So, I thought I'd get another post in relatively early in order to get things rolling along and to give people more than just that first introduction to lure them in.
My band has been working on our first full length album for about the last year. This is actually our second attempt at it. We recorded most of the tracks before but were experimenting with recording techniques and really didn’t like how they turned out. So, we started over from scratch and went with a more traditional approach. The results were much more consistent and effective. However, I did learn some very important lessons from the second sessions as well.
Since we were recording using my equipment, we were somewhat limited in what we could do. The computer system has enough horse power to run all the tracks and plugins needed. I have a collection of solid mics. Some are higher quality than others and some are the standards like the Shure SM57’s. But, over all, they’re solid and work well for what I do. The real limitation is the recording interface. I use a MOTU 828MkII firewire interface. It sounds good and I know it very well. But, it limits me to recording 10 tracks at once. For a drummer with a 5 piece kit, that equates out to 1 mic for the kick, 1 for the snare, 3 for the toms, 1 for the hat and 2 overheads and 2 for scratch tracks during tracking. That’s the first thing I did wrong.
During mixing, I realized that I really didn’t need that hat mic. The overheads picked it up more than enough and the EQ and compression on the overheads were the same as I would have used on the hat. So, I pulled that out of every track. Not using that input for the hat would have freed it up to solve my second mistake. Only one mic on the snare.
I mic’d the top of the snare but didn’t mic the bottom which meant I really didn’t get a lot of the snare tone which required some real work during mix down, including using Drum-a-gog to add a trigger for the bottom snare sound on a separate track. Now, before any of the purists start bashing me for using drum triggers, my intent is to put out the best sounding record I possibly can with the resources I have available. I don’t see adding a drum trigger to add that bottom snare sound any different than using a reverb on the drums because I didn’t have the perfectly acoustically tuned room to record them in.
Room mics weren’t a real big concern of mine since the room we were recording the drums in in fairly quiet and doesn’t have a lot of bounce so there wasn’t a lot of “room” for the mics to pick up in the first place. However, we may be moving to a room that has much more ambience and natural reverb. In which case, I would want to add a couple of room mics next time so reverb wouldn’t need to be added at mix down. This might require adding an additional recording interface in order to give me more inputs since I’m already at 10 with the 2 scratch tracks. I say “might” because, my drummer is a monster and ended up recording all but 2 of the songs listening to just a click track and playing the rest of the songs from memory.
When I started mixing the drums down, I struggled quite a bit to make everything sound solid and punchy and cohesive. Enter Ian Allison of Down And Above. Ian is my bassist’s nephew and a bass GOD. He also, along with Down And Above guitarist David Young, mix all of their own songs and have outstanding results.
Ian helped me with 2 things, primarily, which took my mixing skills to a completely new level. One being parallel drum compression or “New York” compression. While I was already familiar with this technique, Ian helped me refine it significantly. If you’re not familiar with parallel compression, the idea is send some or all of the drum tracks to an effect buss running a strong compression such as the SSL Compressor and squeeze the heck out of it. Then blend that back into the original signal in parallel to add a lot of punch to the drums. Ian backed me off of pushing all of the drums through the compressor and just running the snare, kick and a little bit of the overheads. The results were overheads that were more even and controlled and a kick and snare that had a lot of punch and really came through well while leaving the rest of the drums solid but not over the top. That and the simple act of removing most of the rest of the processing I had been adding to them (heavy gating, too much reverb, excessive EQ, etc.) created a much more cohesive set of drum track that sounded like a real drummer playing solid punchy drums instead of individual drums that got slapped together.
The second thing was subtractive EQ. Instead of boosting to add more bass or high end, subtractive EQ operates on the principle of removing any offending or undesirable frequencies and then boosting the overall level of the track slightly. Since EQ is really nothing more than frequency volume, you’re going to end up boosting the “good” frequencies by doing this. I had long understood the rule of “If you want something to sound better, cut frequencies. If you want it to sound different, boost frequencies” but for some reason, Ian sitting with me and helping with it really made it all “click” in my head.
My method for EQ’ing now is pretty simple. Using a parametric EQ, pick 1 band and set the Q or width of that band as narrow as possible (This is often referred to as a “notch”) and boost it all the way up. (I know I know. I’ve been talking about subtractive EQ but stay with me. We’re just trying to find the “bad” frequencies right now.) Now, start slowing sweeping back and forth through the frequencies. It’s pretty easy to hear the offenders, whether it’s the one that makes the guitars sound like a jar full of bees or, in the case of the room I recorded the guitars in, that standing wave at 110Hz that made the guitars overwhelm the bass and kick when I’d palm mute anything. When you find the frequencies, cut it. You don’t have to cut it all the way. May 3-6db to start with. For every 3db, there’s a %50 reduction or increase in sound intensity, depending on whether your boosting or cutting. I’ll, then, widen the Q a bit. If you do need to cut dramatically to achieve the desired results, try boosting a little at half the frequency. For example, I had to cut significantly at 110Hz on the guitars. This took a lot of the life and warmth out of the guitars so I boosted a little (maybe 2db) at 55Hz and that brought the life back to the guitars without bringing the “womp” back. Here's an example:
Those simple thing alone, took my mixes to a whole new level and, while I may not be at the caliber of the $5k a day mixing engineers, my mixes certainly don’t sound like garage demos.
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