Your Best Little Trick...

  • Thread starter Thread starter kidvybes
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'My' 'Tricks'

Awesome thread!

Let's see...

Newest trick concerns recording bass guitar. Along with the DI, take a small bass combo amp and face it towards a corner with both sides touching the opposing walls. Place a mic about 6" above the back of the amp, pointing downwards at about a 45 degree angle. Mix the two. Enjoy.

Snare Drum: SM57 micing the top head just inside of the rim as usual and any other dynamic mic pointed right near the porthole (but not directly in front of it or you'll be recording compressed air). Mix the two. Seems to capture the true tone of the drum much better. Also, I placed a mousepad underneath my snare drum which cut out some nasty overtones and gave it a bit fuller sound. (Don't ask how I stumbled upon that one...)

Guitar: A pet peeve of mine involves tuning with a TU-2 using the '1-2-3-4-5-6' readout. UGH! Learn the notes, dammit! And use the stream readout as it is much more accurate. I digress...
When tuning, turn all tone knobs to ZERO and strike strings as close to the neck as possible.

Vocals: Excercise those pipes.

**I also have a delicious recipe for pork loin, just not sure where to post it**
 
A tip on how to making a backing vox track wider:
Set a 1 repeat stereo delay at 50/50 wet/dry on the vocal track. Now set the delay. Now set the delay time of the left repeat to 1 ms. Set the delay time of the right repeat anywhere between 10 and 80 ms. Can sound a bit "phasey" but in a mix, the stereo image supplied by the phase difference can be worth more than the slight coloration.

A tip on bass solos:
Mic the strings of an electrical base like you would an acoustical guitar, but you can get closer and more over the right hand. This will give you string noise and finger noise. Mix this in very slightly with a DI signal and you've got a super tight low end (because of the DI) but still retain a very human and organic feel because of the mic.

A tip on percussion tracks:
Take any percussion loop, be it a snare, some bongo's, an 808, whatever. Now take something that will seriously fuck it up, but without changing the signal into 99% distortion. Something like the bitcrusher plugin in Cubase will work well. Set it so that you can just bearly make out the initial sound. Now take a gate and set it really, really fast, so that only the very first part of the transients get through. Now bring the track up slighly in the mix (make sure it's a stereo loop for the widest effect) and notice how the groove might get more punch. Might absolutely suck aswell, though, but it worked for me once or twice.

Also, get creative with white noise! An up/down automated slighly resonant band pass filter with a tremelo on every eight or sixteenth note and a bucket of verb can turn simple white noise into something totally new and cool.
 
Buss the kick and the bass.. then get an expander with an eq in the sidechain and set the eq so it's just picking up the kick drumm (usualy easiest to dial it into the click) and then set it so it's only taking of about 2db when the kick isn't playing..

Makes is so the bass is slightly louder when playing at the same time as the kick.. helps pull them together in the mix
 
usernamebob said:
Buss the kick and the bass.. then get an expander with an eq in the sidechain and set the eq so it's just picking up the kick drumm (usualy easiest to dial it into the click) and then set it so it's only taking of about 2db when the kick isn't playing..

Makes is so the bass is slightly louder when playing at the same time as the kick.. helps pull them together in the mix
Click to expand...

I've also used this with vox triggering the instrument mix on a bus. Sidechaining a compressor to the vox track so that any time a particular threshold is crossed, the compressor is made active. This compresses the instruments ever so slightly anytime there are vocals, helping the vocals come out in the mix. Sometimes I just use a trim to attenuate the instrument bus instead of compressor... depending on the sound.
 
old school bizatch

my favorite old-school rap trick.

run a tone generator on one track (you pick the hrtz, should be low), run a gate on it, and key the gate to the kick track (ask someone what a key input is)
edit decay as needed
turn up untill the "kick" ruins your friends carstereo speakers.
 
giraffe said:
turn up untill the "kick" ruins your friends carstereo speakers.
Click to expand...

Make sure to drive around your neighborhood with your windows down so everyone can "enjoy" the hip-hop flava whether they want to or not.
 
