SpiralTruth

These are amazing times for an indie musician. We can now have what would have been million dollar recording studios two or three decades ago for a few thousand dollars. New Macs are coming right out of the box with applications like Garage Band, and there are even a few open source recording packages for the PC user with a tight budget. Musicians of any caliber and any means are so empowered to explore their creativity in the twenty first century. You used to have to woo a record exec to hear how you’d sound with a little bit of production. Now, nothing can stand in your way. Except for lack of knowledge, that is. I learned some of this stuff really slowly. There’s a lot of information out there, but most of it is at a level that’s way too high when you’re just starting to learn. Yes, once you know the basic principles, the language people use starts to make more sense, but I think it’s sad that there aren’t more beginner level resources out there. So, here we go… my advice on two ways to break out of that “basement sound” scenario. WARNING: Once you master these, things will only get more difficult because you’ll now notice a bunch of other things that the pros are doing that you don’t hear in your own recordings. Like any art or science, the journey is an endless one, so make sure you enjoy it more than the imagined destination. 1. Use compression! You’ll probably see the biggest gain in quality here with vocals and drums. Here’s the basic problem scenario… the drums or vocals are too high, so you turn them down… then a little later in the song, they seem too low, so you turn them up. That’s an extreme. Maybe things just don’t seem to sit well in the mix. You wish you could ride the fader (manually raise and lower the volume level) for each track in a way that would keep things loud enough without jumping out. Well, in a nutshell, that’s compression. The basics of most compressors are as follows: * A threshold level: How loud do you want the signal to be before I start working on it? * A compression ratio: How much do you want me to squash a signal that gets over the threshold? * An attack time: How quickly do you want me to get there? * A release time: How quickly do you want me to let go once I’ve done my thing? Yes, there’s a lot more to it than that, and I’m not telling anywhere near the whole story. But knowing the above is enough to get you on your way. You can look up tons of “recommended” levels and ratios, but in the end, just trust your ears and some common sense. Does the volume jump very quickly in your source track? Then you’ll want a shorter attack time if your goal is to keep it sitting well in the mix. Don’t set the threshold so that the compressor is active all the time. You want some variation in volume to make things sound alive, and you don’t want to make background noise as loud as the actual instrument. 2. EQ (almost) everything. Yes, there are some cases where the track is just perfect as is, but most of the time even a track that sounds great on its own needs a little EQ to sit well. Do your recordings sound muddy? This is a classic sign of not using EQ properly. Again, there are lots of recommended settings for EQ, but a basic principle that will get you a long way without tons of memorization is this: the muddiness is there because different instruments are competing for the same frequency bands. They mask each other out. If you cut a frequency, say, on the bass guitar, and then cut a different frequency on the kick drum, you are creating areas in the sound for these instruments to stand out without competing. The reason I mention the bass and kick drum is that these are two instruments that tend to occupy the same (lower to mid) frequencies. Play around with it a bit and you’ll find your own favorites, which may or may not match very closely with pro favorites. Anywhere you feel “there’s not room in this mix for these two” is probably a good area to use this principle. Past that, I think EQ is very much a question of taste. Should this instrument have more of this particular frequency level? If yes, boost it. If it should have less, cut it. But thinking in terms of making pockets for competing instruments to stand out in, your recordings will be light years ahead of where they were. That’s it for now. Let me know if this helped you any and I’ll look into adding more of the tricks I’ve learned so far. Good luck!