Click here to purchase the entire book in PDF format. Hints and tips This list is just a bunch of things to keep in mind when you're doing a recording. It is by no means a complete list, just a collection of things that I think about when I'm doing a recording. Also note that some of the items in the list should be taken with a grain of salt... Spike everything. Masking tape is your friend - if your recording is going to run over multiple sessions, put it on the floor under your microphone stands, the music stands, the instruments and the amplifiers. Digital photos help too... When you're not the only person around the gear, make sure that's it's damned near impossible to trip in any cables. Tape everything down. On remote recording gigs, it's always a good idea to run cables over door frames rather than across the threshold... If you have a temporary setup, or there is the possibility of someone tripping in a cable, leave lots of slack at both ends of the cable. I always leave a couple of loops of mic cable at the base of the mic stand, and at the other end, usually on the floor under the mic preamp. That way, if someone does trip in a cable, they just drag the cable a bit without your gear crashing to the floor. On a remote recording gig, make friends with the caretaker, the cleaning staff, the secretary, the stagehands... anyone that is in a position to help you out of a jam. It's always a good idea to bring along a couple of CD's to give away to people as presents to make friends quicker. I admit that this is manipulative, but it works, and it pays off. Put your gain as early in the signal path as is possible. (See Section 10.1.6) When you're recording to a digital medium, try to get the peak level as close as you can to 0 dBFS without going over. (See Section 10.1) Never use a boost in the EQ if you can use a cut instead. Never use EQ if the problem can be solved with a different microphone, microphone position, or microphone orientation. Usually, the best microphone position looks really strange. My personal feeling is that, if a microphone looks like it's in the right place, it probably isn't. Always remember that a person listening to a CD can't see where the microphones were. No one that buys a CD cares how tired you were at the end of the session - they expect $20 worth of perfection. In other words, fix everything. If you're recording a group with a drum kit, consider your drum overheads as a wide stereo pair. Using them, listen to the pan location of all other instruments in the group (including each individual drum). Do not try to override that location by panning the instrument's own microphone to a different location. If you want a different left-right arrangement than you're getting in the overheads, move the instruments or the microphones. (If you want to get really detailed about this, you have to consider every pair of microphones as a stereo pair with the resulting imaging issues.) Monitor on as many playback systems as is possible/feasible. At the very least, you should know what your mix sounds like on loudspeakers and headphones, and know how the monitoring systems behave (i.e. your mix will sound closer and wider on headphones than on loudspeakers.) If you're doing a remote recording, get used to your control room. Set up your loudspeakers first, and play CD's that you know well while you're setting up everything else. Don't piss off your musicians in your efforts to find the perfect sound. Better to get a perfect performance from happy performers than a perfect recording of a bad performance. Of course, if you can get a perfect recording of a perfect performance, then all the better. Just be aware of the feelings on the other side of the glass. Don't get too excited about new gear. Just because you just bought a fancy new reverb unit doesn't mean that you have to put tons of fancy new reverb on every track on the CD you're recording. Louder isn't always better - usually, louder is just louder. Louder is always better - if you want to make one pair of speakers sound better than another, just play the music a couple of dB louder in the pair you want to sound better. Don't over-compress unless you really mean it. This is particularly true if you're mastering. I have spoken with a number of professional mastering engineers who have told stories of sending tracks back to amateur mixing engineers because they (the mastering engineers) simply can't undo the excessive compression on the tracks. The result is that the mixing engineer has to go back and do it all again. It's not necessarily a good idea to keep a compressor (multi-band or otherwise) as a permanent fixture on the 2-mix output of your mixer... Don't believe everything that you read or hear. (Particularly gear reviews in magazines. Ever notice how an advertisement for that same piece of gear is very near the review? Suspicions abound...) Sometimes, the cheapest device works the best. (For example, in a very carefully calibrated very fair blind comparison between various mic pre-amp's, a friend of mine in Boston, along with a number of professional recording engineers and mic pre-manufacturers, found that the second best one they heard was a $200 box, sounding better than other fancy tube devices for thousands of dollars. They threw in the cheap pre as a joke, and it wound up surprising everyone.) A laser-flat frequency response is not necessarily a good thing. Microphones are like paintbrushes. Use the characteristics of the microphone for the desired effect. In other words, the output of the microphone should never be considered the ultimate Truth. Instead, it is an interpretation of what is happening to the sound of the instrument in the room. Record your room as well as your instrument. Never forget that you're very rarely recording in an anechoic environment. If you're using spot microphone, use stereo pairs instead of mono spots whenever possible. The reason for this is directly related to the previous point. If you put a single mic on a guitar amp and pan the output to the desired location, then you have the sound of the amp as well as the sound of the room, all clumped into one mono location in your mix. If you close-mic'ed with a stereo pair instead, your panning can be the same (with the right orientation of the microphones and the amp) but the room is spread out over the full image. Always experiment. Don't use a technique just because it worked last time, or because you read in a magazine that someone else uses it. Wherever possible, keep your audio signal cables away from all other wires, particularly AC mains cables. If you have to cross wires, do so a right angles. Finally, and most importantly... Always trust your ears, but ask people for their opinions to see if they might be hearing something that you're not. There are times when the most inexperienced listener can identify problems that a professional (that's you...) miss for one reason or another.