The lesson for amateur producers: Capture a top-notch performance, and the rest takes care of itself…

Amateur recordings often sound “amateur.” But what differentiates these hometracked opuses from professional recordings? It’s not just fidelity or sonic quality: Many competent engineers produce lo-fi or distorted mixes on purpose, when it suits the song. Rather, amateur recordings tend to share some key traits, telltale signs that the mixing and recording are the work of a novice.

You can learn to recognize and address these traits in your own recordings, and produce more polished, professional mixes:

• Too much bass: Nothing says amateur mix like a boomy, overpowering bottom-end. Novice engineers often monitor and mix through headphones or small speakers which under-represent low frequencies. It’s natural to compensate by boosting the bass instruments, but this in turn yields muddy, indistinct mixes. If you find your mixes sound boomy on other systems, try checking everything you do against a commercial reference CD to better gauge the appropriate bass levels.
• Poor drum levels: For great drum tracks, everything in the recording chain matters: The room, the drums, the microphones (and of course the drummer.) So before recording a band, professional engineers spend days or weeks tweaking each element in the chain for the best drum sound, and to ensure that no single drum overpowers or vanishes in the mix. In fact, drums are arguably the hardest instrument to record. A large kit can require 10 or more microphones, so it’s little wonder the drums in amateur recordings often come up short.
  
  But even if we don’t have a $50,000 mic collection to capture big studio sound, we amateurs can still at least get good levels. If you have difficulty getting your drums mixed right, try this: Listen to a modern recording that’s sonically similar to the track you’re mixing, and slowly lower the volume. Notice, as the level approaches 0, which elements of the mix are the last to disappear. In contemporary music, it’s usually the kick drum, snare drum, and lead vocal. Now, try to replicate this in your own mixes.
• Clashing instruments: This is an issue with arrangement as much as production. A song’s parts can lack distinction because the individual instruments don’t have their own space within the song’s arrangement. It’s a tell-tale sign of an amateur mix because many of us write as we record, progressively adding new layers to a song, rather than arranging ahead of time and recording only what’s needed. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, per se, but it clearly separates the amateurs from the pros: A professional producer refines the arrangement before setting foot in the studio.
  
  If you find your instrumentation lacks distinction, consider revising the arrangement to add some space. Let your tracks breathe.
• Uneven vocals: The biggest difference between superstar singers and us wannabes isn’t pitch or tone or vibrato. (Let’s face it: Some of the best selling artists are terrible singers, at least in the classical sense.) Rather, what separates good from great, most often, is dynamics. A great singer knows how to control the volume of her voice, and more importantly, when to change her volume. And this has as much to do with the singer’s skill in front of a microphone as it does with her voice. When we hear uneven vocals, we hear a bad bar band with the singer mumbling 2 feet back from the microphone, or half-swallowing the mic and screaming. In other words, an amateur.
  
  Recording vocals more evenly isn’t hard. First and foremost, the singer must practice! Before you hit record, ensure the singer knows every change in the song, and even when it’s best to inhale throughout the song for optimum breath control.
  
  And take note of this simple reminder:    near … far … near … far
• Overused reverb: When used to add ambience or depth, reverb is best applied sparingly. Beginners often miss this, opting for the “some is good, more is better” approach (which is understandable: Remember how lush and important your voice sounded the first time you heard it through a “Carnegie Hall” reverb preset?) But in modern commercial recordings, reverb, unless it’s used as an obvious effect, is usually inaudible, adding texture to the sound without actually being perceptible. Best advice: Raise the reverb level until it’s just present, then back off a notch. And resist the urge to soak your vocals in deep chamber and hall reverb effects.
• Cheap reverb: Even an untrained ear can hear the difference between a $3000 Lexicon unit and the free reverb built into your multitrack recorder. Cheap reverbs sound, basically, cheap. Especially on lead vocals. If you don’t have access to a decent plugin (though SIR, considered one of the best, is free,) consider avoiding reverb altogether. Or at least, per the point above, avoid obvious reverb.
• “Fake” drums: More specifically, obviously programmed drums attempting to pass as live drums. This isn’t an issue in electronic and dance music, where listeners expect to hear steady quantized beats from drum machines. But pop and rock music have dynamic rhythm requirements, and listeners are conditioned to expect a more natural, nuanced sound from the drum track.
  
  The ride cymbal and snare drum are the most obvious amateur giveaways. A snare drum’s tone depends on where, and how hard, the stick hits the head, and this goes double for the ride cymbal, especially near the bell. So when a drum track features 32 bars of 8th notes using the same ride cymbal sample at the same volume, listeners always sense something’s not right.
  
  If you don’t have access to a drummer and drum kit, you can still create believable programmed drum tracks with a little effort. This article from Sound On Sound has some great tips on humanizing for more realistic drum beats.
• Muddy, indistinct vocals: If a song has lyrics, listeners should be able to hear those lyrics. That might sound obvious, but it’s an important point lost on many novice recordists. Several things contribute to indistinct vocals:
  
  The proximity effect on a directional microphone. Most vocal mics boost the low frequencies of close-miked sound sources, so back off the mic a few inches for a clearer sound.
  
  Singing without a pop filter. Plosives produce a blast of air that sounds careless and lazy. If you don’t have a pop screen, you can easily make your own.
  
