Editing, comping, cleaning up, shaping, controlling dynamic range and whatever else you have to do to get ur vocals to sound like they belong..2 minutes...u sir are a beast...or work wiht some amazing talent, with a shit load of very topnotch gear in ur house.
The gear (while indeed nice) has little to do with it. Some of the better recordings I've ever made were done on very (VERY) humble gear. What most studios would consider "junk" in many cases. Several were made live to two-track. There's a wonderful freedom to that sometimes... You have to commit. You have to play it safe and get it right, period. There's not enough rope to hang yourself with.
You can kill yourself over micro-polishing recordings for weeks. Been there too. But I'd rather just get it right during tracking. That's 90% up to the talent. Get a bunch of guys on the right side of the mics that really have their sh*t together and the job is simply to capture what happens.
I was put under the gun a few years ago - I was thrown behind the FOH board for one of my freaking heros. He leaned in and said "Hey - Can you record this?" So I called the wife and had her bring me
my Apogee MiniMe and my laptop.
I had around three minutes to make a stereo mix from post-fade aux sends (3 was L, 4 was R - all panning was adjusted by the relationships of those two aux mixes. No pan knobs). SM57s, MD504s, BBE direct boxes, SM81 OH's - Typical live fare - into a $2500 A&H GL2200 console. A decent enough board - But pretty noisy with "reasonable" preamps (nothing like RNP's or what not). Not the board you'd want in a recording situation.
No monitors - Had to do the mix *in the auditorium*
with headphones. After the three minutes, I had a quick chance to listen to the 30 second snippet I made (again, with headphones) and make gross adjustments to whatever I could.
Probably the worst recording scenario I could ever put myself in.
The recording on the other hand -- The hat is a bit hot (mostly due to how amazingly loud the hat was in the monitors). The bass is a bit shy (but wow, it was loud in the room) - But it
sounds fine. NO compression, no EQ, no additional effects other than a little reverb (although the guitarist was running a Bradshaw rig). And sure - It sounded a little anemic at first but then I had a chance to run it through the garden here and spice it up a bit.
But it's just a classic example of what happens when the talent actually has talent. Nothin' to it. Sure, the bass is shy. But it's clear, you can hear it. It'd be fine if it was too loud also. Sure the hat is too hot. But it's a freaking great sounding hat played by a guy who knows how to hit it. Those anomalies don't "bug you" when you crank it up - They don't ruin the mix.
But it's just like any other mix also - If you can't just bring the faders up to around unity and have a reasonable resemblance to a decent mix, you should have a long talk with the tracking guy.
Talent from the talent is them knowing what sounds good. Talent from the engineering perspective can be as complicated as you want to make it, or as simple as capturing it as best you can and just getting out of the way.
(EDIT) I'll probably take this down quickly, but here's a snippet of snippets of the recording in question:
http://www.massivemastering.com/special/liverecording.m3u Nothing with vocals on it (I really don't want to give it away if you know what I mean) but the vocals sounded fantastic. Again, with no compression or EQ, through a 58, straight into the A&H's preamps. Surprisingly, by a guy without an awful lot of raw vocal talent. But again, he fit the suit sound-wise.
And for the record (no pun intended), it was recorded at 44.1kHz/24-bit, without the
*summed* signal ever peaking above -20dBFS (meaning that if it were multi-tracked, it's very likely that no one signal would've ever hit above -32 or -30dBFS. Ever).
