As long as you keep your multitrack recorder safely ensonced in your basement studio, perhaps taking it upstairs to record a piano part every now and then, you really don’t need to think much about its safe transportation.But what if you decide to take it on-site somewhere to record your band playing live?Or what if the local community singing group asks you to record one of their concerts so they can make a CD?
You could just set the unit carefully on the back seat of the car when you drive to the gig, and it would probably be OK.But if you want to be sure about it, or if it looks like you are going to be going places with your recorder fairly often, you are going to want to put it in something.If nothing else, this will make it easier to get the thing from your parking place to the recording area!
Have you ever considered getting one of those multi-effects boxes to play your guitar through in your studio? If you play guitar and you don’t have one of these units in your studio you are like, so totally missing out! This podcast tries to convince you to buy a multi-effects box, using a Digitech RP100 (pictured) to demonstrate some of the many cool sounds you can get out of one crummy electric guitar (mine, in this case)!
Back in my Wonder Years (actually more like the mid-70s) I worked as an electronics engineer for a government systems contractor.(You didn’t think I made a living playing music, did you?)The projects I worked on involved racks of equipment, mostly “homebrew,” with all kinds of lights and knobs on the front panel and a lot of wiring between units on the backside.
While we were developing and trouble-shooting a system, the various wires and cables in the back could go any which way, but when we prepared a final prototype all of the wiring was grouped into “harnesses,” sets of cables with a cable tie around them every 6 to 12 inches that could be neatly routed around the backplane as a single unit.A similar idea pertains to the wiring in your car, wherein harnessed sets of mystery cables can be seen wending their way hither and yon.
The overlap between my old systems projects and a home recording studio is obvious.After all, a home studio also consists of a set of equipment with lights and knobs on the front and interconnecting cables on the back.So would a similar approach to cabling be appropriate?
Most mixes, whether simple or complex, end up with some of the sounds coming from the exact center of the stereo field. It is conventional, for example, to have the lead vocal positioned dead center, along with the kick drum, the bass, and (usually) the snare. The reason for this is fairly obvious: these easily heard parts carry most of the power and message of the song, and to have them be off to one side or the other would seem arbitrary and distracting.
Even under the scrutiny made possible by headphones, though, it is not necessary to have all of these centered sounds be exactly centered and thus exactly right on top of each other! You can give each of these parts a little micro-position of its own by panning one of them a tiny bit to the left, another a tiny bit to the right, and so on. The idea is to give the parts a little breathing room without anyone but you being the wiser.
[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Home Recording.]
When music is played live, each song must have some kind of ending, whether it be a strike-and-hold final chord, a snappy “cha-cha-cha,” or one of those crazy all-out noisefests with everybody in the band going nuts on their instruments for awhile and then suddenly stopping, to tumultuous applause (and possibly some jeering).
With the advent of recording, the need to definitively end each and every song was eliminated.Now, if you couldn’t come up with a proper ending you could just vamp along to some simple chords from the song for 20 or 30 seconds at the end and then gradually fade the level down to zero during the vamp when the song is mastered.Needless to say, this production technique became very popular, and remains so today.
Whether you do your fadeouts “by hand” or use an automatic fadeout function built into your DAW or software, there are certain guidelines you should follow to make sure that the fade sounds natural and that it provides a suitable, if somewhat inconclusive, ending for your song.Here are some tips to keep in mind.
When we mix a song, there are basically two ways to hear what we are doing as we tweak our faders and spin our knobs: monitor speakers, or headphones.Although each has its advantages and disadvantages, there is general agreement that your mixes will come out better if your listening is done through a pair of high-quality monitor speakers in a sonically appropriate room.
Monitor speakers are designed to give a fair, “colorless” reproduction of your mixes.Over time, and with the use of techniques like listening to CDs you know well through your monitor speakers for reference and EQing the signal the speakers receive from the recorder or DAW to match your room, you will develop a sense of exactly how your mix needs to sound in the mixing studio in order to sound great in a car or a living room, or through an iPod with earbuds.
Having said this, there are reasons to mix using headphones, such as not being able to afford proper monitor speakers or needing to mix late at night when others are asleep.And naturally, you will check each candidate mix by playing it in your car and living room (and through your iPod) to see what final tweaks may be needed anyway.The final evaluation is made through “real world” sound systems, not studio monitors or studio headphones.