  Poor or inappropriate EQ. Novices often attempt to clean up a vocal track by boosting high frequencies, hoping to add definition. However, this usually has the opposite effect, increasing sibilance and giving the vocal a sharp, edgy sound without improving the clarity. It’s far more effective to clean a track with a low-frequency cut, and you can safely remove everything below 100Hz from vocals. In fact, your microphone might even feature a low-frequency roll off switch for this purpose.
  
  Your mix sells the vocal performance. So make sure the lyrics can be heard.
• Too much bad room sound: Unless you have a well-treated space, or record in a very large room, your room probably doesn’t flatter your recordings. (See The Portable Vocal Booth for details.) However, a bad room doesn’t automatically equal bad recordings. Many classic albums were recorded in less-than-perfect environments by engineers wise enough to limit the room’s presence on the recording.
  
  
  Strive to minimize the room sound in your recordings by close-miking whenever possible, and choosing microphones with polar patterns that reduce the capture of extra room noise.
• Timing problems: Professional musicians practice a song for weeks or months before recording it. But as noted above, many amateurs write while they record, essentially eliminating practice from the process. Additionally, whether through impatience or inexperience, beginners tend to approach recording with a “fix it in the mix” mentality, which naturally leads to sloppy takes. You don’t need to aim for perfection to sound like a pro. But you do need your “keeper” takes to be free of obvious timing errors. A single snare drum hit lagging by a 16th of a beat is enough to make your whole track sound amateur.
  
  Worded another way: Good bands are tight, so when you don’t sound tight people assume you’re not good. Spend some more time practicing your new song before hitting record, and you’ll capture better performances. And sound more professional as a result.

See Also: 5 Ways To Improve Your Recordings Today, Record Better Vocals

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“The Bonham kick drum is the quintessential rock drum sound,” Martin explains. “I usually obtain it by boosting the frequencies between 120 and 240 Hz by about 4 dB or more. You’ll also need to roll off everything above 1.5 kHz. Sometimes, depending on the drum, you also might want to notch out 80 Hz a bit-not too much, just by 1 or 2 dB. Then add a little bit of 60 Hz, but again, just by about 2 or 3 dB.”

It’s an older article (in Internet terms, at least,) that I’ve read a dozen times over the years. And I get something new from it each time.

Immediately, you’ll notice that the male vocal gets an upper-frequency boost of 1 dB with a shelving EQ, while the female vocal requires a 3 dB shelving cut at 8.8 kHz. The male vocal also needs a 2 dB boost at 7.5 kHz and a 5 dB cut at 5.1 kHz. Martin told me that this was because the singer had a cold and sounded a bit nasal.

With recording and mixing, lessons from experts come even easier when the engineers and producers volunteer to share their knowledge.

Michael Tretow, the engineer for all of Abba’s studio albums, offers a wealth of information on his techniques in this 1980 article, Abba In The Studio:

I always try to place the electric guitar amp in a different room, if the studio has access to a storage room or something like that. I believe that to get a really loud sound you must play loud and literally let the sound fill the room. I use one close-up mic in front of the amp and one omni, out in the room, to pick up rattling windows and the like.

In this interview with Michael Fremer, Roy Halee, who engineered for Paul Simon from the 1960’s through Graceland and The Rhythm of The Saints, talks at length about his experiences (particularly some of the tricks used on The Boxer.) See also part II of the interview.

MF: And then there’s that big drum “kishhhhhh.”

RH: Well that was done in the elevator shaft at Columbia! So we go to the church, add their voices with Dolby, and now we’re out of tracks…Then we were going to do strings, so we decide to record it onto a two-track and wild track it into the final mix.

MF: You had to use a variable pitch control to keep it in synch with the rest?

RH: That’s what I did.

Previously: Ryan Hewitt’s hand in Stadium Arcadium

Most articles on the subject, though, are addressed to engineers, by other engineers and producers fed up with the hammering their mixes receive at the hands of overzealous mastering engineers. For the average music consumer, the matter remains somewhat esoteric.

In his article Imperfect Sound Forever, Nick Southall addresses this, and more importantly why the steady increase in volume is so bad for consumers, from the perspective of someone who just loves music:

Levels have crept up over the last decade though, and alarmingly so. Nevermind is 6-8dB quieter than, say, Hopes & Fears by Keane—to contextualise this, those 6-8dB will make Nevermind sound approximately half as loud… Keane should NOT be twice as loud as Nirvana.

For those why decry the practice, it’s a good sign when writers outside the field of music production begin to address the issue. And Southall has more great thoughts in his follow-up article:

Compression will continue to be abused in the pursuit of loudness for as long as the recording industry believes that louder shifts units. I don’t think the loudness war is causing tangible increases in sales anymore than I think the actual notes and words and beats of music are getting “worse” though … I think this is because the clamour to make music louder has made it less loveable, and in the long run loveable sells more. Record company people sadly don’t always seem to get this

… a clean sound on the intro with Kurt’s vocal, as well as 1-2-3-4-5 guitars, 2 tracks of the Mesa Boogie, 2 tracks of the Fender bassman, and one track that we call the “super grunge”.

The video is a great little tutorial on thickening your guitar sound with multiple overdubs.

If the producer knows how every step of the preparation and recording process is going to contribute to the final mix, then the mixing stage should be straightforward and successful. This means, among other things, getting the arrangement right and selecting the right sounds, making sure the musicians are playing in time and in tune, obtaining a good performance from the singer by whatever means necessary.

Previously: The Big Page of Mix Tutorials