By Nathan Rosenberg
I started recording pianos before recording anything else, probably because I am a pianist. It is a notoriously difficult instrument to record, so when the editors of Recording asked me to write about miking acoustic pianos, I began by asking myself What if I had known then what I know now?”
What's the trouble?
The piano is a complicated contraption consisting of up to 7000 discrete parts. Hundreds of strings resonate sympathetically and then project in unpredictable directions. Challenges include reflections within the case, tuning, leakage from other instruments, and the sheer fact that no two pianos sound exactly alike. Then there's the wide range of pitches, from the lowest A (beneath the lowest E on a bass) to the highest C (which is also the highest note on the piccolo)—your mics have to be able to capture the full spectrum.
Finally, the sheer size of the Grand with its expanse of strings and the two-position lid calls for placement experimentation—too close and you might not capture the full range and miss out on the room sound, too far and you may get less definition and more room than is desirable.
Tone, tuning, placement
Every instrument has registers and dynamics where it sounds the best. Listen, enlist the help of the player or arranger, and get the best result from the instrument and the part. It pays to be flexible.
Piano tuning is an art, not a science. No two tunings sound exactly alike but they can all pretty noticeably change the character of an instrument. Discuss your requirements with all parties involved; a skilled piano tuner can help greatly.
Just because it's big and heavy doesn't mean you shouldn't move the Grand to the location where it sounds best in the room. Moving it gently shouldn't affect the tuning, and finding the right spot will have a profound effect on the piano's tone. Then look for the most balanced sound, in the sense that all notes from high to low have a similar sound, without any notes or note clusters sticking out more prominently than others.
Stereo—what stereo?
Piano lends itself nicely to stereo recording where two signals are split, traditionally with bass on the left and treble on the right which is the way the pianist hears it. This does not restrict you to orthodox, phase-coherent stereo techniques designed to create a strong center image. In fact, many of the techniques that follow will result in a very wide image that may not resolve perfectly to mono. Live with it.
You need to keep an eye and ear out for phase problems, whether you multi-mike and pan or record in true stereo using something like an XY technique. With all the sound bouncing around inside the case of a piano, there can be a lot of stuff out of phase. But before you use the meter, use your ears.
First, sum the mics to mono and note how the sound changes. If you lose a lot of bass or you hear some weird kind of filtering in the midrange, try switching the phase on one mic, or try moving it. A little repositioning goes a long way, and this may be enough to get things into the ballpark.
Next listen in stereo. With any luck, you will hear a bit of a phantom center image. Flip the phase again to be sure you still have it the best way. Once it sounds good in mono and stereo, you are done. But if you were to look at it with a scope, it will probably still look a mess. Give up. If it sounds fine, it probably is.
In fact, sometimes to accentuate the left-right effect, I will actually delay one channel of the stereo pair by a few hundred samples in my DAW. This purposely destroys the stereo image, making the spacing from left to right seem very wide. Think of it as the bastard child of stereo miking and tight double-tracking. It isn't necessarily a natural sound, but it can often help phase issues and sometimes makes the track hold its place better in a mix.
Leakage
With more than one player in the room, leakage is inevitable. A little bit can help keep things sounding cohesive. But drums next to the piano will bleed too much into the piano mics.
Standard procedure is to stuff mics inside the piano, shut the lid, and use as many moving blankets as you can afford. This will help some. A highpass filter on your mic or preamp can deal with some of the kick drum, but the hi-hat could be enough trouble to make you move the drum kit further away and use baffles or gobos, although they begin to defeat the benefit of recording together in the first place.
With all the sound bouncing around inside the closed box, it may sound muddy, muffled, and boxy. This makes mic choice and placement within a closed piano particularly important.
Unfortunately there is no magic formula for where to stick piano mics. The sound of a piano is too complex. I recommend making a series of test recordings with the mics in different spots to better evaluate how the sound changes from place to place. Use the positions below as a point of departure.
Mic positions—the best seat in the house
Every piano is different. Suggestions for mic positioning are just that—suggestions. Walk around the open instrument while someone is playing, cover up one ear and let the open ear guide you as to where a mic should go. Then make test recordings and evaluate them. Factor this into your time budget—if you don't, you are relying on luck.
For example, on my piano, the best seat in the house is, well, the seat. Even with the lid down, there is a beautifully balanced stereo image right where my ears are while I am playing; not too hyped, percussive or unnaturally close sounding but still not distant.
An XY pair of small-diaphragm condensers about a foot over the player's head, pointing down but not directly at the keys, reveals a great jazz tone. An omni mic a little closer, or a figure-eight, gives the added benefit of allowing you to record a piano/vocalist once you get the balance right. Be careful about player noise such as creaky benches, grunting players, and people with long clicking fingernails. And if leakage from another instrument in the room is to be an issue, then, well, as we say in NYC, fuhgetubattit!
Other sweet spots
There are often a few sweet spots to be found, despite the crazy bouncing around of sound inside the piano. For example, on a well designed Grand piano, there is often a wonderful place at the tail, just about where the back leg is, or often just outside the case. Here, the various registers tend to project in a surprisingly uniform manner. This is a great spot to place a single mic for a well-balanced mono recording.
For this technique, try a large-diaphragm condenser to capture a large full sound from the instrument. This is also a good mic choice outside the piano case because this mic position won't be adversely affected by the off-axis coloration that is often present in many large-diaphragm mics.
A ribbon mic could work well here, too, typically capturing a good deal of room tone from its rear lobe. Another option is an XY pair of small-diaphragm condensers in this same location, although it won't give you the pronounced stereo image that you may be accustomed to; but you may get a natural, balanced and true stereo image if your piano projects here the way many do.
A happy medium is an M-S pair. In some ways this is the best of both worlds, capturing the on-axis mono signal along with the side mic which allows you to adjust the stereo width to taste. But again, if isolation from other instruments in the same room is mission-critical, this would not be my first choice because the mics are outside (or almost outside) the piano.
The missionary position
Two cardioid mics directly over the hammers, pointing down, one for the bass strings, one for the treble, is probably the most common setup that I observe, but it's not my personal favorite for most styles. It can work well for percussive styles such as rock and gospel because of the proximity to the hammers, but watch out for that hole in the middle” of the frequency range which can be a result of close-miking the top and bottom of the range.
The problem may start to go away as the lid is closed (due the many reflections inside of a piano). But these reflections can also be detrimental. A benefit of this technique, however, is that it allows the lid to be placed on the half stick” or, depending on your mic, perhaps even fully closed. With a bunch of blankets, you can get significant isolation, although you will invariably have to dial in some general tone fixes with a good eq to make up for the boxy and muffled sound of the fully enclosed piano. For this setup, check out Slider's Piano Barre (reviewed March 2000), as it can really help with positioning.
Off with your head
A variation of this position involves actually removing the lid of the piano and lifting the mics higher off the strings. This can solve some of the problems inherent with the missionary position.” Removing the lid isn't hard to do, but you will want an extra set of strong arms to make sure you don't hurt the piano or yourself. Pull out the small pins that are set into the hinges that hold the lid in place, and carefully pull the lid off, taking care not to bend the hinges.
Once this is done, you can hang the mics directly over the strings at any height. Remember that the lid is an integral part of the way a piano projects its sound, so this may or may not work for your needs. But this technique often results in a bright, nicely separated and well-balanced piano sound. Try different kinds of mics. Small-diaphragm condensers are a safe pick but if you have a good sounding room, try spaced omnis three or four feet off the strings.
Down the hatch
A lot of people like to stuff mics in and over the metal holes that cover the sound board. I suspect that there are more people that do it that way than pianos that sound good that way.
But there is an exception to every rule.
Sometimes I find this can work as a supplemental mic in setups that use more than two mics. Contrary to what you may have been told, these holes are not where the sound comes out.” But they do tend to focus certain frequencies. Sometimes it's a good place to catch an extra bit of zing,” sometimes it is just resonant and peaky. But people swear by this method so I include it, assuming there are instruments that really sound good this way.
One exception is that a dynamic mic or two (think SM58) can really capture a vintage piano-bar type sound. I suggest a fishbowl placed on top of the piano, as resonance from a glass full of dollar bills is requisite for authenticity.
Boundary mics
Another popular miking technique involves a pair of PZMs placed either along opposite side rails of the piano, pointing in toward the strings, or taped to the lid pointing down. A boundary mic is basically like one half of an omni mic, and because it sits at the far extremity of the piano, it is not subject to reflections from the rear. As is the case with a pair of spaced omnis, the stereo image really depends on how far the mics are spaced apart.
If your piano doesn't happen to sound good at its edges you are out of luck. But if it does, and you can adjust the placement to ensure good phase relationships, you might really like this sound.
Spaced pair” ORTF
Another option, and one of my favorites, is a sort of modified ORTF array. Two cardioids spaced a foot or two apart are placed at or around the unhinged side opening of a grand piano.
The mic closer to the keyboard can be thought of as a treble mic, the other as a bass. In practice, however, what you will most likely be getting is the full balanced sound from the mic near the back of the piano (remember that sweet spot I mentioned) mixed with a slightly more percussive sound from the treble” mic which is closer to the hammers.
The two mics are spaced far enough so that a rich stereo panned effect will be evident, but given their orientation, the phase issues should not be overwhelming. Another benefit of this position is that it will allow you to freely adjust the lid opening to taste: wide for a clearer sound, half stick for a lot more reflection, and there's even the possibility of blanketing the piano to reduce track bleed from other instruments. With an apparatus such as Slider's Piano Barre, you can even close the lid all the way if you have mics that can fit deeper inside. Another benefit of this technique is that, with the exception of an XY pair, it is the best way I have found to capture a true stereo” recording.
This position is a good starting point for classical recordings. With classical music, you typically don't want so much of the sound of the hammers and the inside of the case. The air around the instrument and the tone of the room is paramount. A spaced ORTF pair can be pulled away from the piano a couple of feet (or to taste) to excellent effect.
Another benefit of this setup is that you can be flexible in your choice of mics. While ORTF generally favors a small-diaphragm condenser, I find that sometimes a large-diaphragm pair can help to capture a more broad-shouldered sound. The rear of the mic will be pointing outside the piano (or in some instances the entire mic is outside), which makes the slower response and off-axis coloration, so typical of most large diaphragm condensers, less of an issue.
Many engineers favor an AKG C 12 in this application, but there is really a world of choices these days. Consider ribbons too! One of my favorites is the Beyer M160 because of its unique cardioid pickup pattern. Traditional figure-eight ribbons can also be used here (you might even substitute a Blumlein pair—see Robert Auld's review of the Royer Labs SF-24 in this issue) when the room sound is an asset; one lobe picks up the piano, the other gets the room.
Everything else
You can mix and match the abovementioned techniques to accentuate different aspects of an instrument. I have found that mixing microphone types and placements can sometimes catch elusive qualities that stereo and pseudo-stereo miking can't achieve. For example, you might want to use two different kinds of mics on the hammers. This can start to break down the stereo image, making the piano's width seem wider, like a cousin of the channel-delay technique I mentioned earlier.
Another valid technique involves using more than two mics. Perhaps the standard, over-the-hammer position works well but there might be a sound hole, where the very high frequencies seem to congregate. (My piano has one that seems to focus all the really high stuff, i.e. 10 kHz and above.) A supplemental mic here may be mixed in to capture this.
Watch out for phase problems and keep the relative distance between mics and the piano in mind when adding mics. The old three-to-one rule” states that the distance between any two mics must be at least three times the distance between the mics and the source to avoid phase problems, but it's a bit more complex than that: see John Shirley's ‘Compleat Recording Musician' on the subject in the October 2004 issue. To make your life a little easier, it might also be worthwhile to eq the stuff you don't need (in my case, everything below 6 kHz) out of the extra mic's track.
Keep in mind that reflections from the case and the lid will be intense here, so choose a mic with good off-axis response and attenuation I use an Electro-Voice RE20, which works well because of its slower response time, excellent rejection and bass response, and unpronounced proximity effect. For whatever reason, however, I have also had good luck with nearly the polar opposite: an AKG C414B-TLII (a predecessor of the C414B-XLII reviewed by Paul Stamler in this issue). Go figure.
Either way, supplement this mic with another one in the treble register, somewhere where you are going to catch that high end and punch that the other mic will miss. I would usually reach for a small-diaphragm condenser. Pan them hard left and right and see how you like it.
Don't forget to have fun
I hope this wide selection of suggestions gets you started and helps you avoid some of the cliches and pitfalls that novices can encounter when recording this big, beautiful, complex instrument. Just remember: if it sounds good, it is good.
