The sound is really professional, even more so on this one than the others you have uploaded. How do you do that? It's a mystery to me because you don't seem to use a lot of processing (EQ, compression etc). Do you have tons of acoustic treatment? Is it all mic placement and mixing technique? Where exactly do you place your 57's on the speakers? Close-mic? And how the fuck are you able to crank those Marshalls without disturbing the whole neighborhood? I can barely even play at TV-volumes without disturbing anyone. I've got a drumset too, but there's no way I could play it due to neighboors. Do you live in a bunkers?
Lol. Thanks a lot man. Are those rhetorical questions? I'll try to answer anyway while my coffee kicks in because I got nothing else to do right now....
I do not live in a bunker. I live in a brick house in a nice quiet (besides me) suburban Houston neighborhood. I can be pretty damn loud and not disturb anyone. Or maybe I do, but in ten years of living here no one's complained. I'm not loud at odd hours though. I'm only loud during daylight hours. My room is treated pretty well. I'm just like most home recorders in that I track and mix in the same room. The mixing aspect is more important to me, so while my room isn't ideal for tracking live, it's not totally terrible, and it's quite good for mixing. I track very dry. I'm not a fan of room mics and stuff, and it works out because my room is super dry anyway. I do have a large, very high ceiling entryway in my house, and it's right outside of my little man-cave "studio", so when I do want that big room sound, I just roll my shit out there for a little bit.
But that's only part of it because I spend a great deal of time, and I can't stress this enough, I spend a great deal of time and effort and money on really good gear and having it sound bad ass before the sound even hits a microphone. Tracking and mixing is pretty damn easy when you're dealing with good sounds to begin with. I know it's cliche and vague, but that's really all there is to it. Most home recordings would be vastly improved if the creator used better sounds to begin with. There was one dude in here pretty recently, I can't remember who, and he had a bad ass guitar sound. Pretty overdriven, but a really nice and clean capture. It sounded pretty awesome to me. And if I remember correctly, it was just one guitar track. His band recorded live, one guitar, one bass, and drums. Vocals overdubbed later. Sounded awesome. So I asked him, "Hey what's your guitar setup?" He answered, and not at all to my surprise, it was if I recall correctly a P-90 Les Paul into a Marshall DSL into a 1960 cab with a single 57 out front. Bam. Simple. Duh! No tricks, no gimmicks, no stupid complicated tracking or mixing techniques. Just a good sound hitting a microphone.
So yeah, for me, I try for good sounds. My mic placements are simple. I use one mic on one speaker (close mic, dustcap/cone junction or just outside the dustcap is my go-to spot). One mic on each drum. Spaced pair overheads. I'm not reinventing the wheel. My process is relatively caveman. I don't have a mixing technique. I just mix. Maybe that sounds smug and douchey? I don't know how else to describe it. There is no technique. I just move faders and panners until I like it. If I feel it needs some EQ or compression or reverb or whatever, I do it. I don't follow any rules, but I don't do things to the mix just because I can either. I feel that too many home recorders way overcook their mixes.
Going back to the mixing environment thing, I think people just don't have good listening environments and they use a lot of DAW processes just because they can. That's just my opinion based off what I read and hear at this site alone. Look at how many mixes pop up in here squashed to hell, shitty low end, harsh high end, just sounding bad. Then you ask them wtf happened, and they describe a fucking process of side chaning and multi-band compressing and all sorts of other ridiculous DAW tricks that are totally unnecessary. They do it because they think they're supposed to, and more simply, because they can. Look at how many questions get asked like "why does my guitar sound bad?" Then you probe further, and they describe going line out from their modeling amp, into a DI, into the DAW, back out to a stompbox, back in to a plug-in, copy-paste-pan-shift "for thickness", and it sounds shitty. Duh. Just mic your fucking speaker, you fucking dumbass. Or one of my recent favorites "How do I record a bass guitar? I don't have a bass". Buy a fucking bass, you moron. Common sense has left humanity because technology has made everything too easy. Too many options has killed the basic fundamentals. I'm not an analog purist by any means. Fuck analog. There's nothing worse than an analog purist. I hope they all die in a toxic tape fire. Okay, not really, but yeah, really. But they do have a point when they complain about how DAWs have enabled any idiot to record his music. I make that same complaint regularly. There's very little intelligence in it anymore. I know very well that no one is born knowing how to record music. I get that, but a little common sense goes a long way. I started out with a 4-track cassette recorder, and back then I had one shot to do it right or do it all over. I carried that over to digital.
Wow, okay, end of rant. I'm going running.