The recording/mixing/mastering techniques thread

[JemDooM]

If I was worried about it sounding kind of shit I wouldn't have self recorded with shit gear in a warehouse then put it on a tape! It's just a demo but I still need to think about how to master it...

Lumpy all the info on the googles is very wishy washy, I think it's a lot down to opinion, or experience, I wondered if anyone here has done it and learned something from it...

[Lumpy]

I think the stereotypical description of cassettes is that they are "muddy" (bassy and warm, maybe lacking a little detail in the treble). For a doom band (I assume that's you) you might find that cassettes add a nice ooomph to your recordings. Since you're the bass player, a bass-heavy demo would be extra nice.

If you're doing your own dubs, you can do output tests and make revisions to the master file. One trick I've heard about... play a piece of music you're very familiar with, which has production qualities you want to emulate. A/B that music with your master, and see if you can tweak your recordings to get as close as possible with your mix. Can you flip between different pieces, without a shocking difference in volume and frequency range? Some people even import that 'pro' music into their DAW (Pro Tools or whatever) and compare the waveforms.

If you're sending it out to a dubbing facility/manufacturer, ask them if they have any guidelines.

Also, maybe there is somebody local/regional who can master your material for cheap/sliding scale. Here is the US people send their files to Billy Anderson or James Plotkin (etc etc) and have them do their mastering. Does it add anything to the final recordings? I dunno. But it adds some additional interest to your recordings to say "mastered by ______". Who is your local Billy Anderson?

I wouldn't fret too much, recording quality can be overrated. Good songs trump an average mix, we see that all the time.

[JemDooM]

I was waiting to mix/master it more after some more listening and thinking etc but you've got me thinking i'll just throw it on a tape and see what happens! the tracks are already very bass heavy so hopefully it wont be bass overload, or atleast it will but in a good way, i'm recording onto tape now so I'll see if the highs need to come up, playing guitar on this so I'll want my leads to be heard, though I don't mind if theyre all murky been listening to the Darkthrone demos all week so I'm more than happy for this to sound a bit like ass

the bottom bass string snapped during recording and there was no spare so we had to use one much smaller than usual and hell it did not appreciate being tuned down to A! So the bass on this sounds like what we could only described as a giant scratching his balls

thanks dude I appreciate the helpful thoughts

[Jake]

^^^Much more helpful than my snotty indignation.

I just don't see why cassettes are the du jour thing now (or maybe they're already passé?). They're more expensive to make than CDs, reproduce sound relatively poorly, and are generally obsolete with most systems. I get the nostaligia thing – I've got an 8-track player and a couple hundred 8-tracks. But I'd be super disappointed if a band I really wanted to hear released something on tape. The depreciation in sound really does detract from the enjoyment.

[Chovie D]

This might be overly complexbut..... One time, in the early 1990's  I heard "famous grunge producer" Jack Endino go off on this subject. I wasnt paying too much attention  to him at the time, but looks like he wrote an article about it.
Maybe it would be helpful?
http://www.endino.com/archive/cassettes.html


edit: after reading that it appers to be more about mastering FROM cassette, than mastering FOR Cassette, but the man is insightful nonetheless...

[Lumpy]

^^^Much more helpful than my snotty indignation.

I just don't see why cassettes are the du jour thing now (or maybe they're already passé?). They're more expensive to make than CDs, reproduce sound relatively poorly, and are generally obsolete with most systems. I get the nostaligia thing – I've got an 8-track player and a couple hundred 8-tracks. But I'd be super disappointed if a band I really wanted to hear released something on tape. The depreciation in sound really does detract from the enjoyment.

they're not more expensive than CDs. You can get 100 pro-dubbed cassettes with full color J card, in a plastic shell with printed info (band name etc... on the cassette itself) for 150 dollars. Might even include shrink wrap and shipping, I forget.
http://nationalaudiocompany.com/Cassette-Duplication-Imprinting-and-Packaging-C14001181.aspx
Well, they were running a special for a long time, I don't see it immediately. But that's a ballpark estimate. For CDs, the cheapest I've seen is about 4/piece. CDRs are about 2.50/piece. Many manufacturers will not do a run under 500 pieces. Your costs go up for short runs.

If you make your own dubs (and a lot of people do, probably a majority) then the cost per cassette is under a dollar.

I don't recall hearing complaints about cassettes sounding bad, back when they were one of the industry standard formats (90s I guess). Maybe people complained and I don't remember. I don't remember.