Sunday, 7 August 2016
Friday, 5 August 2016
Uk Recording Studios In The 50s And 60s
Let's start at the end of the 1950s. Most of the first generation of recording studios built their own sound consoles. It has been suggestedthat they had to do this because professional commercial desks were unavailable at that is probably the other way round. There were few desk manufactures because the small amount of studios around didn't need them. It made sense and was the norm to build custom consoles to suit.
The first generation of mixing desks were simple affairs consisting of a small quantity of mic pre-amps, some limited eq if you were lucky and a set of output amps The big studios like Abbey Road and Decca had R&D departments and maintenance staff, for who,building some valve mic pre-amps would be done before the morning tea break. If desired, modular pres could be bought like the Telefunken V72s that EMI used to build the sixties consoles around.
As more tracks became available on tape machines the desks needed more channels to accommodate so designerslooked towards the emerging introduction of the transistor in the late fifties opened up many more avenues of design, with their small size, low voltage use and eventually, low cost. Dick Sweetenham over at Olympic and Rupert Neve led the way in the recording field being two of the first in the commercial sector to experiment with this technology and build transistor consoles in the early sixties.
The majority of the professional studios where based in London. The engineers and maintenance staff of studios often moved around so one studios 'secrets' could be passed onto the next place of work. And many of these engineers worked at one time or another for Abbey Road, the university of sound, which not only designed its own equipment but would study and modify the best from America and Germany.
The vast majority of recordings in the UK where being produced on British desk and most designs were linked directly to studios. The in house designs of EMI, Trident, and Sound Techniques would become commercially available. Dick Sweetenham's desk at Olympic was a blueprint for the formation of Helios. Decca only built for themselves and then you had the independent companies, the main two being Neve and Cadac. These are the names that have achieved almost legendary status.There was also the Soundcraft with the series1/2 , Rosser from Wales built one of the Mayfair desk and became a big part of the Rockfield set up but were more of a communications company. We shouldn't forget Vic Keary over at Maximum Sound and Chalk Farm. Vic built his valve desks, told everybody for the next 40 years that valves were best and eventually most people agreed with him. Hats off to you Vic.
Vic now designs the superb Thermionic Culture range of equipment ( no I'm not being paid to advertise, just credit where credits due) There were few foreign desks in the UK, these being from the German manufactures Neumann and Telefunken.
Advances in electronics and technology would suggest that these desks would now be museum pieces, valued for their historic and nostalgic value, leaving us wondering how the makers of the recorded music coped with such primitive offerings. We've now come to the realization that the technology used within these desks may have just been spot on for the recording of pop and rock music. In fact it could also be suggested that these consoles were an integral part of that sound.Maybe the public always knew that those records sounded wonderful and that we never really needed all these so called now refer to much of this gear as 'classic'.
In terms of features and control, the designs of today are light years away from what was once used. But what about the sound?
If we compare old to new with our electronic test instruments we could happily come to the conclusion that new is best. But what are we testing for here? Is one system better quality, more accurate, more transparent, less distortion. Technically distortion should be as low as possible. But do listening tests back this important is phase integrity? Can we really list in order what are the most important elements for the design of recording equipment. Is not the bottom line producing a sound that the engineer, producer and musician likes, that can be put onto record for the public to like? The guitars and amps of the late fifties and early sixties are still seen as possibly the best designs, the sound of rock and roll in its broadest sense. So why is it so hard sometimes to accept that much of the studio gear of that era sounded right for that style of music.
Many of the designers of that era have become historical figures within the recording industry and their designs are seen aslegendary to be borrowed and reworked. But is it possible that we suddenly had a burst of great designers in the sixties and seventies and now the secret information and judgment that these people had has been lost ? Is there common ground in these designs? Yes.
Discrete circuitry, first valve then transistor, inductive eq and transformer coupled.
They were designing and building with the information and components that were normal for that era.
'There are some desk where, by pure fluke, it actually enhances the sound -Dick Sweetham's first desk at Olympic for example.' Glyn Johns - June 81.
Royer Microphones
The piano can be recorded in a variety of ways, with different miking methods yielding markedly different results. Classical recordings often benefit from some degree of room ambiance, achieved by placing the microphones outside of, or at a distance from, the piano. Pop and rock recordings often call for closer miking of the piano's soundboard to give a tighter, more immediate response. Placing mics over the hammers yields an even brighter, more percussive recording. Removing the piano lid allows for miking the soundboard with no lid "bounce", while opening the lid at full stick and placing mics just outside of the lid can give a fuller bodied, more natural sounding recording. The piano is a wonderfully complex instrument and the possibilities for recording it are endless!
Engineers around the world are using Royer ribbons to record piano, from classical and scoring to rock and country. We've been fortunate to attend a number of sessions where engineers have let us photograph their miking techniques and we share them with you here. As always, these are good starting points, but experimentation is the key to getting the sound you're looking for.
You can also try pulling the mic back further to bring in more of the natural ambience of the room. In this picture, engineer Giovanni Di Simone was beta testing a prototype SF-24V (tube) stereo ribbon microphone for us - it's on the stand next to a stock SF-24 at a live concert.
Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell 3 Recording Session
This multiple mic technique is one of the most useful methods for recording rock/pop piano. Here we have a spaced pair of R-122 s alongside a pair of Neumann U-67s, although any quality condenser microphone should yield decent results with this method.
Two R-122s - Spaced Pair
Live piano during a Henry Mancini Orchestra performance.
Open the piano lid to full stick and place one microphone about 12 inches above the hammers, half way between the lowest key and middle C. Place the second microphone at the same height, between the highest key and middle C. This technique gives a brighter, tighter sound which is usually preferable for rock, country, and pop.
Engineers around the world are using Royer ribbons to record piano, from classical and scoring to rock and country. We've been fortunate to attend a number of sessions where engineers have let us photograph their miking techniques and we share them with you here. As always, these are good starting points, but experimentation is the key to getting the sound you're looking for.
You can also try pulling the mic back further to bring in more of the natural ambience of the room. In this picture, engineer Giovanni Di Simone was beta testing a prototype SF-24V (tube) stereo ribbon microphone for us - it's on the stand next to a stock SF-24 at a live concert.
Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell 3 Recording Session
This multiple mic technique is one of the most useful methods for recording rock/pop piano. Here we have a spaced pair of R-122 s alongside a pair of Neumann U-67s, although any quality condenser microphone should yield decent results with this method.
Two R-122s - Spaced Pair
Live piano during a Henry Mancini Orchestra performance.
Open the piano lid to full stick and place one microphone about 12 inches above the hammers, half way between the lowest key and middle C. Place the second microphone at the same height, between the highest key and middle C. This technique gives a brighter, tighter sound which is usually preferable for rock, country, and pop.
Thursday, 4 August 2016
Setting Up And Microphone Technique
by Marc Henshall
A full drum kit can be one the most difficult instruments to record successfully. It requires a great deal of patience and a skilful drummer to achieve excellent results. Don't let this discourage you, though, as your efforts will reward you with far more individual character than is possible with software or drum machine alternatives.
So how do you capture the perfect drum sound?
The options and approaches, of course, are endless, and the seasoned sound engineer will have numerous microphone techniques developed over a number of years. For those of us with a little less experience, it's useful to start with some tried and tested methods, from which, you can adjust to taste as your experience grows.
Setting Up the Drums
In all recording applications, good results start at the sound source. A poorly setup and tuned drum kit, will only ever produce a disappointing result; no matter what trickery you apply with microphone placement and mixing techniques. Make sure the kit and the drummer are on top form before proceeding with anything else.
Setting up and tuning drums is a real skill. It requires a deep understanding of musical styles and the mechanics of a drum kit - combined with a good ear - to get professional results.
If you don't feel confident tackling this on your own, I'd highly recommend you consult someone who does. At the very least, conduct some research first; paying close attention to the kind of drum heads and how they're tuned. If your drum heads are old, they can be very difficult to tune, so you might want to consider replacing them first.
If you're still getting excessive, undesirable resonance after you've replaced and tuned the skins, it's worth considering specialist drum damper products, such as ‘moongel'.
Damper products should tackle any additional resonance and are particularly useful if you prefer a dry sound. Cymbals, on the other hand, are very difficult to control if you're unhappy with the tone. Therefore, the lesson here for drummers is clear: if you have a limited budget for your drum kit - spend it on cymbals first.
Room Acoustics
Once you're satisfied with how the drums sound, the next biggest influence on how your final recording will sound is the room it's in. Two very different approaches apply here: 1)
Embrace the natural acoustic qualities of your room. 2) Control the room acoustics and apply synthetic ambiance later.
Headley Grange
1) Natural Ambiance
There's no doubt that the best drum sounds are recorded in great sounding rooms. What might surprise you though, is that these spaces aren't necessarily pro studios. For example, Led Zeppelin famously recorded drums at the bottom of a 3 storey stairwell for their album ‘Led Zeppelin IV'. The natural reverb - captured using microphones hung down the stairwell - was used to capture their signature stadium drum sound. Check out the drums on ‘When The Levee Breaks' for example.
Whether or not you decide to let natural acoustics shine is a matter of personal taste, genre - and in certain cases - luck. For example, if you're recording drums at home, the kind of home you live in could be the deciding factor. Unfortunately, most home acoustics are less than stellar. However, if you're lucky enough to have an interesting sounding space - try experimenting and embracing the room.
2) Controlling Room Acoustics
If, like many of us, your studio acoustics are naturally uninspiring or detrimental to the recording - you might want to consider controlling rather than embracing them. (Think concrete walls in a garage for example). By reducing reflections using soft materials or specifically designed room kits , it is possible to turn even the most humble of recording spaces into a usable room. Once the basic dry sound is captured, you can easily add room character later on using software plugins. This more controlled approach also has the advantage of retaining control over the room sound right down to the final mixing stage. In other words, if you change your mind about the room ambiance later on, you can easily change it. The same cannot be said for natural ambiance.
Microphones
The kit is setup, the drums are tuned, and the room is sounding great; now it's time to capture your hard work with the appropriate microphone technique. Again, two very different approaches should be considered depending on a number of factors.
1) The Drum Kit as a Homogenous Sound Source
First things first, this approach only works with a great drummer in a fantastic sounding room. The idea is to treat the kit as one entity; using a minimal amount of microphones.
Typically, an experienced engineer will use just 2 overhead microphones with additional close mics - usually on kick and snare - to plug in sonic gaps. Much like our Led Zeppelin example mentioned earlier, this technique is particularly effective in capturing the attack and dynamic range of the drum kit.
If you decide this approach is right for you, it's best to start with the overheads. Most engineers use a couple of large or small diaphragm condenser mics and develop the sound from there. The wide dynamic range and sensitivity of condenser microphones make them ideal for capturing the wide frequency range and dynamics of a drum kit. If you prefer a smoother sounding high-end, then it's also worth considering ribbon microphones as an alternative.
When placing your overhead microphones in this application, you're aiming to achieve a well-balanced representation of the entire kit. Although there are no right or wrong ways to go about this, having some understanding of how the cymbals resonate will help you make an informed choice.
Cymbals radiate their sound above and below, whereas the hi-hat resonates horizontally. With this in mind, you can begin to imagine how a balance between drum and cymbal sounds can be achieved simply by moving the overheads. You can typically achieve a balanced sound of the kit with overheads placed between two and three metres above floor level, and either behind or in front of the kit.
A/B vs X/Y - There are two main microphone techniques to consider for overhead configurations. The most common is referred to as the A/B technique. This approach involves 2 mics positioned to the left and right of the kick, which helps pick up much more of the room sound with a wide stereo image. The second approach is a technique called X/Y configuration.
The X/Y technique presents fewer phasing problems as the capsules are closer together, but gives you less control over balance and image of the individual elements of a kit. You might find that X/Y works better for you in close-mic drum applications, but it's important to experiment when finding a sound that works best for you.
Once you're happy the overheads are capturing a good balanced sound, you can now begin to add spot microphones to support or emphasise certain parts of the kit. In almost all circumstances, you'll want to give the kick drum some more weight, and in some cases, the snare can also benefit from additional support. Consider using a purpose built kick drum mic to boost the bass drum and either a dynamic or condenser to emphasise the snare. Close micing individual drums will be covered in more detail as part of approach number 2, which looks at a more surgical approach to recording drums, by close micing almost every element of the kit.
2) Close Micing a Drum Kit
While the minimal approach described above captures a pure and dynamic sound, close micing comes with its own distinct advantages and can even be the preferred approach for certain genres of music. The close-mic approach can give you a drier, more intimate sound, with greater separation and control. If your room acoustics aren't up to scratch or you have a drummer that isn't great at controlling dynamics - the close mic approach will likely produce better results.
