recording is hard...

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Tue May 29, 2007 7:32 am

Howdy all,

My old band and I have recently got back together. We changed our name (formerly Sunnydale Ohio, now The Fultons) and we got about three new songs under our belt that we are pretty proud of (two from my nur ein entries). Now we are looking to home record a good two to three song demo to give out to promoters and bookers and hopefully play some good shows.

now comes the hard part, admitting we have a problem. We are all young and fairly inexperienced with recording. You might have heard some of my earlier attempts at such. We have invested in some new equipment and are looking to make this recoridng sound better than anything we've done before.

But i need help in doing this right. Everything from mic placement to mixing to equalizing.... and we hope to have this done fairly soon (within a couple weeks hopefully). We recorded some yesterday and I'm gonna be trying to mix that together throughout the week and put it up here to see if you all can help us.

so first things first:
Equipment
Cubase LE
Tascam US-122
Yamaha MW12 12-Input USB Mixer
mics:
MXL 990 condenser mic (for vocals)
Sennheiser e906 dynamic guitar mic amp (yea guitar)
Samson C02 Cardoid Condenser mic pair (drum overheads, horns later)
a couple cheap vocal mics came packaged with mic stands (dirty work)
bass plugged straight into yamha mixer

this is all well and good. But as you see we use Cubase LE so we have limited capabilities. Also we are having a lot of trouble recording drums.

We tried using the condenser mic pair like the recorderman set up I saw mentioned in Deshead's blog. it worked fairly well and we put one of our cheap mics on the kick. Still the kick didnt come through all too well. Like i said as the week progresses I'll get more stuff posted here and hopefully things will get clearer.

please feel free to simply yell out anything you need more info on.

Thanks for any and all help guys,

Lostman

Reist · Post by **Reist** » Tue May 29, 2007 2:00 pm

I suck at recording too, so maybe you should stop by at the 'My Eternal Mixing Problems' thread and see what they told me - that might help you. Especially with EQing and drum micing.

Hoblit · Post by **Hoblit** » Tue May 29, 2007 2:33 pm

For my band, the drums are the easiest thing to record. I bought a drum mic kit and use one condensor overhead and a shure 58 for the highat/splash/tamorine. It came with mics desigined for the snare toms and kick. The snare and tom ones attach to the drums and work GREAT. We leave them on when we play out for the sound guys/girls.

It's always the guitar cab via microphone that we always have problems with. Find myself always scooping a chunk out of the guitar WAV when I'm trying to avoid that frequency from even getting pass the board.

!!!

Recording IS hard

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue May 29, 2007 2:53 pm

It might be helpful to get a couple more input channels (get a Tascam 428 or another 122 or whatever) so that you can record your mics separately rather than going through a mixer, making it easier to mix and tweak. It's pretty hard to get a good mix if you're in the same room as the drums and the mix is going direct to the recording. At the very least you should be recording your vocals and instruments to separate tracks. Obviously you'll also need to get better recording software (unless LE allows multitrack recording or something).

When I recorded the various "live in a warehouse" Octothorpe songs (D&C and Glutton) I really wanted to have a fifth channel. The setup was basically one mic'ed channel each for vocals, drums, and the room, and then one shared channel for guitar and bass (ideally these would have been on separate channels but I only had 4 tracks to work with and it's easy enough to work around this with EQing after the fact). The main problem with the recordings is that a certain bass player kept on cranking his bass up to the point that it caused clipping on the input (though that's more to do with the fact we were using the monitor amp as the mixer as well and he needed more monitor).

Billy's Little Trip · Post by **Billy's Little Trip** » Tue May 29, 2007 6:04 pm

Lost Man, I'm not understanding why you feel the Cubase LE is a problem. You can record 48 tracks and it has built in plugs for all of your recording needs. Just a quick visit to Ken's INVALUABLE free plug in thread, and you have damn near anything you could ask for.
When tracks start getting too heavy with FX, just find a common start and end point, export the tracks as a .wav, then start a new project and import your bounced tracks in. Someone, I think DES, gave me this advice. It's so nice to have a "clean" working area for the final mix.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Tue May 29, 2007 6:51 pm

Doesn't LE only allow recording to two tracks simultaneously though? Or am I thinking of a different edition?

It sounded to me like they wanted to record the whole band live, rather than doing it in parts.

Billy's Little Trip · Post by **Billy's Little Trip** » Tue May 29, 2007 7:02 pm

Ahh, that could be Fluff, I've only recorded two simultaneously. I never really thought about it.

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Tue May 29, 2007 7:55 pm

now my comp is being difficult. I placed all our work from yesterday on a CD and for some reason my computer isn't letting me copy and paste the tracks onto my desktop. I'll try my other comp in a minute but in the mean time to answer some questions.

