Recording tips

I’m ramping myself up for the arrival of my new DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) on April 14, and felt like I wanted to archive some of the tips I’ve picked up over the years. Thanks to the Harmony Central Board for several of them!

• Can’t stand headphones for a vocal recording session? I know I’ve been in that boat before, because I can’t hear myself well, and I hate having one ear open. So you can set up your mic and two monitor speakers as an equidistant triangle, making particularly sure that the microphone is exactly the same distance from both speakers, and the two of them are at the same height. Then just reverse the polarity on one of the monitors, pan all your tracks to perfect center, and record. You’ll get the vocalist’s voice, and the phase of the two monitor speakers will cancel one another out so they don’t show up in the recording.
• Use a highpass filter to cut out low frequences in your tracks, all the way up to (maybe) 500Hz or more. This will help give a lot of clarity in the mix to instruments that might otherwise have “boominess” (think: acoustic guitars and vocals).
• If the take sucks, do it again. Hard disk space is cheap. A good performance is priceless.
• Keep your “dry” signal mono, just pan the effects and “special effects” tracks. This makes for a less-muddy tune. Wish I’d known this two years ago.
• When mixing, get your kick, snare, vocal, and bass to about -6dB. Adjust the master volume to the bare minimum you can hear anything at all. At that point, adjust your mix so you can only hear the snare drum, and even that, just barely. Then raise it a bit more; adjust the kick’s volume until you can hear it, too. A tad more, and adjust the bass. A tiny smidgeon more, make it so you can barely hear your lead vocals. Once you’ve done that, you generally have a pretty good rough mix to adjust the mix of everything else around. Go back once you’ve adjust levels and make sure you follow that foundational order as you ramp up the volume in tiny increments: snare, kick, bass, lead vocal.
• It’s hard to beat a visual indicator to see if you have the sound that you’re looking for. Look at a spectrum analyzer of your tune next to a spectral analysis of the frequency response pattern of a well-mixed representative sample of the genre you’re doing. If the spectral analysis is pretty close, then you are probably pretty close to the right high/low mix for your genre. If it’s off, look at EQ’ing and listen to the differences to make yours sound more professional.
• Fast release and moderate attack on your compressor.
• Avoid overlapping sonic lines. If you have one instrument playing a line centering around a certain frequency, try to give other instruments room to work.
• A good mix can’t substitute for poor musicianship. Make sure your drum, bass, and guitar players are in the groove and tight. Otherwise people will complain about a muddy mix even if the mix is perfect.
• When recording bass or guitar, play hard, try to fret nearly on top of the frets, rather than behind them, and remember to try to damp at least a little bit between notes where possible. The recording will come out cleaner.
• Be upbeat and positive. And get the money from the people in your studio before you record.
• Good recordings can’t improve poor arrangements.
• If you find your drum track a bit thin (a tip I’d wished I’d known for Void War), split the track off to a bus, give it some good stereo compression, and then mix it back into the dry signal. It will fatten the drums without them sounding over-compressed.
• For removing “mouth sounds” from vocals and spoken tracks: try using a noise gate, set to around 200ms attack and 180ms release.
• A pencil or straw taped to the front of your mic can often dramatically reduce “popping” with no reduction dynamic range or high-end response.
• Some old pantyhose and a coat hanger or embroidery hoop also work as great, cheap pop-filters.
• A 27ms delay on a vocal or bass track, mixed with the primary track, can really fatten the sound. Avoid exactly 20ms, though, that’s the delay which causes phase cancellation. Pan hard left and right to really give the sound some depth.
• This sounds basic, but every drum gets its own track if you can do it. This will let you do things like add reverb to your kick and cut out some of the 12KHz-ish frequencies from your cymbals.
• Get both a clean feed and a a feed with effects on from the guitar when playing (split the signal, one dirty, one clean, record both at once if you can). That way, if you want to go back and fix the sound, you can.
• Record a bunch of sybillants — d, ssh, p, fff, t, th, etc. — into a track before laying down the recording. If you find that the vocal track isn’t clear enough though it’s in-key, you can drag-and-drop with a little mix creativity to fix the sound.
• If you’re going to EQ and compress a track, put the limiter first in the chain.
• Use about -6db as the max target for your raw mixes, rather than 0. This will give you a less artificial sound and give you headroom to work with in post-processing (mastering) to CD.
• A little duct tape on a cymbal goes a long way to shortening the decay time.
• Play your mix on your home stereo, car stereo, headphones, neutral monitor speakers, and everything else you can find before you decide it’s “done”. I played my Void War soundtrack on my car stereo, and MAN, I mixed the high-end way too hot.
• If you’re doing MIDI first, get the MIDI mixed perfectly before dumping it to audio. It makes it much easier to mix the audio.
• Don’t use new strings on acoustic guitars in the studio. Dead strings let more of the resonance of the instrument shine through, rather than just the high-end resonance of the strings themselves.
• Keep your original takes pristine. If you must add effects to tracks, dupe the original track, archive it (that’s a Cakewalk term; other editors may use a different term), and apply the effect to the dupe. That way, when you screw up the effects, you can try again. Archives just take up disk space, not CPU time.
• If the take sounds bad, try moving the mic and re-recording before trying EQ to fix it.
• Use the highest-quality, longest-shelf-life CDRs you can for both burning your music and backing up your data. Many cheap CDRs have a half-life of just a few months. Burn your masters at 1X (the slowest setting) for maximum playability.
• Beware hidden fees for out-of-state, “cheap” mass-duplicators.
• Take a break every few hours when recording. Your ears get tired, and just like beer goggles, that track that looks great the night before has you chewing your arm off in the morning.
• Do the same with vocals as with guitars: get one take through the compressor, and another one totally clean. Mixing the two can give very pleasing results.
• Try using a parametric EQ and cutting heavily and narrowly in the 8-10KHz range to make that heavily-distorted electric guitar sound more “real”
• If you want to thicken an acoustic guitar, try duping the track, panning one a little left, the other a little right, and EQ them a little differently.
• Effects: less is more.
• Having trouble with volume in the high ranges on your tune? Sing it in your regular voice, then double a falsetto on top of it.

Just some thoughts, some debatable, and some are a case of “TMTOWTDI”: There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Hope it’s helpful 🙂