Third Take

I’m deep into the mixing of my band’s EP right now. I’m learning lots of new things, and putting lots of theories into practice. This is the biggest project I’ve ever mixed, in terms of both complexity and importance. Here are a few things I’ve learned:

• VC64 Vintage Channel sounds really good, and works magic on vocals.
• Boost11 is a must have. Classic Master Limiter doesn’t cut it.
• Console view for recording automation. Track view for cleaning it up.
• Mixing is more about subtraction than addition.
• You can compress acoustic guitars and have it sound good.. but it’s hard.

My audio data drive crashed. I’m glad I have backups. I only lost about 8-10 hours of work. It could have been so much worse.

How long since your last backup?

I wasted way too much time in the last session trying to record a short snippet of guitar and make it into a loop to stretch out for several measures. In the end, I just sat down and played it like a pro – start to finish. Read more

I’ve been recording scratch tracks by dangling an SM-57 over the top of the amp. I know with a little tweaking I can do better, but dang, this sounds pretty good.

Of course, my guitar rig sounds good. Really good. So capturing it isn’t that hard. The best recordings start at the source.

• ‘T’ is the keyboard shortcut for the normal tool. ‘C’ is the keyboard shortcut for the scissors. ‘Q’ mutes the selected clip.
• When working with track layers, it’s safe to “Remove Empty Layers” after deleting some clips. It won’t rearrange your clips like “Rebuild Layers” does.
• Remember to turn off the air conditioner before recording vocals. Remember to turn it back on before going to bed.
• Don’t tell a vocalist to “sing it more like Eddie Vedder.”

I downloaded the free Orca softsynth a while back, but never did anything with it. I don’t do a lot with MIDI or softsynths, but last night we were looking for a weird sound to add texture to a song and I remembered Orca.

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I previously mentioned the trick of getting a guitar amp off the floor to minimize the early reflections the microphone “hears” and tighten up the bottom end. As I said in that article, it’s something to try but not a hard and fast rule.

I recently did two recordings of the same amp, same guitar, and same player with the same microphone and preamp. The only difference was whether the amp was on a stand or not. I managed to get good sounds out of both positions, but with the amp on the floor I got that sound much faster with less tweaking of amp settings and microphone placement.

On the stand, I spent considerable time trying to get more bottom and fighting the high end. When the amp was on the floor, it was almost as easy as sticking a microphone in front of it and pressing record.

Looking back at all the electric guitar sounds I’ve recorded in the last year, all of the really great ones were amps on the floor. I think that will be my default position from now on, and I’ll only move it on to a stand if I can’t get the floor to work.

I recently purchased a pair of sound isolating earbuds for live use. At one of my guitar gigs, we have an in-ear monitor system and I wanted a nice pair of earbuds that would block out stage noise and let me hear the monitor system clearly. Then I had a brainstorm: why not use them when recording vocals in my home studio? Read more