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Doing it Old School


Happy Jack
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[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1495548427' post='3304658']
Well worth 35 minutes of your time.

I know there's a special section for 'Recording'. I felt this deserved a wider audience.
[/quote]

Couldn't agree more on both these points. I'd love to record at Sugar Rays. Cheers for sharing, I hadn't seen this.

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[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1495548427' post='3304658']
Yes, I know there's a special section for 'Recording'. I felt this deserved a wider audience.
[/quote]

Which is odd because it has been [url=http://basschat.co.uk/topic/304462-sound-on-sound-article/]posted before[/url] and in this very section.

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[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1495560759' post='3304865']Which is odd because it has been [url="http://basschat.co.uk/topic/304462-sound-on-sound-article/"]posted before[/url] and in this very section.[/quote]

As a forum moderator I click on far more posts then I would if I wasn't moderating & I missed it. "Sound on Sound Article" isn't the most revealing of topic headers to be fair. I'm pleased it was posted again as I really enjoyed it and even took time to share it with several friends.

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+1 from me. I really enjoyed it and didn't see it the first time around. I'll also be forwarding it to my guitarist: I want to record with my band soon, and I've recorded before "all in the room" - it worked out well and we got a really nice "Live" feel. I'd like to do it that way again, but he want's to layer it all track by track......which I think for a blues band will be a bit tedious and unnecessary.
Thanks, Jack.

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There's nothing wrong with either recording all at the same time live in the room or building up a track instrument by instrument, or any method in between. The trick is to find the way that suits the band the best. There are different skills a band needs to be able to make the best of whichever method they choose.

If you are going to record live the band needs to be so well rehearsed that they can nail the song in a couple of takes. Alternatively if you are going to build up the track an instrument at a time each musician need to be able to play their part without necessarily being able to hear cues from the other instruments that they might normally rely on. Both are skills that need to be worked on long before the band sets foot in the studio.

Whichever method you choose, I wouldn't even consider recording to tape any more. The downsides, especially with multi-track tape, more than outweigh any (imagined) sonic benefits. I see too many studios who've installed a tape machine for that "old school" vibe, but either haven't got the skills or can't afford to keep it properly maintained and aligned, and don't have the rack of Dolby A modules that you need to keep tape hiss in check. Doing anything other than pressing record at the start, and stop at the end of your perfect take is a complete hassle and very time consuming. Things that takes seconds on a DAW like setting punch in and out points for an overdub or removing an unwanted noise at the beginning of an otherwise perfect recording will take minutes at best using tape (out of time you as a band are paying for) and if the engineer gets it wrong there is no undo button. You may find, like I have several times in the past, having to go back and do the whole track again because the wrong thing as been inadvertently wiped.

On top of that, if you aren't going to simply copy all the tape tracks into your DAW once tracking is over (in which case your studio might as well just invest in a good tape saturation plug in), the studio is going to need racks of outboard gear to process everything. Even if you do at lot of it at tracking the studio is going to need a compressor/limiter and gate on every mic at the very least. All that hardware doesn't come cheap and really if the studio cares about the sound they are going to want quality outboard with valves and opto-compressors. A handful of Behringer MDX2600s isn't going to cut it.

And unless the studio has a very expensive analogue automated mixing desk, any mix is going to have to be done live, which can be as much a performance as playing the song in the first place. Also making adjustments to that mix at a later date will involve setting it up from scratch all over again. You had better hope that the studio took notes of every channel setting if you want to do this.

Having gone through the rigmarole of multi-track tape recently, the only way I'd consider recording to tape again would be if was with a brilliantly rehearsed band going live direct to a mono or stereo master. In that case the performance of the producer/engineer on the desk would be just as critical as that of any of the musicians - perhaps more so since they won't have had the luxury of weeks of practice to learn the song and what needs to be done when it terms of riding the faders and adjusting the outboard as the band plays.

Having said all that I don't necessarily see a studio recording as an excise in trying to achieve perfection, but at the same time I don't want to be left with errors in the recording that could and ought to have been fixed. For me multi-tracking and using a DAW to capture the performance(s) gives the ultimate in flexibility. The things that you do want to change can be done quickly and easily.

Finally, of the [url=https://terrortones.bandcamp.com]four Terrortones releases[/url], 3 were recorded as live performances with a few vocal, guitar and theremin overdubs and one was built up one instrument at a time. I would defy anyone to pick out which was the assembled recording.

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[quote name='Happy Jack' timestamp='1495548427' post='3304658']
...I felt this deserved a wider audience.
[/quote]

My house mate, who you might remember from the Risley DB Bash, has a 60in chest. Is [i]that[/i] wide enough for you? I'll show it him if you like.

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