How do I get a thicker heartier sound?

G

gongli

New member
When I compare my recordings to an award winning engineer's work, mine is thine and small sounding.
Are the gears giving me this, or perhaps mixing technique?

I am using US-1800 Tascam interface, Studio Projects microphones C1 and C4, with Epic reverb.
His is apple computer based system with $35,000 effects hardware Lexicon, with Schoeps and Neumann U87 mics.

Any light on this problem will be greatly appreciated...

Oh, and I record classical music - cello with piano accompaniment.

Thank you sincerely, and have a great one everyone !
:D
 
Experience. That's the key word. He would probably get similar results using your gear.
It's more then gear and the mixing.
The recording process is a whole series of little and not so little steps where everything is done right and with care.

Mixing is only one of the last steps where everything gets blended together.

One can only mix what is there in the first place.

If you know this person, maybe you could ask if he'd let you help him set up mics sometime. A lot can be learned from just that.
 
gongli said:
When I compare my recordings to an award winning engineer's work, mine is thine and small sounding.
Are the gears giving me this, or perhaps mixing technique?

I am using US-1800 Tascam interface, Studio Projects microphones C1 and C4, with Epic reverb.
His is apple computer based system with $35,000 effects hardware Lexicon, with Schoeps and Neumann U87 mics.

Any light on this problem will be greatly appreciated...

Oh, and I record classical music - cello with piano accompaniment.

Thank you sincerely, and have a great one everyone !
:D
Click to expand...

You're recording exactly the same player(s) / instrument / room as the professional aren't you? So there's a reasonable basis for comparison.
 
Yes exactly the same artist / song, and mine is thin and not as satisfying as the pros...
That is a good point - I will ask him if he would give me pointers - he is a super nice humble guy, considering he won an academic award for classical recording engineer !
 
Let's not forget the source and the space here...

Put a Strad or a Lupot (well, nice ones - There are "meh" sounding Strads and Lupots) in a "meh" sounding space and you're going to get a "meh" sounding recording limited by the space.

Put a Roth or a Yamaha in room two at Abbey Road and also get a "meh" sounding recording limited by the source.

Put the Lupot in room two -- Now you're limited by the gear. And you're always limited by the engineer's ears and the monitoring chain.

But in basically every case - the source and the space (which is really just an extension of the source) are going to be 95% of the recording.
 
Some of it could be in the musical arrangement. If you write the song to have a thick hearty sound, then the mix will not have too hard of a time going there. Remember that the notes being played create waveforms that interact with each other as you mix them together just as much as what effects you use.
 
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