Here are some examples of how to mic each piece of a typical kit:
Overheads - Once again, it's best to start with the overheads as a base from which you refine. In a close-mic multichannel drum recording application, you'll likely find that the overheads work better closer to the kit than you might otherwise try in our first, more minimal approach. As the overheads will primarily be used to capture cymbals, it's better to place the overheads directly above the kit. Under the X/Y technique described earlier, you'll achieve the best results when overheads are placed directly above the snare with each mic pointing left and right respectively. The X/Y techniques inherent phase coherence is particularly valuable when using lots of mics on a single kit. If you do decide to try the A/B technique, be sure to listen carefully for phase problems. Phase problems are a whole separate topic, but, in short, try flipping the phase inversion switch on one channel if your mixer or audio interface allows. Listen for which setting sounds ‘fuller' or ‘stronger' and select that option. If neither sounds good, you might have a phase problem and will need to experiment further with mic placement for a better result.
Kick Drum - The vast majority of kick drums are recorded using a dynamic microphone, and ideally using one that's purpose built for the job. Purpose-designed kick drum microphones have a tailor-made frequency response designed to compliment the low-frequency power and the attack of kick drums. They are also particularly adept at handling high sound pressure levels.
Microphone techniques for kick drums vary greatly from engineer to engineer and from genre to genre. As a general rule of thumb, placing your mic inside the kick drum and pointed towards the beater will capture lots of attack, while positioning further back - or even outside the drums resonant head - will increase low-frequencies. For the best of both worlds, many engineers prefer to balance the attack and low-frequency tone using both mic techniques in combination.
Resonance - Micing up a kick drum can often reveal unwanted resonance when you monitor the result, if this proves to be the case, try placing a pillow inside the drum kit to help dampen any ringing and provide a tighter sound.
Snare - The jury is still out on whether a dynamic or condenser works best for snare drums, and much will depend on style and taste.
By far the most common approach is to use two microphones: with one placed above the snare to capture the ‘crack', and the second placed beneath to give you more ‘fizz'. Once again, whenever two microphones are used to capture the same sound source, phase coherence can become problematic. With a snare drum, the phase relationship between top and bottom is invariably out of phase, so you'll want to flip the phase switch on one channel.
As for dynamic vs condenser microphones on snare drums, the general consensus is that dynamic mics capture weight and body, with greater isolation from other drums. Condenser mics on the other hand, will reveal far more subtlety in the drummers performance and capture more high-frequency detail for a crisp, punchy tone. A condenser, of course, will not handle high sound pressure levels as well as a dynamic mic; so be sure to check levels and apply a pad at the mic or pre-amp if necessary.
In any case, the mic should be positioned close to the edge of your snare for the best harmonic complexity, but secondly to protect the mic from being hit! When considering distance, placing the mic a good 4 inches away from the snare and angled toward the centre will ensure you capture the whole drum sound, with a clear and punchy attack.
Toms - Cast your mind back to our minimalist drum mic approach, and you'll recall that the toms are rarely close miced. This is because if you've set your overhead microphones effectively, the toms should be clear and well balanced with the rest of the kit. Saying this, for certain genres - particularly modern rock or metal - everything is close miced, and this includes the toms.
Much like the snare drum, using a dynamic mic will deliver a full, fat sound, with less spill. Traditionally, dynamic microphones have dominated for tom-tom applications, and the primary reason is almost certainly spill. Think about it like this: The more mics you have, the more spill. The more spill, the less control, and the harder it becomes to balance the kit.
There is, however, always two sides to every story. Over time, the introduction of purpose-built, discreet condenser microphones have made it much more practical for engineers to harness the superior transient response of condenser mics, without risking damage to their favourite mic. As with any microphone selection, listen and experiment to find what works for your genre or song. For more on dynamic vs condenser mics on toms, check out our previous post on the topic.
Hi-hat - I've left this piece until last, because typically, a well placed pair of overheads should be more than enough to capture a nice crisp hi-hat. If you do find a little extra attention is needed, try placing a pencil condenser mic roughly 10 - 15 cm away and pointing directly down at the edge on the far side, away from the snare.
Checking Phase - Bringing the Kit Together
Once you have all the microphones in place, it's important to check phase relationships between each channel. Failure to do so can result in a weak sounding recording. The kick drum will spill into other microphones more than other elements of the kit, so it makes sense to start with this as a reference point.
Monitor carefully with a high-quality pair of headphones and check the phase as follows:
Have the drummer play the kit just as they would during the recording.
Fade up the kick drum
Fade up each individual track in turn and flip the phase polarity
Listen for which setting sounds ‘bigger' or ‘fuller'
Pay particular attention to how your kick and snare sound together as this will form the backbone of your beat. The overheads are also important, but less important in context with the kick if you're working on a close-mic model for recording drums. The reason for this is that you'll likely apply a heavy dose of low cut to overheads during the mixing stage for close-mic applications; allowing the individual kick and snare mics to carry the burden.
More on Phase Issues & How to Avoid Them Using The 3 - 1 Rule
Phase cancellation happens when two microphones are receiving the same soundwave but with opposite pressure zones. When it is necessary to use multiple microphones, phase problems can be minimised by using the 3-to-1 rule. For multiple microphones the rule states that the distance between microphones should be at least three times the distance from each microphone to its intended sound source. As a result, the sound picked up by the more distant microphone should be at least 12dB less than the sound picked up by the closer one. This guideline helps to reduce the audible effects of phase cancellation to a manageable level.
The Bottom Line
When all is said and done, recording drums is a major challenge. The importance of room acoustics and the use of multiple microphones to capture a diverse range of sounds requires a substantial amount of patience, knowledge, and perseverance to obtain first-class results. Nevertheless, in a world where programming a convincing, real sounding drum track is possible using software alone - the sound of real drums could be just what you need to set your recordings apart from the crowd.
A full drum kit can be one the most difficult instruments to record successfully. It requires a great deal of patience and a skilful drummer to achieve excellent results. Don't let this discourage you, though, as your efforts will reward you with far more individual character than is possible with software or drum machine alternatives.
So how do you capture the perfect drum sound?
The options and approaches, of course, are endless, and the seasoned sound engineer will have numerous microphone techniques developed over a number of years. For those of us with a little less experience, it's useful to start with some tried and tested methods, from which, you can adjust to taste as your experience grows.
Setting Up the Drums
In all recording applications, good results start at the sound source. A poorly setup and tuned drum kit, will only ever produce a disappointing result; no matter what trickery you apply with microphone placement and mixing techniques. Make sure the kit and the drummer are on top form before proceeding with anything else.
Setting up and tuning drums is a real skill. It requires a deep understanding of musical styles and the mechanics of a drum kit - combined with a good ear - to get professional results.
If you don't feel confident tackling this on your own, I'd highly recommend you consult someone who does. At the very least, conduct some research first; paying close attention to the kind of drum heads and how they're tuned. If your drum heads are old, they can be very difficult to tune, so you might want to consider replacing them first.
If you're still getting excessive, undesirable resonance after you've replaced and tuned the skins, it's worth considering specialist drum damper products, such as ‘moongel'.
Damper products should tackle any additional resonance and are particularly useful if you prefer a dry sound. Cymbals, on the other hand, are very difficult to control if you're unhappy with the tone. Therefore, the lesson here for drummers is clear: if you have a limited budget for your drum kit - spend it on cymbals first.
Room Acoustics
Once you're satisfied with how the drums sound, the next biggest influence on how your final recording will sound is the room it's in. Two very different approaches apply here: 1)
Embrace the natural acoustic qualities of your room. 2) Control the room acoustics and apply synthetic ambiance later.
Headley Grange
1) Natural Ambiance
There's no doubt that the best drum sounds are recorded in great sounding rooms. What might surprise you though, is that these spaces aren't necessarily pro studios. For example, Led Zeppelin famously recorded drums at the bottom of a 3 storey stairwell for their album ‘Led Zeppelin IV'. The natural reverb - captured using microphones hung down the stairwell - was used to capture their signature stadium drum sound. Check out the drums on ‘When The Levee Breaks' for example.
Whether or not you decide to let natural acoustics shine is a matter of personal taste, genre - and in certain cases - luck. For example, if you're recording drums at home, the kind of home you live in could be the deciding factor. Unfortunately, most home acoustics are less than stellar. However, if you're lucky enough to have an interesting sounding space - try experimenting and embracing the room.
2) Controlling Room Acoustics
If, like many of us, your studio acoustics are naturally uninspiring or detrimental to the recording - you might want to consider controlling rather than embracing them. (Think concrete walls in a garage for example). By reducing reflections using soft materials or specifically designed room kits , it is possible to turn even the most humble of recording spaces into a usable room. Once the basic dry sound is captured, you can easily add room character later on using software plugins. This more controlled approach also has the advantage of retaining control over the room sound right down to the final mixing stage. In other words, if you change your mind about the room ambiance later on, you can easily change it. The same cannot be said for natural ambiance.
Microphones
The kit is setup, the drums are tuned, and the room is sounding great; now it's time to capture your hard work with the appropriate microphone technique. Again, two very different approaches should be considered depending on a number of factors.
1) The Drum Kit as a Homogenous Sound Source
First things first, this approach only works with a great drummer in a fantastic sounding room. The idea is to treat the kit as one entity; using a minimal amount of microphones.
Typically, an experienced engineer will use just 2 overhead microphones with additional close mics - usually on kick and snare - to plug in sonic gaps. Much like our Led Zeppelin example mentioned earlier, this technique is particularly effective in capturing the attack and dynamic range of the drum kit.
If you decide this approach is right for you, it's best to start with the overheads. Most engineers use a couple of large or small diaphragm condenser mics and develop the sound from there. The wide dynamic range and sensitivity of condenser microphones make them ideal for capturing the wide frequency range and dynamics of a drum kit. If you prefer a smoother sounding high-end, then it's also worth considering ribbon microphones as an alternative.
When placing your overhead microphones in this application, you're aiming to achieve a well-balanced representation of the entire kit. Although there are no right or wrong ways to go about this, having some understanding of how the cymbals resonate will help you make an informed choice.
Cymbals radiate their sound above and below, whereas the hi-hat resonates horizontally. With this in mind, you can begin to imagine how a balance between drum and cymbal sounds can be achieved simply by moving the overheads. You can typically achieve a balanced sound of the kit with overheads placed between two and three metres above floor level, and either behind or in front of the kit.
A/B vs X/Y - There are two main microphone techniques to consider for overhead configurations. The most common is referred to as the A/B technique. This approach involves 2 mics positioned to the left and right of the kick, which helps pick up much more of the room sound with a wide stereo image. The second approach is a technique called X/Y configuration.
The X/Y technique presents fewer phasing problems as the capsules are closer together, but gives you less control over balance and image of the individual elements of a kit. You might find that X/Y works better for you in close-mic drum applications, but it's important to experiment when finding a sound that works best for you.
Once you're happy the overheads are capturing a good balanced sound, you can now begin to add spot microphones to support or emphasise certain parts of the kit. In almost all circumstances, you'll want to give the kick drum some more weight, and in some cases, the snare can also benefit from additional support. Consider using a purpose built kick drum mic to boost the bass drum and either a dynamic or condenser to emphasise the snare. Close micing individual drums will be covered in more detail as part of approach number 2, which looks at a more surgical approach to recording drums, by close micing almost every element of the kit.
2) Close Micing a Drum Kit
While the minimal approach described above captures a pure and dynamic sound, close micing comes with its own distinct advantages and can even be the preferred approach for certain genres of music. The close-mic approach can give you a drier, more intimate sound, with greater separation and control. If your room acoustics aren't up to scratch or you have a drummer that isn't great at controlling dynamics - the close mic approach will likely produce better results.
Here are some examples of how to mic each piece of a typical kit:
Overheads - Once again, it's best to start with the overheads as a base from which you refine. In a close-mic multichannel drum recording application, you'll likely find that the overheads work better closer to the kit than you might otherwise try in our first, more minimal approach. As the overheads will primarily be used to capture cymbals, it's better to place the overheads directly above the kit. Under the X/Y technique described earlier, you'll achieve the best results when overheads are placed directly above the snare with each mic pointing left and right respectively. The X/Y techniques inherent phase coherence is particularly valuable when using lots of mics on a single kit. If you do decide to try the A/B technique, be sure to listen carefully for phase problems. Phase problems are a whole separate topic, but, in short, try flipping the phase inversion switch on one channel if your mixer or audio interface allows. Listen for which setting sounds ‘fuller' or ‘stronger' and select that option. If neither sounds good, you might have a phase problem and will need to experiment further with mic placement for a better result.
Kick Drum - The vast majority of kick drums are recorded using a dynamic microphone, and ideally using one that's purpose built for the job. Purpose-designed kick drum microphones have a tailor-made frequency response designed to compliment the low-frequency power and the attack of kick drums. They are also particularly adept at handling high sound pressure levels.
Microphone techniques for kick drums vary greatly from engineer to engineer and from genre to genre. As a general rule of thumb, placing your mic inside the kick drum and pointed towards the beater will capture lots of attack, while positioning further back - or even outside the drums resonant head - will increase low-frequencies. For the best of both worlds, many engineers prefer to balance the attack and low-frequency tone using both mic techniques in combination.
Resonance - Micing up a kick drum can often reveal unwanted resonance when you monitor the result, if this proves to be the case, try placing a pillow inside the drum kit to help dampen any ringing and provide a tighter sound.
Snare - The jury is still out on whether a dynamic or condenser works best for snare drums, and much will depend on style and taste.
By far the most common approach is to use two microphones: with one placed above the snare to capture the ‘crack', and the second placed beneath to give you more ‘fizz'. Once again, whenever two microphones are used to capture the same sound source, phase coherence can become problematic. With a snare drum, the phase relationship between top and bottom is invariably out of phase, so you'll want to flip the phase switch on one channel.
As for dynamic vs condenser microphones on snare drums, the general consensus is that dynamic mics capture weight and body, with greater isolation from other drums. Condenser mics on the other hand, will reveal far more subtlety in the drummers performance and capture more high-frequency detail for a crisp, punchy tone. A condenser, of course, will not handle high sound pressure levels as well as a dynamic mic; so be sure to check levels and apply a pad at the mic or pre-amp if necessary.
In any case, the mic should be positioned close to the edge of your snare for the best harmonic complexity, but secondly to protect the mic from being hit! When considering distance, placing the mic a good 4 inches away from the snare and angled toward the centre will ensure you capture the whole drum sound, with a clear and punchy attack.
Toms - Cast your mind back to our minimalist drum mic approach, and you'll recall that the toms are rarely close miced. This is because if you've set your overhead microphones effectively, the toms should be clear and well balanced with the rest of the kit. Saying this, for certain genres - particularly modern rock or metal - everything is close miced, and this includes the toms.
Much like the snare drum, using a dynamic mic will deliver a full, fat sound, with less spill. Traditionally, dynamic microphones have dominated for tom-tom applications, and the primary reason is almost certainly spill. Think about it like this: The more mics you have, the more spill. The more spill, the less control, and the harder it becomes to balance the kit.
There is, however, always two sides to every story. Over time, the introduction of purpose-built, discreet condenser microphones have made it much more practical for engineers to harness the superior transient response of condenser mics, without risking damage to their favourite mic. As with any microphone selection, listen and experiment to find what works for your genre or song. For more on dynamic vs condenser mics on toms, check out our previous post on the topic.
Hi-hat - I've left this piece until last, because typically, a well placed pair of overheads should be more than enough to capture a nice crisp hi-hat. If you do find a little extra attention is needed, try placing a pencil condenser mic roughly 10 - 15 cm away and pointing directly down at the edge on the far side, away from the snare.
Checking Phase - Bringing the Kit Together
Once you have all the microphones in place, it's important to check phase relationships between each channel. Failure to do so can result in a weak sounding recording. The kick drum will spill into other microphones more than other elements of the kit, so it makes sense to start with this as a reference point.
Monitor carefully with a high-quality pair of headphones and check the phase as follows:
Have the drummer play the kit just as they would during the recording.
Fade up the kick drum
Fade up each individual track in turn and flip the phase polarity
Listen for which setting sounds ‘bigger' or ‘fuller'
Pay particular attention to how your kick and snare sound together as this will form the backbone of your beat. The overheads are also important, but less important in context with the kick if you're working on a close-mic model for recording drums. The reason for this is that you'll likely apply a heavy dose of low cut to overheads during the mixing stage for close-mic applications; allowing the individual kick and snare mics to carry the burden.
More on Phase Issues & How to Avoid Them Using The 3 - 1 Rule
Phase cancellation happens when two microphones are receiving the same soundwave but with opposite pressure zones. When it is necessary to use multiple microphones, phase problems can be minimised by using the 3-to-1 rule. For multiple microphones the rule states that the distance between microphones should be at least three times the distance from each microphone to its intended sound source. As a result, the sound picked up by the more distant microphone should be at least 12dB less than the sound picked up by the closer one. This guideline helps to reduce the audible effects of phase cancellation to a manageable level.
The Bottom Line
When all is said and done, recording drums is a major challenge. The importance of room acoustics and the use of multiple microphones to capture a diverse range of sounds requires a substantial amount of patience, knowledge, and perseverance to obtain first-class results. Nevertheless, in a world where programming a convincing, real sounding drum track is possible using software alone - the sound of real drums could be just what you need to set your recordings apart from the crowd.
Tuesday, 2 August 2016
Recording And Mixing Rock Guitars
Here are a few getting started” ideas, tips and tricks for recording and mixing electric guitars.
I deliberately have written in generalities: I have seen posts on forums, and in some articles, blathering about boosting 500Hz by 3.5 dB, cut 2 dB at 200Hz, add 5 dB at 3.35 kHz blah-blah, use a 4:1 compression ratio with a 10 ms attack and 120 ms delay with the threshold set to blah-blah'.”
All nonsense. There are no magic numbers. None of these writers have heard your guitar, in your room, with your set up, playing your style, with your song. All I hope to do in this article is to point to possible techniques and tips that may make you think about how to record and mix your guitar tracks.
My focus has always been on rock guitars, so even though your recordings may be for a different genre of music, you may find a few ideas that can be adapted to your needs.I'm not going to discuss playing techniques here. There are many online resources. Ultimate Guitars is a good place to start. There are tons of resources, columns and links here. Let's assume for the purposes of this article that you are working with (or you are) good musicians who have developed their style and chops, and know what they're doing. No discussion on recording rock guitars would be complete without reference to the classic Slipperman's Recording Distorted Guitars Thread From Hell article, particularly for distorted, hard rock and metal styles. It's funny, highly informative and worth a thorough read, unless you're easily offended.
You can create a great guitar sound in any situation if you're prepared to work at it. You will need a couple of microphones and a preamp/compressor, separate or a combo channel unit, a D.I. box and a reamp box if you want to get into reampmg (see below). Spending money is not the solution. Sure, it's nice to have high-end outboard gear, but experimentation and thoughtful planning are going to give better results.
Here are a few ideas for some equipment for various budgets. I've just included stuff I've actually used - there are many more options available, and I've left out many outboard options, such as API and old dbx compressors, as the chances are if you have those you're beyond the target audience for this post.
LESS EXPENSIVE
MID-HIGH RANGE
GENEROUS BUDGET
MICROPHONES (Close)
Shure SM57, Audix i5 (both good on snare drums) Cascade Fathead II
Shure SM57, Audix i5, ElectroVoice RE20 (good on kick drums and some vocals), Sennheiser MD421 (good on drums too) Beyer M160, Royer 121, Cascade Fathead II
Shure SM57, Audix i5, Sennheiser MD421, Royer R-121, 122 and 122V, Coles 4038 (also great on drum overheads)
MICROPHONES (Room)
Cascade Fathead II, any good multi-pattern condenser mic especially Røde
Cascade Fathead II, any good multi-pattern condenser mic.
Neumann U87, Coles 4038
PREAMPS & COMPRESSORS
Find a used M-Audio Tampa on eBay, Presonus Tube Pre with a Comp 16, Summit 2BA, Drawmer MX 60, Summit TD-100, GT Brick (active DIs and preamps) Focusrite Trackmaster Pro
Great River MP-2NV, Universal Audio SOLO 110/610, Empirical Labs Mike-E, Purple Audio MC-77. Think about a 500 series rack or lunchbox if you're planning on expansion.
Empirical Labs Mike-E, Empirical Labs Distressor, UA 1176, Purple Audio MC-77, EAR 660, UA LA-2, Thermionic Culture Vulture , Thermionic Phoenix SC, DW Fearn
Try out gear first; it pays to make friends with a local dealer who will let you try out equipment for a day or two before purchase - they do exist; support those guys.
When evaluating equipment, it's important to start with a reference. Record a minute or so (you can always loop it later) of a guitar playing various parts, a few chugs, a conventional rhythm part with a few chords which ring out and are allowed to naturally decay, interspersed with a few licks.
Record this cleanly, using a D.I. box if necessary. This is your reference track.
Set up an amp/cabinet which you already know. Set it so that you're getting close to the sound you have in mind, and route the output of your DAW into the amp, via a reamp box (or reversing a D.I. temporarily). Go for a sound that is slightly less distorted or overdriven than you would like. The sound doesn't have to be perfect, and some mismatching is tolerable.
You just need something that you can memorize as a reference. Note the amp settings.
Now insert your new gear in the recording chain, but one device at a time. If you're evaluating recording preamps, don't change microphones or positioning. The goal is to compare apples to apples. Try out the preamp settings. Are they easy to understand and are effective? Are you noticing any changes as the input stage starts to overdrive? How's the noise at higher gain settings? Do you like the character of the sound? Try to listen critically to the three main bands of frequencies - low, medium and high. Do your sustained sounds change?
Try out any EQ and LP or HP filter settings. Record the output of your new chain on another track in your DAW. Also, without changing anything, record the mic directly via your interface's vanilla preamp to another track. Compare the two on playback. What did the new preamp do to your sound? Do you notice benefits in using it? If you're evaluating a channel strip, bypass the compressor and EQ sections and only add them back in when your preamp evaluation is complete.
When listening back, be careful not to fool yourself. Louder and/or brighter will generally sound more appealing. Match your playback levels carefully.
Once you've found a preamp you like, next check out microphones, compressors or anything else you are considering, but stick to the same testing methodology. Let your tests determine what you buy: sometimes a mic will be more effective than any preamp choice, and remember that some microphones work best with some preamps. Depending on your existing setup, you might need a mic more than a preamp, so let your mic choice make your preamp decision. This is particularly important if you're adding a ribbon mic to your set up, as typically ribbon mics have a lower output and need a matched preamp.
A couple more notes on selecting equipment.
• Don't be fooled by manufacturers hype.
Just because manufacturer A, B or C are big and can afford to spend more on advertising doesn't mean that their preamp, compressor or microphone is any better than a smaller manufacturer that largely promotes themselves by word-of-mouth. The internet forums are great to learn what people are saying about different gear, such as Gearslutz , but take it all with a pinch of salt - some of those guys will try to tell you that you need to spend a fortune to get an acceptable sound.
You don't. If you can't actually hear a significant difference between a $100 mic, or a $1,000 mic in your room, then don't waste your money.
Ideally, I like discrete components. As your studio expands, it's nice to have the ability to pair preamp A with compressor B and EQ C, which gives you more mix and match variations.
Think about your goals. If you realistically expect that your studio will expand over the next couple of years, then consider discrete components. If you just don't know at the moment, and you're starting out, you can save some money with a channel strip, where one unit contains a preamp, a compressor and maybe an EQ section all in one box.
You save money because it's more economical to combine these functions on to one chassis with one power supply.
If you have a reasonably generous budget, don't overlook 500 series modules (often referred to as the API Lunchbox format ) - they are a perfect compromise between budget gear and the high-end individual components, and save you money as the individual modules are usually substantially less expensive than their stand-alone equivalent, and are a great choice if your plans also include recording live location shows.
Pasta Sauce
You can buy a jar of pasta sauce, slop it over some pasta, throw on some packaged Parmesan cheese dust and you're done.
Where's the joy, the love, the refinement, the subtlety?
Spending hours chopping garlic, onions, peppers, tomatoes, adding just the right amount of herbs and spices, adding meat, sausage or shellfish, pouring in some wine and having a vat of the stuff bubbling away for hours is so much more satisfying.
The end result will be uniquely yours, and it's a basis for further experimentation.
So it is for guitar sounds. What fits your particular song and the ways you can create it is half the fun. Learning what makes up a great sound, how an amp and cabinet interact with a room and a microphone is immensely satisfying and the sounds are yours.
Although the focus of modern recording is to record and process everything within your digital audio workstation (DAW) the old school method of recording a box in a room, with the air and special characteristics of that particular room, is going to get more satisfactory, and unique, tones than using modeling plug-ins or a Pod preset.
Having said that, there are some good guitar plug-ins, and they can be helpful (if all else fails) in getting a final tweak to your tracks, but let's start with the basics.
Mic and Speaker Placement
• Rules: Let's start with the cliché: There are no rules. Actually, I think there is one: getting a good guitar sound is 90% achieved in the room, before it ever reaches tape or a computer. Mixing and adding processing should be to enhance already good sounds, not to fix sounds that are crap.
• Before starting, try to have a clear idea what sound you're looking for, and what the song needs.
Dark or bright? Clear or indistinct? Sustain? Overdrive? Resonant? Contained or wide-open?
