IT’S GO TIME
Let’s pause for a moment and think about this. What is it that you need? If you’re a 4 piece band of drums, bass, guitar and vocals, and you want 5 songs recorded for an EP. How do you go about doing this?
There are quite a few methods to achieving this. The main three are 1) Completely live off the floor 2) Record bed tracks and over dub OR 3) Individually track everything.
The first option, which is one of my personal favorites, is a great way to get the best sound and groove out of your music, provided that the group is very very tight! I’ve had the pleasure of working with a band not that long ago that recorded a track live off the floor and it was beautiful and required very little mixing. The reason something like this usually doesn’t require as much mixing is because in most cases, the battle within mixing is trying to make everything sound like it’s played together organically. When you record everything together, you don’t have to worry about this problem. However, you need to be much more careful about mic placement and also musician placement, more so than the other two methods of recording.
The second option, most typically used in large format studios with bands, is typically a favorite for most as it offers to maintain some of that groove from the live feel of the band playing together, but also offers more clarity and distinction between instruments. Also, this method offers the flexibility of editing various takes together, which the first option doesn’t allow so easily... And when I say, so easily, I mean it’s utter hell trying to get any editing done with a session that is only done live off the floor.
Recording “bed tracks” usually refers to the entire band playing together, then removing most, if not all, the instruments except the drums and start recording the other instruments on top of the edited drum takes separately. As stated before, this keeps the groove of the band playing together, but now we can have the other instruments recorded separately without any other instruments bleeding into any of the other instrument’s takes. This makes the engineers life much easier when it comes to editing and mixing both in clarity and precision.
Option three is something that is more commonly being used nowadays with the closure of many large format studios and the vast majority of artists taking the production of their records into their own hands, financially. Not everyone is a one take wonder like Paul Shaffer (David Letterman’s band leader and musical director), which means that keeping the costs down by recording in smaller studios or in their bedrooms, makes recording an album possible for many indie acts.
This option usually entails each artist to record with a click and start from the ground up. Some start with guitars and vocals and build the other instruments around it and arrange it afterwards or they’ll start with the percussions and build up from there like many typical recordings.
In some ways, this gives much more freedom to the bands to express themselves more because every instrument is individually recorded without any bleed from any other instrument and allows for a ridiculous amount of editing and mixing possibilities. However! What this lacks in many cases is life or feel. These aren’t things that you can just easily inject into a song. With this method, there are many advantages, but also disadvantages that make the songs sound like, well... in the words of the inexperienced listener, “not right”... It’s almost as if something is missing. This is where the mixers come in and really showcase their talents. This is where the mixer can become the glue in the song making everything just fit together properly.
What Next?
Next week we’ll discuss the hunt for the right mixing engineer!... That’s if you decide not to mix your album yourself... And trust me, if you lack the needed experience in the world of mixing, it really makes a difference to get some one that has it.
Please feel free to leave comments and discuss! I will definitely respond to all the comments here.
See you all next week!