OK...Round 2!

...bringing back a constructive thread for another round of tricks (hopefully)...
 
This may seem silly, but it works for me. I always had trouble keeping the hi hats out of the snare mic, even with a gate on the snare. It was ok if I was playing closed high hats, but for those parts that require a pretty loud and semi-open high hat ride, the snare would pick it up when the gate opened and it would change the snare track too much.
So what I found works great is taking a baseball cap and putting it on the back of the snare mic so it falls sideways and creates a "wall" between the snare and high hat. Don't put it over the whole mic and it won't muffle the sound of the snare. Just let it fall to the high hat side. Weird but it works.
 
well i'm a newb, so hopefully this isn't bad advice, but a trick that i've used in the past while mixing is to turn up the monitors pretty loud, then leave the room and shut the door and listen to the mix from outside of the room (of course my home studio isnt soundproof hehe). obviously you wouldn't use this for final mixing, but sometimes i try this trick and for some reason, it tends to bring out sounds that are disproportionate to others in the mix, like if i had hi-hats too loud or vocals too quiet or something like that. then i go back into the room and i know which levels to address and fine tune them in front of the speakers like normal. this seems to work well for me when my ears are "tired" after a long day (or night) of mixing. of course you wouldn't rely on this technique all the time, but sometimes i do it just to check if anything in the mix "sticks out".
 
Yeah, I do something similar. If I think it sounds good in front of the monitors, and then it also sounds good around the corner outside the room, it usually means I'm getting closer.

Tim
 
RAMI said:
This may seem silly, but it works for me. I always had trouble keeping the hi hats out of the snare mic, even with a gate on the snare. It was ok if I was playing closed high hats, but for those parts that require a pretty loud and semi-open high hat ride, the snare would pick it up when the gate opened and it would change the snare track too much.
So what I found works great is taking a baseball cap and putting it on the back of the snare mic so it falls sideways and creates a "wall" between the snare and high hat. Don't put it over the whole mic and it won't muffle the sound of the snare. Just let it fall to the high hat side. Weird but it works.
Click to expand...

ive done the same thing, but with a pillowcase draped over a pop screen filter attatched to the snare mic stand. works great!

this thread is awesome
 
Something I recently tried helped to tame a snare track that kind of sucked. I ran the snare track into my friend's guitar amp and cranked the gain. The distortion gave the snare a bit more grit and added a nice "analog" kind of feel.
 
Timothy Lawler said:
Yeah, I do something similar. If I think it sounds good in front of the monitors, and then it also sounds good around the corner outside the room, it usually means I'm getting closer.

Tim
Click to expand...

HAHAHAHA! I laugh but i do the same, i often leave the room and listen outside...

Of course the other thing is always mixing it down and playing back on many cd players, in the car etc.
 
my best little trick is to haul my p.a. speakers out of the basement and set them in the window next to the front door. mic up the door chime and when the next visitor rings the bell there in for a sonic treat. BING BOOONG!!!!!!!!
 
drummerdude666 said:
Of course the other thing is always mixing it down and playing back on many cd players, in the car etc.
Click to expand...


yeah i do that a lot...i'm so used to how music sounds on my car stereo, that i always burn a copy and listen to it in my car to make sure it sounds good in there. i'll use a CD that i like for refence to see if my mix sounds awful or if its working OK. luckily for me, the CD player in my car plays CD-RW's, but for a while i wasting a bunch of CD-R's. now i just have a handful of CD-RW's that i recycle for checking my mixes in my car or in other CD players capable of playing CD-RW's. :cool:
 
gemsbok said:
my best little trick is to haul my p.a. speakers out of the basement and set them in the window next to the front door. mic up the door chime and when the next visitor rings the bell there in for a sonic treat. BING BOOONG!!!!!!!!
Click to expand...


so, what kind of mic is best for doing this? stereo pair of SDC's? or maybe a U87? :D :D
 
Me too. Walking into another room to check a mix is standard now for me.
 
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