I first got into recording because I spent 2 hundred dollars at a recording studio and had nothing to show for it. One of the things that you learn when you begin recording is just how bad of a musician you are. When you start seeing your audio track on the screen and you see how terribly offbeat you are you wonder how anyone could've ever listened to you play. All of us think our playing is pretty solid until we're humbled by the studio experience. Just the same, singing in the studio was a pretty embarrassing experience as I'm in no way a good singer. After the first hour or so I began to realize that my finished product would consist of me strumming chords, a bass guitar, a drum beat and a pitiful vocal track. If you pay attention to the structure and components of music on the radio you will notice that you don't hear chords being strummed as often as you might think. What you hear are synthy riffs here and there and something ambient (usually strings or a synthesizer) filling in the high and low ends of the musical spectrum. At the end of my recording session I realized that I would get none of this without spending an absurd amount of money and even then I would receive a recording with someone else's riffs making it less and less my song. I paid the producer and told him I didn't even want a finished product. That was when I decided I wanted to build my own setup.
I built my own computer and got a watered down version of some recording/mixing software. A friend of mine gave me a cheap soundcard and another friend gave me a drum machine. Both of these were must have's. After getting through all the conflicts with my soundcard I was able to actually record. Since I'm not a drummer I decided I would try to "rip" drum beats from songs to figure out what was going on. I listened to the song "I'll be coming home next year" by the Foo Fighters over and over again so I could reproduce every single beat. Doing that helped me learn how drum beats are or at least should be created and got me comfortable creating my own. What I would do then is plug the drum machine into the computer and push record. This is key because you MUST have a constant in your recording and that constant should always be the drum/percussion track. From here I would move on to recording a guitar track with the drum beat as my metronome. Then I would record the lead and bass guitars followed by the vocals. Now this alone can give you a "band sound" but it is lightyears behind of the "produced/professional" sound. Again, MOST radio quality productions have much more than a 4 piece band but it is entirely possible to achieve a professional sound with a small setup.
Assuming you're at this point there are a few things you should know before you even consider stepping into the world of production and they all have to do with mixing. Something that you will learn early on (and you may already know this) is that instrument placement is key in having a decent sounding recording. If you listen to any quality recording you will notice different instruments coming out of different headphones. If you have 5.1 channel surround sound you can notice the placement even more. If all the sounds are coming from the same direction it is very hard to distinguish the different instruments. Most mixing programs allow you to decide how far to the right or the left you want the different instruments to sit in the recording. Producers refer to this as "panning". For starters, the vocal track is the most important part of the mix (it's the melody after all) and you almost always want to put it in the center. (Vocal harmony tracks can be slightly panned to either the left or the right) All other instruments should be placed in positions to compliment the lead vocals, not to crowd them out. As a general rule of thumb you are usually safe "panning" the rhythm guitar to the left and the lead guitar to the right or vice versa. The bass guitar goes right in the center or slightly off. You can get away with this because it's vibrating at such a lower frequency that it doesn't crowd out the vocals. The drums are a different story altogether. If you listen to your favorite rock band you'll usually notice that the bass, snare, high hat, toms etc are coming out of different speakers though they are usually closer to the center than the guitars. The good news is that if you're using a drum simulator chances are it's already been professionally panned. If you want to go the route of recording drums then expect to spend as much on microphones as you did on your drumset. The panning should be similar to where it would sit on a stage.
Something just as important as mixing but on the same topic of "crowding out the space" is the actual composition of the music you compose. I'm going to refer to this as complimentary composing. I was recording a friend one day who had written 3 guitar riffs to be played simultaneously. Writing for 3 guitars is perfectly fine. Where he screwed up was in the fact that they were all in the same musical range. Consequently, no amount of panning would allow the music to be "interpreted" or "deciphered" clearly. Make your lead guitar riffs either much higher or using a drastically different meter than that of the strumming guitar. Meter refers to the timing of the musical line. If you have 4 notes in your riff you can play them all as quarter notes (just count 1-4) or you can add half notes and eight notes to resonate for the split second in the music where the other instruments are silent and waiting for their next pulse. Orchestral composers have known this for hundreds of years which is why they regularly give drastically different metered parts to different instruments.
Just as important as panning and good complimentary composing is equalizing. On an electric guitar you have a tone knob and on your amp you will usually have treble, bass, and mid knobs. In the same way that having all the instruments in the center and writing music all in the same range and meter crowds out the space having the instruments equalized the same way can destroy a recording. If you're using virtual instruments then you're usually safe as they have already been professionally equalized but when recording you almost always have to equalize every instrument. A friend of mine once told me that it's always better to subtract sound than it is to boost. This is good advice because boosting adds something that wasn't there before introducing something foreign whereas subtracting only allows a better perspective of the natural. I usually find that since the rhythm guitar has such a full sound it is often necessary to slightly decrease the mids or the lows. Depending on how many notes you are playing at a time on the lead guitar you can usually get away with beefy pronounced lows. Every recording is different so equalizing is definitely something that you usually have to handle differently case by case.
In the area of effects you will usually find that less is more. When people are new to recording they will usually add all kinds of reverb to their instruments and vocals. (I know I sure did.) This is because adding reverb DOES make a lot of things sound better. The problem with adding reverb is that it takes away much of the natural tone and fills a lot of the space with the decay of the sound. If you're going to use reverb turn the decay down as far as possible. You'll notice most radio recordings have very little reverb. This is because there are better and more effective ways to increase the quality of the tracks. Creating a chorus effect can drastically thicken the sound of a guitar. You can do this a couple of ways. You clone the track and slightly drag the clone a few miliseconds before or after it's twin begins. You can re-record the part to have an even more dynamic clone. Lastly, you can simply add a chorus effect. (I prefer the first method.) When using a chorus effect you either want it obvious or not obvious at all and you definitely want to pan the cloned track to the other side.
Well there you have it. While cool effects and synthesizers can certainly add flavor to a production it is very possible to get producer level quality with just a 5 piece band. If all else fails and you still don't like the sound you're getting don't be so cocky that you rule out re-writing some of the music. There have been many times when I spent hours tweaking volume levels, effects, and equalization values yeilding no satisfaction only to find that simply re-writing a guitar part fixed the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment