The first thing you have to be aware of when you want to record your music is that you must be prepared. This means you need to have rehearsed your songs until you can play through them with virtually no mistakes. If you are in a band, every member must be able to play through their part without errors that would require the song to be done again and again and again. You will waste a huge amount of money if you go into a studio unprepared. The studio doesn’t care. In fact, they count on it because more time equals more money for them.

Professional Studios

If you choose to use a “professional” studio, shop around. Just about every studio will let you come in and see what they have; listen to some of their “finished” work. They may even let you sit in the control booth during a session to get a feel for how they operate. This is a good way to learn the level of professionalism and technical savvy they have and if it is sufficient for your needs.

If albums have been made from recordings done at their studio, get copies and listen to them. Are they sounding in the ball park of how you wish to sound? Different studios have different “sounds”. This is not a bad thing, it is just that they were designed differently and may even have been designed for specific types of music over others. The albums will give you an idea if they understand what your kind of music requires from an engineering standpoint.

In this economy, many studios are charging less just so they can weather the downturn, the tight money times that exist right now. There are deals to be had. They may even have package deals that will include the following: recording time, mix down time, and a project master you will use to send to a mastering house for “sweetening” (more on that later). Just make sure you buy all the recording media you will be using. If it’s tape, buy it. If it’s hard drives, buy them. Check with the studio you have chosen to learn what media, if they use tape, their equipment is biased to operate at peak levels upon and buy it. Forget the cost, buy it. You should own all media you use outright. (And make sure you have copyrighted the tunes before you go into the studio, not after.)

A professional studio will give you the benefit of tons of high end equipment that, when in the hands of a capable engineer, will help to make you sound better than you ever thought you could. But it will also bring out all the flaws in your technique as a player. That’s why you need to rehearse a lot before you go into the studio. Unlike the famous rock stars who use the studio to create as they go, burning through the gross national product of a third world country in as little as a few weeks, you cannot afford that luxury (waste).

The engineer will set up the microphones and get the best possible sound out of your equipment, sounds you probably didn’t know lived there. And they will make suggestions, too. Listen to them, they know what they are doing because it is what they do for a living. You aren’t going to tell a doctor how to perform an operation when you haven’t the first idea how to hold a scalpel (yes, there is a right and a wrong way to do that). Don’t go into the studio thinking you know what you need or don’t need.

When you go into a studio with an ego and an attitude, the engineer becomes your enemy. He will do only as much as he has to. He will not make suggestions to you any more. He will not even try to make you sound great. He will do the job he was hired to do, record your project, mix your project and give you the masters.

Repeat after me: The engineer is my friend… The engineer is my friend…

Get to know your engineer. Buy him lunch, a cup of coffee, whatever. When you arrive at the beginning of each session, bring some doughnuts or something for the staff. They will appreciate it and you may get unwritten “perks”, such as if you go over time and budget, they might just blow off the extra expense and help you get your project done, and done right, without rushing to finish because you ran out of money.

A word of caution: This is not the rule. It is what you hope they will do. It is what you want them to do. You have to be willing to treat them with the trust and respect they deserve. Follow these rules and you will have a great recording experience and come away with a great sounding product.

One final note on pro studios: in talking with the staff, meet the engineers if possible and get a sense of what kind of people they are. And, if you’ve chosen an engineer, begun your session and it turns out the engineer just isn’t “getting” it (and don’t mistake a difference of opinion as him not “getting it”), if the session is not unfolding in a beneficial and creatively positive fashion, you can always request a new engineer, one who may be more suited to what you are striving to accomplish. And if that doesn’t work, talk with the owners and tell them that the sessions aren’t going well and you wish to cancel any further work.

It is better to pull out of a bad situation and regroup than to push on and pray it will turn out better. If it’s going from bad to worse, stop the sessions, stop wasting money, and terminate the deal and settle up on what you may owe or what they may need to refund to you. Then chalk it all up to experience and go find a studio that will do what you need done the way you need it to be done.

Project Studios

If you choose to use a “private” or “project” studio, do the same thing, shop around. Listen to examples of their finished work. Ask to speak to former/current clients. These people will not have the million dollars’ worth of equipment, but they may have very good equipment capable of doing the job. However, equipment doesn’t translate into ability to use it and make a recording sound good. That requires you to sit in on a session and see how they operate. Do they know what they’re doing? Are they slow (not necessarily a bad thing if you’re paying a flat rate per day, typically 12 hours)? Are they thorough in their setup and execution of each step? Ask to sit in on a current session so you can assess how they work.

As with a professional studio, these guys may have albums that were put out from the sessions done in their studio. Get copies and listen to how they sound. Can you hear everything without having to hunt for a given instrument? Is it clean? Is it cluttered? Stuff like this will let you know if they are a good tracking studio, but not a good mix down studio (the same can be said of pro studios, too. Some are great for tracking songs, but not for mixing them).

Some of these smaller outfits are “mobile”, which means they will come to your space to record. In fact, you can record just about anywhere, literally. All you need is quiet surroundings so there will be no “bleed” into the recording. No screaming children, no airplanes flying overhead, no heavy traffic outside your space, stuff like that.

A project studio will save you a ton of money, money that can be put into a better more complete recording session than at a pro place. Or the money can be used for a better mastering house when you’re ready for that step; better packaging with a better/bigger budget.

As with the pro studio, get to know the engineer and do a little schmoozing. It will go a long way and they will be more likely to see the project through even though you’ve run out of money. A finished product will reflect well on the studio and their commitment, to say nothing of your glowing praise to other musicians about how cool these folks are. PR is important to the survivability of any business; they will definitely enjoy that added endorsement.

Do It Yourself Studio

You can save even more money (in the long run) by purchasing the recording equipment you will need to make your record (okay, CD…whatever!). The distinct advantage here is that after you finish your record, you’ll not only have a master tape/CD-R to show for it, but all that equipment sitting ready to be employed for the next project! But, be aware that it will probably cost you at least the budget you have planned to set up in a way that will make it possible to “emulate” a “professional” studio product.

You can do a really, really professional recording with as little as five thousand dollars worth of gear – especially if you are willing to buy second hand equipment. And the more creative you are with the gear you do/will have, the more interesting the sound of your project – and I mean that in a good way if you pay attention to details during the process.

Used is not an evil word if you know what you’re looking for. All it takes is a little reading (okay, a lot of reading), time and a reasonably gentle learning curve to be sure you’re buying good gear, and the gear you actually need. In this economy there is a lot of good quality used equipment for sale. People who ramped up during the late nineties are now financially strapped and have to sell their gear. This is to your benefit. You will pay at least a third less than retail. You will even get deals at pennies on the dollar if you are patient. Wait for the gear to come to you (metaphorically, of course). If you are patient – and reasonable in what you are willing to pay – the gear you want will turn up for sale and you’ll get it.

If you’ve never done this sort of thing before, you will have a period of trial and error. It is advisable to do the following: either find someone you know who is a recording engineer (even a live sound guy will help more than nothing) or buy a book or two on the subject of “home studio” recording. Subscribe to Mix magazine; they have dynamite articles on all kinds of things like the best way to mic a drum kit, guitar, voice, etc. Valuable information is even available on the Internet if you “Google” the subject you want to find.

Read the stuff, follow the equipment directions and learn how to use the gear before you begin the “real” recording sessions. The better prepared you are, the better sounding your music will be. It all depends upon how much time and effort you are willing to invest in what you are striving to accomplish. A little time will result in crap. A lot of time will result in something wonderful.

The most beneficial aspect of creating your own studio is that you are no longer bound by the “clock” and watching your money fly away with the ticking of the second hand. You own the gear. It awaits your attention. It will be there tomorrow. Your money may not.

However, do not attempt to create the ultimate masterpiece entirely in your studio. The best advice I could give you is that until you have the space and equipment, do not attempt to mix down the equivalent of a Led Zeppelin II album. Find a reasonably priced studio and use their tuned mix down room to mix down your project. Make sure your media is compatible, too. Expect to pay around $2000.00 USD, maybe a bit more.

Why use outside people to mix down your masterpiece? Because they have gear you cannot afford. The space is “tuned” to optimize the sound of the mix, exposing if there is too much bass (a common problem) or too little high end (another common problem). The room you have at home has not been built specifically to mix down music. Theirs is. It will cost you, yes. But it will be worth it when you send the master to be “sweetened” in the mastering lab.

The better the mix when you send it off to the mastering house, the less work the mastering house will have to do to “correct” the mix down. Also, the studio will send the mastering house different versions of the mix so they can be blended if necessary. One may have a hot drum or bass track, another will have hot vocal tracks, another guitar, and so on. The mastering house will take all this and blend it together and create the most fantastic sound you never knew you could create.

Yes, this costs a lot. Average mastering is around $1500.00 USD. But if you do not use this process, your album will not sound good. It won’t sound like what you buy in the stores, music that was put through the sweetening process at a mastering house. Mastering houses “equalize” the sound of your record making everything nice and even and pretty as they can, given the material they have to work with. That’s why you want to give them the best possible sounding music to work with in the first place.

Critical piece of advice: do not hurry through this process, whichever route you decide to take. If you are in a rush, you will make bad decisions, bad choices, and waste a whole lot of money on services and things you do not need. And this experience will leave a very bad taste in your mouth and possibly even discourage you from future musical endeavours. Make no mistake, recording can often be a tedious process, but it is ultimately rewarding if you do not lose sight of the reason you are doing the work (and it will be work sometimes).

The bottom line is that the recording experience can be fun, creative, a journey, a learning experience and result in something that is worth the time, effort and expense to create. If this is the result, then you will not have spent one dime in vain. It will have all been well spent and now becomes an investment into your future as a recording artist. And that, my friends, is a very, very good thing, indeed.

Future articles will help you to work through the minefield of choices, giving you example equipment purchasing options. No holds barred ideas and real world solutions to make it possible to create a real studio.

Now We Begin

Now since many of you will be choosing different paths to accomplish recording your music it will be difficult to cover everything and every instance. So from this point forward we are going to speak in generalities regarding the facility you are actually employing, whether home of professional. It doesn’t matter because the process is essentially the same in both worlds.

Having previously established that you need to be well rehearsed before beginning the process, and you have been diligent and done so, it is now time to go into the studio and record your songs.

I will use real world examples throughout these articles to illustrate what you should do, should not do, should insist upon and should just shut up and let the process progress. You may find some of these things don’t seem to apply, but believe me, they do. You just don’t know it yet.

Important Note:

Use a strobe tuner and tune your instruments to the tempered scale, not harmonic scale. Why? Because it is more accurate to the correct pitches up and down the guitar neck (and if you play with a keyboard, there will be no “conflict”). From session to session you will be in tune through the whole process. Buy a strobe tuner and live in peace. Ebay has Peterson model 420’s and Conn Strobotuners all the time. Yes, they are expensive (averaging about two hundred dollars), but well worth the price.

Some Preparations

Drummers/Percussionists: Okay, drums are tricky stuff. Set them up in the space, let them acclimate to the room temperature (do the same with all guitars, especially acoustics) and then, after they are “warm”, about a half hour, tune your heads! If you play drums with no bottom heads, well, do your best. If you play with the bottom heads on, you will need to tune both top and bottom heads. The bottom head is a “sympathetic” skin, vibrating in harmony to re enforce the sound of the drum, which comes off the top head, not the bottom head. To what do you tune drums? Generally, bass guitar notes are a good place to start. You can tune them, high to low, off the strings of the bass: G, D, A, E. The kick drum should just have a nice pleasing and satisfying “thud” sound. You can tune it if you let it ring out, to a specific note. Choose one that sounds right to you. These are just guidelines to help you understand the importance in tuning drums. The kit is an instrument and needs to be tuned, too. Very important: get new heads to ensure you have the best and most consistent sound coming from your kit.

Guitar/Bass players: Before you go into the studio put all guitars you intend to use in the shop for a tune-up, checking the intonation, maybe a fret dressing, to make sure they are in their best state for the sessions. Buy a bunch of sets of strings and don’t play them more than two or three days – and if you break a string, replace the whole set, not just the broken string. Yes, Eddie Van Halen records using “dead” strings; if you want to do this, fine. But remember if you break a string, you’ll need to have saved a bunch of “dead” strings from the past to replace them; new strings won’t work with this choice.

Keyboard players: Get your equipment checked out. Make sure you have labeled all the patches you plan to use. Have a notebook with this information in it so you can do a quick “recall” without having to remember everything in your head. You will forget critical information you need. Make backup copies of everything in case you have a catastrophic failure. You should do this anyway just for safety. There’s nothing worse than showing up for a gig and realizing your gear has suffered a horrible core dump, wiping out months and years of carefully created sounds. The studio is no place to “reinvent” all your sounds. Repeat after me: CD-R and floppies are our friends. Use them!

In The Studio

Microphones

Every engineer will have their “favourite” microphones for each task. Sometimes it’s a very expensive mic and sometimes it’s a fifty dollar special. It all depends upon what you are trying to do, the sound you are trying to capture. Price of gear, up or down, should not be an issue. If a piece of gear gets the sound you are looking for, that’s the piece of gear you need. Hopefully, it will be less expensive and not the priciest piece of gear on the planet. Usually, you can find “alternative” gear within your budget which will accomplish the same thing. Usually.

So you heard that SM-57’s are the ultimate guitar mic. Well, yes and no. It depends upon what you want. If the engineer reaches for something else, shut up and see if it works. If not, suggest A-B testing your choice with theirs and then make the decision. The engineer works for you, not the other way around. But remember, as mentioned in Part One, the engineer does this stuff for a living (or at least, a lot more than you). Listen to their suggestions and ideas. They want you to have a great experience, too. If you really want mic A over mic B, just say so and they’ll acquiesce. It’s your money; it’s your time.

MD-421’s are great drum mics for tom toms. RE-20’s are great kick drum mics; so are D-112’s. There are others, too. SM-57’s work on snare (they are the “workhorse” mic in the industry, both studio and live). Ideally, you want a “match pair” of microphones to do the “overhead” work. “Matched” microphones are chosen at the factory and paired up because their specs, their characteristics, are all but identical (which is what you want in a “stereo pair”). If you’re recording yourself, buy a pair – spend the money. NT-5’s are reasonably priced and a matched pair runs around three hundred dollars. They are great acoustic guitar mics, too.

For all you who chose to buy the recording gear, all microphones you purchase should serve multiple purposes until you can afford to buy “single purpose” mics. The one exception is the vocal microphone. Do not chump out on this purchase because you will regret it if you do. An AT-4050 CM/5 is about six hundred, is a multi pattern dual diaphragm monster that you should investigate. It’s great, a poor man’s Neumann. And you can use it on guitar, bass, kick drum and a bunch of other stuff, too.

If you are at a studio, experiment with microphone placements on the speakers for the guitar and bass, and the drum heads on the kit (top mic placement is preferred, however, you can double mic the snare top and bottom). Find the “sweet spot” for every sound you use. For example, if you change the sound of your guitar, you will need to find the “new” sweet spot on the speaker cone for that sound.

The Process

“Live” Base Tracks

Some bands like to record the basic tracks “live”. What this means is that the guitar, bass and drums are tracked at the same time. These three members play together, just like in rehearsal, to lay down the core of the song. What you have to do in this situation is be sure there is enough isolation between the instruments that if the track went well enough to keep the drum and bass parts, but not the guitar part, the guitar can be redone as an “overdub”, that is to say, the guitar player will listen back to the drum and bass tracks and redo his part, but the drummer and bass player need not redo their part (risking screwing up what they did right the first time).

The basic advantage in recording basic tracks “live” is to bring a sense of immediacy and “reality” to a recording. You’ve heard the phrase, “Live music is best”? Well, there is a reason live music sounds better (especially if the band is really tight and the songs are actually good). It’s called synergy. Synergy is an indefinable quality that describes the interaction of different components with one another. Another word used in music is “chemistry”. When you put certain musicians together, the resultant grouping has a certain “chemical” reaction. That’s why your band sounds the way it sounds, you are exhibiting a certain chemical reaction to one another through your interaction. Replace any one member and the chemistry will change, either for the better (hopefully) or for the worse (in which case you need to remove the “bad” element, which may not be the new member).

In music, this synergy, this chemistry, results in anything from the most awful thing you’ve ever heard all the way up to heavenly sonic bliss. The interaction between players is what creates the mood and feel of a song. Recording “live” preserves that “magic” to tape. Even when you overdub (add parts) to this core recording, that energy, that magic is not going to be lost. The new parts hopefully will tap into that synergy and chemistry and contribute rather than take away from the magic of the “moment”.

Recording is all about capturing “the moment”. This is why famous bands who are preparing to create a live album will record a selection of live dates or their whole tour to capture that “moment” for each of the songs that will appear on the album. They want the best possible performance of each song to be included, creating a memorable record of what their live performances are/were like. In the studio you want to capture these moments. You want to create that buzz, that synergy, so the songs will sound alive and substantive so people will want to listen again and again to what you have done. This is why rehearsal is so very important. Your arrangements must be tight and the flow from section to section must be smooth and “natural”, not forced and artificial. This is why you need to take the time to make sure everything is prepared and set up right before recording.

“Building” The Perfect Song

Another method to recording songs is to “build” the song from the ground up, one instrument at a time. The advantage of this method is that while the process is longer, you have the choice at each stage to change parts or redo the whole song. And, if you find the arrangement isn’t quite right, you can stop and move on to another song. In the off time, away from the studio, you can then fix the arrangement of the song that isn’t working. It will probably mean you will start that song all over again. Another advantage to building songs is that the whole band does not need to be present for a given stage in the process. If you’re doing vocals and three of five members sing, only those who sing need be involved on that day.

When you build songs, you must use a click track so the timing of the song is precise all the way through the build process. You cannot rely on your sense of time, your built in meter, to be absolutely spot on every time. Yes, your drummer is a freakin’ machine. Use the click track anyway. The song will lurch forward or bog down if you do not rely upon a click. Better to have the little helper than to risk not being able to synch up with your own meter (which is nearly impossible – trust me on this one – and I hate click tracks!). Another advantage is, if you are recording everything yourself (the “one man band” idea), the click will bring you in line with all the other instruments and make it sound like a real band played the song. It will be cohesive and flow the way you want.

You lay down a “guide track” to begin the process. A guide track involves finding the correct meter with the click and then recording the click on one track and an instrument like an acoustic guitar on a second track, playing through the arrangement (without vocals) to set forth the structure of the song to tape. It doesn’t have to be “perfect”, without error, but it does have to flow and be correct to the feel and structure of the arrangement (it can be rerecorded later). You can then choose to lay down a “scratch” vocal, also a guide track, to help move the song along. Some people take their cues from a vocal line rather than a musical cue.

I recommend that you lay down all the guide tracking for the album first. This allows you to create copies of this guide for the other players to follow. They can take it home and play along with the recording to check their parts and fix any problems they may have and be fully prepared for the experience with few surprises (I’m making so many mistakes because I’m not used to hearing the songs so stripped of everything else.). Doing this also gives you a sense of the tone of the album, the flow and the character. At this point you can also check the arrangements to be sure it is structured the way you want. Once you start to layer in other instruments, you’re pretty much stuck with what you kept unless you change it now, before all that work begins.

And you should always record more songs than you will actually use. Sometimes certain songs just don’t “fit” with the theme of the album the way you originally thought they might. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad song, it simply means that song is not right for this project.

Once the guide tracking is done, each player can come in and lay down their parts. Oftentimes this method can proceed much more quickly than when recording in a “live” context. Less work means better focus, which means faster progress in some stages of production. When you get to the drums it will slow down, of course, but once the kit is set up and the levels are good, they can play through all the songs, sometimes getting them in one take and saving valuable time. Any given player may only need one day to track their parts. And that is a good thing.

There is not tried and true rule as to which instruments should be recorded before others. My personal rule of thumb is to record a guide track on guitar. Then I lay down the bass track. Then I lay down a keyboard or second guitar track. I may then add some scratch backing vocals just to “flesh” out the sound. What I do next is go back and listen to the original guitar track and decide if it was recorded right the first time or needs to be rerecorded. After that is done, I will give the drummer a rough mix of the songs. Unlike everyone else, the drummer gets a fairly “complete” version of the songs (minus drums, of course) to practice over.

And here is why it is wise to lay down the guide tracks. If a player can proceed in a linear fashion through the songs, some of them will be done quickly. No further action need be taken for his/her part on that song. They’re done. In as little time as it takes to go through each song, that player’s role can be finished if they are well prepared before going in to record their parts. Less time wasted is more time – and money – that can be invested in the mixdown, mastering and/or pressing and printing processes to come.

The object is to be prepared, know your songs, understand the process involved and work with the engineer to make it happen in as painless and easy a fashion as possible. The more prepared you are, the better the experience will be. That joy will transfer to the recording. People who listen to the finished product will sense the uninhibited nature of the recording. The singer will be more relaxed, the drummer will be in the pocket, the guitar and keyboard players will be flowing and the sum will be greater than the parts that went into it, whether recorded “live” or one part at a time.

Now Hear This

During the recording process, many things happen to the sounds that come out of your instrument(s), drums, guitar, bass, horn, whatever. It is the nature of the beast we call electronics that your carefully crafted sound will be somehow changed, and not necessarily for the better, when it encounters augmentation into little electronic pulses and eventually to become one’s and zero’s when pressed to CD form.

One More Thing On Preparation…

Before moving on, a note to all players: I can’t tell you how many musicians I know who do not understand how their equipment works. Guitar and bass players plug in, they turn it up…loud(!), twiddle the tone knobs, wonder about the presence knob and turn it somewhere in the middle and then leave their guitar’s tone knobs all the way open, using only the volume controls (and then only when they have to). On a typical two pickup guitar with two volume controls, two tone controls and a toggle switch, you have a virtually infinite variety of tones available. The reason a given “genre” of music all sounds the same, with rare exception, is because guitar players don’t use their gear. And by “use”, I mean taking advantage of and employing what it is truly capable of doing.

Horn players and vocalists don’t have “gear” like most others and so do not suffer as much from ignorance of their instrument. With horns, strings and all acoustic non-amplified instruments, your sound will be whatever comes out. You can “adjust” that sound, but only the quality of the instrument (to some degree) will actually affect what you will ultimately sound like. Stringed instrument players should be aware that about 90 percent of their sound is in their fingers, not the wood or strings. Horn players will tell you that most of their sound is in the reed or mouth piece and a properly tuned instrument. The quality of the brass or silver will be a factor but, ultimately in all musical cases, it is the player who creates the sound by how focused they are on what they are striving to accomplish.

Sit down with your equipment for one whole day (about eight hours with short breaks every two hours) and learn what it can do. For amplified instruments, you do not need to have the volume at 120 decibels; the volume you should play at need only be as loud as if you were yelling across a semi-crowded room, about 60-70 decibels. There’s a whole scientific reasoning behind this that I will not go into; just accept it as the way things are and move on. And do not use distortion, use a squeaky clean sound; you want to actually hear the tone you are creating. When you add distortion later, the tone will suffer just a little, but it will still be really good (maybe requiring a minimum of adjustment to restore highs and tighten the lows) At this volume the true tone of the sound you will be shaping becomes consistently more accurate. You will need to venture about ten feet away from the speakers to begin to hear the uncompressed sound of your guitar tones. Bass players will need to be more like twenty feet or so away from the speakers. One cycle of the sine wave for low E on a bass is 24 feet long. That means the sound will be uncompressed and focused, clear, at that distance.

All controls on the guitar should be wide open. You are seeking to create the broadest tonal palate you can. Later, when you employ the tone controls on the guitar to augment the sound, you will be using various combinations of pickups, volume and tone settings to accomplish obtaining the sonic tonalities you want for any given song portion or solo. This isn’t just rhetorical tripe, taking the time to properly set up your amplifier will result in a much more rewarding and satisfying playing and recording experience. This is why your guitar heroes sound like they do. They took the time to do exactly what I am suggesting here, sit down with their gear and learn how to use it properly without having a “thrown together” sound that cannot be duplicated at will later on. They make their gear work for them, their guitar, amp and effects are tools just like with a carpenter or plumber, and they use them the way they were meant to be used.

Why do you want to do this? Because one day you’re going to be sitting there twiddling the knobs on your stomp boxes and amplifier and find a sound that knocks you out. If you do not understand how your gear works, you will not remember the process. Yes, you could scribble down the settings and think that is all you need do, but that is not all there is to finding and remembering sounds. You need to use your head, your brain, to understand how to repeat things you find and how to use your gear to create new sounds only found in your head. You cannot run around with reams of paper that have all these settings listed for sound A and sound B. It’s not practical and you will lose these precious pieces of paper. So you need to know the properties of the gear you are going to employ. The only way to understand this information is to work with the gear.

For those of you who employ modeling amplifiers such as the Line 6 products, it’s just a bit easier because you will be able to create your sounds and save them in the memory of the unit itself. If you forget the settings, the manual tells you how to “recall” what it is you created in a given location. Better yet, because you are able to “store” the sounds on your computer, do this and then make a CD-R of those sound files for archive purposes just in case all your sounds are wiped out.

For example, I own a Flextone II XL with floorboard. In Bank 3 I have created the following sounds:

a) 65 Twin; set up to emulate EJ’s clean sound using chorous, verb and slight delay b) Boutique #1 (Dumble clean channel), clean, no effects c) Boutique #1 (Dumble clean channel), clean with slight room ‘verb d) Open (currently has a default JCM800 amp sound)

I know people who own the Line 6 Pod 2 and the Pod XT and they have yet to sit down and create the sounds they want to have available to them. Every time I play with them they are tweaking the knobs to find a sound that will work for them that day. Not only is this unprofessional (though they are very good players otherwise) it is unthinkable to me that someone should agree to play a gig and not be prepared as much as possible, including having their sounds together. There is no excuse for this negligence. What, like you just don’t have the time (the complaint of my colleagues)? Turn of the bloody television, sit down and get to know your gear. Say “No” to going to the Pub and sit down with your gear. Stop putting off what you know you have to do anyway and sit…down…with…your…gear!! One day. One day(!) and you’ll be done with it. Okay, with the amp modeling people you will spend a few days programming your machines (for me, about an hour per amp model, tweaking and setting it just right), but then you’ll be set for live and studio gigs with a host of amp and effects sounds that will be the envy of fellow players and a joy for producers and engineers, who have you to thank for that great sound that made the session. And people will think you are so professional because you have it all together. And that means for you who aspire to studio work, you will get a call back for more work, which equals more income. Okay, that rant is done. Now on back into the studio we go…

The Chain

Your guitar, bass or keyboard goes into an amplifier and then into speakers. You may also employ a direct inject box (DI) to send a signal straight to the mixing console. Horns and other unamplified instruments will go straight into a microphone. So, from the “source”, your equipment/instrument, the sound goes into a microphone, down a cable and then to a microphone preamplifier, through the circuits of the mixing board and finally into the recording machine (tape or HDD). If you employ “outboard” microphone preamps, you can go straight into the recording machine from there, shortening the distance between your instrument and the media to which you are recording.

The shorter the distance between your instrument and the recording media the better. Why? Each stage, every device, your sound travels through, including the cables used to transmit sound between devices, can alter the sound you spent so much time creating. That is why it is important to choose wisely how you will execute this process.

You want to “capture” the sound in as pure form as possible. The method I use in my studio: employ the best microphone preamps I can afford (or the best preamp for the given task – not always the most expensive) because the better the preamp, the less likely it is to “colour” or alter the sound. This is important to understand because preamps such as the Focusrite Red series (and the SMD version Green series – identical except for assembly techniques) change the sound they receive very little. No device is going to let a signal pass without affecting it in some way. The challenge is to employ devices that a) do the least amount of alteration possible or b) colour the sound in a desirable fashion. And you want to choose the most appropriate microphones possible, too.

With so many choices, how do you determine what’s best? By experimentation. If you are buying the gear, develop a relationship with your sales rep at the recording gear store and he will let you test drive gear at your studio before you buy it. This is common practice in the recording world. If you find you like what the devices do, you will be inclined to buy them. A happy customer is a returning customer. Returning customers mean good business. They will work with you. If not, find a store that will.

For those of you who are paying for studio time, try out every different outboard preamp they have. If they don’t have them, you can rent what you want and bring that in to patch into the system. If the preamps on the mixing board are good, you can just go with them.

A good preamp is above all quiet. Hook up a decent microphone and conduct the following test. You will never crank up a preamp to 100% so it is a good test to do that so you can hear how much noise is actually present. If a cranked out preamp is reasonably quiet, it will be very quiet at the levels you will actually employ it, generally around 40 to 60 percent of maximum gain. Use headphones, not the studio speakers. If it is noisy, pass, unless you like what the preamp noise does when interacting with the sound you are going to record.

As mentioned earlier, everything colours the sound. Sometimes you can use this “feature” to your advantage. British EQ is often touted for what it does “for” the sounds that pass through those filters as being among the best in the world. Likewise, we choose certain microphones because of the qualities they bring to the process. Neumann (pronounced ‘new-man’, not ‘noi-man’!) microphones are renown for their generally warm and colourless sound transmission properties. Well, any gear that employs tubes is going to colour the sound, it can’t be avoided. What you are looking for is a sound that is pleasing to your ears. I know a vocalist who hates the sound of her voice on a Neumann. Even when in a multi-million dollar studio, the sound didn’t appeal to her. So she employs different vocal mics. I have mentioned the Audio Technica AT4050 CM/5 as the “poor man’s Neumann”. It is a great mic, not tube, and is quite versatile. It is a great vocal mic.

The point here is that just because you can buy/use expensive gear doesn’t mean you should. You have to forget about labels and go with the sound. The sound is what you are seeking. I use a Rane MC22 compressor on electric guitars because of what it does to the sound when I squeeze it through the unit. Fat, dirty and totally rock and roll. My cost was around $125.00. The ART Dual Tube preamp is a pretty decent and inexpensive mic preamp that employs tubes in the gain stage. TL Audio used to make what they called the Crimson line of mic preamps that were FET based and sound just fine. Good sounding, reasonably priced equipment is everywhere. And if you purchase used gear, it’s an even better deal.

So, you choose a microphone that transmits the sound in a way you like into a microphone preamp that sounds good to you. At this point you have to strive to keep the sound pure and put as little junk between your sound and the recording media. You can add effects later. For guitar players it means disconnecting all your pedals (sorry, folks) and recording the guitar part clean as possible. You can “recreate” your effects setup with outboard gear during mix down. Yes, it is a pain, but it will be worth it once you understand the reason. Also, with outboard gear, you have the option of using the stereo feature most processors have. (Tip: Instead of using the insert, fold the effected sound back into free channels on the mixing board and bring up the faders until the effected sound blends with the clean sound in the desired way. Very cool.)

Why do it this way? You do it this way because a muddy sound will not “clean up” when you add compressors and other stuff to beef up and shape the final sound of each instrument or voice, it will only re enforce what is already there. If you want to use a compressor when “printing” your track, fine, but do so only as much as is needed, not necessarily desired. You can always compress the sound more later.

In this vein, you should also “hit” the tape (or hard drive) with as much volume – short of distorting the signal – as possible. Hotter levels during recording means quieter (less white noise – hiss) mix down later on. The less distortion and noise, the more your music will come through and the better separation between instruments. You really, really want that.

A Final Thought…

All musicians must take the time to get their sounds together. It doesn’t matter what instrument you play, amplified or not. If you will not take the time to “define” your sonic signature, you will not be an “individual”. How are people going to identify your songs if you sound like everyone else. Great songs have been ruined by mediocre sonic signatures.

We all know what Santana sounds like, right? We all recognise Miles Davis’ horn right? We all know what Eric Johnson sounds like. The list goes on and on. You recognise these players because they developed a personal sound, as well as a personal style, one that lets people know, “Hey, this is me and I’m serious about what I do.”

In the studio, everything you do will be under a microscope. Every sound will be right in your face; you will learn if what you are doing works or doesn’t work very quickly. In a song, the different parts are supposed to come together to create a great harmonious sound. That’s the theory, and in general it works out. But occasionally, it doesn’t work at all. The equipment you choose to employ will either enhance your sound and song or expose your mistakes and parts that don’t work, such as the wrong scale being used in a solo (don’t laugh, I can point to a lot of songs that have this common error) or a bad choice in vocal stacks on harmonies. Even lyrics can be subject to this scrutiny. You thought they worked, but now that you hear it outside your head, when you’re not actually performing them, in a 3rd person context, they don’t quite sound right. It doesn’t necessarily mean the engineer or producer don’t know what they’re doing, it probably means you weren’t paying attention when you wrote the parts. Deal with it.

Enjoy the process, the journey, rocky pitfalls and lofty summits and everything in between. But learn because the next time you go into the studio to record an album, you can avoid making the same mistakes through better preparation, by taking the time to tear your songs apart an examine how they work or don’t work and “fix” them before you go in to record them. Rehearsal time is not merely “performance rehearsal” time where you run through the songs and just let them “evolve”. This is a bad, bad practice. It is the time you work on the songs, the parts, and how they should be, how they do or do not reflect what you conceived in your heart and mind when you began to create them. I can’t tell you what a thrill it is when I write a song that sounds exactly the way I imagined it. Likewise, I can’t tell you the thrill I have had when I went into the studio with a song that was just “so-so” and watched it blossom into something I never imagined, something even more wonderful than I ever thought it could be, simply because I began to add parts, other instruments. The song didn’t change structure or form, it “matured” simply by layering in more instruments beyond the acoustic or electric guitar upon which I had written the song and adding vocal harmonies that were well written and, above all, appropriate to the song and melody.

War Stories…

Every studio musician has war stories. Tommy Tedesco used to write about them in the pages of Guitar Player magazine. You tend to encounter all sorts of situations the more you work in a studio. Many of us have come across the exact same situations, but not always resolved them the same way. And that’s really important to remember; just because so-and-so figured out how to deal with problem ‘x’, it doesn’t mean the same solution will work for you, even though the problem is exactly the same. And you may even encounter the same problem and find the previous solution doesn’t work this time around. It’s all part of the process.

And so, here now is presented a series of tales from the studio…

I was producing one particular album session and we had recorded all the guitar and bass parts, along with a scratch vocal guide track. When it came time to record the drums for the song, a big problem was exposed. At a bridge point in one song the acoustic guitar broke cadence for about two bars changing the whole feel of that part – a very bad thing because all the other instruments were playing the correct feel. I confess, as the producer, I should have heard it sooner. Why all the other parts weren’t affected, God alone knows. Adding the drums exposed the conflicting feel even more. The guitar needed to be redone to “repair” the problem.

The engineer “dumped” the acoustic guitar track once the song got under way and the rest of the instruments, having the correct feel, were all the drummer listened to in order to record their part properly. Remember, you don’t necessarily need to hear all parts. Some players want to hear only what they need to help establish the feel of the song. For a drummer, one guitar and the bass may be all they want to hear. For a bass player, maybe they and the drummer will record their parts together to get that foundation locked in to establish the whole feel for the rest of the band.

Side bar: You cannot “fix it in the mix”, a popular term in some studio circles, when you have problems like this. No matter how hard you try, any part that was not recorded properly in the first place cannot be “fixed” later on. A bad track is a bad track. Deal with it and re-record the part. And don’t get pissed off about it. Pay attention next time and you will most probably avoid this problem in the future. Many people record multiple takes of the same part and either choose the best one or create a “composite”, combining the better parts between the two or three takes into one “perfect” take. (Personally, I believe that if you can’t perform the part perfectly at least once in the studio, you need to rehearse more. Compositing a track is easier, but not necessarily “honest”.)

In another session I worked as producer, everything had gone smoothly until backing vocals were added in on one particular song. It was discovered that while a vocal line the backup singers were singing was pretty good by itself, when played against the lead vocal track, it didn’t fit. They changed the line and it fell into place, complimenting the lead vocal part.

Many years ago, a session in which I played guitar had a very limited budget and the equipment was very limited as well. But, because I am also an engineer, I understood how to maximize the limited resources. We were able to get the job done and done well. You can create a good recording on very little equipment if you understand the limitations of that gear and how to use it effectively and efficiently, even creatively.

Here’s what we did:

The artist chose a four track studio because of a small budget. We would clearly have to record more than one instrument at a time, doing “semi-live” recordings of the parts of the songs, even recording one track at a time with multiple instrumentation on each track. This meant we had to be very well rehearsed – and very careful.

