blah blah blah

cjacek said:
Don't you mean "cjacek" ? :eek: :D ;)
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I was wondering that myself, seeing I haven't actually had a chance to listen to the tracks and was just talking really generally.... :o
 
wait, you live in gainesville? home of the infamous goldentone studios? thats a tough cookie to beat.

to me it sounds like your drum tracks need a lot of work. compression would really help em out. guitars could go for being a bit less distorted and then double tracked. theres lots of little things you can do to improve the sound, and i think taking your time on this new record will smooth them out.
 
most of the studios seem to be really cool..I'm not competing against rob in any way. there is some really good local stuff being done. I'm lucky. For a town of only 150,000, there are over 250 bands, and at least 10 venues.
 
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robs been absolutely crucial in the florida punk scene. hes still charging dirt cheap rates and he basically molded the entire dirty drunk gainesville punk sound. its a great city, too bad i have a warrant out for my arrest there.
 
Dont feel bad about not being able get mixes to stand up.

Here is a small part of a song I did on a Fostex E 16 that just eats me up cause i cant go back and do it again. :( There are a ton of things I wish I could fix on this.

Go to this page and click on the E16 thing in the top left corner of the page.

http://mysite.verizon.net/resopl6x/
 
Herm said:
Dont feel bad about not being able get mixes to stand up.

Here is a small part of a song I did on a Fostex E 16 that just eats me up cause i cant go back and do it again. :( There are a ton of things I wish I could fix on this.

Go to this page and click on the E16 thing in the top left corner of the page.

http://mysite.verizon.net/resopl6x/
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sounds as good as most local studios. nice job. Its not about feeling bad though. There is no room for feelings here. only emprical data!

plus from here on out I am really not going to have the luxury of even wanting to go back and change it. from now on its for release and I hope to eventually get distribution for these releases so the fun time is over. shit, I'm even considering just scrapping it all and going to a real studio. ....nah

hey herm...did you ever get your money back from UPS??
 
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well..here's some data: www.yoyoriot.com . that's my other band, where I do the 2-piece thing. those tracks were recorded to a layla 20 and mixed ITB. much better quality, IMO. recorded live, including vocals (re-15). just for a reference all of the songs for both bands are based on improvisations (including the lyrics). the room on the yo yo riot recording had wood floors and just sounded nicer. of course things open up when there's no bass. I am looking forward to taking my recordings to the next level with your help!
 
Out of interest, are the MP3 samples for No Pronto excerpts, or is 'Tired' really only one minute fourteen seconds long?
 
FALKEN said:
blah blah. I hate posting a boring thread. so go ahead and put negative rep points with some cursing for good measure. this thread is going to be about how I can get the most of my 1/2" setup, for my next project.

I recorded a demo for my band on my fostex E-16, and it came out pretty damn good. It got played on the radio and next to what all the other local studios are putting out, it didn't stand up. I mean, its all about the music and I sincerely believe that the band is the best music on my local show, and our performance on the recording was great. but it sonically did not stand up.

I have never been in a real recording studio.

I have been home recording for 10 years, since I was about 14.

and I always had this notion that I could out-do the local studios. Even when my only mic was a 57.

well, I tried that, and it didn't work. So I have been building my studio. I now have a fully analog system, including a tascam 32 mixdown reel. A nice low-priced mixer, low-priced monitors, and a 20VU rack full of mid-range pres and compressors. I have a collection of mics that rival any local studio. My instruments and amps are better than any local studios. I have built a ton of acoustic treatment to treat my control room and made enough gobos to isolate and treat everything in the live room (except the ceiling-i'm renting).

And I've probably made over 100 "CD's" of my own stuff over the last 10 years. live shows, improvisations, tracked albums, beats, etc. etc.

I am determined. My next project is going to be an LP. so, about 30 minutes of music. I am going to have it pressed to vinyl (hence the fully analog system) and CDs. My last recording I was going to have pressed to CD in order to get gigs but I'm just not happy enough with the sound. I am playing loud ass rock music. Not in the commercial vein, either. I am trying to do something "different", yet the same, always the same, but old and new at the same time. anti-commercial, however. therein lies the conundrum. while the music is anti-commercial, and I am definitely against commercialized production techniques, I want my recordings to be as Hi-Fi as possible. I want to out-Fi them. I think digital recordings for the most part suck. And I have been recording digitally for the last 6 years. And it just doens't sit right. Obviously there are exceptions to this and yada yada I've even made some decent digital recordings myself.

Thats just sort of the problem. My band thinks the digital ones sound better. Obviously I disagree but on some level they are right. It all depends on how much you weigh the different characteristics of each. I tend to find the fatigue of digital unacceptable, which means I must accept the loss of clarity I am getting now.

Only It shouldn't be that way. Analog recordings should be MORE clear. So what am I doing wrong??


My current hypothesis is that its the NR. So I believe I am going to use GP9 on the next one, and boot the NR. I think this will give me a higher fidelity. I'm not going to really set my machine up for it. I don't use it enough to consider the additional wear an issue. The bias for GP9 isn't really that far off. And if I try to rebias the machine, I'll probably do more damage than good. No doubt I'll screw it up somehow. 16 channels and only 2 heads.

