These are collection of fairly random observations from the whole process that I hope might be useful for other readers or even for myself at some point in the future ...
- Monitoring! If players can’t hear, they can’t play. Good headphones, a decent balance and a clear headphone amp help musicians play better. I had 4 pairs of ‘phones. Beyer DT100s were deemed too heavy and fatiguing on the ears. AKG K55s were too bassy. Sennheiser HD120s were rated very highly. Audio Technica ATHM30s seemed to be the favourites. And cheapest, with the least intrusive cable. Go figure.
- Using different instruments and amps when recording can really liven things up. Most guitarists have more than one guitar and they will all have their own sound. Sometimes you can spend hours trying to tweak an amp to get a particular sound when simply changing guitar will do!
- For rock drums, I wouldn’t necessarily go with the AKG kit set again. For toms, the sensitivity of the C518 condenser mics picked up a lot of spill and needed a lot of gating. The also tended to lack body especially when the toms were hit hard. We ended up selling that on and buying one of the Audio Technica kits where all the mics are dynamics. It also made more sense to have something you can use live (not all live desk with have phantom power that the AKGs need).
- Our discovery of using a boundary mic inside a kick a drum is one that I urge anyone to try!
- If you’re after a natural kit sound, rather than immediately closemic’ing all the drums and using overheads just for cymbals, spend some time placing the overheads in the best place to give you a full drum kit sound, and then augment this with individual mics. As overheads, it’s worth trying to see if you can get a pair of large diaphragm condensers rather than smaller ones. They give a better breadth of sound and tend not to be so focussed.
- Its worth listening to all the drum tracks together before you start to mix rather than automatically sticking gates, limiters, EQs and compression on where you think they should go. Which of course is exactly what I did when I started and then had to undo it all! Also I’d recommend avoiding using saved settings from previous songs. At best, you’ll make two tracks sound identical and at worst you’ll have sounds that don’t fit the song! It doesn’t really save you that much time either.
- If you have poor acoustics in the recording room there are good isolation products from SE Electronics and Red5 Audio among others that can help exclude unwanted reflections from the mic. You can also use cheap duvets and rugs to deaden an overly live room or put down plywood sheets if you want to liven it. Whatever you have acoustically, its far easier to try and work with it and use it to your advantage than it is to try and change it!