You are currently browsing articles tagged professional-engineers.
Some of the easiest ways to improve your recordings are also the cheapest. In fact, the most effective techniques require no money at all. Here’s a collection of tips you might find helpful the next time a pricey piece of gear stands between you and great recordings. Help from others Have a friend perform: Home […]
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Over time, I’ve noted several questions that arise repeatedly on the web’s home recording forums. Each question reads as though it should have a simple answer, but none of them do. And indeed, the questions themselves betray their askers’ lack of experience with the subject. In effect, posing one of these questions tells the world […]
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I’m amazed when I compare Glyn Johns’s early mixes of Let It Be with Phil Spector’s final release. The music and performances are the same, but the mixes couldn’t sound more different. Shouldn’t these men, both professionals practicing a time-honoured craft, have created similar mixes with the same material? Of course, no two listeners hear […]
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Inspired by “engineering screw-ups” on Gearslutz, here’s a list of recording and mixing bloopers that made it past the mixing room onto the final release. These aren’t performance missteps, where the band missed a cue, or the singer came in too soon. There are certainly countless examples of those but most were included intentionally, to […]
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Steve Albini (yes, that Steve Albini) hangs out on the 2+2 poker forums, and decided to entertain music questions from the poker community. It seems an odd location for that discussion, but the thread has some great Albini quotes: Well, mixing isn’t the magic bullet it’s purported to be. A recording is about 90 percent […]
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I spend a lot of time, in and out of the studio, with my ears covered, plugged, or otherwise shielded from loud sounds. I do it to protect my hearing, of course, but I wasn’t always as diligent as I am now. The motivation behind my (possible over)use of earplugs was my discovery a few […]
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Butch Vig discusses mixing Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Cobain with his “vocal cords … starting to come right out of his throat.”
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Linkin Park’s singles often inspire the question “haven’t they already written this song?” An mp3 that does the rounds from time to time mixes Numb (on the left) and Pushing Me Away (on the right) to illustrate this with almost comical effect: All Linken Park Songs Sound Exactly The Same. As shown below, and forgive […]
Read the full post ...Electronic Musician just added an old interview with Bob Clearmountain to their web site. Clearmountain is one of my idols (his work with Radiohead notwithstanding.) And while he’s arguably the most famous mixing engineer on the planet, he doesn’t mind sharing advice with us amateurs on how to mix: I mix at various monitoring levels, […]
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This interview with Chris Lord-Alge is short, but packed with tips on recording electric guitar and bass. you’re going to get a better sound recording electric guitars on analog than digital. If you’re going digital, you may want to use a bit more compression than normal, maybe dial more low-end because digital is like a […]
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The Top Ten Tips for Sonic Excellence features an interview with mastering engineer Art Sayecki. Art offers advice, from a professional’s perspective, for indie artists looking to improve their own mixing and engineering skills: Keep your mixes balanced and not too bright or too bassy. Shoot for soft highs and tight basses. Don’t try to […]
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Some quick recording links for a Friday night: What the Experts Say About Recording. 3 pros discuss some of their studio techniques. On recording vocals: “It’s a big mistake letting the singer record their own vocals. They’re not the best judge of their own voice. They’ll think they sound bad, when everyone else is saying, […]
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William Whittman (who produced and engineered the track) discusses the recording of Cyndi Laupers’ Time After Time: IN the mix I took the shaker (I just realised we always CALLED it a shaker, but actually it’s the Linn Cabasa), through an Eventide Flanger to make it dance around in stereo a bit and get it […]
Read the full post ...A poster on Gearslutz asked the pros to share demos of hit songs. The Killers demo (on page 2) is a study in the role played by a great producer. a VERY VERY old demo of the Matchbox Twenty song “3 AM”. This was recorded around ’93-94 and is from the Tabitha Secret days, which […]
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Gearwire has a 3-part interview with Dave Huizenga, who scores and records the music for Cold Case Files (part 2, part 3.) Dave discusses his equipment, techniques, and philosophies, offering lots of great behind-the-scenes details, especially for those who dream of adding Music Director for National TV Show to their resume. (It could happen! Dave […]
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Terry Howard, Ray Charles’s engineer, offers some tips on mixing professional singers: Electronic Musician magazine interviewed Howard last year, and he shared his thoughts on working in digital with Ray Charles: That’s the whole thing: when you get into working a microphone with the proximity effect and knowing when to get close and far and […]
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From Mix Magazine, here’s a great interview with Andy Wallace, the engineer who essentially defined the modern rock mix (with bands like Nirvana, Linkin Park, and System of a Down.) The Pro Tools thing is a mixed blessing. The younger guys who have never had to cut tape or edit by bouncing on analog have […]
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I mentioned Charles Dye in the post on using distortion for better mixes. Dye turned his Hard Disk Life series of articles into a (highly touted) video tutorial called Mix It Like A Record. Here’s a clip from the video, with Dye discussing his use of channel-strip emulators, which add distortion, to achieve a more […]
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Digital equipment simplifies most aspects of recording, yet high profile studios still work in analog, often recording to magnetic tape. Why stick with the older, more expensive technology (especially with the panic over Quantegy’s decision to stop making tape?) Ethan Winer offers some thoughts on the matter in his article Gaining an Edge with Subtle […]
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How can I give my mixes that organic ABBA sound? ABBA is not an organic sound. Quite the contrary. Their sound relied heavily on layered vocal tracks, heavy use of digital verbs, and lots of synths. What do we know about getting that Big Star drum sound? The earliest Big Star tracks were recorded for […]
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Mix Magazine’s Classic Tracks looks at Phil Collins, and the recording of Face Value: The famous drum fill, Collins contends, could have been anything. What is on the record is what came out at the moment. “When people talk about the ‘Phil Collins drum sound,’ that is actually a huge variety of drum sounds,†Collins […]
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What is “harmonic balancing” and why should I care? (Or more appropriately, why should I ignore the hype?): Peaks and valleys in your spectrum don’t determine what’s “good” or “bad,” your ears do… And what causes records to sound different in different listening environments is a poorly balanced mix, again something you fix with your […]
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From the Muse’s Muse: “Singing and playing a great song is almost as good as getting a lesson from the person who wrote it.” 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 […]
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Ryan Hewitt contributed to the tracking and mixing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Stadium Arcadium, and is happy to share his engineering experiences: In an interview with EQ Magazine: “What makes mixing this band so hard is that you have three musicians who are all laying down serious stuff, and the balance between […]
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