Chapter 13

Hints and tips

This list is just a bunch of things to keep in mind when youre doing a recording.
It is by no means a complete list, just a collection of things that I think about when
Im 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 youre not the only person around the gear, make sure thats its damned
near impossible to trip in any cables. Tape everything down. On remote
recording gigs, its 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. Its always a good idea to bring along a couple of CDs 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)

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When youre 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)
You can get away with a cut in an EQ easier than you can get away with a
boost.
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 its in the right place, it probably
isnt. Always remember that a person listening to a CD cant 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 youre 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 instru-
ments in the group (including each individual drum). Do not try to override
that location by panning the instruments own microphone to a different lo-
cation. If you want a different left-right arrangement than youre 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 youre doing a remote recording, get used to your control room. Set up
your loudspeakers first, and play CDs that you know well while youre set-
ting up everything else.
Dont piss off your musicians in your efforts to find the perfect sound. Better
to get a mediocre recoding of a perfect performance from happy performers
than a perfect recording of a bad performance from unhappy performers. 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.
Dont get too excited about new gear. Just because you just bought a fancy
new reverb unit doesnt mean that you have to put tons of fancy new reverb
on every track on the CD youre recording.
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Louder isnt 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.
Dont over-compress unless you really mean it. This is particularly true if
youre 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 cant undo the ex-
cessive compression on the tracks. The result is that the mixing engineer
has to go back and do it all again. Its 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...
Dont 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-amps, 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 micro-
phone 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 youre very
rarely recording in an anechoic environment.
If youre 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-
miced 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.
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Always experiment. Dont 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 youre not.
There are times when the most inexperienced listener can identify problems
that a professional (thats you...) misses for one reason or another.