What's it all about, Jean Paul?

  • Thread starter Thread starter LI Slim
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Straw Man (and I don't mean Darryl)

I haven't seen anybody here say that since it's the song that counts, recording quality is unimportant. That's a straw man you're knocking down. Certainly, for even a great song and a great performance to be appreciated, it's got to be recorded well (with the possible exception of Dead bootlegs). The whole point of this thread is to discuss whether you can do that at home. I don't think that home=shit.

Some software compressors are a lot better than others; isn't it possible that the best programs (perhaps, yet to be written) can rival studio compressors?

There are an awful lot of people out there holding themselves out as professional studios. From my limited experience and what many others have said, I think that many of us do a lot better at home -- relaxed, unpressured, able to mix and remix and get feedback and fix and remix -- then spending a few hours in a mediocre "professional" situation, even though the studio has much more expensive equipment. And, as Dobro pointed out earlier in this thread, having the home experience is invaluable to choosing a studio and recording in that studio if you later choose to do that.
 
Re: Straw Man (and I don't mean Darryl)

LI Slim said:
I haven't seen anybody here say that since it's the song that counts, recording quality is unimportant. That's a straw man you're knocking down. Certainly, for even a great song and a great performance to be appreciated, it's got to be recorded well (with the possible exception of Dead bootlegs).


My post was a sum reply to several other posts I have seen lately on the BBS.
Quite a few people have been emphesizing the point that this is a homerecording BBS, and I agree with their
pointing it out. Answers to HR should be posted with that in mind. It's when the post is all about how to get that pro sound/Can it be done/Why are my mix's not alike those bands" posts, that seem to want to cross over to the other side and it seems that there is always somebody that tells you "what the hell, it's all about the song not the equipment". I have yet to meet the dumb fuck engineer that thinks it's all about him and his equipment. But the gear and the engineer is a factor in the equation and there is no way around this.
Everybody ! seems to know an artist that has done a album with a 4 track these days... They forget to mention that that same artist has built a name for himself and sold all his other albums using Gear that most of us dream about and now every body is willing to listen to their 4 track album.....


The whole point of this thread is to discuss whether you can do that at home. I don't think that home=shit.


Home isn't shit. Nor is pro studio the only way to go. But having a knowledgeable man behind the knobs is the ONLY way to go.

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Re: Re: Straw Man (and I don't mean Darryl)

Shailat said:
Home isn't shit. Nor is pro studio the only way to go. But having a knowledgeable man behind the knobs is the ONLY way to go.
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ABSOLUTELY!

That says it all right there...

Bruce
 
hehe Shailat, said in a couple of words what I tried to avoid saying in a couple of hundred.......

OK, I think I should back this up somehow. I've never made an MP3, so I better have a go at it anyway.
What if I downloaded Pro Tools free, did a basic track, at my friends apartment, not in a studio, put some vocals on it, mixed it in PT free without using anything but the effects that PT free it comes with. I think it comes with some basic stuff, if it doesn't I just won't use any. What else will I use? let me think.
I'll have to use an ADAT bridge I/O to get in and out of the notepad, I'll use a 2 ch Lucid AD and DA, I won't use any tube mic or pre, I can take a AT 4055 and a Symetrix preamp. I'll mix it using the Event 20/20's.
Now pleeeeeeeeeease don't think that I am trying to show off. If I was so inclined I would use my real name here, wouldn't I? All I will try to do is prove that you CAN do something that sounds good without using a mountain of gear.
(Saying that, it might sound like total shit:)
 
Engineer: You ain't gonna get pro results at home.
Homerecordist: Yeah, but I can get almost that if I get good at it.

This discussion always seems to boil down to this dialogue.

A long time ago I posted a rant where I classified gear into five groups: Crap, Okay, Good, Great and Pro. I argued that people on this board will want to avoid Crap and Pro (too lousy or too expensive for the marginal improvement in sound). A parallel to this would be recording sound: Crap, Okay, Good, Great, Pro. You can't get pro results at home. If you're Moby, maybe you can get great results at home. If you're me, the bottom line is okay, but aiming at good.

Put it on a scale, don't turn it into a black and white issue. :)
 
Lots of good things said here... I'll add a few questions and a few thoughts.

