miking your monitors after tracking

[BRIEFCASEMANX]

Anyone try soloing instruments and playing them through your monitors and setting up mics out in the room? How's it work for you?

I keep hearing recordings where guitars and drums were recorded at the same time, and theres a cool "live" quality there that I don't get with my recordings, and I'm not talking about group dynamics. I was thinking about trying this to attempt to sort of simulate the bleed the drum mics would pick up from the guitar.

 

[chessrock]

Doesn't really achieve the same effect, but it is great for adding some space / air if you originally close-mic'ed without any sort of room mics.

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[Flangerhans]

If I have an odd track left over, I'll do this, and label the fader, "Bleed." Just a little goes a long way, though.

 

[pathdoc]

I've used this trick a few times. I'll sometimes mic the room, record the mix and then mix it back it at different times during the song, on the chorus for example just to give it something different. I've also taken that track and used a mutliple band compressor and solo'ed the compressor to emulate a telephone. I've mixed that back in on a fade ending with some success.

 

[BRIEFCASEMANX]

are you guys doing it on single instruments or the entire mix?

 

[Flangerhans]

I use computer drums, so I tend to mix the other instruments into the drum track very lightly to give their sound realism. That way, they make their way into the reverb for the drums, too. Unfortunately, they still sound like computer drums to me, and probably to everyone else, as well.

 

[Robert D]

I've used it in studios with big rooms on sampled drums. It can help put some space around a track in a different way than a reverb unit or plugin.