ideas, tricks, and pure magic!!!

J

Jacobi1211

New member
okay, well...

i thought it would be cool if we had a thread that everyone can come to and read good ideas and tricks and such to try at home while recording. I'm sure there are plenty of you who have ideas... it's understandable if there are some that you would like to keep to yourself. after all, they are your tricks. but!!! if anyone has anything... let's get down to business!!!

i like homerecording because of all the great people and great ideas that are shared... this should make it a little easier to grab hold of these ideas instead of going..."okay, i'm pretty sure i saw it in this thread... wait... this one??? shit, i don't know!!!"

thanks to everyone here, and hope this gets interesting fast!!!

one million dollars to the first cat to reply!!! (just kiddin'!!! unless you wanna give me a million dollars???)

Jacob
 
Ugh You again!!!! :mad:

Nah only messing mate.

I guess over the years i have tried loads of different stuff to try and make interesting, or quirky sounds to build up my arsenal of tricks. To be fair most of these were really shit or just didnt work on the session or song. One of my favourites that i was busting to pull out on a session involved climing up on a step ladder above the drum kit and swinging a mic in a circular motion around the kit. I finally got to use it on a session, of course i told the band "hey ive got an idea that will make this track come alive" The result.....Absolutely Sickening.
This hasnt put me off trying stuff out. I guess most of my ideas come from necessity, for instance if you are in a recording situation and you are pretty much up against it in terms of your equipment. I always like to use natural reverb, my last studio was in an old mill and it was great for creating epic sounds.
Just keep on coming up with ideas and try them out, because who knows one day one of those ideas might work and you may even find a trademark sound in the process.
 
I just posted this elsewhere in response to a question regarding ambience:

"I get good ambience from the bathroom that neighbors the tracking room. I place my AT4050, in omni mode, suspended over the bath tub. Just don't try it after a steamy shower... or during! :eek:"

It sounds huge when mixed with the initial sound of the other mics in the tracking room. I can't wait to post the songs I've been working on. I think you'll all be proud of me. :D
 
Another one that i have tried. This one actually worked for me. By the way i stole this idea off the engineer for Bruce springsteen's "the River" in an article i read in Mix online. Wasnt sure how he did it bit heres my version.

If you have a singer that plays guitar at the same time, particularly acoustic, this should work for ya. The problem is that if you are trying to capture both it is very hard sometimes to work with the bleed from the mics, particularly if you are then gonna over dub other stuff and work with panning on the guitar track. So what worked for me was to make a perspex divider between the guitar and the voice. I got heavy, see through perspex wide enough to fit a guitar lenth and depth ways, then i made a simple structure witha load of telephone directorys layin about. Kind of looked like a really high table. Then all the guitarist did was move into position, with his guitar under the "table" and his head above. It was kinda awkward, but it did help in the separation of the tracks, plus the guitarist was able to see his guitar.
 
that's a really good idea!!! i've often pondered how i would isolate the guitar from vocals/vice versa when in this situation. the transparency of the perspex is a great idea!!! thanks for sharing!!!

Jacob
 
Ok, then how about the Botrill Drum technique.

This is a tid bit as per information from David Botrill (Tool, Coheed and Cambria).

You need a good, large room for this to really take good effect.


Basically, to get this ginormus drum sound:


-Set up your drums as normal

-Mics set up as you usually would, except you would need a good ambient mic set up. (stereo is fine...for example, a matched pair of C414s or Royer Ribbons....XY, spread pair,....whatever your preference.)


-You take a single PA speaker and mount it above and behind the drummers head, facing foward.


You route the outputs (console) of your kick, snare and toms to a mono out which will feed the PA.

You EQ the PA to match or enhance the natural sound of the kit, then simply hit record.

You capture a somewhat unique perspective on the drums, and depending on how good the room sounds, so will the drums.
 
I've had really good experiences with miking a guitar cab, or whatever instrument you're recording, as normal... but setting up another dynamic mic whatever distance away, in the open. Say 10 feet pointed in the general direction of your sound source, at approximately the same height. Mix this "open" mic low in the mix and you get a really really nice natural reverb sound that works pretty much regardless of the room size or type. Of course some rooms work better than others, but since the "verb" is lower in the mix and you can adjust it, it works way better than just a single mic in the open room.