OK What's a "Project" Studio?

Where is the difining line between "home" "project" and "pro"?

My studio isn't in my home. It's not a home studio, it certainly isn't pro, so by defalt I guess it's a project studio.

The results that I can get now with my setup are good. NOt spectacular, but good. Well not good enough yet. That's due mostly to my lack of knowledge, and somewhat by the gear I don't have. I will have gear, my "list" morphs everyday, along with my wallet, and along with my exspectations. What are my exspectations? hmm... that's a good question. I want to produce good sounding CD's. I want to bring the music into another realm where people can connect with it. What do I need to do that? Probably not all that gear on my list, but the answer is mostly on those things on the side of my head, you know, ears...

-jhe
 
hmmm, to me it's more about getting my songs on cd so they can be heard. of course i would like my cd to compete with every new release of a major but i accepted that that aint gonna happen. my point is taht if the music is strong enough the quality can suffer a little before the recording turns to crap... think of bob marley and his REALLY crappy live recordings. i like those still because of the music. but then again i couldn't live with an "ok" guitar sound (i'm a guitarplayer). i can understand the real engineers... i guess most of us saying that "the song matters most" are just musicians trying to get heard... maybe we should care more but the argument for me never was that a pro couldn't do it better, but that i could do it and get fair results. so people would start buying albums so i could get a pro studio build. and then people would say" hey the first album of guhlenn was done on a DAW" if he can do it i can too;)

and then the circle is round?

please do me a favor; go to www.dreadlockpussy.com (not my band so no spam) and tell me what you think of the recordings. please do not look at anything else just download a song and tell me what y'all think.

greetz guhlenn:)
 
*grin* great. Both Dobro and James.
But ..... I've heard a lot of Pro thats crap as well :)

I think that the absolute best thing over the last years has been the advances in gear, which are watering down the differences between "home - project - pro"
This, for the FIRST TIME EVER, is creating a situation where everyone can record. The result? Real talent has a better chance then ever before. And isn't that what good music, regardless of what kind, is all about? Talent? I love it!

2 little stories to illustrate this. A friend of mine, a very talented young producer / engineer / musician, started his career by recording his own CD. All he had was one old ADAT, a DA88 and a Mackie board. The album was totally off the wall, not commercial, but it sounded downright brilliant. As good as anything major, better than most. It started his career, he's been booked solid ever since.

almost 2 years ago I was working with a major artist, in a big studio. We were using 3 2" machines, every track of them, and with returns had over 90 channels open on a Neve Legend. He wanted some specific things done to one song, which would have ment re-configuring the entire board, so after we looked at the work involved he said he was just going to go home for the week and leave me to get on with it, call him when it was done. I phoned him the next day to tell him I had done all the edits and re-shuffled various bits and pieces
He came and listened - and loved the result, which was exactly as planned. How? I dumped the tracks on a bunch of 20 bit ADAT's through good converters, took it to another place and did the whole thing on the ADATs and a D8B, then dumped it back on the 2" machines. The 10.000 bucks console could do in hours what would have taken me 3 days at least on a 750.000 bucks Neve.

As a result this artist sold his "home studio" gear, a top analogue console and 2 Studers, and is now happilly working on a Pro Tools system at home, without having to spend 2000 a day in a large facility.
 
guhlenn , I listened to all of the tracks on the site.
Difficult to give a good assesment on the things I'm listening to. Comments? It sounds a bit toppy, while that music is normally a lot heavier in sound.
Also, the panning is quite extreme, which also takes away from the "wall of sound" kinda heavy sound.
What would you compare it to? What I think is well recorded in that genre is something like Fear Factory

nog steeds koud daar?
 
ehehehe nog steeds koud! altij koud hier en altijd regen. tijd voor zomer.

that recording is downright CRAP if you ask me. i don't like one thing about it. and yes FF would be an example of an excellent sound in the category. point being is that i payed with these guys more than once but they managed to break through with this recording. done on a totally little budget but enthousiatic enough to get the message across. That's what i mean with" the song is most important." not in a "artist is the motor quality don't mean shit" kinda way. i guess it's engineers vs artists

guhlenn. ;)

everyone, i would appreciate it alot if you could give comments on those recordings.
 