I've tried GP9 before, and there is some hiss... but the saturation is 100% better and the clarity is restored. it sounds better. There is a strange quality to the sound but after some experimentation I think it will be better than before. but there is still the issue of hiss.

maybe a ME could clean that up.

any thoughts on any of this are welcome. I know its the same old shit, but at least I've tried to add a little more than that. I am going to invest in a top-quality dual preamp and a top-quality compressor. After that, I could still blame my cables, my cheap monitors, my cheap mixer, my 1/2" machine, or my skills. Those are the only things left. It gets expensive from there on out. Plus I don't have the engineering skills to upgrade my machine or mixer. But I can't afford this time to make a recording I am not going to use. I have to make a good one this time. My band's future will depend on it. I posted this here because I found this site looking for info on reel-2-reel's, and it has been a better resource than I have ever imagined.
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Imagine, a 1/2 ' 16 track that can't compete with 2" pro stuff?

who could have ever believed.

All kidding aside, you are going to need great rooms, great outboard equipment and tons of experience to come close to a pro studio.

If your band's future REALLY depends on pro sound, then, go to a pro studio and forget the home recording stuff. You cannot do both and be a success.
 
jpmorris said:
Out of interest, are the MP3 samples for No Pronto excerpts, or is 'Tired' really only one minute fourteen seconds long?
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All of the songs are that long. its my pop vs anti pop outlook. there's no sense of verse, bridge, and chorus, yet still the song has a beginning and ending and something in the middle. its short like peoples attention spans these days. to the point. like poetry. cram as much goodness into as small of a space as you can. yes, these are the entire songs.
 
MCI2424 said:
Imagine, a 1/2 ' 16 track that can't compete with 2" pro stuff?

who could have ever believed.

All kidding aside, you are going to need great rooms, great outboard equipment and tons of experience to come close to a pro studio.

If your band's future REALLY depends on pro sound, then, go to a pro studio and forget the home recording stuff. You cannot do both and be a success.
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I will take this into consideration.

it sort of reminds me of skateboarding companies. the ones that are marketing anti-marketing. like "produced" punk rock. I dont want to turn out like that... but I dont want to sound like a bunch of assholes in their garage just putzing around either.
 
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Hey Falken,

I'm getting a sense that you may be chewing on an interesting problem: the difference between the attitude of your music and the attitude of your production. Forgive my use of the word "attitude"- I don't mean it in a negative way, but couldn't think of a better word.

You and your band aren't satisfied with the level of production you're getting while at the same time not wanting to sound TOO produced and need a way to strike a balance.

My guess is that if you keep as much of your recording process live while refining your techniques to get more separation and clarity in your mix you'll have what you want. I don't think its the 1/2" 16 format that your weakest link at the moment, though it might be if its not in good shape.

MCI2424 is right about a good room, equipment and skills. My guess is that you'll get the most reward for your efforts by focusing first on your room and your skills. If you don't want to sound like "assholes in their" garage... you'll have to find a way to make your recording room sound like something other than a garage.

Take care,
Chris
 
FALKEN said:
All of the songs are that long. its my pop vs anti pop outlook. there's no sense of verse, bridge, and chorus, yet still the song has a beginning and ending and something in the middle. its short like peoples attention spans these days. to the point. like poetry. cram as much goodness into as small of a space as you can. yes, these are the entire songs.
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Yes, well my personal taste is the longer the better, as long as it's kept interesting, although as you approach 20 minutes, songs tend to split into separate chunks anyway.

For what it's worth, I think 'Tired' is almost perfect. Make it three times longer and it would be :)
 
In order of importance to get a "pro" sound:

1. Skills at recording and as a musician
2. Good sounding rooms
3. Recording gear

Without #1 or it lacking in any way, the rest means absolutely nothing. Sadly, most home recordists have not yet mastered the first, to any significant degree. More sad is they think they'll compensate by following possibly damaging advice from those who would like to believe that anything that is not made for the "pro" industry, is not worth shit. Here's the deal: If you've got #1 in spades and have good sounding and treated rooms, be it with heavy blankets and some ingenuity, you CAN sound "pro" with the so called "semi-pro" gear. Let no body tell you different.

~Daniel
 
really? I would have thought that good sounding rooms was the least important, considering all the close mic'ing of the drums...

And I would say that "skill as a musician" and "skill as a recordist" are two TOTALLY different things.
 
IMHO, for somebody that wants to "pro" results in the analog domain, I think the biggest roadblock is the effects processing. Modern "pro" stuff is usually EQ'ed to hell and back to get the seperation between the instruments, which is much easier to do when you can open as many instances of a parametric EQ as your CPU can handle... Then there is the compression, digital reverbs, and god knows what else. Its gonna be hard for a home recordist to buy up all the outboard gear that you're gonna need to get THAT MUCH CONTROL over your sound.

I really think that tracking to tape, then dumping to the PC to mix is the way to go if you're on a budget.
 
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Hi_Flyer said:
Its gonna be hard for a home recordist to buy up all the outboard gear that you're gonna need to get THAT MUCH CONTROL over your sound.
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It's gonna take some prior planning and educated guessing but even if you have 1 comp and effects unit to record a bunch of instruments and vocals with, you can "mix as you go". It can be done.

~Daniel
 
Hi_Flyer said:
I would have thought that good sounding rooms was the least important, considering all the close mic'ing of the drums...
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Sure, you could close mic instruments but some things are gonna sound bad with mics too close to the source, that has to be eq'd to hell to get it to sound right and even then it won't sound "natural". Let's take lead vocals, for example, and note that these are usually not close mic'd and if you've got terrible reverb in your room, it ain't gonna sound good. And "good sounding rooms" can also mean to make them "dead" and reverb added later. Or, with drums, for example, one can use sampled drums, played in real time, to take room sound out of the equation entirely and add reverb later. I think that room sound, whether dead or otherwise, makes a big difference, bigger than the difference between pro and semi-pro gear.

And I would say that "skill as a musician" and "skill as a recordist" are two TOTALLY different things.
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Yes, they are. I know. Musician and Audio Engineer.

~Daniel
 
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