Suggestions for improving recordings

[Tamarocker88]

Hello everyone!

I've been a musician for 13 years now. I play drums guitar and bass. I've been in several bands and have been studying recording and mixing on these forums and elsewhere very seriously for a few months.

I've got some beginner quality recordings on my Soundclick page
( www.soundclick.com/ZacharyCruz )

All constructive criticism is appreciated, but if you're going to tell me something sounds horrible, please help point me in the right direction to improve what I'm doing. Just saying "you suck, this sounds like shit" will not help.

Here's what I have as far as equipment:

Presonus Firepod FP10 Audio Interface
Behringer Multicom PRO-XL 4 port Compressor / Gate / Limiter
Two KRK Rokit 5 monitors
Shure drum mic kit containing 3 SM57's and a Beta 52 (I bought an additional Beta 52 too)
Audix drum mic kit containing an f12, three f10's, two f15's and an f14
Tama rockstar 9 piece drum kit with about 15 cymbals
Line 6 solid state 35W combo amp
7 string Washburn WG-687 (standard tuning) with dual humbuckers
5 string Sound Gear Ibanez SR-305 bass with active pickups


I use ableton Suite 8 for my DAW. I use various VST plugins. I used FL Hardcore and Guitar Rig 4 for my amp sims in the recordings. If anyone would like any more specific details, just let me know.

Thanks!


PS: The recordings posted on Soundclick are obviously nowhere near perfect. I'm in my trial and error phase. I did not spend a lot of time very seriously recording ANY of the parts. I'm aware that the playing is messy. My main focus at this time is trying to figure out what to do and what not to do when recording, mixing, and mastering.

 

[RedDog]

Welcome to the Forum! Let me be the first to say you've come to the right place to learn how to start mixing this kind of music. Let me also be the first to point out, there will be a lot of reading to be done on your part. If I had the time, I would post some articles you should definitely read on recording guitars, but I'm a bit lazy at the moment.

Where would you like us to start with our contructive criticism? I'll go for the obvious. Take the sub-frequencies out of your guitar tracks to make some room for the bass. Also, watch where your guitars peak, as I can hear some obvious clipping.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Welcome to the Forum! Let me be the first to say you've come to the right place to learn how to start mixing this kind of music. Let me also be the first to point out, there will be a lot of reading to be done on your part. If I had the time, I would post some articles you should definitely read on recording guitars, but I'm a bit lazy at the moment.

Where would you like us to start with our contructive criticism? I'll go for the obvious. Take the sub-frequencies out of your guitar tracks to make some room for the bass. Also, watch where your guitars peak, as I can hear some obvious clipping.

Thanks for the reply RedDog! I've found many fantastic articles on recording metal drums and guitars. Everything from frequency ranges to mic placement etc... I've tried to put it all to use, but my recordings tend to sound like they're muddy or "in the background". With drum recordings, it's largely because my drum kit is not in a nice acoustic environment.

As for taking the sub-frequencies out... Every one of my guitar tracks gets highpass filtered around 80Hz very steeply, and I also lowpass filter at 12,000Hz very steeply. I do check where my guitars peak into my Firepod. The guitars don't clip more than once or twice on the way into my recording device on a recording typically. I could very well be wrong, but I think the clipping you're hearing is probably from a VST plugin clipping the signal on the way out to the master output, so I'll look into that.

I had been using Guitar Rig 4 and FL Hardcore for my guitars in those recordings, but I've recently been trying out the demo version of Overloud TH1. I definitely prefer TH1 over the others. The guitar tones are far cleaner.

 

[Scott Horner]

As far as amp sims go, do yourself a favor and try the free ones that are posted here. LePou and Onqel make spectacular sounding sims and best of all, they are absolutely free!! I've gotten better results out of them than anything I've ever paid for. Definitely try those out before you go spending money on anything. Also, welcome.

 

[Tamarocker88]

As far as amp sims go, do yourself a favor and try the free ones that are posted here. LePou and Onqel make spectacular sounding sims and best of all, they are absolutely free!! I've gotten better results out of them than anything I've ever paid for. Definitely try those out before you go spending money on anything. Also, welcome.

Thanks! I wasn't aware that there were some good free amp sims . I will definitely check them out.

 

[xmortumx]

Its not about the gear you have but what you can do with it. I mean you have a pretty good set up to start and you should yield with some decent result, so I think that you should practice your mixing technique. For example you say that your drums sound muddy, well one thing to take into consideration is that you have to get it right at the source so ofcoarse think about acoustic treatment, mic placement, and having a decent kit to work with. Once the source is "right" then start experimenting in mixing like combining your acoustic drums with samples(many people here have posted FREE samples so look after those) after getting a good start with drums look into some ampsims like Scottrosia mentioned. To tell you the truth Ive demoed all those ampsims(TH1, guitarig, revalver) but nothing compares to the freeware of lepou and onquel with some good impulses(if you dont know about impulses read about them because they make a BIG difference)

Other than that read up on the forum man, use the sneap google search function to look at any specific question that you have, hope it helped.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Its not about the gear you have but what you can do with it. I mean you have a pretty good set up to start and you should yield with some decent result, so I think that you should practice your mixing technique. For example you say that your drums sound muddy, well one thing to take into consideration is that you have to get it right at the source so ofcoarse think about acoustic treatment, mic placement, and having a decent kit to work with. Once the source is "right" then start experimenting in mixing like combining your acoustic drums with samples(many people here have posted FREE samples so look after those) after getting a good start with drums look into some ampsims like Scottrosia mentioned. To tell you the truth Ive demoed all those ampsims(TH1, guitarig, revalver) but nothing compares to the freeware of lepou and onquel with some good impulses(if you dont know about impulses read about them because they make a BIG difference)

Other than that read up on the forum man, use the sneap google search function to look at any specific question that you have, hope it helped.