Hunting around hoping to hit on something which sounds good can waste a lot of time and take you in the wrong direction. Generally, if you place cabs in corners, your bass response will increase.
If you're recording in a carpeted room, get an 8′ x 4′ sheet of plywood, or a roll of vinyl flooring, and put the cab on one end so as to increase floor reflections. If you want even more/different type of bass response, put a mic in the corner of the room facing out, and point the cab into the corner. Moving the cab/mic into/out of the corner will allow you to vary the bass response.
• Change the acoustics.
Recording in a bright room, with hardwood floors and few soft furnishings, is a good thing. You can always tailor a room's characteristics and some reflections by hanging blankets, quilts and rugs. Installing some permanent acoustic treatment is a very worthwhile investment, and needn't be expensive if you have some basic D.I.Y skills.
• With a multi-speaker cabinet, first pick the best speaker; especially with an older box, they're going to be different. Listen to them. As with setting the best position for any microphone, you need to listen from where the microphone will be. As we're placing the close mic an inch or two from the speaker grill, your ears will be there too; it will be loud. Use some ear protection; either plugs or well fitting semi-closed back headphones. Really.
Yes, it will change the sound you hear, but you'll still be able to hear when the cone starts flapping or the limit travel is reached on each speaker, and cabinet resonances becomes apparent, but your hearing need to be preserved.
• Learn how speakers behave. When driven hard, there comes a point where the cone reaches the end of its travel - the excursion characteristics. When the speaker flattens out, the sound changes, as does the distortion. Do you want this effect? If so, find the volume spot at which it's working for you; if not, back off until your get a cleaner tone. With open-back cabinets, another mic at the back can work well, and often yields a less bright tone, but you might have to play around with a phase invert switch for one of the mics.
I have found a great sound by putting a cabinet in a fireplace hearth, with a front mic, and a rear mic pointing away from the cab and up the chimney.Another option is to raise the cabinet from the floor. A chair, a table, whatever.
Depending on your floor construction, this can affect the low end of the cabinet's response.
• There's not much over 5 kHz produced by a guitar cabinet speaker, which is one reason that stomp boxes and in-line processors sound so much worse if not played through a guitar amp/speaker, which naturally roll off the higher-end fizz.
• Remember that positioning your mic directly in the center of the speaker cone usually yields a brighter tone than positioning the mic off-axis. A common technique is to point the mic at dead center, but then move the mic 2-3 inches from the grill, and slant it slightly so that it's positioned 90 degrees to the speaker cone. This is a good starting position from which to experiment.
• Slight changes in positioning can affect the tone quite dramatically, as will the distance between the mic and the grill. Experiment!
• A trick, which works about 20% of the time and is dependent on an individual speaker, is to make an X” out of duct tape. Place the X at exactly the center of your selected speaker cone position, sticking your X to the grill. Now position the mic dead center behind the center of the X, 2″ back. This can have the effect of reducing the mid/high end, but the highest frequencies are unaffected, unlike moving the mic off-axis. This can create a different color to the tone, without affecting low/mids. Try it and see, if that's a sound you like.
I've expanded on this, and occasionally have taped an inverted tea cup saucer over the center of the speaker grill, with some interesting results.
• If you have multiple mics, try one on one speaker, and a mic with a different character on another, or even on the same speaker. Combining dynamic and ribbon microphones often work very well. Getting two different tones (one really bright, and one darker) and mixing them later can reduce the amount of EQ you may otherwise apply later, as well as giving you more opportunities to balance the tone, balancing the attack of the brighter tone with the body of the darker track.
• Ribbon mics are ideal for close mic'ing of guitar cabinets. They generally have a much smoother, as less pronounced, mid-range and HF characteristic, often having a roll-off at higher frequencies - perfect to control the upper register ‘fizz.' Ribbons do require more careful handling.
• Room Mics. If available, start with two mics; one very close (1-3″) to the speaker cabinet (often, but not always, a ribbon or dynamic), and another, the room mic, much further away.
Depending on the size and characteristics of your room, this can be 5 - 15 feet) A large diaphragm condenser (LDC) or a ribbon (depending on room size and characteristics) works well, with the LDC set to an ‘omni' pattern.
Rooms mics positioned low often increase bass response. Change the height of your room mic position and listen to the changes in sound, in your particular room.
Positioning 'round the corner' can work in an L-shaped room, as can a mic in a hallway outside the recording room.
• Most ribbon microphones have a figure of 8 polar pattern, also called bi-directional.
You can use this as an interesting variation in some rooms by turning the mic 90 degrees to the sound source so that the side rejection of a ribbon's pattern is rejecting the direct sound, and instead is capturing reflections. This can be an interesting sound in hallways and brighter rooms. Many multi-pattern condensers can be used in the same way.
Some ribbons have slightly different characteristics depending on which side you're aiming at the source. The Royer 121, for example, is a bit brighter on its rear side.
• Room Loading. There comes a point, especially in smaller rooms, where the level is high enough to blur directional information and your ears limit. Microphones hear the room a little differently, particularly depending on the pattern selected on the mic. Experiment with the settings available on your room mic; start with omni, then try figure 8. Using a figure
8 pattern and placing the mic appropriately can reduce side reflections in a hallway, for example, and can be a better choice than an omni pattern.
• Experiment. I have placed cabs in bathrooms, corridors, porches, parking lots, the end of custom-made air-conditioning ducts, the back of a panel truck, inside closets, inside fireplaces and chimneys and hung from ropes in stairwells and an elevator shaft.
Try anything, however odd it might seem, but keep focused on the sound in your head which you're looking for.
• Strumming and Strings, Adding another dimension: Try pointing a small diaphragm condenser mic at a solid body guitar close enough to capture the sound of the pick and the strings; near the strings and the player's hand, between the hand position and the neck).
Mix this in with the amped sound, and it can adds great percussive element to the mix. If you're recording a semi-hollowbody, try a dynamic mic (back to your i5 or SM57) plugged in to another amp, and mic the amp, or try a large diaphragm condenser mic and record that mic's output directly as if it were an acoustic.
• Before reaching for EQ, move the mic, or select a different mic if available. I prefer to not EQ in recording at all (except for special cases) because the goal is to get the sound right in the recording room. But I do suggest using a HP filter getting rid of the mostly unusable extreme low end - usually below 80 Hz - low E on a guitar is around 82 Hz and perhaps 120 - 150 Hz for lead parts, depending on what's being played.
• Stomp Boxes and effects: Knock yourself out, if it's part of your desired sound.
But I'd suggest that to do not use any types of reverb, echo or delays at the recording stage. They can't be removed in the mix, and the chances are you have much better versions of those effects in your mix chain. Add these types of effects later.
• Distortion: You can't take pepper out of the sauce. So be slightly conservative when deciding how much distortion you really want. You can add more later, but a wall of indistinct fuzz is going to need re-recording to get it right.
Players without a lot of recording experience set up their rig as if it were a live show - and that often means that the overdrive and cabinet distortion are set at levels too high for recording. You probably don't want to conduct these experiments during the set up for a session, but rather in your own time. Just take some cleanly recorded tracks, even those recorded with D.I. and route these out to your recording room or any other places in your surroundings (see ‘reamping' later in this article) and try out different ideas and placements.
Reamping
A D.I. (Direct Injection) box is a device that connects the high impedance, unbalanced output of the instrument signal to a low impedance, mic level balanced input, usually via an XLR connector.
A Reamp box is used for taking the dry guitar recording to re-record” the performance though guitar amplifier and/or external effects box(es). The combo amp or cabinet is placed in the live room or any other suitable location to produce the desired guitar tone, including distortion and room characteristics.
A reamping box, is almost, but not quite, a D.I. box in reverse, although the Radial JDI and the excellent LittleLabs RedEye can be used for both. Other reamp boxes are the Radial X-Amp , or a Reamp V.2 , among others.
Rather than running a long cable out of your interface into the recording room and into your reamp box, try using amp head into your control room and run a long speaker cable to your cabinet. Be cautious about grounding issues, and don't run the amp off a different circuit than your interface. This way you can use a short guitar cable (usually a good idea). You can then make amp adjustments when monitoring through your control room monitors and often this way cuts down on noise.
This obviously isn't possible with a combo amp; if you're planning on a lot of recording with your combo, know that long instrument level cable runs can add to noise and loss of level and tone. Better to buy a LittleLabs the way, if you're a synth. player who stumbled onto this page by accident, trying reamping those synths to get some dirt and room air happening!
Mixing
Like witnessing the process of making sausage, mixing is best performed when the artists aren't in the room; guitarists in particular are likely to cringe seeing the processing which their sound is going through.
If you are the player, and working on your own tracks, be brave and think only of the song and what it needs.
Let's start with some EQ definitions so we're talking the same language:
• Cutoff Frequency is the frequency for the turnover point; the frequency setting where a change takes effect.
• High Pass Filter (HPF): A filter section that reduces low frequencies
• Low Pass Filter (LPF): A filter section that reduces high frequencies.
• Band Pass Filter: A filter section that reduces both high and low frequencies.
• Parametric EQ: EQ section with controls for frequency, gain and Q.
• Graphic EQ: An Equalizer with a number of slider controls set on octave or third octave frequency centers.
• Bell EQ: An EQ with a peak in its response.
• Slope: The rate at an EQ section reduces the level above or below the cutoff frequency. Usually 6, 12, 18 or 24 dB/octave
• ‘Q': How wide or narrow the range of frequencies that are affected by an EQ setting. A high Q curve is narrow and a low Q curve is wider.
If a specific band is centered at 1 kHz. a high Q setting will only boost or cut frequencies right around 1 kHz and not affect the signal too far on either side of the selected frequency.
High Q settings are used more for surgical adjustments (sometimes called notching) such as removing a ring from a drum or mud from a guitar sound. EQ settings set with a high Q are less obvious, as fewer frequencies are affected, allowing more cut to be used.
A low Q setting affects a wider range of frequencies either side of the selected center frequency. Centering also 1 kHz with a low Q setting, the same curve looks like this:
Lower Q settings are generally used to change the character of a sound, rather than correcting a particular problem.
• EQ: Some will argue, but I believe that any boost of over 5 dB is an indication that you've done something wrong at the recording stage (unless you're deliberately creating an effect).
A different mic, different guitar or amp settings or a different mic position would be a better solution.
Your ears are more capable of hearing a boost than a cut at the same frequency.
Generally, a 5 dB boost is in a mid-frequency is about as obvious as a 9 dB cut, depending on the ‘Q'
You can use this to your advantage. To find a frequency where there's an annoying element to the tone of the instrument, first boost the frequency in the approximate area where you think the problem is. By sweeping through the frequencies with an increasingly higher Q, you'll be able to isolate the tone - it will be much more pronounced. Now cut the gain at that point so you're notching out that sound.
Balance the Q and the level adjustment so that you're reducing the sound without affecting the sound in the surrounding frequencies. Remember, do this final adjustment listening to the whole mix; you'll often find that less notching is needed than you would think if you listened to the track solo'd.
• EQ: First, get rid of the low junk that shouldn't be there.
Hopefully, you recorded using an HPF set at 80Hz, but you'll probably need to scoop out more than that. For lead parts, you'll probably set the HPF to a higher frequency - maybe 150 Hz. The trick is to make room for the bass, while not thinning the sound too much. A common problem is that guitars and bass clash, and the sound is indistinct and muddy, and the bass becomes swamped by the low end of your guitars.
Another reason to make EQ adjustments when hearing the guitars and bass in context - solo'd won't work here, and you won't be impressed with the guitars in isolation.
Secondly, there can be muddiness anywhere from 100 to 500 Hz. Find out where it is by setting a fairly narrow EQ dip (higher Q) and play with the inverted bell until you find the spot where you've got rid of the less useful mud and achieved some definition.
Unfortunately, the effective mid-range of guitars (around 1 - 4 kHz) occupies the same space as vocals. So getting them to coexist happily is one of the challenges you will face when mixing. As the vocals need to be prominent in most cases, you'll have to learn how to use EQ and compression, delays and reverb together with riding faders or using automation in your mixing techniques to make these two components work together.
• Bypass: It's there for a reason. Use it often, and once again, make adjustments in context, not solo'd. It's all too easy to tweak your way into a worse sound - be critical, and if your changes aren't adding to the sound rethink your approach.
• Doubling: Do you really have to? Of course, it is often useful, but I prefer to always ask does the song really need it?” If the part is played, and works off of, or against, the original track, that's one thing - that's a performance choice.
