hobbestheprince said:
Anyone have any cool tricks they almost ALWAYS employ in recording and mixing?
tricks? not really. techniques? absolutely.
tracking:
i almost always use 2 mics when recording a vocal, usually one condenser and one dynamic. sometimes they're next to each other, and sometimes one is a good distance behind the other. they always capture different "sounds"--sometimes they're very complimentary (and sometimes it doesn't work at all). often the "far" mic is essentially a room mic.
speaking of which--room mics are critical to giving a sense of "space" or depth to a track. we usually close-mic just about everything these days.....a room mic on an amp (or having one in close and one a couple feet back) can really open up the sound of the guitar, etc.
mixing:
i always start a mix in mono. yes, i pan things while in mono. if you can get the mix *happenin* in mono, when you switch over to stereo it'll REALLY kick.
mults, mults, mults. rarely do i apply an effect (especially a radical one) to the track itself. i always mult it out to another channel and effect that one instead. that way i can bring in as much or little of the effected track as needed, and leave the "main" track dry.
i *always* use delays on vocals (and on everything, really). they're usually timed to a fraction of the BPM (maybe an 1/8 or 1/4 note), and very subtle. you don't necessarily hear them, but you miss them when they're not there. on guitars, i'll get creative with the panning of the delays--if the guitar is panned right, the delay will be panned left, etc. it's fun to radically eq and compress the delays (and reverbs for that matter)....and it's fun to send the delay to one side with a reverb sent to the other side, and the unaffected track in the middle.
parallel compression is your friend. mult out the vocal track to another channel or two. compress the snot out of one of them and bring it up under the "main" vocal track. this allows you to have a nice, tight vocal sound without the overall sound being overly compressed. this is useful for a number of things, not just vocals. try it on kick and bass.
distortion is your other friend. a little distortion on a vocal (or bass, etc) track can help it sit in the mix a little better. again, mults are great for this.
and lastly, i'll have a separate reverb set aside for "glue" that i'll send an aux from all of the "important" tracks to--vocals, snare, guitars, etc. this may not be the "main" vocal reverb, but sending a vocal mult to it helps to put all of the main focal points of the song in the same sonic space.
IMO, the point to adding effects isn't so much that the listener hears them and says "cool vocal effect".....it's that the effect makes the overall mix better. often it makes it deeper or wider, and my general goal is that when the effect isn't there, you miss whatever contribution the effect gave to the overall mix.
....as always, YMMV....
cheers,
wade
If he boings her every night, then lets do the math: 17000/365 = 46.57 years. 
Holy shit man. Where does Mutt get any time to record/mix if he's in her panties that much. No, I think you might have streched it just a little (and maybe he did too if he's doing her that much lol) 
