T
TieDyedDevil
New member
Hi, everyone. I joined the forum years ago; my profile says 2008, but it seems longer.
At any rate, I was about seven years into home recording at the time. I had already dipped my toes into multitracking, with several small projects completed, and had begun a transition to live-in-the-studio recording with my collaborators.
I've long held the notion that there ought to be a way for a musical ensemble to compose, arrange, produce and record material in real-time. Sort of like jazz, but without the imposed structure. Or like free jazz, but with the implicit understanding that we're not intentionally tossing familiar structures out the window for the sake of being "free".
We went through several iterations of recording technique, beginning with recording a live session to a multitrack recorder and doing mixdown after the session. That worked, of course. But the approach had issues that I wanted to avoid: (1) complexity, (2) divided attention and (3) extra effort.
The complexity came from the gear: setting up a session for a new recording meant programming the recording device. Some devices (and I went through several) imposed more overhead (and consequent opportunity for error) than others; even the device with the simplest workflow led to various mistakes.
Most of those mistakes came about through divided attention. It's really difficult -- at least for me -- to split my attention between creative and technical concerns. If I focus on the creative aspect, I sometimes overlook key technical activities. And yes, that's *with* a checklist. If I focus on the technicalities, my attention is diffused and I have a hard time getting into the creative flow.
One thing I noticed is that, absent gear changes that required rebalancing the instruments, the multitrack mixdown had become routine. More often than not, the mixdown settings that worked for one track worked for the next. That was my impetus for the next phase of experimentation.
I figured that, since the mixdown was pretty much the same from track to track, I may as well skip the multitrack recording step and record directly to a stereo master. Yeah, there are potentially huge disadvantages: (1) you can't fix anything in post and (2) one glitch -- technical or creative -- can ruin an entire track. On the plus side, time that we didn't spend on production is time that we're able to spend on recording more tracks.
Now, if your goal is to produce a polished tune according to someone's vision, then multitracking seems to be the way to go. It's really the only way to go if you're a solo recordist. But we're an ensemble that's interested first and foremost in the creative flow. Every recording is both an experiment and a lesson. The more attempts we recorded, the faster we learned what did and (especially in the early days) didn't contribute to our goal of being able to create a tune as we played.
So I ditched the multitrack recorder and replaced it with a nice analog board and an outboard effects rack plus a stereo recorder. The recorder is set up to start and stop automatically based upon incoming audio levels. The drums are mic'd, electronic/electric instruments go direct with a feed to the room PA for monitoring. The room volume is low enough that bleed from the PA to the drum mics did not overwhelm the direct signals; it really helps that our drummer is sensitive to dynamics and can play at near-conversational levels with good tone.
We experimented with using personal monitors (amps) rather than the PA. Those attempts didn't pan out. A guitar amp in the room -- even a really small one (4 watts with an 8" speaker) was way too loud at a volume where it sounded "right". Bass amplification was even more difficult in our small studio: what was good for the instrumentalist didn't translate to the rest of the room because of reinforcement and cancellation at different nodal points in the room. Gradually we learned to wean ourselves off of the personal monitor and trust the PA.
At this point, we had a recording system that was mostly hands-off, allowing the musicians to focus on making music while letting the hardware take care of the recording. There was still a lot of post-production needed. The automatic recorder captured a lot of short recordings, well over a hundred per two-hour session, that needed to be discarded to leave only the intentional creative works. Once the intentional tracks were extracted, post-processing could be handled by a script that normalized track volumes.
We proceeded with that arrangement for a long time. Technical errors dropped from an average of one every few sessions (and we were recording a couple dozen sessions each year) to one a year. The ability to forget about the technical details of recording freed us to learn about what did and didn't work for us, creatively, while improvising. The payoff of that freedom to be creative came when we began to realize that our recordings had started to become listenable rather than serving as studies of things to not do during a session. From the first "aha!" track, it took roughly another eighteen months of session to get to the point where most of a session's tracks were keepers.
But there were still problems. We needed to check instrumental balance any time the bassist or I made a significant change to our rig. We mostly trusted the room sound, but knew that it didn't exactly match the recorded track. It was too easy to forget to re-arm the recorded after auditioning a test track. Reminder placards on pedalboards and the recording rack were effective most of the time. But tracks still got lost. And I really wanted to hear how the recordings would improve without the bleed.
The final phase was to replace the room PA with IEMs. Our IEM system is simple: all three of us hear a mono mix of the stereo feed to the recorder. There's no local blend: we hear exactly what's going into the final track, modulo trimming a bit off the beginning and end. But with IEMs, you can't really hear the room; that made between-track conversations awkward. I ended up building a controller to automatically mute the room mic while the recorder runs.
And that's where we were when the pandemic put our sessions on hold. The IEMs still have some issues w.r.t. blocking the room sound from the kick drum, even when supplemented by over-ear isolation headgear. But the absence of bleed has opened up the soundstage so we can hear more clearly what's going to the recorder (aside from the low-bass register, which was a problem even with the PA).
All told, we recorded 106 sessions from mid-2012 to the end of 2019. We've published all of those on Bandcamp (link below). The ten or so releases at the top of our Bandcamp page are all from the IEM era. A bit of advice, should you care to listen: our music evolves over the course of a track. I advise just letting it play in the background until something catches your ear; this isn't music that grabs your attention in the first bars.
There's a lot more to tell, if anyone's curious. Pretty much all of the post-production work is now supported by scripts. And there's a whole philosophy of improvisation that we've discovered.
