This is why I find it almost impossible to record myself... so I concentrate heavily on recording others.
The most important instant of sonic decision and critical listening in the entire recording/mixing/mastering process comes as the musician is playing and the mics are being chosen and moved into place. If I'm the one playing that instrument, there is no way I can also be the one in the other room listening to the isolated sound on the monitors instructing the assistant where to move things.
You really, really are up shit creek in a self-recording situation. I always feel like it's a blind shot in the dark if I'm performing and the monitoring downgraded to headphones in a noisy room.
I suppose it can be something of a shot in the dark when self recording but if you've been doing it for long enough and you're an experimenter, you can't help but know where to place things. Sometimes it may be wrong but la la how the life goes on....
If you go on line today, there are more articles, forums, tutorials, videos, advice 'shops' and the like on recording than any one human could get through in a year, probably. When I began recording in '92, such a situation didn't exist ( I never even heard of the internet till '96 or got online till 04.....). If you were lucky back then, there was the odd magazine or book. Most of the time, one didn't know where to look. So rock biographies, interviews and books that weren't necesarilly about recording
per se {though they might be about producers} were where I picked up snippets of info. And as time went by, you'd amass quite a bit of accidental knowledge and as well as making things up as you went along, you'd combine that with a snippet that leaked thru in some amusing anecdote a producer or manager or tape operator might be regaling the interviewer with. So it just never occurred to me that there was something strange about setting stuff up and recording my friends and I. I learned to mic a flute simply by listening to where the sound seemed to come from. I'd just stick a mic at the soundhole of an acoustic guitar. Then as time went by, I learned about other options.
For sure, alot of gunge got recorded, but it was part of the price of my education. I even learned how to press record and play and punch in with my feet ! Then I heard of footswitches, non latching, no less !
But the sound has never been the same in my phones while recording as it has been when playing back ! But I don't see it as a problem. It's only the initial playback where I think about it coz that take is hot off the press.
