Commercial level results at home

Some great stuff already been said here. I'll add my $0.02

could you build and run a professional F1/Nascar/Indy car at home by yourself, with just raw talent and figuring stuff out on the internet and watching youtube videos

It's not impossible! but you'd be up against teams of people with huge budgets with incredible levels of experience and specialization in every single aspect of the endeavor from component selection, to R&D, to winning sponsors to drilling for hours to change out the tires and fill the gas tank in seconds. You're trying to figure out how to do all of it on your own!

Same thing with music production. If you are shooting for commercial release level, you individually are up against a whole group of people who write songs for a living, Play and perform their instruments for a living, record in rooms designed by professional acousticians, mics and gear are all placed and set up by guys who do this for a living, the tracks are passed to professional mix engineers and from their to professional mastering engineers.
Can you do all of those multiple tasks and skills on your own at home in between working, raising a family, having friends and so on. It's not impossible but.......
Many times you will see cited one or two examples of people (like Imogen Heap) who have done it, but even if they really did all of it on their own they are still one or two examples among tens of thousands of releases that were made by a massive, professional group effort, and so are really the exceptions that prove the rule rather that proof that anyone can do it.

The main thing is to do the best you can and follow the advice already given in this thread about having solid material to start with and then recording the absolute best raw tracks that you can that sound as close to the finished results as possible. That really is "the Secret" to this game. all of the fancy plugins and gear is just icing but if the cake tastes like crap all the fancy icing in the world doesn't help.

Also don't forget to have fun with it cos that, really is what it should be all about and will come through in how the recordings sound

As always YMMV
 
I think one thing that I didn't fully appreciate was getting the best 'raw sounds' in. It makes sense now to see that you can't polish a turd. I believe I've got some really good material(doesn't everyone? :) ) and I'm just aching to get it as good as possible. Will defo link here to a track as soon as I post it. Thanks for everyones help. This is a really interesting topic with many views. Good stuff.
 
ste20man said:
Hi again,

I guess what I was really meaning was the clarity of each track and achieving a good balance overall.

If you have a drum, bass, single guitar and vocal track only, like rage against the machine say, you can hear in their recordings a clarity and separation of each instrument.

This might be due to the recording process, getting the best quality audio in, but I also have the feeling that their must be a large amount of credit due to the mixing process. Balancing, levels, panning.
Click to expand...

If the question is "Can you get fairly close to commercial quality at home?" then I'd say the answer is "Yes" - at least I sure hope it is! The final few percent will probably never be achievable at home, but I don't think that they're necessary for most purposes.

When you're up against hundreds of thousands of bucks worth of gear, and probably hundreds of years of combined playing and audio engineering experience then you'd have to be wildly optimistic to think you can match it all. But I believe that some of the home level gear is now good enough to get close enough. The part that's harder to get in a hurry is the knowledge and experience but, again, it's not totally out of range.

It's worth remembering that the end result can only be as good as the gear that the end listener hears it on. In most cases that means at best a half decent home stereo, but often a crummy car version, through computer speakers, in mono through a radio speaker, through a tiny ipod earbud, etc. The last word in perfection versus 90% there will probably be undetectable.

So what can you do?

Well, I'm only just finding out. But last week I downloaded 9 tracks from the original Queen recording of Don't Stop me Now Remix contest. I'd recommend grabbing them if they're still there. It was a real ear opener.

I dropped them into a Pro Tools session and took them round to a friends place. He's been a working muso for 40 years and has a studio in his back shed where he does a bit of commercial recording and mixing work as well as a bit of teaching. I told him it was one of my song projects and that he might notice that my vocals had improved a lot recently... :rolleyes: Obviously that didn't fool him, but what stunned me was how much he was able to do to the original tracks just by using his experience and some very impressive plug-ins. I'd assumed that the originals would be pretty much as good as they could be and that re-mixing would be mostly about adding new tracks, doing musical re-arangements etc. But no...

Clearly I'd misjudged the effect of the age of the recordings. He was able to make significant changes that were actually improvements to the audio. Tighter, crisper, punchier .... I don't know what all the right terms were (and there would be debate about whether they were all improvements or not) but the effect was very impressive. In about 10 minutes he'd rebuilt the bass and drums into a really punchy rhythm section that was - to my ears - a clear improvement over the original.

He was using similar gear to mine. So I think the challenge for me is to try and get some of his all-important knowledge to go with it. :)

Chris
 
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Hey Bro!

The guys that said it's the talent and the raw material are spot on. The dude downstairs from me runs a little studio and his equipment is mostly not much better than mine. Some of it is even worse than mine. But man, he's got an ear and a talent for recording and engineering. His recordings sound way better than mine (even when the people he records aren't as good musically as me). He's been doing it for years and had great instruction but also just has the knack for it.

I know how to play almost every Rush song on guitar and I don't sound like Alex Lifeson. No idea why. That's why he plays arenas and I don't.

On the other hand, I can take a cheap and nasty point and shoot and come up with better photos than people I know who have the entire library of Canon dSLR equipment, including a few people who run photo studios. So it's all good, Bro! Keep at it!
 
Bristol Posse said:
The main thing is to do the best you can and follow the advice already given in this thread about having solid material to start with and then recording the absolute best raw tracks that you can that sound as close to the finished results as possible. That really is "the Secret" to this game. all of the fancy plugins and gear is just icing but if the cake tastes like crap all the fancy icing in the world doesn't help.

Also don't forget to have fun with it cos that, really is what it should be all about and will come through in how the recordings sound
Click to expand...

Good post, and the analogy with bulding a race car was nice too. :)

I totally agree that you should try and get the basic track as good as you possibly can before you start fiddling around.

