Equipment VS Technique!!! Everyone Should Read

[Todzilla]

I disagree with all of you. With good equipment, performance, song quality and musical chops are utterly irrelevant.













Well, I just figured somebody had to stick up for the other side.

 

[Monkey Allen]

I just shuffle up and go wang.

 

[Dogman]

I disagree with all of you. With good equipment, performance, song quality and musical chops are utterly irrelevant.













Well, I just figured somebody had to stick up for the other side.

Too bad this wasn't true...I could buy, not suck.

 

[bilco]

My best recordings to date were made on a a tired old Teac 3340, bouncing bass, drums and rhythm guitar from 3 tracks to 1 and then overdubbing 1 electric guitar for lead, a lead vocal and a harmony. We used a Peavey PA head, all dynamic mics and the reverb that was in the PA head.

I think it sounds better than everything I have done in PTLE so far because:

• The rhythm tracks were recorded head on without a click track. The takes just breathe because the drums, bass and rhythm guitar track went to tape at the same time. Bleed? You bet, but the band just cooked. This was in 1990. Fast Forward to 2006 - same rhythm section, overdubbing parts separately to a click track, scratch vocals and scratch acoustic guitar, it's clean, perfect isolation and separation....... absolutely NO MAGIC!
• Tape Compression - I swear, running my Pbass directly into the input of the 3340 sounds better than what I can get with my Pbass and a Sansamp directly into PTLE.
• Limited Choices = Not Overproduced - The guitar player had ONE track for all of his electric parts. It had to count. Now, with all of the playlists, 32 total tracks and no producer to say "STOP!" it turns into a midrange melee that I don't know how to EQ. They are all good parts and I'm just a guy who can't say no.

I get obsessed with the "it's PT, so in theory it COULD sound like a professional recording" syndrome. I obsess about gear when I know that it's like letting me drive a Formula race car at the Indy 500. Yes, I am a good driver and I can make it to work without dying, but it doesn't qualify me to get in that race car......

Decisions I've made:

I am going to record us live from now on, at least the rhythm tracks and try to rediscover the magic.

I agree with the "Use the home studio as a sketchpad" idea. When we are good and ready, we'll spend the $ in a real studio with a real engineer.

I will never spend more than $500 on any piece of home studio gear again. It is like trying to drive to work in the Formula 1 car, interesting, but...... I have a couple of good mics, PTLE on a Mac G4 and an RNP and some okay monitors. I think I am done spending money, at least for awhile.

Bill

 

[TragikRemix]

I'd go even further and say that the worse the gear one starts out on, the better the engineer one will turn out to be.
G.

thats bad news for me guess....

maybe i should go back to basics and use my cracked SONAR 2 and pentium 3 computer with onboard sound...

 

[Dani Pace]

As a recording engineer I have to admitt, I suck! Not that I'm really terrable but due to lack of experience and computer savy I'm not all that great, period. On the other hand, as a musician I'm pretty darn good, again not great but good. A point I'd like to make (strictly from a musician's point of view) is that I don't sound a lot different whether recorded in my humble home studio or in a pro studio (I've done both.) Something I've noticed is that while I can make a certain guitar sound really good, the same guitar in the hands of another guitarist may sound like crap. I have to wonder if this isn't true of recording gear also. To me, getting the truest recording is the important thing, no matter what kind or how fancy the gear. If a track is over processed ( as far too many are) the purity of the recording is lost. While all the processing gear is fun and if used correctly can make some musicians sound a little better, it's still good musicians on good instruments that lay the foundation for good recordings. Naturally good engineering on good recording gear completes the process. It dosen't matter if we are talking about instruments, amps, computers, or recording software, it's the people using them and their proficency that gets the desired result of good recordings.

 

[Yareek]

Well anybody with a good ear and willingness to sit down and learn how to record, engineer, mix could probably make a good recording. I'd like to think that with a Portastudio and a Quadraverb could make a good recording.

Trick is, most people want to make GREAT recordings...and that requires a GREAT ear, GREAT technique and knowledge, a GREAT room, and a GREAT monitoring chain.

Some of my favorite readings of late have been techniques...not equipment reviews or plugins, but techniques. Things like how people approach a mix, parallel compression, MIKING techniques, creative drum muffling and mixing, goofy reverb tricks, that's interesting.

What I'd LOVE to chew on would be a book of old analog guys mixing techniques and philosophies. That's more fun than reading about the gear. Because it gets you thinking and not wanting.

 

[travelin travis]

What I'd LOVE to chew on would be a book of old analog guys mixing techniques and philosophies. That's more fun than reading about the gear. Because it gets you thinking and not wanting.

This was a fun book to read when I was using a four track.

 

[cusebassman]

It would seem you need a nice balance of both working equipment (not the best or worst, necessarily, but what you can navigate and use well), and talent / playing ability. A lot of people here were able to get decent recordings on equipment that, complete, cost what? A couple hundred bucks tops? And then there are people who get a great sound out of far more expensive equipment.

In both cases, talent was also a factor. Sure, people have also gotten terrible sounding recordings out of both levels of equipment, mainly because they were inexperienced at those particular tools. Once I learned a decent bit by working with my little 4-track cassette recorder, years later I moved up to an 8-track digital tape system with a little Behringer board and some MXL mics... now I've expanded it to 24 tracks (chained tape machines), with a Yamaha board, and have started buying much nicer mics and pres, and other outboard equipment.

While my playing style is roughly the same as it was when I first started with the 8-track setup about 2 years ago, the recording quality has increased significantly... mainly in the lowering of the noise floor, since better mics and pres, and moving up from a Behringer mixer, has gotten rid of a lot of otherwise noisy components. So yea, better recording gear has helped a decent bit, but I still got good stuff out of the old setup... it just had more... "character"