Recording shit.

Anarkissed

Anarkissed

BOK CHOY!!!
May 3, 2003
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anarkissed.deviantart.com
After listening to many riff threads i've realised that some of you people really can create extremely good quality recordings with rudimentary equipment (in comparison to a professional studio).

My setup includes:
30watt Roland GC-405 amp
Epiphone Les Paul
Zoom 707II multi effects pedal
Vocal mike (some no-name brand that's supposedly a replica of a Shure SM-58, i think...it's not too bad quality)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2

The software I use is Adobe Audition 1.5 and Fruity Loops for drums. The samples I used for Fruity Loops was just from some random site a friend sent me.

Using this setup, I recorded this little demo:
The Devil's Lust

The guitars were recorded directly, not through the mike. I may have double-tracked the distortion, if I remember correctly.

As you can hear, the distortion is pretty messy, and the drums sound very machine-like. What could you guys recommend? What do you do to record good distortion? What better ways are there to creating drums? Blah blah blah...?
 
Make sure your levels are not set too high. It sounds like you recorded too loud so everything got distorted. Your program should have something that shows how loud you are playing.

I also have a tip for drums in fruityloops. When you do a drum roll on just one drum (I'm not even sure if this is called a drum roll), don't do it all in one channel. For example, if you want to color in a bunch of snare sounds next to each other, first clone the snare channel, then instead of coloring in all the snares, color in every other one, and then color in the snares of the cloned channel at the locations that you skipped on the first channel. That should make it sound less machine-like.

I hope this stuff made sense.
 
Anarkissed said:
My setup includes:
30watt Roland GC-405 amp
Epiphone Les Paul
Zoom 707II multi effects pedal
Vocal mike (some no-name brand that's supposedly a replica of a Shure SM-58, i think...it's not too bad quality)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2

The software I use is Adobe Audition 1.5 and Fruity Loops for drums. The samples I used for Fruity Loops was just from some random site a friend sent me.

Using this setup, I recorded this little demo:
The Devil's Lust

The guitars were recorded directly, not through the mike. I may have double-tracked the distortion, if I remember correctly.
Click to expand...

i don't know about creating drums with your software specifically, as i've always used Logic to sequence drums sounds in Battery, but...

for guitars, i would definitely mike the amp - pick up a Sure SM57, they're cheap, sturdy, don't need 48-volt phantom power, sound great with amps/cabs, and can be used for vocals in a pinch. the reasoning? ...the speaker in a guitar amp does most of the work in "contouring" the guitars sound eq-wise - i.e. they roll off under 100hz and over 5000hz or thereabouts. the high frequency rolloff helps both give it it's tone, and helps it and the cymbals/hats from drowning each other out. the low frequency rolloff helps keep the bass guitar and kick prominent.

in general, try and give each sound in a demo it's own "space", using frequency cuts/boosts, and moderate panning if you can. for guitar and drums, and if you're able to pan instruments with your software, record the rhythm guitar part twice, panning one hard left, and one hard right- you'll hear the "middle" of the mix open up for the drums a lot more. it's just the way our brains separate sounds from each other...
 
If you want a good free set you should check out www.nskit.com
Alot of recording artists seem to borrow at least one or two samples from it.

For God's sake though, don't sequence the damned drums in Fruity Loops! (your turn to support me now, Niel). If you want to do really basic drums with no variation, then at least use leafdrums2 or something... it's less mundane than working in Fruity Loops. But, if you really want to get some convincing shit going you'll need to grab yourself a sampler like LM-7, Battery etc. and sequence the drums within a host application like Cubase, Sonar, Logic, ProTools etc. This will give you the flexibility you need to open up your recordings.

You're using Adobe Audition and Fruity Loops. That's how alot of people start, myself included. You can get some decent recordings like this, as Mr Niel's old ones would attest. To really expand and give yourself the needed flexibility for good recordings, you'll need to move onto a more sophisticated application (I use Cubase now).