The scary thing is though that with modern software it's no longer quite true that "you can't polish a turd", as the old saying goes. Now you can completely dismantle the turd and build it back as a plate of meat and veg if you've got the skill, time and patience. You might not get any Michelin stars for the creation, but it could still look authentic. OK, maybe that wasn't such an attractive analogy, but..... :o

What are some of the usual things wrong with amateur's tracks (mine exhibit all the faults, so I have first hand experience of being bad...).

Timing off:

Not too hard to fix, just get the DAW to quantize it and put it all on the right lines. Sounding just a touch too perfect now? Apply a 'humaniser' to it, or adjust it (even manually if necessary) so that you're whatever fraction ahead of or behind the beat you like the feel of. The tools used to be relatively crude but, from what I read, they're now way more sophisticated and can give amazing results.

Sharp or flat in spots:

Pitch correction is bread and butter for software such as Melodyne. check this video out Melodyne They're not just talking about correcting a single note, but isolating a single note within a chord and changing it. That's freaky stuff, but it's fun to do, and definitely handy. :)

Wrong Notes:

Pitch correct (as above) or cut and paste from one that was right...

Poor general sound:

Once you have a track with all the right notes in the right place then there is a more or less endless choice of re-amping, adding effects, boosting, softening, etc, etc, etc.

Uninspired Playing:

Surely, this must be the last ace up the artist's sleeve? Well, you'd hope so. But once that audio gets onto the computer it's nothing but a row of ones and zeroes. The only difference to a computer between a masterpiece and a clunker is in the details of the arrangement of those ones and zeroes. And they can be manipulated by clever software in the right hands. Think what studios like Pixar can do with completely animated movies now. No humans in sight, but an incredible degree of apparent 'reality' in the movements and the emotional impact. The soundtrack scores for movies used to employ whole studio orchestras, but now they're often composed by one guy and a bunch of electronic gear.



With programs like the latest Band in a Box you can put songs together that were generated in a midi environment and played entirely by software, yet still feature 'real' playing. Some of the tracks on songs I've done that way used small bits of real audio, played by professional studio musicians, which the software then selected and matched to my composition. Whereas other tracks on the same song were done by driving a virtual instruments with a midi track (apologies if my terminology is a bit off...).

But is electronically generated or manipulated music good enough to 'fool' genuine musicians though? My guess is mostly not, but it depends on what has been done. Some treatments may fool most people, unless you are a player of the particular instrument and can pick things that are missing. But that's not really the important question for many people. Does it matter to the punters whether it was played by a musician with a bit of wood and some strings or by an audio engineer/composer with a box of electronic gadgetry? Mostly, the question is "Is it entertaining or not?".


There's certainly a place for genuine artistry in the playing (and I hope there always will be) but there can genuine creativity and artistry in the electronic domain too. I asked a friend, who has been a successful performing muso for 40 years, what he thought of it and he laughed and told me that in the modern recording industry competent studio musicians are a dime a dozen, but that really top flight studio engineers were highly prized.

I know that I'll never play like a pro, or have the skills of a recording/mixing pro either, but I still believe that by learning to combine some of both abilities I will be able to create stuff of moderately good quality.

Time will tell.... :D

Chris
 
I've been disagreeing for years with those that say you can't polish a turd because it's patently obvious that in the software you can. But it goes well beyond that. They were polishing turds in the 60s. Lacklustre, uninspired performances were being juiced up by technical wizards a long time ago in a galaxy far away.....
 
the problem with polishing a turd is that what you end up with, while shiny and sparkly, is still a turd. And it still smells like sh!t :D

I'd rather use all that great "polishing" equipment to polish something nice. So I'm finding while my writing, practicing, refining, practicing, rewriting, practicing, experimenting with sounds, practicing, trying out various mic placements, effects, voicings, practicing, deciding I like the song, practicing time is increasing exponentially, my output of finished songs is way down because I don't start serious recording until I have something pre polished and really rehearsed and ready to go that I've tried out at a few open mic sessions and so on so I really have it in my fingers and voice. So what I end up recording is hopefully a little more worthy of some elbow grease and polishing in the mix

Now I'm finding my recordings are moving up from crap to mediocre :p

It's a long and winding road for sure and I'm very happy with the journey to get a song done even if the results aren't up to that of a *good*commercial release
 
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grimtraveller said:
I've been disagreeing for years with those that say you can't polish a turd because it's patently obvious that in the software you can. But it goes well beyond that. They were polishing turds in the 60s. Lacklustre, uninspired performances were being juiced up by technical wizards a long time ago in a galaxy far away.....
Click to expand...

Maybe this forum needs a weekly "Polish The Turd" competition. :)

A freshly uploaded bundle of awfulness each week to test our skills at operating all the goodies and see just how far we can get with improvements. Having a few people working on the same tracks, uploading results, and sharing information on what they did might be a really good way to learn in a fairly lighthearted environment.

Cheers,

Chris
 
The problem with that, is finding musicians willing to call their stuff turds. I would be down with buffing some crap for fun, but who is going to give up their poopy tracks?
 
Bristol Posse said:
the problem with polishing a turd is that what you end up with, while shiny and sparkly, is still a turd. And it still smells like sh!t
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Possibly. My thing here is that turd polishing can be done. Whether it's a good thing is another debate. But it can be done and once the technical wizards have weaved their magic, many of us simply wouldn't be able to tell. I'm not saying that it's the way forward, just a way forward.
Thinking about it, many artists down the years have felt that what was put out in their name was pure shit, just dressed up. I'm often surprized because included there are many great songs. I just couldn't tell !
 
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