But doubling a part without adding variations by playing with different parts or chord voicings, or just doubling to try to get it fatter can create more problems than it solves. Don't duplicate mud, and indistinct variations. At the very least, change the sound of one part dramatically, use a different guitar (one with single coil pickups and the second with humbuckers, maybe) different amp, effect or mic set up, or sculpt the tone. (See ‘thickening' later, for doubling in the mix).
• Room Mic: Your room mic can greatly increasing the ‘fatness' of your guitar track. You can tweak the apparent size of the room (from studio iso booth to arena) with some judicious delay in front of the room track. Ten miliseconds of delay creates the impression of roughly 10 feet of added distance. It's fake, because it messes with the reflections ratio of what would be natural in a bigger room, but it can work.
In the mix, the room mic can really help create some space, and set right in the mix, can add a different element of ‘fatness.' Experiment with a touch of a really short room reverb preceded by EQ rolling off low end and higher frequencies, unless you recorded in a large bright room, in which case the natural room reverb may be all you need, particularly when well processed. Pumping compression can be a great effect too - medium attack and short release. Mixed just behind your main guitar bus can add a great dimension.
Speaking of the room mic, one trick is to use the vocal track to ‘duck' the room track - just set up a good compressor with a side chain driven from the vocal track(s) and adjust your compressor to clamp down on the room track during the vocals. This is great to get some movement and dynamics into your track, and help create a space for your vocals which are roughly in the same part of the spectrum as the guitars.
Just don't set the attack and release too fast or it'll sound fake.
• Stop listening to solo'd tracks. To isolate a noise, a bum note, or adjust broad effect parameters (to get the routing set and make sure the settings are approximately right), go ahead, but don't waste your time fine-tuning guitar sounds in solo - they almost certainly won't work when in the mix. You need to make these changes when listening to your track in context with the other instruments and vocals. You'll be surprised how often a great sounding guitar track ‘in the mix' sounds quite awful solo'd.
• Thickening: Create one or two extra tracks. Make copies of the guitar tracks or regions. Insert a pitch shifter plug-in on each copy, and adjust the cents slider slightly. Also EQ one track so that it is different from the original - you can get brutal with HP and LP filters.
• SubMix channels: Useful for controlling. processing and maybe automating your guitars. Instead of outputting your tracks to the mix bus, route them to a new bus and bring that bus up on new track(s). Now you can add additional processing (see the compression section below) or add the final touches to get them sounding right. Pan to taste - although I often prefer to not use extreme L-R, but instead narrow the stage slightly - your material will determine the best choice. Experiment with adding a really fast delay to one side, returning to the other, with different EQ.
• Dual Stage (Serial) Compression: Often, two compressors are better than one. You need two compressors (or plug-ins) of different types. The first is set to just control the peaks. Use a fast compressor (an FET compressor is good) with the threshold set so only peaks are being affected. Use a fast attack and a fairly aggressive ratio, depending on your tracks.
Follow this with another compressor (perhaps a Opto or VCA type) where the threshold is set much lower, with a lower ratio and slower attack than the first compressor, which will affect the body of the sound and help add sustain. Depending on your track, reversing this order of compressors can work better. See here for more details on compressor types.
Finally, if you're sending your guitar tracks (perhaps the rhythm guitars) to a guitar sub mix, you can apply more yet more compression on the bus, maybe with a muti-band compressor which can make it play better with other elements of your mix, especially vocals.
This technique often works well on other instruments too, drums and vocals in particular. Set right, two compressors together adding quite heavy compression can sound much more natural than one.
• Parallel Compression.
A technique often used for drums and vocals, this works really well for guitar tracks too.
The idea is to have some/all of your guitar tracks routed to a sub mix. Then send the individual guitar tracks to another bus. This bus gets EQ'd and heavily compressed. Bringing the return of the parallel compression bus up so it's just below the level of the main guitar sub mix; this can add a great thick, fat sound without affecting the main attack and definition of your original guitars left unaltered on the GTR SUB (see below). Here's a simple routing which may help you set this up. In the example, Logic is used, but you can adapt it to your system easily.
There are several options which may apply to your particular tracks - whether you send pre/post fade is a consideration, and depends on whether your guitar parts are mostly static, or if you're likely to be riding these levels in a mix. Remember that if set to post fade sends, changing the send levels will affect the effect, as the compression change depending on the levels seen at the compressor's inputs and the threshold set.
That's it for now. Please add additional tricks and tips in the comments section. If this brief article encourages you to try to create your own sounds, then great. Above all, have fun, and help keep alive the concept of developing great rock guitar sounds and textures.
I deliberately have written in generalities: I have seen posts on forums, and in some articles, blathering about boosting 500Hz by 3.5 dB, cut 2 dB at 200Hz, add 5 dB at 3.35 kHz blah-blah, use a 4:1 compression ratio with a 10 ms attack and 120 ms delay with the threshold set to blah-blah'.”
All nonsense. There are no magic numbers. None of these writers have heard your guitar, in your room, with your set up, playing your style, with your song. All I hope to do in this article is to point to possible techniques and tips that may make you think about how to record and mix your guitar tracks.
My focus has always been on rock guitars, so even though your recordings may be for a different genre of music, you may find a few ideas that can be adapted to your needs.I'm not going to discuss playing techniques here. There are many online resources. Ultimate Guitars is a good place to start. There are tons of resources, columns and links here. Let's assume for the purposes of this article that you are working with (or you are) good musicians who have developed their style and chops, and know what they're doing. No discussion on recording rock guitars would be complete without reference to the classic Slipperman's Recording Distorted Guitars Thread From Hell article, particularly for distorted, hard rock and metal styles. It's funny, highly informative and worth a thorough read, unless you're easily offended.
You can create a great guitar sound in any situation if you're prepared to work at it. You will need a couple of microphones and a preamp/compressor, separate or a combo channel unit, a D.I. box and a reamp box if you want to get into reampmg (see below). Spending money is not the solution. Sure, it's nice to have high-end outboard gear, but experimentation and thoughtful planning are going to give better results.
Here are a few ideas for some equipment for various budgets. I've just included stuff I've actually used - there are many more options available, and I've left out many outboard options, such as API and old dbx compressors, as the chances are if you have those you're beyond the target audience for this post.
LESS EXPENSIVE
MID-HIGH RANGE
GENEROUS BUDGET
MICROPHONES (Close)
Shure SM57, Audix i5 (both good on snare drums) Cascade Fathead II
Shure SM57, Audix i5, ElectroVoice RE20 (good on kick drums and some vocals), Sennheiser MD421 (good on drums too) Beyer M160, Royer 121, Cascade Fathead II
Shure SM57, Audix i5, Sennheiser MD421, Royer R-121, 122 and 122V, Coles 4038 (also great on drum overheads)
MICROPHONES (Room)
Cascade Fathead II, any good multi-pattern condenser mic especially Røde
Cascade Fathead II, any good multi-pattern condenser mic.
Neumann U87, Coles 4038
PREAMPS & COMPRESSORS
Find a used M-Audio Tampa on eBay, Presonus Tube Pre with a Comp 16, Summit 2BA, Drawmer MX 60, Summit TD-100, GT Brick (active DIs and preamps) Focusrite Trackmaster Pro
Great River MP-2NV, Universal Audio SOLO 110/610, Empirical Labs Mike-E, Purple Audio MC-77. Think about a 500 series rack or lunchbox if you're planning on expansion.
Empirical Labs Mike-E, Empirical Labs Distressor, UA 1176, Purple Audio MC-77, EAR 660, UA LA-2, Thermionic Culture Vulture , Thermionic Phoenix SC, DW Fearn
Try out gear first; it pays to make friends with a local dealer who will let you try out equipment for a day or two before purchase - they do exist; support those guys.
When evaluating equipment, it's important to start with a reference. Record a minute or so (you can always loop it later) of a guitar playing various parts, a few chugs, a conventional rhythm part with a few chords which ring out and are allowed to naturally decay, interspersed with a few licks.
Record this cleanly, using a D.I. box if necessary. This is your reference track.
Set up an amp/cabinet which you already know. Set it so that you're getting close to the sound you have in mind, and route the output of your DAW into the amp, via a reamp box (or reversing a D.I. temporarily). Go for a sound that is slightly less distorted or overdriven than you would like. The sound doesn't have to be perfect, and some mismatching is tolerable.
You just need something that you can memorize as a reference. Note the amp settings.
Now insert your new gear in the recording chain, but one device at a time. If you're evaluating recording preamps, don't change microphones or positioning. The goal is to compare apples to apples. Try out the preamp settings. Are they easy to understand and are effective? Are you noticing any changes as the input stage starts to overdrive? How's the noise at higher gain settings? Do you like the character of the sound? Try to listen critically to the three main bands of frequencies - low, medium and high. Do your sustained sounds change?
Try out any EQ and LP or HP filter settings. Record the output of your new chain on another track in your DAW. Also, without changing anything, record the mic directly via your interface's vanilla preamp to another track. Compare the two on playback. What did the new preamp do to your sound? Do you notice benefits in using it? If you're evaluating a channel strip, bypass the compressor and EQ sections and only add them back in when your preamp evaluation is complete.
When listening back, be careful not to fool yourself. Louder and/or brighter will generally sound more appealing. Match your playback levels carefully.
Once you've found a preamp you like, next check out microphones, compressors or anything else you are considering, but stick to the same testing methodology. Let your tests determine what you buy: sometimes a mic will be more effective than any preamp choice, and remember that some microphones work best with some preamps. Depending on your existing setup, you might need a mic more than a preamp, so let your mic choice make your preamp decision. This is particularly important if you're adding a ribbon mic to your set up, as typically ribbon mics have a lower output and need a matched preamp.
A couple more notes on selecting equipment.
• Don't be fooled by manufacturers hype.
Just because manufacturer A, B or C are big and can afford to spend more on advertising doesn't mean that their preamp, compressor or microphone is any better than a smaller manufacturer that largely promotes themselves by word-of-mouth. The internet forums are great to learn what people are saying about different gear, such as Gearslutz , but take it all with a pinch of salt - some of those guys will try to tell you that you need to spend a fortune to get an acceptable sound.
You don't. If you can't actually hear a significant difference between a $100 mic, or a $1,000 mic in your room, then don't waste your money.
Ideally, I like discrete components. As your studio expands, it's nice to have the ability to pair preamp A with compressor B and EQ C, which gives you more mix and match variations.
Think about your goals. If you realistically expect that your studio will expand over the next couple of years, then consider discrete components. If you just don't know at the moment, and you're starting out, you can save some money with a channel strip, where one unit contains a preamp, a compressor and maybe an EQ section all in one box.
You save money because it's more economical to combine these functions on to one chassis with one power supply.
If you have a reasonably generous budget, don't overlook 500 series modules (often referred to as the API Lunchbox format ) - they are a perfect compromise between budget gear and the high-end individual components, and save you money as the individual modules are usually substantially less expensive than their stand-alone equivalent, and are a great choice if your plans also include recording live location shows.
Pasta Sauce
You can buy a jar of pasta sauce, slop it over some pasta, throw on some packaged Parmesan cheese dust and you're done.
Where's the joy, the love, the refinement, the subtlety?
Spending hours chopping garlic, onions, peppers, tomatoes, adding just the right amount of herbs and spices, adding meat, sausage or shellfish, pouring in some wine and having a vat of the stuff bubbling away for hours is so much more satisfying.
The end result will be uniquely yours, and it's a basis for further experimentation.
So it is for guitar sounds. What fits your particular song and the ways you can create it is half the fun. Learning what makes up a great sound, how an amp and cabinet interact with a room and a microphone is immensely satisfying and the sounds are yours.
Although the focus of modern recording is to record and process everything within your digital audio workstation (DAW) the old school method of recording a box in a room, with the air and special characteristics of that particular room, is going to get more satisfactory, and unique, tones than using modeling plug-ins or a Pod preset.
Having said that, there are some good guitar plug-ins, and they can be helpful (if all else fails) in getting a final tweak to your tracks, but let's start with the basics.
Mic and Speaker Placement
• Rules: Let's start with the cliché: There are no rules. Actually, I think there is one: getting a good guitar sound is 90% achieved in the room, before it ever reaches tape or a computer. Mixing and adding processing should be to enhance already good sounds, not to fix sounds that are crap.
• Before starting, try to have a clear idea what sound you're looking for, and what the song needs.
Dark or bright? Clear or indistinct? Sustain? Overdrive? Resonant? Contained or wide-open?
Hunting around hoping to hit on something which sounds good can waste a lot of time and take you in the wrong direction. Generally, if you place cabs in corners, your bass response will increase.
If you're recording in a carpeted room, get an 8′ x 4′ sheet of plywood, or a roll of vinyl flooring, and put the cab on one end so as to increase floor reflections. If you want even more/different type of bass response, put a mic in the corner of the room facing out, and point the cab into the corner. Moving the cab/mic into/out of the corner will allow you to vary the bass response.