Thanks for the info! I definitely agree that you really need to get the sound right at the source. My drum kit is certainly good, but if I were trying to record something serious, I'd go out and buy all new skins and spend the time to tune them meticulously. I'm trying to just go about learning to mix right now.

I'll have to look up impulses since I have no idea what they are lol.

 

[xmortumx]

impulses in lame terms simulate different cabs with different mics

I Never use stock cabs that come with Revalver, guitarig ect.... because they always suck!

 

[pikachu69]

I'd go out and buy all new skins and spend the time to tune them meticulously. I'm trying to just go about learning to mix right now.

Trust me when I say you will have a very hard time trying to learn how to mix until you get your source right. Don't make the same mistake most noobs make, concentrate on your learning your source FIRST then mixing will not only be easier to learn, but it will be more fun too.
If you can't record a good source just yet because of lack of gear or space then search this forum and find some practice tracks to download that have been recorded well. Practice mixing on those until your source recordings are good enough.
My two cents.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Trust me when I say you will have a very hard time trying to learn how to mix until you get your source right. Don't make the same mistake most noobs make, concentrate on your learning your source FIRST then mixing will not only be easier to learn, but it will be more fun too.
If you can't record a good source just yet because of lack of gear or space then search this forum and find some practice tracks to download that have been recorded well. Practice mixing on those until your source recordings are good enough.
My two cents.

Cool, thanks for the honesty. Yeah I'm sure it would be a million times easier to mix a nice perfectly tuned drum kit in an acoustically treated room as opposed to recording in my drum room where the acoustics are abysmal.

My main focus is to be able to make good sounding recordings given what I've got. Aside from recording for my own enjoyment, I hope to eventually do the recording and mixing for my band's demos. I guess part of me is still in the bad mindset of hoping to take the source audio and improve it more than I can realistically. At least with guitars, I can try using amp sims and that alleviates the problem that I have a lame solid state Line 6 combo amp.

I already downloaded a few of the Lepou amp sims and tried them out. Beautiful sound. I'll upload an updated mix of my "Black Metal" recording with the Lepou amp later tonight.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Hello everyone,

I've just made some modifications. As suggested, I tried using LePou (Legion, specifically). I've also got that running through LeCab, running some Impulses. I did this, did the normal HP LP filtering and then remixed the track overall so that things sat together better.

Again, please critique. It's on my soundclick page www.soundclick.com/ZacharyCruz The track name is Black Metal Remixed. ALSO... After listening to the track, I realize there's a couple places where something clips. I don't know what it is, but I'll have to find out later.

The difficulty here is that I hadn't realized before that not only can the signal clip on the way in, but after each VST plugin etc, I need to be watching the output level even though the overall volume isn't peaking past 24dB. It's rather difficult to do within Ableton because I only see very very small dB meters on the sides of the plugin windows.

 

[RedDog]

Maybe you could try a different DAW other than Ableton. Seems that only a handful here use Ableton for mixing metal. Personally, I use REAPER and love the interface. Great metering performance and very very versatile.

And when you say peaking past 24dB, do you mean -24? With that much headroom, nothing you have should clip. Try keeping your levels at or around -10dB. Gives you proper headroom without worry of clipping. Don't let anything digital clip ANYWHERE.

 

[Tamarocker88]

Maybe you could try a different DAW other than Ableton. Seems that only a handful here use Ableton for mixing metal. Personally, I use REAPER and love the interface. Great metering performance and very very versatile.

And when you say peaking past 24dB, do you mean -24? With that much headroom, nothing you have should clip. Try keeping your levels at or around -10dB. Gives you proper headroom without worry of clipping. Don't let anything digital clip ANYWHERE.

Yeah I think I'll try Reaper. I've been using Ableton for a while now and I'm finally comfortable with its main features, so it'll be tough to learn an all new DAW.

Yes, I did mean -24dB. The way I've handled my levels is that I make sure my knob on the Firepod is as high as possible without ever clipping while tracking. I then drop the volume slider on the input in the DAW to -24dB. When I look at my chain of VST's though, there are level meters next to them (albeit small ones). Sometimes I see that these small meters clipped, so I did my best to lower the outputs of each VST so that it wouldn't clip into the next one. The overall track never clipped, but sometimes the output of one VST seemed to clip. The really difficult part is that these meters are very small and I can't accurately tell if the track barely clips.