Help on Getting "OOMPF" into tracks?

[rpc9943]

Hi guys, im having problems and no one on the syntrillium website is really helping so im going to paste it in here :P

Hey all

It's me Ron Cavagnaro, i have a probably oft-asked question...

Most of my recordings have a thin feeling to it all, and ive tried compression, eq, etc and i really cant get a punchy professional sound, everyone says it sounds early 90's... Well im wondering could this be because of the mics i use? I am currently using all I have which says "AKG D 190 ES 200 OHM MADE IN AUSTRIA"... I think its a multi-directional mic, and its plugged directly into my livedrive extension (for my SBLIVE)... Most of my older recordings I have used noise reduction... But still sounding thin... No matter how i normalize things, or EQ things up, it still sounds "early 90's" to everyone i ask. So what should I do about this? Ive heard lots of other cool edit pro users material and it sounds so loud it almost breaks my speakers compared to what Ive been producing. Is it that they sent their material out to be mastered? I dont even know what to say about this. Please any suggestions? Are there ways I should use the frequency statistics to fix things? I really would like technique. I feel that I have a good recording ear and producing ear, but i want to produce THICK sounds. Most of the material ive been producing for musicians here have been in a very acoustic guitar-centered solo songwriter arena. I know lots of tricks and whatnot but i never can reach that THICK sound.

Tips PLEASE?

Ron Cavagnaro

[dobro]

1 Good mics, yeah. A good mic is first and foremost. A good mic captures more of the sound that's there, and you get a fuller, smoother sound.

2 For loudness: record the signal hot without clipping, then in the mix, compress it, boosting the volume afterward. If you're doing singer-songwriter stuff, then you probably don't want to compress it too much, because that sort of music typically has a greater dynamic range than pop and metal. When you've got the mix where you like, you can normalize the whole mix, which gets it as loud as it can get without clipping.

3 For body: try doubling the tracks. Use two mics on the guitar, for example, and then separate the two tracks you get, maybe a bit, or maybe across the whole stereo field if it's a simple mix. Thing is, when you double tracks, you have to get the two tracks sounding *different*. That's why I use two mics. Other people EQ the tracks differently and/or use different delay or reverb. Which brings me to: reverb. It adds space to the sound.

Now, if this isn't a Cool Edit issue, I'm going to shift this thread over to the mixing clinic, all right?