Also, this one is kind of a no-brainer for some folks, but should be stated anyway: Use as many head/cab combinations as you've got. It will vary the sound of your guitar and essentially make the recording sound more organic and less stale. Organic = Good.
 
that's a very cool idea about the drums... but have you not found that the bleed into the other mics is less than desirable??? i guess that's all part of what makes it so huge sounding!!! that's really awesome!!! i guess if it was high enough it wouldn't even bleed too awefully much anyway. thanks a lot!!!

i wish i had more guitar amps... :( so far though it has helped me to work with what i have, and if i can make that sound good... geezzz i'm pretty proud of myself... haha!!! i'm a poor kid.

i know many of you have heard of this, but I use a 12" sub (originally bought for a car audio system) and mounted it inside of an unused 12" tom. this occured to me while in the shower one day (that's where i typicallly am in my deepest stage of thought) that by all means of practicallity, a 12" speaker should mount perfectly inside of a 12" tom... and look really freaking cool in front of the kick drum. plus the tom matched my drummers kit, so that's exciting.

what i did was this:

cliped the female end off of a XLR cable. once these wires are exposed, i reversed the polarity by just soldering the negative lead of the cable to the positive terminal of the speaker, and the positive lead of the cable to the negative terminal of the speaker. simple eye??? exactly my reason for doing it!!!

then, i ran the cable though the air hole (i'm not very drum salvy) on the side of the tom and sealed it with the rubber bushing that was already part of the XLR connector.

I then posistioned the sub how i wanted it, and tightened the rim back down over the edge of the speaker frame.

this sub can be easily mounted in front of the kick drum by meands of an elbow tube off the rack, or if the drummer doesn't use a rack, you can simply use a snare stand... or a small bed of foam for it to set on.

by building a tunnel in front of the kick drum about 4 ft. using 2 velux blankets, i was able to get a very thick kick drum sound. i placed my Audix D6 just inside the hole of the kick head facing the beater, and the sub at the end of the tunnel farthest away from the kick drum.

WALLAHHHH!!!
very simple home made sub kick mic!!!

Jacob
 
For a pretty cool rockabilly-ish accoustic guitar tone ...

Try using a traditional condenser at the 12-fret -- or whatever your normal prefered mic'ing method.

Simultaneously, run an accoustic pickup signal out in to a pignose amp (or similar very-small speaker type amp). Place the pignose in another room if you can, where you'll want to mic it up with something like an SM-57 or similar. You can try driving it a bit, or try using a compressor pedal (or a tube screamer).

Experiment with the two signals in the mix. I like to pan them 50-50 or even hard left/right for a wide image. It sounds pretty bitchin, because the mike'd signal gives you the fullness and dynamics of the strumming, while the pignose gives you this honky, lo-fi thing that just fills the mids right in and compresses the guitar overall in a pretty cool way that doesn't sound too overly effected unless you want it to -- i.e. depending on how much of the pignose track you introduce in to the mix.

.
 
I recently upgraded my setup so I have 4 ins now (not that I need them, but I needed more outs) So I was trying to figure out what to try 4ins with. I decided I'm going to try my 12-string Fender Acoustic to a A/B switch, one line from the A/b to my Fender M-80 amp - line out of the M-80 to my Fender Dynatouch Stage 1000. The other line from the A/B to an Aguilar DB924 preamp (made for bass but it chunks up an acoustic like woah) then direct in to the soundcard with the Aguilar pre, mic both amps (in seperate room) and mic the acoustic as I play. For shits and giggles of course. Chorus on the M-80, some delay, flange and verb on the dynatouch. Might get interesting, might suck eggs too.
 
I'm not really too sure how it would translate to recording, but I've found that while playing live through two rigs at once (e.g. two half stacks as I often do) if you put a very slight delay between the two it sounds much thicker and has a better groove. basically I do it to simulate a bass (two man band) and for volume. it works well.
 
do you use a DI??? I've done this with a Y dividing connector when i was in a pinch... but that just splits the output signal, which isn't cool.

Jacob
 
hey!!! let's get this thread goin again!!! I think it's a good thread and a lot of people can come out with a lot of fun ideas!!! thanks everyone who has participated!!!

Jacob
 
one trick which works nice for guitar is to record the same guitar with two mics a dynamic and a condenser but using 2 or 3 waves for each mic then mix every dynamic+condenser so that they are both in the centre ( the condenser mic needs to be lower than the dyn ) and then pan each couple of con+dyn to another side or different interesting sides and then eq every couple of dyn+con waveforms a bit differently ( only a bit ) ... this makes a dull guitar sound more interesting ... also you can take one of the sides only and add a little reverb to it or chorus or something
...
another nice trick for vocals is when recording vocals to just sing in front of an open closet which is full with clothes !!!
 
williams said:
another nice trick for vocals is when recording vocals to just sing in front of an open closet which is full with clothes !!!
Click to expand...


Especially if it's all women's clothes. Then, if you get the urge to like try some stuff on, you can pretend to be Boy George.
.
 
gummblefish said:
If you have a singer that plays guitar at the same time, particularly acoustic, this should work for ya. <snip happens> So what worked for me was to make a perspex divider between the guitar and the voice. <snippity doo da> It was kinda awkward, but it did help in the separation of the tracks, plus the guitarist was able to see his guitar.
Click to expand...

