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M123 Recording Tech Tip

Condense this!

Condenser microphones are at the heart of nearly every studio, and rarely is a record made without one. The good ones are highly sensitive and also very accurate, and that is why condenser mics are such a staple. They help recordists capture sounds with an extended, precise response not found in most dynamic microphones. The heart of the condenser mic is its diaphragm: an extremely thin piece of either Mylar, plastic, or metal (and sometimes Mylar-coated plastic or metal) that is suspended in front of a metal plate called a back plate. When you hit the diaphragm and the back plate with voltage it creates a charge in the space between them. When a sound wave (air movement) hits the diaphragm, it moves into the charged field generating a fluctuation in voltage that is picked up and amplified by the internal preamp of the microphone. This internal preamp is why all condenser microphones require some form of power, usually from phantom power, but sometimes from an onboard battery. While condenser mics were traditionally expensive and used almost exclusively in pro studio settings, the last decade has seen a large selection of condenser microphones hit the market at prices well within the reach of most home studio owners.

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M123 Music Production Tech Tip

Getting too loopy

This week's Music123 Tech Dude tip is for musicians and producers working with synths and sequencers. Don't fall in love with a 4- or 8-bar loop you create and try to stretch it too far. Sitting in front of your workstation with the monitors blasting a hot sequence you just came up with is very different than listening to a CD. As the composer, you are creating and interacting with the music and it is personal to you. A CD is not interactive and is not personal. If you repeat a static, 4-bar loop for an hour and put it on a CD, you will not have a hit—you will have an incredibly boring CD. Adding musical elements—even rapping or singing on top of it—can't save a loop that's been stretched too far. You've got to change it up to keep your listeners involved.

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Music123 Recording Tech Dude

Music123 Question: When recording music, is it best to record everything dry and save effects for mixdown?

Music123 Answer: There are 2 schools of thought on this issue. Audio purists believe that sending the cleanest possible signal to disk without effects that may crowd or muddy your mix is best. This gives you more options at mixdown. This approach hearkens back to the days of $2,000-a-day studios, when going back and recording a track was expensive and problematic.

The other school of thought is to record effects as you go and think of the effect as part of your instrument’s sound. This is the approach of Grammy-winning producer/mixer Tom Lord-Alge. Many people have a hard time working when they don’t hear instruments the way they expect them to sound in the final mix. Also, having too many options at mixdown can cause problems. Because there’s so much going on in a mix as it is, you don’t want to add decision impairment to the list.

Another consideration is our tendency to imitate nature and fill voids wherever we find them. If you wait until mixdown, you may find that the sonic space you needed for a reverb may be filled with something else. If you have a limited amount of effects processors, recording with them expands your sonic palette, providing more opportunities for contrast. Otherwise, your mix will be limited to the few processors you have.

Personally, I prefer to “record” with effects as I go along. Even with plug-ins providing multiple instances of effects processors, you only get so many before your computer chokes. My favorite trick is to apply the plug-in and bounce the processed track, which frees up my CPU (just like recording hardware effects in the old days and having them to use again in mixdown). Also, I save a "dry" version of the track, which saves going back and re-recording if I don't like the effect in context of the final mix.

And nowadays, in the time of affordable, high-quality home studios, if you don’t like an effect, going back and re-recording a track is not that big of a deal.

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Much like composing music, recording and mixing are a combination of creative and intellectual processes. First, we have a stream of consciousness where we improvise and wait for ideas to come. Next, we have the editing process, where we take those ideas and refine, expand, and organize them into coherent form. These different processes involve different sides of the brain—left brain for the intellectual and editing process, right brain for the creative. Problems can occur in the creative process if we have to switch between left brain and right brain processes too often. It interrupts our creative flow and is how we lose those precious ideas. The secret is to get all of your left-brain processes out of the way first so that once you're in the creative groove, you can stay there.
 
This holds true for both recording and mixing. In recording, the process should be as invisible as possible so that the artist can focus solely on performance. Your gear should be set up in advance so that all you have to do is hit the record button. In mixing, which is a very complicated process, we often find ourselves switching back and forth between the left and right brain. The best mix engineers do all their left-brain activities first. The key is to make a list of each type of activity and do as many of the left-brain housekeeping chores as possible before you start mixing. Patching in all your outboard gear, normalizing the console, loading plug-ins, naming tracks, and calibrating your meters are all examples of left-brain activities. Basically, anything that takes you out of that creative, meditative state is a left-brain activity. Once you get your left-brain chores out of the way, you'll be able to stay in your creative zone, where you can truly strike gold.

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