Lesson learned: the importance of GIGO

[akpcep]

This is probably really obvious to you all, but I thought I'd post it just in case it saves any other newbs some time.

I realised tonight just how important it is to put good sounds to tape (or HDD) straight off the bat. I've been mucking around with one song for weeks and it still won't sound right, but for another I started tonight, I spent a long time tweaking the guitar sound, bass sound, vocal compression etc before even pressing record, and voila! The track sounds great (by my standards) already, without ANY eq on anything - just a bit of light compression, touch of reverb, panning and adjusting the faders.

I do think mixing is incredibly hard, but I'm enjoying learning it a lot. All I'm saying is that in my (limited) experience if you put garbage in, you're more than likely to get garbage out, unless you're prepared to do a lot of tweaking.

 

[Massive Master]

Mixing isn't incredibly hard - You've had the "vision" now.

When something sounds good to begin with, you're 90% there. Once you have good sounds on (tape, DAW, etc.), you can actually take a "creative" approach instead of a "I have to make this less irritating" approach.

'S a wonderful thing.

John Scrip - www.massivemastering.com

 

[Richard Monroe]

Thou speakest sooth about this GIGO thing. In 2 years from clueless newbie to self-tracked commercial release, I learned one thing above all else. If you record a great musician on a great instrument in a good room with the right good mic in the right place into a really good preamp, post production gets really easy.-Richie