That's great!!

What I generally do is take two microphones that I would normally use for both applications and switch them into "Figure 8 pattern". If they don't go into "Figure 8 pattern" then they're not in the running for selection.

Lemme explain why [if you know why, then skip the next half dozen paragraphs... it'll only bore the snot out of you... if you don't know why (and give a shit), then take notes as there is going to be some good, useful theory ahead].

---------
WARNING: Theory approaching [which may contradict some bullshit myth you may have heard or don't understand]

A microphone in cardioid pattern only picks up from the front... right? Well, to a degree, yes... to another, larger degree, no. As the frequency of a sound lowers it becomes more omni-directional by nature... which means that our cardioid microphone that only picks up from the front at 1kHz and above picks up everything from everywhere from say 400Hz and below... which means, that you will get a whole buncha non-specific mud building up in your recording... You could put bricks between the guitar and the singer's voice and still get bleed.

Now the way a cardioid microphone works is that you have either a single transduction element [capsule/diaphragm] that is in service at the time of use... so even with a "multi-pattern microphone" you're either acoustically [as in the case of many early RCA ribbons as well as cardioid and hyper cardioid dynamic mics... but I'm so not going into that expanation right now... we're going to stick to condeser mics for the rest of this explanation] or electronically [condenser mics] causing there to be a cardioid pickup pattern. In the case of a multi-pattern condenser mic you have a front and back diaphragm... turn off the back diaphragm/capsule and you have a cardioid mic.

If the MFG. doesn't put in a rear diaphragm then you have a TLM-103 or any of cornucopia of cheap assed 'cardioid only' "Maocrophones".

Because of the nature of sound, it is impossible to achieve a fully directional pickup pattern across the frequency spectrum. Anything below 250Hz is fully "omnidirectional" and it becomes less fully omni the higher you go in the sound spectrum so that when you get up into the "speech intelligibility" range the mic is fully "directional"... but there is a lot of 'mud' and crap underneath the 'speech intelligibility' section of the pogrom... and you can't filter out the low shit or your recording will sound "thin" and nasal instead of 'full and rich'.

The way "Omnidirectional" directional condenser mics work is that you have two diaphragms [or two capsules back to back] that are 100% in polarity so they pickup in both directions... front and back.

Now, if you take the polarization voltage to the rear diaphragm/capsule and flip it 180' [so it's out of polarity to the front capsule] the net result is that you get a distinct, full bandwidth line around the microphone where the front side and the back side cancel 100%. No other pickup pattern has this "full bandwidth" area of rejection. This is how you get a condenser microphone to go into "Figure 8 pattern" as you're electronically cancelling the information [sound] common to both the front and rear diaphragm/capsule.

End of theory... you may now return to the original retort already in progress
---------------------------------------

So... if you have two mics that go into "Figure 8" and you point the "null" [no sound] band at the singer's mouth and the business end of the mic at the singer's guitar... and take a second mic in the Figure 8 pattern and point the "null" [no sound] part at the guitar player's guitar and the business end at the guitar player's vocals... then you get the singing in one mic and the guitar playing in the other mic with no bleed [because it's electronically cancelled, which means a 'full bandwidth' sound rejection along the line where both capsules pick up common information.

Yeahbut... Figure 8 mics pick up from the front and the back so I'm going to get too much "room sound" you might say... to which I would respond: "not if you take the 'inverse square law' into account".

---------------------------------------
Warning: More theory

The inverse square law is that for every frequency there is set piece of real estate where the sound pressure level drops 3db... so, if you have a mic 1ft. away from a guitar [or vocal] and a second guitar/vocal two feet away from the mic on the other side, it'll be 3db down from the signal on the front side.

Which means that when using a microphone in the figure eight pattern you will get some 'room' sound from the back side of the mic... but it will be sufficiently attenuated in relation to the original sound that it won't be a factor [yeah, kind of a lame description of the law... but you get what you pay for... suck it up or crack a book].

--end theory--
--------------------------------------

The bottom line is that using two mics in 'figure 8' pattern and positioning them carefully will give you far better separation than any construction project of which you can conceive that will do little more than make the player uncomfortable and thus, less prone to give up an amazing performance. We're in the business of selling emotions here... and while "pissed off/inconvenienced" is kinda an emotion... the fact of the matter is that we don't really strive to listen to music to reinforce the stresses in our life but to distract us from the stresses in our life... which means that the music should be recorded from a happy/comfortable performer.

....and thus concludes our sermon for today.
 
So sayeth teh Fletcher, so sayeth teh flock!


Good read, I might just have to start tinkering around with some "figure 8" type stuff sometime.
 
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