So sjoko, go ahead and do it. Judging by your profile, it would be a good test of whether a pro can make a pro sounding recording with homerec tools.
 
that's why i didn't say anything about it. didn't want to push the direction... guess i did anyway... ah well. thanks for your reply though!!!

guhlenn;)

ps all my friends rave about the great recording of that band and that it sounds so "real" and "alive". see what i mean?
 
I listened to Choke from the dreadlockpussy website. I don't listen to much of this kind of "thrash a screamin' demon" music, so I might be off here, but I didn't like the sound at all. Too much high end - ugly sound. But maybe that's how they *wanted* to sound? Abrasive. :D
 
I'll try and make an MP3 of a song my son James wrote / recorded with his band Our Own in the UK, and post it. Very hardcore, and recorded on a couple of ADATs. I think you'll discover a "small difference" in sound.
Oh...If you like hardcore stuff, ever boon to the trottersrock website? Its cool! Look up James' revieuws
(I'm a damn proud dad) :)
 
OK - I dundidit, or is it didunnit?
Uru and I recorded one song 2 night ago. I'm ashamed to admit I didn't totally stick to the equipment list, but cane as close as possible.

Here is what we did:
Mac pad, with a version of Pro Tools Free.
I/O - a Digidesign ADAT bridge. Note, this is not a cheap piece of gear, but we just used it as a means of getting in and out of PTfree.
A 2 channel Lucid A/D 2496 converter to go direct to disk, for playback I used the ADAT bridge's D/A's.
A (very cheap) Yamaha keyboard, I think it costs about 500 bucks. Did the bass and drums on that, WITHOUT using a sequencer, sampler or anything else. Just played parts on the keyboard, get the sounds I wanted on individual tracks, comped them down to 2 tracks, a bit of cut-and-paste and voila.
For other sounds, like the clapping kinda noise, I used a CD with water sounds, CD player analogue into the converter - tracked at 24/96, cut into bits, added reverb and inverted the result (in other words, played it backwards).
Total time for putting the track together, about 1 1/2 hour.
(which means - drum and bass basic track, one scratch vocal as a guide - then add the rest).

Then the vocals. I did go off what I proposed to use. I'm not just doing this for fun, its a song for a movie soundtrack, so we had to do it in a way we're accustomed to for Uru's voice, otherwise it would have thrown her a bit (she is unbelieveably intense, determined and accurate). So we used her normal set-up, which is a Stayne MagMike and a pre amp Stayne build especially for me, with a gigantic mother of a transformer in it.
Tracking ALL the vocals took about an hour. Please note that this is not normal, it could have taken a week with some other artists. She's just got perfect pitch, knows her stuff, rehearses, and is the fastest person to layer vocals I have ever encountered.
Mixing took about 2 hours.
After that I lost quality, as the mac doesn't have a network card, so I couldn't convert it to MP3 in Pro Tools and upload it, I had to go analogue out, into a CD burner, burn a CD, find a free MP3 encoder (I listend to a whole bunch that really sucked!).
That last bit took more time than all the rest. I'm sure the sound quality would be better if I had been able to make an MP3 file in PT and uploaded it from there. I had to do it on one of our network PC's, which has got really crappy little speakers, so I more or less did it blind.
As soon as the peeps at MP3 get their acts together, you'll be able to go and have a listen and tell me how much I screwed up :)

Artist: Uru Song: You Know ... Song ID 1448851
 
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Cool.

Which MP3 encoder did you decide to use? Was Music Match Jukebox one of those that you considered?
 
Man there is some crap out there!
I didn't want to pay for an encoder, because I'm a cheapa$$ and also because I have a good plug-in encoder already in pro tools. I think I tried six of them, and even though I was listening an crappy little computer speakers, they sounded BAD.
So yes, I did try the MusicMatch one, and that one seemed to sound a little bit better, so thats the one I used. What's your opinion on it?
 
I like Music Match also. I thought it was significantly clearer than the one that's in my n-track software. I don't know this stuff, but as I understand it, Music Match uses the program licensed by Fraunhofer, which is supposed to be the best. One thing I noticed is that it's not as loud as the .wav file -- is that unavoidable?
 
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