how much of your equipment/skill/time is only necessary for fixing musician issues?

  • Thread starter Thread starter antichef
  • Start date Start date
antichef

antichef

pornk rock
I've been reading this board for a while, and it's awesome there are so many frequent posters who are either professionals or folks who have a lot of experience with commercial or semi-commercial recording. I'm not one of them. I've learned a lot on this board, but also learned how much I still need to learn. I've also cobbled together a modest pro-sumer studio. At least for now, the only people I'm tracking are myself, family, and friends -- that is, musicians that I'm in the position to ask a lot from in terms of time, technique, and sound.

To those of you who do this commercially, this question has been bugging me: how much of your equipment, skill, and time is devoted to dealing with issues that would not exist if the musicians you tracked had optimal sound and technique, etc.? Put another way, how much of your equipment/skill wouldn't you need, and how much more time would you have if you could expect each musician to do a perfect(ish) performance with good mic technique, tuned drums, good amp sound, etc.?

The reason I'm asking is that I suspect that if I focus on the musicianship side of things (over which I have a lot of control for now), I can avoid some big expenses on the recording/mixing equipment side. Skills are nice no matter what, but I want to focus on what's most important, and I realize that good musicianship requires practice and time, but I suspect that more time is spent by engineers trying to fix problems than would have been spent by musicians practicing a little more in order to avoid them in the first place.
 
Let me approach this from a different angle --

One of the best sounding recordings -- let me rephrase that -- One of my favorite recordings I've made I tracked live.

Crap A&H GL2200 board, 57's (stereo guitar), 58 (vocals) M88 (kick) MD504's (toms) SM81's (OH), 2 BBE direct boxes (stereo bass).

"Cheap crappy stuff" as far as LIVE gear goes, much less recording gear.

Aux 3 was "Left" -- Aux 4 was "Right" -- Had about 3 minutes, wearing headphones, while in the room with the band, to set levels -- For the record, the hat was a bit hot and the bass could've been a little louder - But being in the room, along with the headphones, making sure the converters were running properly, etc., etc., made it a rather hectic 3 minutes.

Everything possible stacked against making a good recording, yet years later, it lives in my car, on my iPod, even on my motorcycle.

Did it take a certain amount of talent to capture it well? Yeah, I'll give myself a gentle pat on the back - mostly for not getting in the way, and being resourceful enough to use two open aux sends to "pan" the signal to make a single stereo track. But it was 5% "me" and 95% "band that had talent oozing out of them." These guys had their sound DOWN in a major way (which I expected anyway).

Hat too loud? Sure - But it's a freaking great sounding hat. So it's "loud" but not "distracting." Bass too soft? Definitely. But the guitar and bass sounds were so precisely complimentary, that you can still hear it very clearly and your brain "fills in the rest" very nicely.

Great gear makes great sound easier to capture and enhances its greatness. Good gear will pickup great sound just fine - as long as the person running it knows what to do - and what NOT to do with it. Lots of headroom, no preamps arguing about being pushed, the mix level probably never hitting above -15dBFS (ever) at the converter, etc.

That was one where the once the logistics (how am I going to create a mix and where is it going to go) were handled, it was as simple as staying out of the way and allowing a great band to be great.

And no doubt - These guys were all seasoned professionals, world-class, multi-platinum, yada, yada, yada. But that's where the difference really was.
 
Just to put it short, if the musician is a "pro" then I know that the session is gonna go easy and I can relax. But if I get a "beginner" then I know it's going to be a lot of hard work involved, as far as tutoring and mixing. So the better the musician knows their stuff the better everything runs all around.
 
For me, it is get the best sound (tone, volume etc...) to start with. I'd rather spend a few extra minutes working with a musician to "dial in" the sound they want before hitting the record button, rather than try to "fix it in the mix." Generally the tracks that require the least work after recording sound the best to me. I try to get people to just relax and play as well as they can. I get a real kick when someone (inexperienced with recording) hears a playback and has that look of, wow, did I really do that!
 
antichef said:
The reason I'm asking is that I suspect that if I focus on the musicianship side of things (over which I have a lot of control for now), I can avoid some big expenses on the recording/mixing equipment side.
Click to expand...
Absolutely true. Getting a perfect track in 3 takes instead of 10 will save a *lot* of studio time.

But, frankly, it hasn't done much to my work flow in the past, because usually (there are exceptions) those who walk into the studio prematurely are those with the least amount of money to spend, and can't afford 10 takes. Likewise, they can't afford as much fix-in-the-mix time either.

NOTE: This is why it's important to charge per-hour and not per-project. You charge these kind of guys per-project and they'll bleed you to death trying to make you do everything behind the glass that was originally supposed to be their job in front of it.

G.
 
The way I see it, the further towards the front of the process you can deal with something, the less time it will take and the better the results will be...

Rehearsal time is more beneficial than tracking time. Tracking time is more beneficial than editing and mixing time.

Get the sound right before you hit Record to save time EQing and processing while you mix.

Fix the arrangement in rehearsal to save time trying to separate clashing instruments in the mix.

Track the effects to separate tracks while recording so that you have the effects "in the bag" and ready to mix instead of waiting to mix time to do that. The decisions about the sound will be made up front when it is easier to try different options instead of fighting over them at mix time.
 
Great answers - thanks! I work in software, and there's a truism to the effect that the cost of fixing a bug increases by a factor of 10 at each step of the development life-cycle in which it's discovered in (e.g., developer notices it while coding and fixes = $1, automated unit testing finds it and developer gets notified, locates it and fixes it, automated testing is rerun and passes = $10, integration tester person finds it, documents it, notifies developer who recreates it, locates it, and fixes it and updates internal release notes and bug tracking database and hikes internal release number, then unit testing passes, integration testing passes and person notes that issue is resolved and maybe updates external release notes = $100, and so forth through beta testing, implementation, production support, etc.) - not surprising at all to hear a similar story here.

Any tasks/equipment that are devoted solely or almost solely to fixing problems that would have been better fixed during rehearsal? (Auto-tune being an obvious example, except in Cher's case - but who's to say she couldn't have eventually trained her voice to do that stuff :) )
 
99.99999999999999999999999999999999999%

Pro or amatuer, no human being is able through the laws of human biology or physics to play at the level of quantized, exact discrete chunks that the clients insist on for so many albums today
 
pipelineaudio said:
99.99999999999999999999999999999999999%

Pro or amatuer, no human being is able through the laws of human biology or physics to play at the level of quantized, exact discrete chunks that the clients insist on for so many albums today
Click to expand...
And the really cool part of that is that the same is true of the human engineer.

Right now there's someone working in their cave that is writing software that combines Har Bal and Melodyne with a mixing grid, and then overlays a few simple rules of LCR mixing, and whne that comes out we'll all be out of work. Not to mention music worth listening to.

Man, just think. No need to do anything whatsoever. The entire music production process from composition to mastering won't require any human intervention whatsoever.

Boy, I can't wait. I'm already working on a robot that'll get up and dance for me.

:D

G.
 
WTF are we going to do when robots replace us all?

Robots wont be serving us, itll be the other way around

scary stuff for sure
 
pipelineaudio said:
WTF are we going to do when robots replace us all?
Click to expand...
Let them answer all the "How do I get my recordings to sound like....?" questions from all the newer robots and see how THEY like it :D.

G.
 
Shit, if they spent a couple hours reading stuff like on Glen's site like I just did, it would be painless and quick, much like my first divorce...

On the other hand, most of them are the 'give me what I want, when I want it, and I am not going to work for it, you owe me' types... :rolleyes:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top