• Change the acoustics.
Recording in a bright room, with hardwood floors and few soft furnishings, is a good thing. You can always tailor a room's characteristics and some reflections by hanging blankets, quilts and rugs. Installing some permanent acoustic treatment is a very worthwhile investment, and needn't be expensive if you have some basic D.I.Y skills.
• With a multi-speaker cabinet, first pick the best speaker; especially with an older box, they're going to be different. Listen to them. As with setting the best position for any microphone, you need to listen from where the microphone will be. As we're placing the close mic an inch or two from the speaker grill, your ears will be there too; it will be loud. Use some ear protection; either plugs or well fitting semi-closed back headphones. Really.
Yes, it will change the sound you hear, but you'll still be able to hear when the cone starts flapping or the limit travel is reached on each speaker, and cabinet resonances becomes apparent, but your hearing need to be preserved.
• Learn how speakers behave. When driven hard, there comes a point where the cone reaches the end of its travel - the excursion characteristics. When the speaker flattens out, the sound changes, as does the distortion. Do you want this effect? If so, find the volume spot at which it's working for you; if not, back off until your get a cleaner tone. With open-back cabinets, another mic at the back can work well, and often yields a less bright tone, but you might have to play around with a phase invert switch for one of the mics.
I have found a great sound by putting a cabinet in a fireplace hearth, with a front mic, and a rear mic pointing away from the cab and up the chimney.Another option is to raise the cabinet from the floor. A chair, a table, whatever.
Depending on your floor construction, this can affect the low end of the cabinet's response.
• There's not much over 5 kHz produced by a guitar cabinet speaker, which is one reason that stomp boxes and in-line processors sound so much worse if not played through a guitar amp/speaker, which naturally roll off the higher-end fizz.
• Remember that positioning your mic directly in the center of the speaker cone usually yields a brighter tone than positioning the mic off-axis. A common technique is to point the mic at dead center, but then move the mic 2-3 inches from the grill, and slant it slightly so that it's positioned 90 degrees to the speaker cone. This is a good starting position from which to experiment.
• Slight changes in positioning can affect the tone quite dramatically, as will the distance between the mic and the grill. Experiment!
• A trick, which works about 20% of the time and is dependent on an individual speaker, is to make an X” out of duct tape. Place the X at exactly the center of your selected speaker cone position, sticking your X to the grill. Now position the mic dead center behind the center of the X, 2″ back. This can have the effect of reducing the mid/high end, but the highest frequencies are unaffected, unlike moving the mic off-axis. This can create a different color to the tone, without affecting low/mids. Try it and see, if that's a sound you like.
I've expanded on this, and occasionally have taped an inverted tea cup saucer over the center of the speaker grill, with some interesting results.
• If you have multiple mics, try one on one speaker, and a mic with a different character on another, or even on the same speaker. Combining dynamic and ribbon microphones often work very well. Getting two different tones (one really bright, and one darker) and mixing them later can reduce the amount of EQ you may otherwise apply later, as well as giving you more opportunities to balance the tone, balancing the attack of the brighter tone with the body of the darker track.
• Ribbon mics are ideal for close mic'ing of guitar cabinets. They generally have a much smoother, as less pronounced, mid-range and HF characteristic, often having a roll-off at higher frequencies - perfect to control the upper register ‘fizz.' Ribbons do require more careful handling.
• Room Mics. If available, start with two mics; one very close (1-3″) to the speaker cabinet (often, but not always, a ribbon or dynamic), and another, the room mic, much further away.
Depending on the size and characteristics of your room, this can be 5 - 15 feet) A large diaphragm condenser (LDC) or a ribbon (depending on room size and characteristics) works well, with the LDC set to an ‘omni' pattern.
Rooms mics positioned low often increase bass response. Change the height of your room mic position and listen to the changes in sound, in your particular room.
Positioning 'round the corner' can work in an L-shaped room, as can a mic in a hallway outside the recording room.
• Most ribbon microphones have a figure of 8 polar pattern, also called bi-directional.
You can use this as an interesting variation in some rooms by turning the mic 90 degrees to the sound source so that the side rejection of a ribbon's pattern is rejecting the direct sound, and instead is capturing reflections. This can be an interesting sound in hallways and brighter rooms. Many multi-pattern condensers can be used in the same way.
Some ribbons have slightly different characteristics depending on which side you're aiming at the source. The Royer 121, for example, is a bit brighter on its rear side.
• Room Loading. There comes a point, especially in smaller rooms, where the level is high enough to blur directional information and your ears limit. Microphones hear the room a little differently, particularly depending on the pattern selected on the mic. Experiment with the settings available on your room mic; start with omni, then try figure 8. Using a figure
8 pattern and placing the mic appropriately can reduce side reflections in a hallway, for example, and can be a better choice than an omni pattern.
• Experiment. I have placed cabs in bathrooms, corridors, porches, parking lots, the end of custom-made air-conditioning ducts, the back of a panel truck, inside closets, inside fireplaces and chimneys and hung from ropes in stairwells and an elevator shaft.
Try anything, however odd it might seem, but keep focused on the sound in your head which you're looking for.
• Strumming and Strings, Adding another dimension: Try pointing a small diaphragm condenser mic at a solid body guitar close enough to capture the sound of the pick and the strings; near the strings and the player's hand, between the hand position and the neck).
Mix this in with the amped sound, and it can adds great percussive element to the mix. If you're recording a semi-hollowbody, try a dynamic mic (back to your i5 or SM57) plugged in to another amp, and mic the amp, or try a large diaphragm condenser mic and record that mic's output directly as if it were an acoustic.
• Before reaching for EQ, move the mic, or select a different mic if available. I prefer to not EQ in recording at all (except for special cases) because the goal is to get the sound right in the recording room. But I do suggest using a HP filter getting rid of the mostly unusable extreme low end - usually below 80 Hz - low E on a guitar is around 82 Hz and perhaps 120 - 150 Hz for lead parts, depending on what's being played.
• Stomp Boxes and effects: Knock yourself out, if it's part of your desired sound.
But I'd suggest that to do not use any types of reverb, echo or delays at the recording stage. They can't be removed in the mix, and the chances are you have much better versions of those effects in your mix chain. Add these types of effects later.
• Distortion: You can't take pepper out of the sauce. So be slightly conservative when deciding how much distortion you really want. You can add more later, but a wall of indistinct fuzz is going to need re-recording to get it right.
Players without a lot of recording experience set up their rig as if it were a live show - and that often means that the overdrive and cabinet distortion are set at levels too high for recording. You probably don't want to conduct these experiments during the set up for a session, but rather in your own time. Just take some cleanly recorded tracks, even those recorded with D.I. and route these out to your recording room or any other places in your surroundings (see ‘reamping' later in this article) and try out different ideas and placements.
Reamping
A D.I. (Direct Injection) box is a device that connects the high impedance, unbalanced output of the instrument signal to a low impedance, mic level balanced input, usually via an XLR connector.
A Reamp box is used for taking the dry guitar recording to re-record” the performance though guitar amplifier and/or external effects box(es). The combo amp or cabinet is placed in the live room or any other suitable location to produce the desired guitar tone, including distortion and room characteristics.
A reamping box, is almost, but not quite, a D.I. box in reverse, although the Radial JDI and the excellent LittleLabs RedEye can be used for both. Other reamp boxes are the Radial X-Amp , or a Reamp V.2 , among others.
Rather than running a long cable out of your interface into the recording room and into your reamp box, try using amp head into your control room and run a long speaker cable to your cabinet. Be cautious about grounding issues, and don't run the amp off a different circuit than your interface. This way you can use a short guitar cable (usually a good idea). You can then make amp adjustments when monitoring through your control room monitors and often this way cuts down on noise.
This obviously isn't possible with a combo amp; if you're planning on a lot of recording with your combo, know that long instrument level cable runs can add to noise and loss of level and tone. Better to buy a LittleLabs the way, if you're a synth. player who stumbled onto this page by accident, trying reamping those synths to get some dirt and room air happening!
Mixing
Like witnessing the process of making sausage, mixing is best performed when the artists aren't in the room; guitarists in particular are likely to cringe seeing the processing which their sound is going through.
If you are the player, and working on your own tracks, be brave and think only of the song and what it needs.
Let's start with some EQ definitions so we're talking the same language:
• Cutoff Frequency is the frequency for the turnover point; the frequency setting where a change takes effect.
• High Pass Filter (HPF): A filter section that reduces low frequencies
• Low Pass Filter (LPF): A filter section that reduces high frequencies.
• Band Pass Filter: A filter section that reduces both high and low frequencies.
• Parametric EQ: EQ section with controls for frequency, gain and Q.
• Graphic EQ: An Equalizer with a number of slider controls set on octave or third octave frequency centers.
• Bell EQ: An EQ with a peak in its response.
• Slope: The rate at an EQ section reduces the level above or below the cutoff frequency. Usually 6, 12, 18 or 24 dB/octave
• ‘Q': How wide or narrow the range of frequencies that are affected by an EQ setting. A high Q curve is narrow and a low Q curve is wider.
If a specific band is centered at 1 kHz. a high Q setting will only boost or cut frequencies right around 1 kHz and not affect the signal too far on either side of the selected frequency.
High Q settings are used more for surgical adjustments (sometimes called notching) such as removing a ring from a drum or mud from a guitar sound. EQ settings set with a high Q are less obvious, as fewer frequencies are affected, allowing more cut to be used.
A low Q setting affects a wider range of frequencies either side of the selected center frequency. Centering also 1 kHz with a low Q setting, the same curve looks like this:
Lower Q settings are generally used to change the character of a sound, rather than correcting a particular problem.
• EQ: Some will argue, but I believe that any boost of over 5 dB is an indication that you've done something wrong at the recording stage (unless you're deliberately creating an effect).
A different mic, different guitar or amp settings or a different mic position would be a better solution.
Your ears are more capable of hearing a boost than a cut at the same frequency.
Generally, a 5 dB boost is in a mid-frequency is about as obvious as a 9 dB cut, depending on the ‘Q'
You can use this to your advantage. To find a frequency where there's an annoying element to the tone of the instrument, first boost the frequency in the approximate area where you think the problem is. By sweeping through the frequencies with an increasingly higher Q, you'll be able to isolate the tone - it will be much more pronounced. Now cut the gain at that point so you're notching out that sound.
Balance the Q and the level adjustment so that you're reducing the sound without affecting the sound in the surrounding frequencies. Remember, do this final adjustment listening to the whole mix; you'll often find that less notching is needed than you would think if you listened to the track solo'd.
• EQ: First, get rid of the low junk that shouldn't be there.
Hopefully, you recorded using an HPF set at 80Hz, but you'll probably need to scoop out more than that. For lead parts, you'll probably set the HPF to a higher frequency - maybe 150 Hz. The trick is to make room for the bass, while not thinning the sound too much. A common problem is that guitars and bass clash, and the sound is indistinct and muddy, and the bass becomes swamped by the low end of your guitars.
Another reason to make EQ adjustments when hearing the guitars and bass in context - solo'd won't work here, and you won't be impressed with the guitars in isolation.
Secondly, there can be muddiness anywhere from 100 to 500 Hz. Find out where it is by setting a fairly narrow EQ dip (higher Q) and play with the inverted bell until you find the spot where you've got rid of the less useful mud and achieved some definition.
Unfortunately, the effective mid-range of guitars (around 1 - 4 kHz) occupies the same space as vocals. So getting them to coexist happily is one of the challenges you will face when mixing. As the vocals need to be prominent in most cases, you'll have to learn how to use EQ and compression, delays and reverb together with riding faders or using automation in your mixing techniques to make these two components work together.
• Bypass: It's there for a reason. Use it often, and once again, make adjustments in context, not solo'd. It's all too easy to tweak your way into a worse sound - be critical, and if your changes aren't adding to the sound rethink your approach.
• Doubling: Do you really have to? Of course, it is often useful, but I prefer to always ask does the song really need it?” If the part is played, and works off of, or against, the original track, that's one thing - that's a performance choice.
But doubling a part without adding variations by playing with different parts or chord voicings, or just doubling to try to get it fatter can create more problems than it solves. Don't duplicate mud, and indistinct variations. At the very least, change the sound of one part dramatically, use a different guitar (one with single coil pickups and the second with humbuckers, maybe) different amp, effect or mic set up, or sculpt the tone. (See ‘thickening' later, for doubling in the mix).
• Room Mic: Your room mic can greatly increasing the ‘fatness' of your guitar track. You can tweak the apparent size of the room (from studio iso booth to arena) with some judicious delay in front of the room track. Ten miliseconds of delay creates the impression of roughly 10 feet of added distance. It's fake, because it messes with the reflections ratio of what would be natural in a bigger room, but it can work.
