tell you this project is cheap, but I can't. I would say you should expect to pay about a minimum of 200 hundred dollars. The bay itself will cost money and the chords will not be cheap either, but in my opinion money well spent.

So basically, you can keep wasting your time on your hands and knees under your studio desk trying to blindly connect to the back of each component, or you can set up a patch bay and run everything one time and one time only.

Head over to this site for great patch bay advice "patch bay"



 

The Importance of Using AUX Channels for Your Vocal Tracks

A common mistake made by many amateur Recording Engineers is putting effects directly on to the vocal tracks. When I first started recording and did not have a lot of experience, I mixed vocals in a way that I'm sure a lot of other beginners mixed vocals, putting effects directly on the vocal tracks. I still managed to come out with some pretty decent sounding vocals but after working with others, reading and schooling I dropped this bad habit along with a lot of others.


Using AUX channels is not always necessary when mixing instruments, but mixing vocals with AUX channels is crucial. What makes it so crucial? When you start adding effects to the vocals, you still want to have a track with the vocals that is completely dry that you can work with. This just helps you have a lot more control over the natural sound of the vocals, and if there is anything in the mix that you want to sound as real as possible, that would be your vocals. For instance, if you have a reverb effect on the aux plug-in that you feel has the perfect parameters for what you are looking for, but the natural sound is a little too distant, you can bring up the volume of the vocal track without affecting the parameters of your reverb.

Another great advantage to AUX channels every engineer should know and if you don't, read it, write it down, remember it: If you have more than one vocal track you can run each track to the same AUX channel, this will ensure each vocal will be affected by the same amount giving the allusion that each set of vocals was recorded in the same place. When I first started recording, I listened to a lot of local music recorded in garages and basements. This is where I notice the problem, mainly hip-hop and rap had this problem. A lot of neighborhood artist would get together and produce a track. But with four or five different artist and someone mixing it that was far from professional, all of the artist would sound like they had recorded in different rooms and in some cases they did; and having a different amount of effects placed on each track did not make things any better.

The same effects placed on each vocal will help give the allusion that the vocals were recorded in the same place at the same time even if they were not. Even if you have five vocal tracks recorded in five different rooms, running them through one or more main AUX channel is your best bet to making them sound like they all came from the same room. You can still set up different effects for each track, such as EQ or delay, but you want at least have one or main effect that ever channel is affected by.

Recording Engineer Advice: Get paid First!

If you're a freelance audio engineer then getting paid is important. Unfortunately, there are people out there who just aren't good people and are always looking for someone to screw; it's part of the business. As an engineer you need to protect yourself, and the best way to protect yourself is by making sure nothing leaves your computer or studio without the money upfront.

Rough mixes, data files, masters, mp3's, not even a couple of tracks you recorded out of a full album should ever be handed to the client without being payed. Even if the client is due back for more tracks or a mastering session, you could hand them over a rough mix and later a dispute between rates could arise and the client may decide there are no longer happy with the current situation and not come back; if you did not get paid for the work you handed over, you just lost money.

This is sad to say but even friends should be held to a certain professionalism. Chances are your friends won't skip out on you and not come back, but if you don't take some type of stand it's very easy for them to get the wrong impression and take advantage. Unpaid debt can build up and then get pushed to the side, then be forgotten as they are working on more debt.  It's kind of like the old saying my Mom used to say, "Before it even starts, nip it in the bud."

Music Production: Always Use Your Ears for the Perfect Sound

Nowadays with the technology that we experience in DAW's (digital audio work stations) we tend to be attracted to staring at the big show of colored wave forms, super accurate meters, graphs and digital moving plug-ins that are music programs have to offer. Even know all the glitz and glimmer do serve as a purpose, we tend to forget that our ears are what is hearing the music not are eyes.


When we use both our ears and our eyes, our brains are taking in two different types of information at the same time in-turn distorting or weakening the signal of what we hear. And even know the numbers on the computer screen may never lie they don't always make the sound we are looking for.

One thing that any good engineer needs to do is turn off the computer screen or at least close your eyes when the sound that you are trying to mix is playing. You can  try other things to get away from the computer screen as well, such as getting up and walking to the back of the room or to gain a different sound perspective you can walk from one side of the room to the other. You can also try letting the sound source play while you walk out of the room for a minute then come back into the room while it's still playing to see if you can pick up anything that needs to be changed.

One last tip, something I do often  that a lot of engineers won't do is if I'm pretty close to being finished, I take the music and make a quick copy of it, then I take that copy to my car and ride around the block and listen to it; or I will take it to another room lay on the coach and set back and listen to it. A different room will give you a different atmosphere, and that might just give you a different perspective, then you can head back into the lab make some changes and finish up.