“Hey, My Recordings Suck, I Need Better Equipment” - Reality Check
24/04/12 14:07
How many times have you listened back to your recordings and thought “These sounds aren’t good enough. I need better equipment.” As recording musicians and engineers, we all read the magazines, see the youtube footage and read the blogs of guys who sounds we wish we could emulate. We spend $ and hours combing through articles looking for the silver bullet that will make our mixes slam with the best of them.
The fact is, a good, no wait, GREAT recording can be made with very frugal equipment and a very tight budget. If you take anything away from this article, let it be this, An in tune instrument and a strong clean signal, miked correctly will get you 80% there. Hey it’s true, if you disagree then stop reading here, ‘cause there’s going to be more tough love coming in this blog.
I always tell people I do recording and mixing for, to expect to spend half of your recording budget on mixing. Getting great sounds to disk is half the battle but if you bring up 35 faders with “great” sounds on them it sounds… not good, how can this be? Didn’t you just tell us we’d be 80% of the way there? Yes, but the last 20%, the engineering account for a ton of the result, good or bad.
“I need plugins to sound good” – You do need plug in's, but not for getting a good recorded signal. If you’re guitar sounds harsh and “weird”, you did something wrong when you recorded it. If you have to EQ the heck out of it, you've got problems with your source recording, if you think compression and reverb are the answer to your tone issues, I'm afraid your just as wrong. (I told you this would hurt ).
Here’s the hardest pill to swallow: If your mixes in the box don’t sound as good, or close to the pros out there, then you are not doing it right. Most of the guys mixing great stuff out there do it in the box, with few plugins and and spend most of their time on basic, non-flashy mix techniques based on getting instruments out of the way of each other. Having dropped that opinion on you, I will say plugins are a definite necessity for the mixing engineer. Here are some good suggestions and at least a place to get started.
Compressor – A good compressor. All DAWs come with one. Read books, ask questions and learn to use it. My favorite 3rd party compressor is an 1176 followed closely by an LA2A. PSP, Bomb factory, UAD, Waves all make great emulations. I own the UAD and PSP ones. Check out the PSP for affordability. They are the most underrated plugins on the planet.
EQ – a smooth one. I use cubase and the EQs in there are absolutely great. They are clean, easy to work with and do what EQ is meant to do, fix problems. They have good filters (Hi and Low pass filters) which takes care of 50% of your EQ needs right there. Sometime I like to use certain emulations for a particular sound. Once again UAD, PSP, Waves all have great emulations. I particularly like the UAD EQs (1073 or Pultec) as they impart a very slight sound to the track as do the others. Once again a really great cost effective set of EQ plugins are made by PSP. Free demos for 14 days.
Reverb – ‘Aether’ makes the best logarithmic verb out there in my opinion. UAD also makes a great emulation of the EMT140 plate. Most DAWs these days have convolution reverbs too. Convolution reverbs are great for imprinting the sound of a real room, real plates, and halls on your tracks. It’s not the shiny polished lexicon sound, it is real sounding. But, there are many free impulses of great classic hardware reverbs (lexicon, quantec, Yamaha, Eventide) out there too. These work very well with your convolution reverb. If you don’t have one, get the SIR2 convolution reverb. It’s affordable and good.
Delay – Use the one in your DAW. Warm it up by running a low pass filter at 4k to take the harshness off. You don’t need a fancy delay to mix well.
So that’s it. Hopefully what you got from this is mixing is hard work. There are no secrets or magic the pros aren’t telling you. If it sucks, chances are it’s your fault and you need to figure out why. Tear it down and start again. Compare the sounds you are recording to sounds you are trying to emulate. Compare your mixes to others in the same vein. If they don’t sound the same, put on some headphones, sit back and listen. You need to make notes and ask questions. I do realize that this blog had a fair amount of tough love in it but hopefully it will help you stay focused on the important elements of creating a great sounding recording.
The fact is, a good, no wait, GREAT recording can be made with very frugal equipment and a very tight budget. If you take anything away from this article, let it be this, An in tune instrument and a strong clean signal, miked correctly will get you 80% there. Hey it’s true, if you disagree then stop reading here, ‘cause there’s going to be more tough love coming in this blog.
I always tell people I do recording and mixing for, to expect to spend half of your recording budget on mixing. Getting great sounds to disk is half the battle but if you bring up 35 faders with “great” sounds on them it sounds… not good, how can this be? Didn’t you just tell us we’d be 80% of the way there? Yes, but the last 20%, the engineering account for a ton of the result, good or bad.
“I need plugins to sound good” – You do need plug in's, but not for getting a good recorded signal. If you’re guitar sounds harsh and “weird”, you did something wrong when you recorded it. If you have to EQ the heck out of it, you've got problems with your source recording, if you think compression and reverb are the answer to your tone issues, I'm afraid your just as wrong. (I told you this would hurt ).
Here’s the hardest pill to swallow: If your mixes in the box don’t sound as good, or close to the pros out there, then you are not doing it right. Most of the guys mixing great stuff out there do it in the box, with few plugins and and spend most of their time on basic, non-flashy mix techniques based on getting instruments out of the way of each other. Having dropped that opinion on you, I will say plugins are a definite necessity for the mixing engineer. Here are some good suggestions and at least a place to get started.
Compressor – A good compressor. All DAWs come with one. Read books, ask questions and learn to use it. My favorite 3rd party compressor is an 1176 followed closely by an LA2A. PSP, Bomb factory, UAD, Waves all make great emulations. I own the UAD and PSP ones. Check out the PSP for affordability. They are the most underrated plugins on the planet.
EQ – a smooth one. I use cubase and the EQs in there are absolutely great. They are clean, easy to work with and do what EQ is meant to do, fix problems. They have good filters (Hi and Low pass filters) which takes care of 50% of your EQ needs right there. Sometime I like to use certain emulations for a particular sound. Once again UAD, PSP, Waves all have great emulations. I particularly like the UAD EQs (1073 or Pultec) as they impart a very slight sound to the track as do the others. Once again a really great cost effective set of EQ plugins are made by PSP. Free demos for 14 days.
Reverb – ‘Aether’ makes the best logarithmic verb out there in my opinion. UAD also makes a great emulation of the EMT140 plate. Most DAWs these days have convolution reverbs too. Convolution reverbs are great for imprinting the sound of a real room, real plates, and halls on your tracks. It’s not the shiny polished lexicon sound, it is real sounding. But, there are many free impulses of great classic hardware reverbs (lexicon, quantec, Yamaha, Eventide) out there too. These work very well with your convolution reverb. If you don’t have one, get the SIR2 convolution reverb. It’s affordable and good.
Delay – Use the one in your DAW. Warm it up by running a low pass filter at 4k to take the harshness off. You don’t need a fancy delay to mix well.
So that’s it. Hopefully what you got from this is mixing is hard work. There are no secrets or magic the pros aren’t telling you. If it sucks, chances are it’s your fault and you need to figure out why. Tear it down and start again. Compare the sounds you are recording to sounds you are trying to emulate. Compare your mixes to others in the same vein. If they don’t sound the same, put on some headphones, sit back and listen. You need to make notes and ask questions. I do realize that this blog had a fair amount of tough love in it but hopefully it will help you stay focused on the important elements of creating a great sounding recording.
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