We deconstructed the songs, deciding on what would have to be done and how. With my direction this job was made simpler and quicker. We recorded the keyboards and guitar on one track and the drums two tracks (giving more “stereo” effect for the final mix). The vocals (including harmonies) would occupy the final track. Since the bass was being covered by the keyboard player, that would be done simultaneously with the rest of the keys and guitar, basically putting three instruments down on tape all at once.

If true stereo is not important (because you’re recording a demo to represent your band’s sound for an agent to get gigs), you can do one track at a time recording. It allows you to do a bit more, creatively, but you sacrifice the panorama a stereo recording tends to have. But, that said, when you mix stuff down, you can always run it through stereo processors and “create” the illusion of a stereo mix (which we did).

When you “cluster” instruments together on the same track, you need to be sure they have different characteristics so there will be no “distortion” or “cancellation” issues. Percussion should not be recorded with vocals. Vocals should not be recorded with guitars. These share frequencies and that causes problems. You won’t hear elements of a given instrument because it is being overshadowed or drowned out by the other instrument(s) you chose to put with it on the same track. But, in truth, sometimes you have to compromise. Had we more time and tracks, we would not have recorded keys and guitar together because they occupy many of the same frequencies.

So we chose the order of events, recorded the instruments and mixed them down on a mixing console designed for live gigs, not recording. But, having recorded the tracks hot and keeping the distortion down, we managed to create a pretty impressive sounding recording, accomplishing the intended purpose. I still have a copy of this recording (the master, actually) and it is a “snap shot” of a time in my producing, engineering and musical progression (see my essays on music elsewhere on this site for why you should record and save your music).

On another session, I was hired in to play bass. This was going to be done in a good studio, but with limited budget. The band chose to record “live”. Each song had one to three takes (I think) and the best take was the keeper. I believe I still have a copy of this session as well.

I do not recommend this method at all, unless you are so totally rehearsed and prepared that you can perform the songs nearly flawlessly at least fifty percent of the time. Jazz bands must record this way because the whole nature of Jazz is immediate; the interaction between players cannot be duplicated or simulated in a multi-track session where players come in and lay down their parts separately. Another example where “live” is better is Bluegrass because the same rule applies; Bluegrass players feed off each other just like Jazz players, and you can only do that when you play together.

A session like this takes more time to set up, putting all the instruments in their own little “space” in the studio to cut down on cross-talk (unless you want that included), but once all that work is finished, the band can count off the songs and run through them a couple times, printing everything to tape, and do a whole session in one to two days. Mixdown will, of course, take longer.

Recordings like this have a more “spontaneous” feel to them, somehow transcending the studio environment and transferring that indefinable something to the recording medium. You can tell when a recording like this has been made. The interaction between the musicians is so immediate, so evident, that it is something you cannot duplicate by “traditional” recording methods.

I remember with one of my own bands, we went into the studio and laid down all core tracks as a band in one day; minimal overdubs and all vocals were done on the second day, mixing on a third and fourth day. We were very, very well rehearsed, having spent a month preparing and refining parts before entering the studio. While I said I do not recommend this method, it is very satisfying when it works. But you have to know your band can do this, otherwise you’re wasting too much time trying to figure out why someone keeps blowing their part with each take. (Yes, if there is enough separation, the “offending” part can be re-recorded afterward, or “repaired” using punch-in techniques, but the whole may suffer, the feel you are going for may be compromised.)

One critical piece of the equation that is important to know…

Perfection is really cool, most of the time, but not at the expense of the “soul” of the song. What I mean is simply this: If you recorded a song and there is a really, really insignificant error in a part, but the rest of the song is amazing, let it go. If you listen to “classic” rock and roll recordings from the 1950’s and 1960’s, you will find there are mistakes you can hear. Why did they leave them and not redo the part? They found the error to be so unimportant, but the take so vital and alive, it was worth leaving the error in. They didn’t want to sacrifice the performance for perfection. Sometimes that is more important, but you have to decide when and where this applies.

Just understand this: leaving errors in is only worth it if the take was otherwise amazing and the error is so inconsequential that to re-record the part would only defeat and/or destroy the whole “vibe” of the take in question. Secondly, the error must occur during a portion of the song where it will not screw up the section of music in which it occurred. Look at the overall sound, vibe, feel and statement of the take before you decide you need to redo the part. It may be a mistake to erase, fix or otherwise change it. It’s up to you, though. Just take time to decide. Make a rough mix and take it home for a listen or two. If you still can accept it after a few listens, your opinion probably won’t change after ten or more listens. Leave it alone.

You will run into these problems and others during the recording process. Don’t be discouraged, even if you have to re-record a whole song from scratch. Better to do that than keep something that will only sound worse and worse with each listen. The soul of the song is in how it flows and how the instruments interact with one another. Recording more instruments all at once helps to create the soul of the song, but that isn’t always possible or wise. Learning to build a song up one track at a time can still keep the soul of the song intact, but you have to do it right or it won’t be there.

Just remember: nothing is carved in stone until you press the CD, then it’s final. At any time before that, you can change anything and everything. The earlier in the process you figure all that out, the cheaper it will be. You don’t want to have spent five grand on the Mastering House sweetening process (the very last process before pressing the album) and then change your mind because something now doesn’t sit well with you. If you have any reservations, any doubts, do not proceed to the next step until they are resolved. You will have a better recording, and that’s the whole point, right?