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I’m far from being the world’s greatest vocalist, a brilliant guitarist or a drummer of ANY sort.
[Hell boy, if you were any place close, you'd be sittin' sippin' Martini's in Martinique!] |
Hmmm! Nor do I pretend to be brilliant at recording my music.
[Boy, whatcha doin' writin' this stuff if you don't know nothin' about it?]
But these days, you don’t have to be any of those things and you can still make music and get it heard by other people - and for most of us, THAT’s the point.
If you’re lazy, though, what folks get to hear may not be what you imagined your music would sound like, nor how you’d like it to sound. |
When Brian Wilson captured the amazing sounds that make up “Good Vibrations” for what many regard as The Beach Boys’ finest song and a pop music classic, he didn’t have a DAW - a Cubase, or Logic or Garageband or any one of dozens of other brands.
So when he recorded those astonishingly clear harmonies, those strange sounds, he used tape - 90 hours worth of tape actually - and it took six months, four studios and 20 versions before he was done.
What makes the clarity of the recording remarkable (the way you can hear every voice clearly, every instrument is defined, every drum beat is crystal clear) is that the original is a mono recording!
[Boy, I always told you this stereo nonsense will NEVER catch on!]
While I’m not suggesting any of us could create such a masterpiece, we get into the studio and try to create our own, and the process is very different! We fire up the PC/Mac and lay down the music and vocals. Our software makes the process so easy, many of us (I’m as guilty as the next man) are lured into laziness. We develop bad recording habits and we don’t take the care we should.
We don’t necessarily worry if the vocals are a touch muddy and a little off key. It needn’t “matter” if the drums sound dull and lifeless or if that distorted overdriven guitar drowns everything else out.
It doesn’t matter much because we can “fix it in the mix“.
It’s that phrase - “fix it in the mix” - which dogs most recording these days, and it angers me.
[Steady boy: take five.]
Don’t get me wrong: Wilson spent months mixing, remixing, re-recording and mixing again to get “Good Vibrations” just right. The difference was what they started with in those days - what they captured on tape was the final sound!
[Boy, you're making no sense at all.]
Back then the vocals were probably compressed before they were committed to tape to avoid unwanted transients and almost certainly EQ’d on the way to the tape as well! Today, we record them dry. Some producers put a little reverb on the singer’s monitor loop just so they get the “feel” of it for their performance’s sake. But it’s unlikely to be the reverb/delay which will be used when they “fix it in the mix“.
Guitars in the sixties were amped up and recorded with the distortion, drive, wah - whatever - committed to tape. Today, you can record the raw strings sound direct while using amp simulation on the monitor loop so the layer gets the right feel. But you likely use onboard amp models to shape the final sound. And so it goes on.
And back then, a bum note was a bum note and some wasted tape. It had to be redone. A missed word in a vocal meant re-recording the vocal. The same for a harmony. (My brother’s favoprite phrase when we got close to a good take in the early days was hugely insulting to a certain group of musicians. “It is, ” he would say, “close enough for folk.”)
That’s NOT true today. Slightly off key vocals can be corrected “in the box”. A missed word can be edited out and replaced by a good take: it CAN all be “put right in the mix”.
I said I was as guilty as the next man.
The long note circled in the picture (I run Samplitude right now) appears as the back end of one word about five times in the song. I did dozens of takes but hit the note right about twice and got the timing right no more than half-a-dozen times. I “fixed it in the mix”, using a good take to replace the end of all the bad ones.
My point is this: if you start out with the attitude that it can all be “put right in the mix” and so let laziness take over, the final mix may not be what you expected. One reason is you’ll be leaving the mixing team (even if that’s you) with less time, and less inclination, to polish and enhance your work.
And it is my contention that adding compression, or reverb - or editing a track - should all be done only to IMPROVE the song. Mixing should be an improving and enhancing process, NOT a repair job!
If you, or the mixing engineer get weighed down by complex edits, heavy duty pitch correction, desperate compression and reverb to save a flawed vocal, the desire to THEN improve the recording WILL be diminished.
Sop, for lazy, read lousy and for mixing, read added magic.
I don’t have all the answers, but next week, I’ll be explaining how I try to minimise turning the mixing process into an all out repair job!
[You finished boy? I want a beer!]
[P.S. Apologies for the interruptions. Grandpa says we should all record on wire machines from the early 1900s.]
f folks use keyboard shortcuts, they generally get to know them by heart and hitting the key combination is an automatic response from memory.
Songs in E would dip alarming, as low as C and then rise equally dramatically to F or above and all of this repeatedly giving the impression that the music was being played on a roller coaster or a storm-bound ship. We must have spent a relative fortune replacing those drive belts.
