recording technique

[timtheenchanteruk]

I work in a school, where we have a studio.

 

my problem is, all my experience is live, not recording, and no matter what I try I always end up with a "live" sounding recording from bands.

 

my work is good enough for GCSE etc, so work wont send me on any training at the moment, but for extra curricular stuff we have pupil bands doing demos.

 

the room itself isnt the best, it does have a reverb of its own, which wont help.

 

the kit we have is this,

 

mics, The AKG drum pack (D112 for bass drum, C418 x4, I use 3 for the toms, 2xC1000 I use as overheads with the hypercardoid adaptor on) plenty of SM58s (I dont usually use these for recording) SM57beta I use for Snare top, and guitar amps if students use their own. and 2x AT4021 which I use one for the hi-hat.

Vocals, a Rode NT2

 

 

Bass DI`d, as is the guitar as our guitar amps are not worth using the sound from.

 

Mixer is a Soundcraft Ghost through a 24Tr HDD recorder used as a A/D converter to a PC running Cubase 4 through a hammerfall PCI soundcard.

 

any advice, or potential reading material greatfully received.

[johnhogg]

A good source of info on recording techniques can be found at www.soundonsound.com

 

If the room your recording in isn't properly treated than you will certainly colour the sound of the recording, although this isn't always a bad thing. A few things you can do to minimize the natural acoustics of the room:

 

Soundproofing - from sticking up foam on the walls/roof to building a room within a room.

Recording instruments closely to get less of the room ambience, and DI instruments straight into hdd/cubase.

 

Vocals need to be isolated a bit more, because as you compress them they can sound 'boxy', which is hard to fix after recording. There are various reflexion filters you can buy to go round the back of the mic to cut down room ambience. These work quite well when set up correctly.

 

You don't say what monitoring you use. This can play an important part of the final result, as well as acoustics in the listening environment.

 

This is a very brief outline of some basic stuff, hope it helps.

 

John Hogg

[paulears]

The most useful thing would be to hear a sample of what you have - audio problems are so difficult to put into text - but we'd be able to hear it and say where we believe the problems were. I examined music for ages and got recordings done on dirt cheap simple kit, and others done on hugely expensive pro gear. The first ten seconds was enough to get a really good handle on what had been done right, and what went horribly wrong. I've heard some simply terrible recordings made with Neumann U87s and some excellent ones with a couple of SM57s - the secret is normally poor mic choice or placement, then mix/eq issues.

 

Any chance of putting a small snippet up for us to listen to?

[daveh]

I've spent over 30 years engineering in many studio & live environments and early on I learned that there are no hard & fast rules when it comes to recording.

From the kit line up you've listed you will be able to get some good recordings - with one caveat. You cannot polish a turd. If the source material is crap, no amount of mike placement or knob twiddling is going to make it sound great.

Assuming you have reasonable amount of time available, start at the basics - first work on the sounds that you want to hear from the instruments & players, in conjunction with the material concerned.

Once you have achieved said sounds play around with mic placements. Experiment - a lot.

It seems you are going to capture a band in the fully live mode, so unless you have some good acoustic screening, there will inevitably be a fair amount of spill from one instruments' mic(s) to the next, so 'live' it will sound.

Try to use the room live sound to your advantage.

If the amps are truly rubbish, try to beg/borrow some good uns for the sessions. At least you'll give yourself a head start. The rest is down to the players - oh, and their instruments! Same for the drums. Take the bass D/I + mic the cab.

I presume that the studio has a separate control room? If not you will have real problems trying to monitor in the same room as the band.

I may have misunderstood - are you using an HD24? If so why at this stage dump the material to PC with the attendant aggro? Just grab some great raw takes on the HD24 and leave the post production stuff 'till later - but don't take "fix it on the mix" excuses from your artists, get it right at the recording stage!

My basic recording training was with the BBC a good while back and the rest learned en route, so current reading material would probably be better advised by one of the fellow forumites. I understand that the Focus Press, Music Technology Series is good reference stuff though.

Have fun.

[timtheenchanteruk]

I have a couple of samples, when I find somewhere on the net to put them, I will post it here.

we only use the Fostex HDD as an A/D converter, as the ghost only puts out analogue, and the soundcard is SPDIF inputs, so doesnt do anything exept stay in standby mode, all the recording is done on the PC.

 

monitorin is done by a pair of Tannoy System600A monitors, which personally I feel have a bit more bass response than they should have, and I frequently end up re-doing stuff after hearing it on another system.

 

the amps we have are dire, they are KBA100s, so not actually guitar amps at all!, alot of the students bring their own guitars in for recording, although ours are not too bad.

 

I do have one group in at the moment doing it an instrument at a time, so that could be interesting, so far we have the drums, bass and some of the guitars laid down.

[cedd]

My gut instinct would be to forget the PC for the time being and use that HDD recorder as it's meant to be used. I often found when I was recording that having "hands on" a proper desk with analogue routing and outboard was far easier to learn and to get good results from. I'd use the PC as a mastering recorder and mix down from the HDD, back through your desk.

I'm not saying that the PC isn't a great solution to multitracking, and to be honest, as a computer numpty this is probably down to personal preference, but it's the way I'd do it. Spend your time in the recording session getting your mic placement right and getting the sound you want, then use the direct output of the mixer channel, or a subgroup to send the audio to your multitrack. Sort out EQ, effects and compression later at mixdown.

 

Final thing I'll say from my limited experience of studio work - don't mix down for more than half an hour at a time. After half an hour, everything starts to sound brilliant! Get out of the room, get away from the music and then come back. It's so depressing when you spend 2 hours mixing down, feel all proud of your results, then go for a coffee and come back to a mix that suddenly sounds absolutely dire!

 

I once worked with a guy that mixed down through a household stereo as a set of monitors (he also had "proper ones"). His argument was that the person buying the album wasn't going to listen to it through studio monitors, so why should he mix on them? There's an inane logic to it!