That studio recording is WAY over-compressed. You can even tell just by looking at the waveform - no dynamic range. When you listen to it it sounds flat and lifeless. Find an engineer who doesn't believe in "loudness wars" and get him to work on your stuff.
Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
Recording
- Thread starter lwknives
- Start date
Yes, IMHO this is the ONLY way to do it, especially with bass. Then you can also control how much of the "wet" mix gets put in with the "dry" track. Much more subtle and gives a wide range of possibilities.
Also just some general recording tips: always make sure everything is in phase, and GAIN STRUCTURE IS SUPER FREAKING IMPORTANT! Start at unity - voltage comes in, same voltage goes out. Don't just crank it up. If you don't know what gain does, and you use it to control volume, you need to learn about gain! That's the biggest mistake that I see amateur "engineers" and sound guys doing - cranking the gain up on mics without even getting levels or anything. Feedback city for live sound.
There's no reason not to use pedals if that is the sound you guys like. Holding off every option for mix time is not always a good idea and there is a lot to be said for making creative decisions on the fly.
I have quite a bit of recording gear and know how to use it but I've worked with a singer that just liked to tell people 'yeah we're going in the studio next week to record'. Even though we could spend a lot more time in our own rehearsal space and get as good or probably better results, I think some people believe that some 'magic' happens in a studio that you can't make happen otherwise.
As was suggested earlier, try and get the individual tracks and work on them yourself in whatever DAW you use.
As was suggested earlier, try and get the individual tracks and work on them yourself in whatever DAW you use.
I'm not going to fight over it, this band is fun to play with having lame recordings wont make it less so.
We are a hobby band pretty much, me and the drummer are the only ones willing to play more than twice a month. A producer isnt really a feasible option. After we get the studio recording I'll AB the two and we can have the band vote or the singer decide what to use or whatever. I'll pretend like I'm cool with whatever goes down.
Could you direct me to some good reading material on this topic, it is new to me.
Unity gain (intro to gain structure, sort of):
Link Removed
Microphone phase:
Invalid Link Removed
Your best bet is to talk to an experienced engineer.
I understand phase pretty well, I always mic guitars with 2 mics so I had to learn phasing pretty quick.
Ill look into the gain thing some more, that article was not very technical.
go to gearslutz.com and sign up and learn from the experts.
great forum for recording. or homerecording.com/bbs (and more hobbyists type of forum).
recording is a huge thing that takes years of full time practice to get good at. I don't think the "engineer" you worked with is very good, but of course you have a lifetime of learning ahead of you in tracking, miking amps/vocals, tracking bass, and notably compression and notch filters for letting vocals come through in a mix, also arranging of songs so that same-range instruments don't get in the way of each other etc.
good luck! it's fun! but you do need more than 2 inputs to track things with your drummer... 4 channel interfaces are cheap these days, or rent an 8 channel interface maybe.
great forum for recording. or homerecording.com/bbs (and more hobbyists type of forum).
recording is a huge thing that takes years of full time practice to get good at. I don't think the "engineer" you worked with is very good, but of course you have a lifetime of learning ahead of you in tracking, miking amps/vocals, tracking bass, and notably compression and notch filters for letting vocals come through in a mix, also arranging of songs so that same-range instruments don't get in the way of each other etc.
good luck! it's fun! but you do need more than 2 inputs to track things with your drummer... 4 channel interfaces are cheap these days, or rent an 8 channel interface maybe.
It's pretty hard to get mics out of phase. They are factory wired to their XLR and unless you have a broken cable they should arrive in the mixer just fine.
That "unity gain" link looks like "set your gain levels and don't clip". I don't get it. Care to elaborate?
That "unity gain" link looks like "set your gain levels and don't clip". I don't get it. Care to elaborate?
That's not usually what concerns engineers when they are talking about out of phase. When you have more than one mic recording something the audio will arrive at each mic from the source at slightly different times. This is phase and is what makes things sound 'stereo' when you stereo mic an acoustic guitar for example. In extreme (and undesirable) situations, often on drum kits, you can have a situation where the bleed from all the mics causes phase cancellations that you don't want, like notching the kick or snare drum. This can also happen if you point mics in such a way that the sound enters one mic at the front and another at the back almost simultaneously, causing wonky phase. For example, when I mic drums I sometimes mic the inside of the toms. With that tom mic pointing up and the overhead mic pointing down, when the drummer hits a tom it can sound bad. In that case I send the tom mic in phase reversed. BTW, these things are easy to hear if you listen in mono. A totally out of phase track will disappear. A somewhat out of phase track will lose low end.
when micing the top and bottom of the snare, I have to invert the phase.
Sometimes the tracks have to be slid a little for differences in room mic placement.