LE does work just fine for our recording needs really. WE are multitracking everything and recording each part individually. so in the end i have one track for each instrument (i.e. lead guitar, rhythm guit, lead vox, backing vox etc.) I was saying the only thing i was having trouble with was recording drums because like someone said, using a mixing board means alll the mics feed into one track on the final mix. So its hard to say... boost the kick after it has been recorded.

Plus we really don't have good drum mics, or the money to afford them. Once i can get some mp3s of what the sound we got on monday is I'll put it up here but until then I'm really sorry. You guys are really being helpful (btw BLT i do have a whole lot of VSTs for LE, the whole "classic reverb/compressor/phaser" group).

And i'll probbly spend some of my day tomorrow going over the jolly roger thread, it seems it should be helpful. Although, as sad as it is, you had a bit more to begin with there, well mic-wise at least.

Thanks for all your help so far guys. Any ideas on how to get a good drum sound through a mixer using only four inputs? That would be very helpful. I'll be getting back here soon

Thanks and gig 'em,

lostman

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Wed May 30, 2007 6:29 am

Well it seems the CD i burned our folders to is corrupted or some such nonsense.... so I can't get any mixing done this week, I'm gonna have to wait till my band meets again to get what we had, overdub mistakes and re-record till we fix the timing errors.

This is quite frustrating

why does technology hate me so?

Freddielove · Post by **Freddielove** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 8:47 pm

I think your biggest problem is that you're in College Station. Just kidding guys.

Second the comment about the US-122. I have one and it works great, but would love to have more inputs for recording drums. Assuming I had the time to do that anyway.

i.p. · Post by **i.p.** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 9:04 pm

James Bean, from i.p. is a recording wizard.
he won't say so (this is Lex Butera, not James), but he is.
Maybe he'll post some tips one of these days (*nudges*)

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 8:56 pm

okay well last weekend the band got together and after a grueling two full days of recording, we have come out with two songs completely recorded. There's still a lot that needs to be worked out but once i get my first mix done I'll post it up here and hopefully I can get some feeback from the illustrious community of songfight. (seriously without you guys i would have never gotten where I am musically).

For the curious, we mic'ed the drums wiht the two pencil condensers overhead, a vocal mic under the snare and my mxl in front of the kick drum all thrown in the mixer for some surprisingly good results. Sadly not the best of quality but its 10x better than the drums have ever sounded on our recordings. 8)

oh, and I'm home in old San Anton for the summer, not in college station right now.... but i dont see being an Aggie as a problem (your Rice Owls better watch out in Omaha!)

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 7:24 am

Alright,

finished mixing one of the songs last night and i think it turned out pretty well. Its a full band reworking of my "sister cocaine" nur ein entry.

fultons myspace

its the only song listed there so far. I also have it for download on a yousendit page but its only good for the next few days. So pm me if you want that.

and please, give some feedback on what you think of the song or what could be done better. If you think its great as is, go ahead and say that too (in fact that would be a more than welcome compliment

)

thanks and gig em,

lostman

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 7:21 pm

okay so no bites on that.... thats fine.

Sister Cocaine I'm not really worried about that much.

This song is a bit more intense

its called "Not Too Late" and it involves a time signature change, horns, and a pretty odd breakdown at the end and I really need some help figuring how to mix this down.

Anybody got any suggestions or impressions on what could be done to make this mix better?

Thanks for any help you guys can give its greatly appreciated (really),

Lostman[/url]

Reist · Post by **Reist** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:34 pm

I'm not sure if I've got time for a detailed description, but compared to your 'let me in', Not Too Late is great! Especially a huge improvement on drums!

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Fri Jun 08, 2007 6:29 am

jolly roger wrote:I'm not sure if I've got time for a detailed description, but compared to your 'let me in', Not Too Late is great! Especially a huge improvement on drums!

sweet thanks man.

I'd hope the drums would sound better. My "Let me in" drums were programmed and this is my good friend Rudy playing live with the mic set-up i described. I just sent this mix to my lead guitarist and he says it sounds good too.

Anybody with some criticisms perhaps? (the only ones i can think of is that the horns are kinda iffy performance wise, it was the first time our friend had ever played trombone and the trumpeter was a bit rusty.... i wonder if steve durand would be willing to help out..... *hint*)

thanks again guys,

lostman

Paco Del Stinko · Post by **Paco Del Stinko** » Fri Jun 08, 2007 6:31 am

Sounds pretty good - is the bass line a little weird note-wise in spots?

mr_lostman · Post by **mr_lostman** » Fri Jun 08, 2007 6:49 am

Paco Del Stinko wrote:Sounds pretty good - is the bass line a little weird note-wise in spots?

this could be true. Our bassist took three takes and he just kind of goes with the flow of the music. His part is mostly solid but he throws in some made up things occasionally... I was supposed to listen to his take closely and replace where he messes up but since i was lazy last night i just took one take and let it play throughout the song. I should probably look into that.

thanks for the point out, 8)

lostman