These days, with the popularity of portable mp3 players soaring, an awful lot of listening goes on in headphones (or lo-fi earbuds).Given this, you can make the case that it could be more appropriate to use headphones if you are mixing a song that you know will be heard mostly in headphones.
If you have a set of electronic drums, you know how many sounds there are available for each kind of drum. My Yamaha DTX system has dozens of options each for the snare, the cymbals, the high-hat (open hit, closed hit, and pedal closure), and so on. The thing is, there is no limit on which sound can be mapped to which pad, meaning that you don’t have to assign snare sounds to the snare pad, tom sounds to the tom pads, etc. Anything can be anything!
One song I wrote preceded each verse with a snappy “ba-da-BAP” fill, with the “BAP” on the 4-beat just before the verse started. The “ba-da” was to be sixteenth notes on the kick. Um, sorry, I just can’t reliably hit the kick that fast in time. Now what? Once I realized I wasn’t using the floor tom pad anywhere in the song, I remapped it to the same sound and settings as the kick pad. Then I simply played the tricky fill with sticks on the floor tom and snare pads. But it sounds like I’m really fast on the kick!
[A longer version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Home Recording.]
One of the biggest threats to your studio equipment, and your instruments, comes from a humble source: good old-fashioned dust.This invisible menace can make your faders fickle and your knobs noisy with the passage of time. It’s a miracle substance that can work its way into the tiniest imaginable crevices, borne on unseen currents of air, attacking your gear day by day!
Do you see those spaces between the keys of your keyboard?And the spaces around the fader shafts of your mixer?To a piece of dust, these are huge portals to the inner workings of your equipment.The consequences of an infiltration can be major.How are you going to turn that guitar up for a lead part during a mixdown if the fader for that channel makes a loud SCRZCHCH noise as you move it?
A related problem that you may or may not have at your place is animal hair, blobs of fur that fairly leap off of Fluffy or Fido and make a beeline for your mixer controls.And please don’t tell me you let your pet sleep on your gear just because it’s warm!Pets and electronics make a bad combination.I once saw the inside of a VCR I owned whose ventilation fan had sucked in enough cat hair to make a whole ‘nother kitten.It wasn’t pretty.(And the VCR never worked again.)
As long as you keep your multitrack recorder safely ensonced in your basement studio, perhaps taking it upstairs to record a piano part every now and then, you really don’t need to think much about its safe transportation. But what if you decide to take it on-site somewhere to record your band playing live? Or what if the local community singing group asks you to record one of their concerts so they can make a CD?
Have you ever considered getting one of those multi-effects boxes to play your guitar through in your studio? If you play guitar and you don’t have one of these units in your studio you are like, so totally missing out! This podcast tries to convince you to buy a multi-effects box, using a 
Back in my Wonder Years (actually more like the mid-70s) I worked as an electronics engineer for a government systems contractor.
Most mixes, whether simple or complex, end up with some of the sounds coming from the exact center of the stereo field. It is conventional, for example, to have the lead vocal positioned dead center, along with the kick drum, the bass, and (usually) the snare. The reason for this is fairly obvious: these easily heard parts carry most of the power and message of the song, and to have them be off to one side or the other would seem arbitrary and distracting.
When music is played live, each song must have some kind of ending, whether it be a strike-and-hold final chord, a snappy “cha-cha-cha,” or one of those crazy all-out noisefests with everybody in the band going nuts on their instruments for awhile and then suddenly stopping, to tumultuous applause (and possibly some jeering).
When we mix a song, there are basically two ways to hear what we are doing as we tweak our faders and spin our knobs: monitor speakers, or headphones.
If you have a set of electronic drums, you know how many sounds there are available for each kind of drum. My Yamaha DTX system has dozens of options each for the snare, the cymbals, the high-hat (open hit, closed hit, and pedal closure), and so on. The thing is, there is no limit on which sound can be mapped to which pad, meaning that you don’t have to assign snare sounds to the snare pad, tom sounds to the tom pads, etc. Anything can be anything!
One of the biggest threats to your studio equipment, and your instruments, comes from a humble source: good old-fashioned dust.