What Goes In Must Come Out – How To Add Magic In The Box
If you’re an up and coming name in the music recording world, you have probably had full command of some pretty nightmarish sessions at your home studio. Trust me, we have ALL been there. The worst part is mixing time, where you spend hours tweeking the EQ, trying to enhance harmonics without adding horrible noise, chopping mistakes without any DC offset, and bringing your faders and panners up to pleasing levels only to hear more slop and hiss.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there is no such thing as “fixing in the mix”, or “studio magic”. Sorry, it’s a hoax. The real “magic” happens before your signal even hits your converter. Allow me to explain.
If you’re like me, you’ve read countless article from the pros preaching about acoustics, mic placement, phase allignment, and performance tips. We look at these articles and go, “Yeah well I’m not a millionare, I don’t have the tools, and the musicians around here can’t record 4 bars without screwing up!” Relax. There is a gap between the home studio guys and the pros, and it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Imagine the pros being reduced to your setup, only having your system and room. No one knows your setup better than you (if you take recording seriously), so take advantage of that! Instead of looking at the pros ranting about their HD Accel System and how great a pair of U87′s sound as overheads, think about what you can do with YOUR gear that gets the most out of it.
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Going back to what I said earlier about not fixing in the mix; there are stages when recording. Do your best in every stage, from engineering to tracking to editing to mixing. The most important is the arguably the first. Experiment with microphone placement and keep a pair of well isolated headphones glued to your ears. Have a session booked next week? Get ready now. Listen to their material at a show or on previous recordings and imagine what you want them to sound like after you’re done with them. Now call up your drummer friend. Hit record, have him play drums in your tracking room, and go move stuff around, taking notes as you do it. Put up some diffusion, take some down, move the drum set around the room, try new overhead patterns, and try every possible logically working combination. Go back and listen to the recording. What parts sound the best? What did you do to the mics, room, or kit at that point? Keep doing it. Grab measuring tape, duct tape, a T-square, anything that will help you take measurements of your new sound. Don’t be discouraged if your sound check takes a full week, it will be worth it! Do a sound check for every instrument that you will soon be recording. Unlike mixing, engineering requires you to make reasonably quick comparisons, Don’t waste too much time with a certain mic technique, microphone, preamp, or instrument. If it is too hard to get it to sound the way you want, use something else! If you make engineering and sound checking as fun/interesting as, let’s say, sequencing, your whole session will benefit. You will have to do another sound check when the band gets there, since they will have different instruments and playing styles, but at least you have a good starting point and know what you’re looking for now.
Don’t forget your basic rules of thumb for whatever you’re recording. Be mindful of proximity effects, plosives and signal flow, but take time to be a little experimental. Let me give you a clear perspective of the “experimental” I’m talk about here. Take the time to compare mid-side to stereo micing, see what comes closer to the sound in your head. If you’re a guitarist, you know by now how elusive the perfect tone can be. Try condensors on guitar cabs and combine them with your favorite dynamic. Experiment with the distance not only from the speaker cap, but from the cabinet itself. Be sure to rehearse all of your preamps and marry them to the best microphones. Sometimes just an SM57/i5/ATM650 at a 45 degree angle hooked up to a warm preamp works best, other times you need more. Try assigning a small ribbon mic behind the cab for resonance. Is your cab cloth on or off? Make sure your amplifier is responding nicely with the speakers, the power section is most important here. Check that the preamp section is contoured nicely to the guitar and playing style, and dial in just enough saturation to compliment the punch and presence of the power section. Mix and match speakers, cabinets, amp heads, and guitars. Yes, I am serious. This is a science only cut out for the mad, so go ahead, lose your mind. You’ll do great.
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Our goal in mind is to make mixing as relaxing as possible once the band has left the studio. If you can get your tracks to sound like they are already mixed while they are being tracked, you’re doing perfect. Give your musicians a good headphone mix so they can play their hearts out. Make sure that if you are punching in and out, the musician performs before and after the markers to retain the color. Be an ass, tell them when it sounds bad and how to do better. If they can’t hear that nasty mistake in their track, solo it and put it on a loop until they beg you to redo it.
Now, if you do this, you may still have a headache at the end of the day, but I can guarantee it won’t be as bad. Make your sessions as fun as they can be and make sure EVERYTHING sounds good in the beginning. From there, make it sound better as the recording process continues and you will be proud of your work. With clean tracks to work with, you will be able to A/B your mixing effects much easier and hear the difference between 5ms of attack time on your compressor. You will have more head room for soft limiting and harmonic excitement, and I bet you won’t need to boost or cut any frequencies more than 4dB. Just filter out ultra high and ultra low areas to give yourself a clean bandwith and make your mix as sonically pleasing as possible through all of your available monitoring systems, using all of your DAW’s metering systems.
When you’re mixing, it’s all taste. If you want my advise, isolation and phase are KEY. If your tracks are perfectly isolated without bleed or background noise or phase issues, you will have a BLAST mixing it. If your tracks are clean and tight, your “signature sound” as a music producer will develop instantly. It will be like MIDI sequencing a hip-hop beat using perfectly sampled sounds. Imagine, no clipping, no odd correlation, no DC offset, no timing issues… just purely musical tracks for you to get as creative as possible with. That is the real “magic” us home studio guys are missing out on. Now go get productive!
Sean Hart runs a recording studio in Coventry, R.I.
for more info, visit hartbeatstudios.