My Technique
I'm not sure if the way I make music will sound funny or strange to any of you, because in all honesty I find it to be a rather strange method myself. However I take the word "industrial" to heart, making music is what I love to do, and I must be "industrious" with what I have in order to do it.
First I should mention how I record with mics. I own a standard peavy mic with an XLR connection which I feed into my crappy ass 20 year old pioneer reciever (via converter - XLR to 1/4" into the "mic" input) to boost the mic signal (I don't own a mixer). From there I use the "phones" out put using a standard patch cord and plug that into my computer with another converter to get from 1/4" to 1/8". This sucks primarily because either I have to hook up a separte monitoring system (my mom's bose stero) (it's hard being a pennyless teen borrowing equipment from this, that and the other person btw
which is an overall pain in the ass because it requires a lot of set up time and the monitoring sucks (for some reason or another the bose when set up like this produces really tinny and thin sound - go figure!~). I usually only do the monitoring when performing vocals because doing the set up is acctually worth it. Otherwise since I can't listen and whilist feeding information to my computer from the same system which monitors my primary monitoring speakers (the result of doing so produces an incredibly loud bass rumble which will most certainly blow the spearkers). Anyways the end result is fairly good sounding recordings (especially on vocals) not so much on sampled objects (they usually sound very quite, but that's because my mic sucks for such quite sounds), I can always compensate with the royal treatment from cool edit (a series of compression, amplfy, hard limit and eq transforms). The recordinds also have a fairly noisy quality, but once again, I can eliminate this with cooledit. I dont believe with my equipment there is anyway to eliminate the noise from recording with mics.. anyways sorry for that long spell... but it might help...
anyhow
When beginning any song, it's most common for me to work on drum loops. I haven't the cash for real drums, or more preferrably V-Drums. However I have found that using samples that I have collected (either from scouring the internet for drum machine test wavs, sampling borrowed drum kits from friends, or sampling everyday objects such as springs/chairs/buckets/you name it) and "compiling drum beats either on the fly, or modled after a certain pattern simply by cut and pasting using cooledit, has acctually worked well in creating the percussive section of my music. IT is definately not a recommended method and can be extremely frusterating because usually takes a long time to do - time which could be spent instead starting the melody section. However when the drum beat is finished and sounds good it is extremely worth it. As with industrial music, usually it is the drums which carry the music (but not all the time).
Thus I'll start working in cooledits multitracker laying out the loops I created and basically predicting the patterns of a song (which can be changed later if need be).
Next its common for me to work with synth lines (bass or rythm) I rarely use guitars but have had a lot of success recording both electric acoustic and electric. But since I use guitar so infrequently I won't talk about that. Synth is a major deal for me. The worst part is that because of budget I'm forced to work with an absolute piece of shit keyboard - a Casio CTK-411 non-sampling, and not touch sensitve. However I still find that it can if heavily effect sound semi decent. I record the keys by taking the line out of the keyboard and feeding it directly to the line in on my comp. My keyboard has a really shitty sample rate thus a very annoying noise/hiss thing sounds at every note, this is always a big problem in terms of getting rid of the sound but keeping the keyboards overall brightness and flavor. Sometimes I go crazy and completely fuck the sound up by utterly destroying it's original sound with the stretch function or noise reducing function in cool edit. The result is generally sounds good and sounds obscewer which is convenient for my style of music (if anyone downloaded the song "Despondency" you can hear this done to my lead line in that song, the original patch was a harp)
Sampling.. With sampling, either I hook a VCR via RCA cable to my reciever and feed out with a patch to the input of my computer. This setup is like my mic set up and poses difficulties in monitoring (and is even more difficult when I am to lazy to hook up a TV screen, but that's a different story
. The end result is like sampling real life objects for me, decent but needs volume. Samples are usually ellusive little details I add anyways so the volume is not always a big problem.
And finally once I've recorded and done a general mix I start with vocals. I use the technique described above and the result I believe is acctually somewhat good... but maybe thats just me..
My mix down technique is as follows.
(by the way I always work in 16-bit 44.1kHz Stereo/Mono for individual files, always stereo on drums, rarely on vocals (I'm also working with about 600 megs of hardrive space (did I mention my computer sucks? lol))
Since my computer sucks I usually have to split the songs up into two or three parts (going beyond 3 minutes with 10 tracks usually crashes the bitch). So I've basically got like three mixing sessions a song, and I work ALONE! it's incredily tiring and frusterating. It's difficult enough to standardize between song sections, but then making each section sound good is also damn near impossible. I must admit I'm a culpret and I boost more than I cut, but I'm an extreme newbie - I've only made about 7 songs with Cool Edit (I used to use Cubasis AU but lets not go there because that was a veritble nightmare). Anyways, usually I compress the vocals using the Compression graph on Cool Edit. Generally these are my ratios (I'm still fairly unaware of what it all means)
cmp 1.89 : 1 above -21.7 dB
exp 1.35 : 1 below -21.7 dB
exp 1.04 : 1 below -36.9 dB
But the result is decent sounds vocals that don't really sound to squashed to me, or maybe that's just my newbie ears
Ok and then I'll effect the vocals if I feel it would be appropriate and then start working on parametric EQ to generally get them sounding as full, clear and crisp as possible without the causing clipping in the generaly mix.
I have a rule that drums come before synth, I learned that from my work with cubasis but I'm not sure if it really applies any more. I battle with clipping and unpleasant scratchy sounds that are caused when the drums and synths reach peaks at the same time. Most of my synth sounds are long sustaining sounds. I generally have no problem with quicker attacking synths. My drums are almost always incredibly massive and heavy sounding.. but cutting them, makes the song lack severly. As well I stuggle with subsonic bass (the kind that makes my speakers wobble but no sound is produced) cutting at 50hz and under usually negates this effect but also draws from the overall drum pressance. cutting at 40hz or lower doesnt seem to help much with removing the subsonic effect. I would say the main problem for me is eliminating clipping (my wave forms are always maxed out because anything lower gives a really poor volume rating in the final mix). I guess you consider me lucky in that my only real escape from the rigors of eq'ing comes from the fact that since industrial music can take on numerous formats and unconventional sounds I generally get away with searching for the sound that works for me.
Anways, I hope I didn't put anyone to sleep and once again I would really appreciate any recommendations, corrections, or comments on my methodology in producing music. If you see something that I'm doing that could be done wiser without going out and buying some fancy gatched please tell me
I feel very strongly about what I'm doing and I can acctually say that I enjoy the enitre process. I spend hours and hours tweaking my music, and even more time working on the final mixdown. I do this all alone and I've been told that can be dangerously stupid for me and the music, but since no one else that I've found in this town gives a rats ass about seriously producing music I've got to go in alone.
And in closing damn let me apologize for this incredibly long post.. I thank anyone and everyone who reads it!
Charon
(p.s) thanks for the welcoming
