Studio Recording

[Jimmy Bones]

Yeah your tone fits your style nicely, it sucks that you band didn't give a ****...kindda weird actually, everybody should've cared about the tone of everybody else.

Concerning your singer, like you said it's not about the engenneer, it's about the performance.

I myself am a sound technician, I've been doing it for 5 years or so and if there's something I've learned it's that the whole "we'll fix it later in the mix" is the worst thing you can do in the studio, you should always work a lot more on capturing an excellent performance than fixing stuff and mixing.

Did you mic the bass amp or was it just a DI?

It was a DI. Plugged into some little purple boxy gizmo, a preamp, I guess, which plugged into a Hartke amp, which was sitting on a small cab that made no noise, and the cord from the amp disappeared under the door, so yea, I *think* it was a DI. The guitars, however, were miced, and one was in a seperate room, so I may have not been DI. I really don't know, they had everything more or less ready to roll before we even got there, I didn't watch them set up.

 

[heath_r_91]

Every time I have been in the studio it has take one day per song at least. That is all of the instruments. Each day being 10 hours PLUS mixing and mastering time.

If you want it done right you will need a LOT more than $500 unless you have some serious connections.

 

[jaywa]

<3

Nice to hear that from another bassist.

When we were doing sound checks and such in the studio, they had the drums checking for mic placement for 20-30 minutes, the guitards played for about 10 minutes each. I got all of about 15 seconds to fiddle.

Unfortunately this is pretty much standard operating procedure, especially when you're recording on a budget. Same deal in live situations. That's why coming in with a SansAmp DI or some other device that's pretty much already "dialed in" to your sound is a great help. You can still pretty much go "plug and play" if you have to but at least you've got some cover.

Looks like you've already done the session but one thing I was going to recommend as far as prep is that you have your bass in tip-top condition. Set-up perfectly, intonation dead-on, no crackly pots, etc. The tape (or, now mostly, hard drive) picks up everything and getting a good track straightaway is a lot better than "fixing it in the mix." Any sort of intonation issues are going to jump out too and even if you can digitally pitch-correct it, that still takes time and money that could be budgeted elsewhere.

Usually you don't want your strings to be either too "live" (e.g., brand new that day), or too dead though there is latitude on that depending on the sound you're going for. They definitely need to be fresh enough to hold tune. I prefer to record with them about 75% "live" so they have enough life to cut but are not as noisy as new strings since my left hand technique isn't quite as clean as it should be for studio work. String noise is a mutha and if you try to EQ it out in the mix you are not going to like what that does to the rest of the bass tone.