Gain structure is (simply put) pretty much starting at the beginning of the audio chain, working with trim controls and settings to get a good signal without clipping, then moving onto the next 'stage' & doing the same thing.
Sometimes the tracks have to be slid a little for differences in room mic placement.
Gain structure is (simply put) pretty much starting at the beginning of the audio chain, working with trim controls and settings to get a good signal without clipping, then moving onto the next 'stage' & doing the same thing.
A lot of good music was recorded on 2 tracks, you just cant go back and adjust individual tracks. I used 5 mics on the kit and ran them through my mixer. and then from the mixer to the interface.
I wish my band would put the band money into better gear instead of going to this studio.
Sure it was.
But you only recorded the drums on the first go due to lack of inputs, right? If you had more inputs the bass and guitars might have gotten recorded too instead of needing to be preformed again and recorded individually.
And snare and kick need their own tracks so at least 3, better yet 4, tracks just for drums will help a lot.
Also they were real recording engineers who did great things with 2 tracks back in the day. Experience and knowledge makes all the difference.
Not that you can't do it well... It's just likely to be an accident if you do. Compression and dramatic eq on the kick is vital. Likely on the snare too. Stereo overheads. Room mic. Toms close miked. So much work and gear needed for a competitive sound for radio.
In a nutshell, yes: set gain levels properly and don't clip. You'd be surprised at how many people don't do this - they use the "gain" knob almost the same way you would use a master volume knob.
Sure, but this is really dicey.
Out of phase caused by distance traveled through air is depending on the frequency of the signal. So yes for a bassdrum or a tomtom you might be able to improve the situation but for 99% of the instruments it is a doing more damage than good.
Reversing the phase of one mic (but not the others that pick up an instrument with a wider frequency range) will cause more new cancellations over the spectrum than it fixes old cancellations. But you have a whole cascade of new phase issues with the third (next one over) mic.
What you say is entirely correct but I am not comfortable throwing it out in a (effectively) beginner's recording thread.
The bassdrum should have it's it's own mic totally wiping out the other mics for that drum. If the tomtoms don't have one each (fewer mics pick up many elements of the drumkit) I don't think you can improve the situation by reversing the phase on any of those mics.
Anyway...
The OP likes his live recording more.
http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f67/recording-1001715/#post14635271
Listening to it it seems obvious to me that random room simulation (different for each instrument, and in the case of the guitar plain bad), a lack of instrument separation and the completely messy stereo placement are the reasons for the studio recording being disliked.
The drums are actually screwed up on the better liked "rough mix", the cybals and hihat sound like a low bitrate mp3. Still, doesn't matter.
I wish that I had known about path length and phase cancellation when I was a beginner! I would have either taken the time to learn about audio before recording, or I would have simply hired a professional to do it. It wasn't until I learned about phase that I realized that audio recording is more nuanced than I ever could have imagined.
Anyways, the original tip I posted was "always make sure that everything is in phase" - because on the first "amateur" recording that I made, I had phase cancellation issues with my room mics and snare mic, and didn't even know it. I didn't realize what was going on until the first time I hired a professional to record our drum sounds, and I realized what he was doing when he was getting the snare mics and the room mics in phase. It's not so much to do with "reversing the phase" of a mic, as it is to do with lining up hills and valleys. Not necessarily the SAME hills and valleys - having time-shifted signals adds room depth to a sound. It's just about making sure the peaks and the dips are in the same place.
On the flip side, there is such a thing as too much. One of my friends is SO paranoid about phase issues, he never even records a whole drum kit at the same time. Seriously - he records a track for the bass drum, then a track for the snare drum, a track for each cymbal...yeah he doesn't get a lot of work.
They were recorded at 24 bit, I uploaded the file to soundcloud.com as an mp3, not sure what youre hearing. Can you explain on that further.
Well, we went to the studio Friday. My singer and drummer were supper excited and saying how awesome it was to be going back to the studio so I just kept my mouth shut and pretended like I was happy about it.
Our performance was WAY better than when we recorded it at our rehearsal space! I think the singer is just really excited to be in a studio because of the atmosphere and feel of it.
The engineer had just updated his sound cards from 16 to 24 bit so hopefully that will help with the sound.
Our performance was WAY better than when we recorded it at our rehearsal space! I think the singer is just really excited to be in a studio because of the atmosphere and feel of it.
The engineer had just updated his sound cards from 16 to 24 bit so hopefully that will help with the sound.
As a guy who worked at a radio station, the studio recording is better. I know, there might be more "life" in the recordings you did, but they're gonna be compressed away through the station's mixers anyway. the studio came back with a tight, compressed sound which will sound great over the airwaves.