In the mix, the room mic can really help create some space, and set right in the mix, can add a different element of ‘fatness.' Experiment with a touch of a really short room reverb preceded by EQ rolling off low end and higher frequencies, unless you recorded in a large bright room, in which case the natural room reverb may be all you need, particularly when well processed. Pumping compression can be a great effect too - medium attack and short release. Mixed just behind your main guitar bus can add a great dimension.
Speaking of the room mic, one trick is to use the vocal track to ‘duck' the room track - just set up a good compressor with a side chain driven from the vocal track(s) and adjust your compressor to clamp down on the room track during the vocals. This is great to get some movement and dynamics into your track, and help create a space for your vocals which are roughly in the same part of the spectrum as the guitars.
Just don't set the attack and release too fast or it'll sound fake.
• Stop listening to solo'd tracks. To isolate a noise, a bum note, or adjust broad effect parameters (to get the routing set and make sure the settings are approximately right), go ahead, but don't waste your time fine-tuning guitar sounds in solo - they almost certainly won't work when in the mix. You need to make these changes when listening to your track in context with the other instruments and vocals. You'll be surprised how often a great sounding guitar track ‘in the mix' sounds quite awful solo'd.
• Thickening: Create one or two extra tracks. Make copies of the guitar tracks or regions. Insert a pitch shifter plug-in on each copy, and adjust the cents slider slightly. Also EQ one track so that it is different from the original - you can get brutal with HP and LP filters.
• SubMix channels: Useful for controlling. processing and maybe automating your guitars. Instead of outputting your tracks to the mix bus, route them to a new bus and bring that bus up on new track(s). Now you can add additional processing (see the compression section below) or add the final touches to get them sounding right. Pan to taste - although I often prefer to not use extreme L-R, but instead narrow the stage slightly - your material will determine the best choice. Experiment with adding a really fast delay to one side, returning to the other, with different EQ.
• Dual Stage (Serial) Compression: Often, two compressors are better than one. You need two compressors (or plug-ins) of different types. The first is set to just control the peaks. Use a fast compressor (an FET compressor is good) with the threshold set so only peaks are being affected. Use a fast attack and a fairly aggressive ratio, depending on your tracks.
Follow this with another compressor (perhaps a Opto or VCA type) where the threshold is set much lower, with a lower ratio and slower attack than the first compressor, which will affect the body of the sound and help add sustain. Depending on your track, reversing this order of compressors can work better. See here for more details on compressor types.
Finally, if you're sending your guitar tracks (perhaps the rhythm guitars) to a guitar sub mix, you can apply more yet more compression on the bus, maybe with a muti-band compressor which can make it play better with other elements of your mix, especially vocals.
This technique often works well on other instruments too, drums and vocals in particular. Set right, two compressors together adding quite heavy compression can sound much more natural than one.
• Parallel Compression.
A technique often used for drums and vocals, this works really well for guitar tracks too.
The idea is to have some/all of your guitar tracks routed to a sub mix. Then send the individual guitar tracks to another bus. This bus gets EQ'd and heavily compressed. Bringing the return of the parallel compression bus up so it's just below the level of the main guitar sub mix; this can add a great thick, fat sound without affecting the main attack and definition of your original guitars left unaltered on the GTR SUB (see below). Here's a simple routing which may help you set this up. In the example, Logic is used, but you can adapt it to your system easily.
There are several options which may apply to your particular tracks - whether you send pre/post fade is a consideration, and depends on whether your guitar parts are mostly static, or if you're likely to be riding these levels in a mix. Remember that if set to post fade sends, changing the send levels will affect the effect, as the compression change depending on the levels seen at the compressor's inputs and the threshold set.
That's it for now. Please add additional tricks and tips in the comments section. If this brief article encourages you to try to create your own sounds, then great. Above all, have fun, and help keep alive the concept of developing great rock guitar sounds and textures.
Monday, 1 August 2016
Vintage Reverbs And Recording Techniques
Got a 8 track reel to reel recorder recently, mainly because I'm interested in recording the band using older, analog techniques rather than software.
Apart from the warmth and depth I hear in older analog recordings, I really like the reverb effect used in older recordings especially psychedelic era recordings.
I'm really just on the hunt to learn a bit about these older techniques from some of you folks here on bandamp because I know you guys got the knowledge about this sort of stuff. Did studios have the technology of digital reverbs back in the 70's? Obviously not software ones but outboard units? Is this how they added reverb to recordings?
I know from some friends that in the 60's, popular bands recorded in very large rooms that had an excellent sound and with the best microphones available to get the exact reverberations and character of the room onto tape. Clearly some recordings in 60's and 70's (especially vocals) had extra reverb added to them? was this simply using tape techniques such as tape delay and cabinet speaker effects?
I read about cabinet speaker reverb effect earlier today and it really got me interested in these vintage techniques.
Apart from the warmth and depth I hear in older analog recordings, I really like the reverb effect used in older recordings especially psychedelic era recordings.
I'm really just on the hunt to learn a bit about these older techniques from some of you folks here on bandamp because I know you guys got the knowledge about this sort of stuff. Did studios have the technology of digital reverbs back in the 70's? Obviously not software ones but outboard units? Is this how they added reverb to recordings?
I know from some friends that in the 60's, popular bands recorded in very large rooms that had an excellent sound and with the best microphones available to get the exact reverberations and character of the room onto tape. Clearly some recordings in 60's and 70's (especially vocals) had extra reverb added to them? was this simply using tape techniques such as tape delay and cabinet speaker effects?
I read about cabinet speaker reverb effect earlier today and it really got me interested in these vintage techniques.
Recording Bass Guitar for a Great Home Studio Sound
Recording bass guitar is very similar to capturing the sound of the electric guitar. Along with the drums, the bass forms the backbone of most songs and productions, so getting your bass sound right is a vital part of producing good music.
Combined with the kick drum, when it's used the bass guitar creates most of a song's low-frequency content. The bass is a powerful instrument, and the general aim when recording it is to capture the full weight and body of the instrument's low frequencies, along with the mid-frequencies that give the notes their attack and definition.
There are a few different bass guitar recording techniques to think about:
Directly
A combination of the two
How to Record Bass Directly
Capturing the direct signal of the instrument is important when recording bass guitar. Having to use a DI-box depends on whether the instrument you're using has passive or active pickups.
Active: the bass can be connected directly into your audio interface or mixing console
Passive: the bass must first be connected to a DI box (helping to match impedance levels)
Recording direct helps to capture the low end and the note definition of the bass guitar. But it doesn't really catch the sound's body - this requires an amp.
Bass Amplifiers
Bass amps and cabinets will have better low-end response compared to normal guitar amps, to cope with the low notes of the bass guitar and to give the instrument it's punch. Buying separate amps and cabinets can be expensive though, and isn't usually near the top of essential items for a home studio.
A lower-budget option is the combo amp, which combines the amplifier and the cabinet speakers inside one unit. These days you can find small practice combo amps for bass guitars starting around the $70 mark.
But these amps won't be very powerful and so are best recorded at a lower volume. If you're looking for an amp that you can crank up and record at high volume, amps of at least 50 Watts are recommended.
The other option for recording bass guitar is to use a guitar amp. But caution has to be taken when doing this - if the amp is driven at high volumes, the low frequencies can damage the speaker. The best way forward is to record the DI signal for the low-end, and the amp (at a low volume) for the body of the sound.
Microphones for Recording Bass Guitar at Home
Dynamic mics are definitely the best option, as they can handle the loud volumes of a guitar or bass amp. A dynamic mic I always recommend to have in the home studio is the Shure SM58 , and you can get pretty good results using it on a bass amp.
There are mics out there that are specially designed for recording low-frequencies, with kick drums and bass amplifiers being the main two sources.
The AKG D112 is probably the most popular of these mics - it's a large-diaphragm cardioid mic that can handle very high sound pressure levels, and it's frequency response is geared towards capturing these low frequency sounds.
Microphone Placement
When recording bass guitar with an amp, the best place for the microphone is between 1-3 feet away from the amp's grill. This will give you a solid tone with plenty of body, as well as nice definition of the notes played. Moving the mic further away will give you more body and less definition.
You can get good recordings with both cardioid and omnidirectional polar patterns. Directing the mic towards the centre of the cone will emphasize the higher frequencies and give you a more aggressive sound. Moving the mic towards the speaker's edge gives a softer sound.
The Bass Guitar
The way the bass is set up and played can have a big impact on the sound produced. The range of tone that can be generated can vary between the sharp, aggressive style of rock and metal all the way to the softer, gentler tone of reggae and dub.
If you're after a bright, aggressive tone with more note definition, try these tips:
Use newer strings
Play the bass with a pick
Play the strings nearer the bridge
But if you're after a rounder, more mellow tone try these tips:
Use older strings
Play the bass with your fingers
Play the strings nearer the neck
You'll be able to produce a whole spectrum of different bass tones by mixing and matching the setup and the style of playing. Choosing how you want your bass recording to sound is a creative decision - it depends on the direction that you want to take your production in.
Final Thoughts
Recording bass guitar can be easy when you follow a few simple guidelines. Whether recording directly, through an amp, or a combination of the two, capturing a great bass sound can give you a truly solid foundation for you to build your music and your productions on.
Combined with the kick drum, when it's used the bass guitar creates most of a song's low-frequency content. The bass is a powerful instrument, and the general aim when recording it is to capture the full weight and body of the instrument's low frequencies, along with the mid-frequencies that give the notes their attack and definition.
There are a few different bass guitar recording techniques to think about:
Directly
A combination of the two
How to Record Bass Directly
Capturing the direct signal of the instrument is important when recording bass guitar. Having to use a DI-box depends on whether the instrument you're using has passive or active pickups.
Active: the bass can be connected directly into your audio interface or mixing console
Passive: the bass must first be connected to a DI box (helping to match impedance levels)
Recording direct helps to capture the low end and the note definition of the bass guitar. But it doesn't really catch the sound's body - this requires an amp.
Bass Amplifiers
Bass amps and cabinets will have better low-end response compared to normal guitar amps, to cope with the low notes of the bass guitar and to give the instrument it's punch. Buying separate amps and cabinets can be expensive though, and isn't usually near the top of essential items for a home studio.
A lower-budget option is the combo amp, which combines the amplifier and the cabinet speakers inside one unit. These days you can find small practice combo amps for bass guitars starting around the $70 mark.
But these amps won't be very powerful and so are best recorded at a lower volume. If you're looking for an amp that you can crank up and record at high volume, amps of at least 50 Watts are recommended.
The other option for recording bass guitar is to use a guitar amp. But caution has to be taken when doing this - if the amp is driven at high volumes, the low frequencies can damage the speaker. The best way forward is to record the DI signal for the low-end, and the amp (at a low volume) for the body of the sound.
Microphones for Recording Bass Guitar at Home
Dynamic mics are definitely the best option, as they can handle the loud volumes of a guitar or bass amp. A dynamic mic I always recommend to have in the home studio is the Shure SM58 , and you can get pretty good results using it on a bass amp.
There are mics out there that are specially designed for recording low-frequencies, with kick drums and bass amplifiers being the main two sources.
The AKG D112 is probably the most popular of these mics - it's a large-diaphragm cardioid mic that can handle very high sound pressure levels, and it's frequency response is geared towards capturing these low frequency sounds.
Microphone Placement
When recording bass guitar with an amp, the best place for the microphone is between 1-3 feet away from the amp's grill. This will give you a solid tone with plenty of body, as well as nice definition of the notes played. Moving the mic further away will give you more body and less definition.
You can get good recordings with both cardioid and omnidirectional polar patterns. Directing the mic towards the centre of the cone will emphasize the higher frequencies and give you a more aggressive sound. Moving the mic towards the speaker's edge gives a softer sound.
The Bass Guitar
The way the bass is set up and played can have a big impact on the sound produced. The range of tone that can be generated can vary between the sharp, aggressive style of rock and metal all the way to the softer, gentler tone of reggae and dub.
If you're after a bright, aggressive tone with more note definition, try these tips:
Use newer strings
Play the bass with a pick
Play the strings nearer the bridge
But if you're after a rounder, more mellow tone try these tips:
Use older strings
Play the bass with your fingers
Play the strings nearer the neck
You'll be able to produce a whole spectrum of different bass tones by mixing and matching the setup and the style of playing. Choosing how you want your bass recording to sound is a creative decision - it depends on the direction that you want to take your production in.
Final Thoughts
Recording bass guitar can be easy when you follow a few simple guidelines. Whether recording directly, through an amp, or a combination of the two, capturing a great bass sound can give you a truly solid foundation for you to build your music and your productions on.
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