As Boogs said, you're basically trying to notch out frequencies in each instrument to make way for the others to shine. It's very important to do alot of EQ work, especially if you're at home and work alot with samples and digital guitar processing and whatnot. It's important to know which tracks dominate which frequencies and how to let that stand out.

I'm still learning, and I'm going to put up a complete song recording soon, after I acquire Battery 2 and start messing around with some kits and also recording a real bass guitar. But anyhow, here's a file I posted on the original song thread... it's just a little riff, but it shows the cleanest I've been able to get a recording of my own to sound to-date. Before you ask, yes I had Bloodbath on the brain :)

http://www.digitalsoundplanet.com/Members/000158087_000024318.mp3
 
ahem... options, monitor record levels, keep it in the green. And I agree with moonlapse for the most part on this. I just installed cubase sx and so far it seems killer. I'm a total cooledit/adobe whore at this point too, but I'm beginning to see the light.
 
another drum trick that i have used (with as moonlapse suggested, Cubase and LM-7) is to:

1. remember that you're trying to simulate more than just a drum kit: also a real drummer. a human. human beings are not machines, we make mistakes, spur of the moment impulses, and, importantly, have only 2 arms and 2 legs.

therefore, when writing synthed drums, keep in mind that at any given time, don't push for more than 4 simultaneous sounds, or anything a real drummer can't do.

also, we don't play the same fill every 4 bars. change it up a little. be spontaneous. throw in a few variations on the rhythm that a drummer might play instead of a clear repetition. get louder during key segments of the songs, and back off when the music needs to.

its important to understand silence. rarely will a song include any instrument clear through from start to finish without a single moment of rest. knowing when NOT to have drums (or any other instrument) is just as important as what rhythm to use.

lastly, mistakes. drummers are human. to enhance your synth drums, fudge it a little. barely miss a beat here and there. don't nail every single crash perfectly. adjust the dynamics so that every hit isn't the same exact intensity, because in reality they aren't.

2. when you're satisfied, i use this trick sometimes to get a more realistic sound out of midi synth drums. save the midi track in your multitrack layout, then export it to *.wav. now reinsert your *.wav drum track, and mess with it (EQ, verb, whatever suits you) and layer it onto the midi core track. don't remove the original. blend them. when you record the final mix, keep the blended version for a more realistic drum sound. drums don't occur in isolation, there's always a room they're recorded in, and you need to account for that, while keeping the midi version for sharpness.
 
by panning guitar tracks, how do you guys get a stereo sound? Whenever I pan, my guitars still take over the middle and doesn't sound in stereo. Is there a delay effect you guys add? Or do you guys record two separate guitar parts of the same riff then pan? Or what else?
 
You do two seperate takes then pan each one to a different side. If you're copying the same take over to a different track and panning to a different side, all you're essentially doing is getting the same sound you would out of not panning. Adding a slightly different guitar sound to the other take helps a bit too.
 
Thanks everybody for the help! From the looks of it, i think i'll give Cubase a try. Although, I must ask, what exactly is the difference between programming drums in Battery/LM-7/Cubase and doing them in Fruity Loops?

Also, i'm not quite sure how to go about working with different frequencies on different instruments.

Aaaaaaand, what does compression do?
 
Battery lets you randomly vary the pitch and amplitude of a drum hit. You can also choose to decay the envelope faster or perhaps have a longer attack time etc. It also lets you use velocities so that you can easily vary samples so that all your hi-hat hits for instance don't sound the same.

Fruity Loops eats dick.

That's pretty much the distinction.

Oh with the panning, I'd say go hard left and hard right. I always go 100% with my rhythm tracks and I put the leads around 30-50 depending.

Compression does just that. It compresses a waveform so that you can chop off some peaks and the more you compress, the more everything normalizes and becomes equal volume. It lets you do things like enhance the attack times, get more volume out of your recording... pump everything hard so that there is a wall of sound. The Bloodbath-ish recording I posted is heavily compressed.
 
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