LCW on Bandcamp
Music | LCW
At any rate, I was about seven years into home recording at the time. I had already dipped my toes into multitracking, with several small projects completed, and had begun a transition to live-in-the-studio recording with my collaborators.
I've long held the notion that there ought to be a way for a musical ensemble to compose, arrange, produce and record material in real-time. Sort of like jazz, but without the imposed structure. Or like free jazz, but with the implicit understanding that we're not intentionally tossing familiar structures out the window for the sake of being "free".
We went through several iterations of recording technique, beginning with recording a live session to a multitrack recorder and doing mixdown after the session. That worked, of course. But the approach had issues that I wanted to avoid: (1) complexity, (2) divided attention and (3) extra effort.
The complexity came from the gear: setting up a session for a new recording meant programming the recording device. Some devices (and I went through several) imposed more overhead (and consequent opportunity for error) than others; even the device with the simplest workflow led to various mistakes.
Most of those mistakes came about through divided attention. It's really difficult -- at least for me -- to split my attention between creative and technical concerns. If I focus on the creative aspect, I sometimes overlook key technical activities. And yes, that's *with* a checklist. If I focus on the technicalities, my attention is diffused and I have a hard time getting into the creative flow.
One thing I noticed is that, absent gear changes that required rebalancing the instruments, the multitrack mixdown had become routine. More often than not, the mixdown settings that worked for one track worked for the next. That was my impetus for the next phase of experimentation.
I figured that, since the mixdown was pretty much the same from track to track, I may as well skip the multitrack recording step and record directly to a stereo master. Yeah, there are potentially huge disadvantages: (1) you can't fix anything in post and (2) one glitch -- technical or creative -- can ruin an entire track. On the plus side, time that we didn't spend on production is time that we're able to spend on recording more tracks.
Now, if your goal is to produce a polished tune according to someone's vision, then multitracking seems to be the way to go. It's really the only way to go if you're a solo recordist. But we're an ensemble that's interested first and foremost in the creative flow. Every recording is both an experiment and a lesson. The more attempts we recorded, the faster we learned what did and (especially in the early days) didn't contribute to our goal of being able to create a tune as we played.
So I ditched the multitrack recorder and replaced it with a nice analog board and an outboard effects rack plus a stereo recorder. The recorder is set up to start and stop automatically based upon incoming audio levels. The drums are mic'd, electronic/electric instruments go direct with a feed to the room PA for monitoring. The room volume is low enough that bleed from the PA to the drum mics did not overwhelm the direct signals; it really helps that our drummer is sensitive to dynamics and can play at near-conversational levels with good tone.
We experimented with using personal monitors (amps) rather than the PA. Those attempts didn't pan out. A guitar amp in the room -- even a really small one (4 watts with an 8" speaker) was way too loud at a volume where it sounded "right". Bass amplification was even more difficult in our small studio: what was good for the instrumentalist didn't translate to the rest of the room because of reinforcement and cancellation at different nodal points in the room. Gradually we learned to wean ourselves off of the personal monitor and trust the PA.
At this point, we had a recording system that was mostly hands-off, allowing the musicians to focus on making music while letting the hardware take care of the recording. There was still a lot of post-production needed. The automatic recorder captured a lot of short recordings, well over a hundred per two-hour session, that needed to be discarded to leave only the intentional creative works. Once the intentional tracks were extracted, post-processing could be handled by a script that normalized track volumes.
We proceeded with that arrangement for a long time. Technical errors dropped from an average of one every few sessions (and we were recording a couple dozen sessions each year) to one a year. The ability to forget about the technical details of recording freed us to learn about what did and didn't work for us, creatively, while improvising. The payoff of that freedom to be creative came when we began to realize that our recordings had started to become listenable rather than serving as studies of things to not do during a session. From the first "aha!" track, it took roughly another eighteen months of session to get to the point where most of a session's tracks were keepers.
But there were still problems. We needed to check instrumental balance any time the bassist or I made a significant change to our rig. We mostly trusted the room sound, but knew that it didn't exactly match the recorded track. It was too easy to forget to re-arm the recorded after auditioning a test track. Reminder placards on pedalboards and the recording rack were effective most of the time. But tracks still got lost. And I really wanted to hear how the recordings would improve without the bleed.
The final phase was to replace the room PA with IEMs. Our IEM system is simple: all three of us hear a mono mix of the stereo feed to the recorder. There's no local blend: we hear exactly what's going into the final track, modulo trimming a bit off the beginning and end. But with IEMs, you can't really hear the room; that made between-track conversations awkward. I ended up building a controller to automatically mute the room mic while the recorder runs.
And that's where we were when the pandemic put our sessions on hold. The IEMs still have some issues w.r.t. blocking the room sound from the kick drum, even when supplemented by over-ear isolation headgear. But the absence of bleed has opened up the soundstage so we can hear more clearly what's going to the recorder (aside from the low-bass register, which was a problem even with the PA).
All told, we recorded 106 sessions from mid-2012 to the end of 2019. We've published all of those on Bandcamp (link below). The ten or so releases at the top of our Bandcamp page are all from the IEM era. A bit of advice, should you care to listen: our music evolves over the course of a track. I advise just letting it play in the background until something catches your ear; this isn't music that grabs your attention in the first bars.
There's a lot more to tell, if anyone's curious. Pretty much all of the post-production work is now supported by scripts. And there's a whole philosophy of improvisation that we've discovered.
LCW on Bandcamp
Music | LCW
Last edited:
