Need basic/simple help with getting polished recordings

All,

I've been doing recordings for years (since the early 90's) primarily doing instrumentals of my playing and handling all of the duties myself. I do the guitar, bass, lead guitar, and even drums (got back into that recently). I started out with Cakewalk years ago and use Reaper now. Love how easy it is and does what I need it to do.

What I need help with is BASIC stuff that can help give my recordings a bit of polish or to help me avoid pitfalls (too much bass, etc.) or just tricks people use that are simple solutions. Things like "Always set the bass frequencies at ___" or "I always pan one guitar right at __ and one left at ___", etc.

I normally record a guitar part and have it at anywhere from 30 to 50% panned in a direction and then record a second panned the other way. I put a bass guitar track down and leave it up the middle and put drums on. I keep it pretty simple and don't like to obsess too much because I would rather just create. Don't get me wrong, I want it to sound awesome but not trying to get a Grammy.

I use EZMix 2 and does a great job of adding quick mastering things that add compression and various other tools. It is simple and straightforward. Any other tips that you guys use? Appreciate the help. I know there are a lot of folks here that have done serious recordings, etc over the years. Thanks! RR

Biggest home recording pitfall EVER: trying to mix your tracks in an untreated, acoustically compromised environment.
Your mixes will NEVER sound good if you can't properly hear what you are doing.
Spending a few hundred bucks on acoustically treating your mixing environment will have more impact on the quality of your work than just about anything else you can do.

Bass traps... Bass traps ... Bass traps! If you don't have any in your room, you are dead in the water right there.

Other than that, there really is no "magic bullet" rule or setting because every recording and song is different.
The only thing I can think of that might apply is that proper gain staging through your recording and mixing chain is critical. Making good use of high pass filters on every track is a big part of this. Unnecessary sub-sonic content in your tracks can really gobble up the digital headroom and make a mess of your mix. Modern digital recording gear will capture all kinds of sub-sonic garbage, and on most tracks, you can kill everything below 60-70hz and it won't really affect the tone you're trying to achieve for those parts. Makes a BIG difference on the headroom through your plug-ins, and on the mix bus, and also helps with overall clarity and definition between parts.

I also do instrumentals and like to keep things as simple as possible. I use a plugin called Red eq which has a low and high pass filter and use those filters to remove scratchiness/fizz from the guitars and to remove some bass to make room for the bass guitar. It has a rhythm guitar preset that is a good starting point.

For mastering I use a stock plugin that comes with Ableton Live called full mastering chain. The default settings are good but I usually tweak the limiter and stereo setttings just a bit so it's louder and bigger sounding.

Pan your guitars at 80% each track.

In Reaper, use a notch in the EQ at 50khz to leave room for the bass, or shit gets thumpy.

Also in Reaper, last thing in the mastering chain use something called ReaComp, there’s a setting called Master Bus Glue. It’s dope, try it.

They already stated the basics I have learned and read all over. Treat your room, Hi Pass and Lo Pass.

The only other basic thing I have learned from videos and reading for this situation is sweeping the eq to remove horrible noises. Make a very small notch and boost it very high, then slowly sweep across the frequencies back and forth. You will hear a very horrible noise every so often, like either white noise or a boxy sound, just anything nasty and then cut those frequencies a bit. You will end up with an eq FX track that looks very weird with tons of notch cuts all over but I thought it was very cool and I was happy with the results.

Ok.. real world stuff. Get yerself a pair of some shitty earbuds, or shitty headphones, or shitty laptop speakers..etc. Use your good phones, or monitors initially and keep a/b ing on the crappy stuff till your mix sounds good on both. Repeat with mastering and add in compression. Dont squash it, just thicken it up. That should help.

phil b":tlkgihgn said:

Ok.. real world stuff. Get yerself a pair of some shitty earbuds, or shitty headphones, or shitty laptop speakers..etc. Use your good phones, or monitors initially and keep a/b ing on the crappy stuff till your mix sounds good on both. Repeat with mastering and add in compression. Dont squash it, just thicken it up. That should help.

Click to expand...

Good advice. Realize that your monitors have limitations and inconsistencies and work around them. I've had the same set of Samson monitors for 12 years and have learned that they emphasize everything but the rhythm guitars and bass guitar, so if I go solely by the monitors the guitars end up too loud. I usually mix the rhythm guitars and bass quieter than I like then listen through a good set of earbuds the next day on my laptop and tweak from there. I have a cheap set of headphones that are real bass heavy which gives me another perspective.

I also solo the rhythm guitar and drum tracks with the mastering track activated to see what the mastering brings out. Sometimes there is digital distortion or pops/clips that aren't always obvious in the mix.

Tronald Dump":1s8lo6io said:

phil b":1s8lo6io said:

Ok.. real world stuff. Get yerself a pair of some shitty earbuds, or shitty headphones, or shitty laptop speakers..etc. Use your good phones, or monitors initially and keep a/b ing on the crappy stuff till your mix sounds good on both. Repeat with mastering and add in compression. Dont squash it, just thicken it up. That should help.

Click to expand...

Good advice. Realize that your monitors have limitations and inconsistencies and work around them. I've had the same set of Samson monitors for 12 years and have learned that they emphasize everything but the rhythm guitars and bass guitar, so if I go solely by the monitors the guitars end up too loud. I usually mix the rhythm guitars and bass quieter than I like then listen through a good set of earbuds the next day on my laptop and tweak from there. I have a cheap set of headphones that are real bass heavy which gives me another perspective.

I also solo the rhythm guitar and drum tracks with the mastering track activated to see what the mastering brings out. Sometimes there is digital distortion or pops/clips that aren't always obvious in the mix.

Click to expand...

I have recorded with some producers that that insist on bringing their $3 garage sale boom box and a/b'ed mixes from 20k Genelec speakers with that radio. Most people today listen to their music on smaller devices with portable speakers or earphones. What usually sounds awesome on a pair of good monitors in a room with traps and such sometimes doesnt sound good on equipment that the average person uses. Obviously this is pretty general and i'm sure most of us here have decent playback equipment, but unfortunately theres a lot more people that still use the generic Ipod phones or replacements from a dollar store. The trick is to find a good medium. Took many hours of running back and forth to my car with a cassette back in the day to admit it though!

Thanks everyone for the tips!!! I really appreciate the help. I record thru my Axe-Fx II and digital drums so I don't have to mic anything or worry about amps in the room, etc.

I have never understood a "bus" and have never used that before. I know it is something that is always used in recordings but I never had a grasp of what it does. Sounds crazy that I haven't with all of this experience. LOL! Appreciate the comments about Reaper and the 80% panning. I have always wondered what is a good one. And the bass comments were good too. I know that is a big one that can kill a recording.

I'm going to have to mess with the Hi Cut and Low Cut stuff. I need to get a better understanding of that so I know exactly what to do. Thanks guys!!

Some great tips on here.. gonna have to experiment with some too

The only thing I'll add is having a good track/mp3 to use as reference. Pick something that you know sounds good pounded thru a good system. So when your setting up your amp settings or eq'ing your midi drums you can have a reference to what should sound good and how it should sound on your speakers or headphones. I never use to do that and would struggle with shit sounding recordings (headphone only mixed). One day I think I used Metallica's Shortest Straw playing in the back ground and I literally tried to get my guitar thru reaper to match it's settings as close as possible with IR's and what not... and that was the first decent sounding recording I was kinda of happy with that also sounded good in my car first crack

You could use any flat, natural-sounding set of headphones with Waves' NX inserted in the master channel.

IMHO, this would negate the need to treat the room; the NX software literally places you in a "perfect" control room situation. You can even get head-tracking add-ons for it so that as you move from side to side you hear what you would in a real-life control-room situation. IMHO, this isn't necessary 'though as ideally you want to hear things from the optimum listening position - at the point of an equilateral triangle with the monitors. Mind you, I think you can tweak the plugin to alter this distance, along with room reflectivity and whatnot.

IMHO, no domestic room is going to sound as good as the Waves virtual one, no matter how much you spend, and on top of that the monitors in the virtual environment are literally "perfect", so there's a huge saving there too. IOW, using it should get you 90% of the way to an expensive-studio-setup situation... at 1/1000th the cost.

Don't know how much the plugin is; I bought it on a sale for, I think, $29. If you wait, you'll be able to pick it up for a no-brainer price 'cause Waves stuff's on a perpetual-sale carousel.

Lots of great advice here. Think the only thing I could add is just to remember having fun with the process. I'm loaded up with OCD and obsess about every detail. If I let that get out of hand, it stops being fun, stops being the reason I started playing and recording in the first place. If it's not perfect, I just try to remember what worked and what didn't and move on. Maybe I come back to the particular project if I get to a place where I think I could do a better job, maybe I don't, maybe I find something that inspires me to do something I wouldn't have even thought of before. That, to me, is the reward.

As several have mentioned above, if you're not miking anything and monitor/mix through headphones, room treatment isn't quite as important. Make sure all your tools are where you need them to be, keep everything in reach so you don't have to stop the process just to find something.

The BEST investment I ever made in recording equipment was some really really good converters. Nothing sounded right before that and I'd tried every trick in every book I could get my hands on. After that, things really started falling into place..

I posted this sometime ago in another thread on a similar topic: One of the most important things is to know your monitoring gear (whatever it is you're using) very well so that you'll know how your mix will translate to other systems and environments since that is the ultimate goal. In the Waves video below, Chris Lord-Alge advises to always start your mix session by first listening to something you know (i.e., material you are intimately familiar with in other environments so you can see how it sounds in your current monitoring environment and to give you a reference for comparison).

Ok. the single MOST important thing has already been mentioned. Room treatment, room treatment, room treatment and desk monitor placement location. You want that desk center wall between two walls or else sound will bounce unevenly. Forget everything else. I had bass traps and panelling up until I renovated a few months back to make room for family shit seeing as we are expecting. The sound of the rough mixes I had before were wayyyyy different after with no treatment. Nothing sounded the same and I started dicking with levels and it all sounded worse. The guy I sold my panels to followed up thanking me saying that is what he was missing. Everything was now clearer in his mixes and sitting well. Treatment is number 1#. A lot of the rest is following basic principles and also mixing to taste. It isn't like all the albums in the 80's followed the exact same recipe. Some producers just had way better ears and taste than others.

I also have EZmix.. it is cool, but really, I ended up being able to EQ the same telling me my ears are decent so I went with a channel strip emulation and Mixbus does the rest.

Get that room treated. You can build your own traps for next to nothing except time and a bit of money spent at Home Depot.

ChurchHill":gqujqfvn said:

Lots of great advice here. Think the only thing I could add is just to remember having fun with the process. I'm loaded up with OCD and obsess about every detail. If I let that get out of hand, it stops being fun, stops being the reason I started playing and recording in the first place. If it's not perfect, I just try to remember what worked and what didn't and move on. Maybe I come back to the particular project if I get to a place where I think I could do a better job, maybe I don't, maybe I find something that inspires me to do something I wouldn't have even thought of before. That, to me, is the reward.

As several have mentioned above, if you're not miking anything and monitor/mix through headphones, room treatment isn't quite as important. Make sure all your tools are where you need them to be, keep everything in reach so you don't have to stop the process just to find something.

The BEST investment I ever made in recording equipment was some really really good converters. Nothing sounded right before that and I'd tried every trick in every book I could get my hands on. After that, things really started falling into place..

Click to expand...

More good advice, I never got past two songs because I nit picked everything and then hated everything and then had no time to re-record the drums etc etc... I think if you pretend it is like a paid for studio and time is limited, you end up getting way more done.

If you aren't going to monitor through speakers then the suggestion for good open back mixing phones is good. That is the route I am going to have to take when I resume recording stuff.

multi-band compression on the guitar trax help me to get a more polished sound.

Monkey Man":2ptn9iqg said:

You could use any flat, natural-sounding set of headphones with Waves' NX inserted in the master channel.

IMHO, this would negate the need to treat the room; the NX software literally places you in a "perfect" control room situation. You can even get head-tracking add-ons for it so that as you move from side to side you hear what you would in a real-life control-room situation. IMHO, this isn't necessary 'though as ideally you want to hear things from the optimum listening position - at the point of an equilateral triangle with the monitors. Mind you, I think you can tweak the plugin to alter this distance, along with room reflectivity and whatnot.

IMHO, no domestic room is going to sound as good as the Waves virtual one, no matter how much you spend, and on top of that the monitors in the virtual environment are literally "perfect", so there's a huge saving there too. IOW, using it should get you 90% of the way to an expensive-studio-setup situation... at 1/1000th the cost.

Don't know how much the plugin is; I bought it on a sale for, I think, $29. If you wait, you'll be able to pick it up for a no-brainer price 'cause Waves stuff's on a perpetual-sale carousel.

Click to expand...

I am always looking for extra tips as well and TBH this is the most interesting reply for me. Going to look into this one.

Honoured to have been able to throw something out there that's appreciated, MN.

Good luck man!

Resurrecting this thread in case anyone has more tips on getting a great polished sound for recordings.

I’ve learned a ton from Warren Huart.
He’s on YouTube under
Produce Like A Pro
Yes he has courses he sells on the side but his free how to videos
Are for the most part exceptional.