Recording on a Dime

Jun 14, 2005 5:11 PM

           
 

With that much gear set up, changing guitar sounds is as easy as moving the close mics to a different amp and re-adjusting levels. Often I can go from one sound to another in the same amount of time it takes for the guitarist to change guitars and tune.

Overdubbing vocals is the real hornet's nest. Some singers are great and you can run down one or two passes and get everything you need. Others will nitpick each syllable and make life beyond painful. I try to get singers to take complete passes and to avoid excessive punching, simply because punching is time-consuming and often loses the feel of the track. Unlike guitar overdubs, vocal sounds generally don't vary much over the course of an album, so you can usually get the sound and then roll through everything.

Few other instruments require different sounds from track to track. Pianos, Hammond B-3s, and horns, for example, will almost always stay the same from the engineer's standpoint. Get the sounds quickly, based on your past successes (I suggest dynamic and ribbon mics on brass, beyerdynamic M 201s on B-3 and horns, and Neumann KM 140s on piano) and roll tape.

As we've seen, being able to do good mixes fast depends largely on the tracks — the more you get things right during the recording, the less you have to fuss over in the mix. That's true whether you're doing an album in a day or a month.

I have mixed a half-dozen or so full-length CDs in a single session each. Of those, I would say all but one sounded really good, and the one that didn't suffered because the drummer had a terrible-sounding kit and there simply wasn't time to make it sound better. In other words, the house was built on a lousy foundation (and some of the performances weren't so stellar, either). In addition, the band had a strict budget and self-imposed deadline, so there was no opportunity to polish the performances before mixing. As you surely know, not everything can be fixed in the mix.

The other albums I mixed in short order were cut almost completely live, so again, many of the decisions had been made already during the tracking phase. In addition, the performances were solid, and each project demanded a fairly consistent sound from start to finish, which further simplified the mix. Even so, when mixing under the gun, my approach is to keep it simple and try to capture the feel without adding anything flashy. You're shooting for as good as possible, not perfection, so be realistic.

One last thing I'd like to point out is that every high-speed project I've engineered has been done in the analog domain — a very intentional choice. Yes, 2-inch tape eats up a big chunk of the budget, but that very fact helps keep Pandora's box closed. I have yet to engineer a project in Pro Tools without the artist(s) wanting to exploit the possibilities of digital editing — very few musicians can resist the temptation to tweak a vocal here and alter a guitar line there. For that reason, I feel it's in everyone's best interest to keep the recording process analog and to get everything on tape pretty much the way you want it to sound in the final mix.

Of course, I don't mind doing whatever it takes to make a recording perfect. But when a band has a tight budget, I have a responsibility to reign them in, just as they have a responsibility to keep me moving forward. As long as you anticipate setups and problems, stay one step ahead of the musicians, and stick to your tried-and-true techniques, you'll deliver your end of the bargain. Assuming the band does its part, everyone will walk away happy.

Sean D. Carberry still sneaks into Boston-area studios to record albums (quickly and cheaply) when he isn't too busy as technical director of The Connection on NPR.