Cassettes are a cool object that fits in your pocket. CDs are not a cool object and don't fit in your pocket. MP3s fit in your pocket but are not an object.

Cassettes also put the means of production back into the hands of the workers

Every format has problems...

[Jake]

Cassette tapes are the new fixies.

[JemDooM]

A very interesting article indeed Chovie, and to be honest quite terrifying while i'm trying to do this haha, i'll send the masters to the tape company and trust that they'll get it right...

recorded the tracks onto tape and they sound even better on the tape! Warmer like you said Lumpy. I like how tapes sound...

Jake they are just better than a cd for a demo imo, they're fatter and more satisfying physically and in sound, I don't like the 'thin-ness' of demo cd's in those thin flimsy cases, all the ones I have are squished up in a basket because there's nowhere else to put them, its not like they look good or fit anywhere so there's no point having them out, whereas tapes are fat enough to stack somewhere and see the spines. Most of my heroes released their first stuff on tape so I want to go for tape over cd for nostalgia reasons as you say and you do get a warm fuzzy nostalgia feeling when you put them in and sit waiting for them to rewind or whatever, and as lumpy said it is indeed very cheap to do, that price is almost exactly what iv been quoted....

[eyeprod]

I like tapes. can't see losing any listening pleasure by playing a tape over a cd. Does not compute.  music is music. if it's good music, I prefer a rough recording over a polished one any day. personal preference.

unless you're one of those hifi only geeks and think too much on how such and such frequency doesn't transfer to tape and so you're home system is not living up to it's potential. i thought that was a different forum

[jibberish]

interesting when the word fat is used for physical description vs a cd, well it goes same for musical description.  ferrous oxide is fat. overloads clean and actually has good headroom. downside is hiss and less freq response. still 16-18k is plenty fine for rock n roll cymbals. the chrome formulations are for freq response at the cost of headroom.

jumz got hit up side the head with theee ana-LOG. I believe you sense why some of us get a bit rabid defending our vinyl and other analog stuff as being more musical. because it is.

[Lumpy]

the chrome formulations are for freq response at the cost of headroom.

i did not know that, thanks.

[jibberish]

they further confused the issue, AND the ideal bias levels, by doing the multi layer thing with both Fe and Cr.
That's why there were "ferrochrome" tapes also.   the tricky engineers wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

this is why my harmon kardon 3 head deck with a bias adjust pot is the total shit for making good recordings,( besides the insane frequency response and low distortion).

you can A/B the source and tape very quickly, plus tweak the bias until the richness vs thinness/muddiness vs sharpness equals the source's. there were even posted numbers for ideal bias values for the different brand chrome tapes like maxell xl 2 vs say tdk SA or the denon chromes and so on

edit: they eventually came out with what they called "metal" tapes. awesome headroom AND freq response, but they needed a new bias setting. that left many old decks in the dust, except me, with the bias adjust pot, bring it, anything. a/b and tweak until dialled in..next... and so on
the only thing keeping it from being god's own cassette deck would have been an eq tweak vs the set value choices

[jibberish]

ok, this chrome thing needs more explaining.
IN THE DAY, you bought an album and a chrome cassette to record it on.
No coincidence what-so-ever that tapes are 45 min or 90 min to exactly match vinyl LP length.
how else could you take your precious music out into the car. this was huger than huger pizza.
8-tracks were too shaky and expensive to have hundreds and hundreds. but those tiny reel-to-reels were perfect. they wound clean forever. that's all you need was to keep the gum off the rollers and heads and that was the most physically tough audio system ever devised(except for solid state players now, total victory there)

in the pursuit of copying albums exactly, the rules were different from music creation.  albums were compressed with 20-20k frqresponse. chrome was perfect.  no surprises=no need for headroom. you recorded chromes a lot like today's digital: don't go over 0 db end of story.  the lower distortion and noise and the higher freq response matched the job of DUPLICATION of LP's better than ferric oxide. remember in the studio, the tape speeds of reel to reels was heinous. cassettes only go 1 7/8 ips or some silly number like that.  reel to reel is the best for everything, but the tradeoff is you use assloads of tape.

SO, the upshot is that for recording original music definitely try ferric oxide tapes, even for cassette. warmth and forgiving headroom is nice.  maybe you have to use chromes and compressors on the mic channels for drum recording if cymbal or bell tree shimmers are getting lost, or do digital for that w/e

i could see maybe mastering digital onto chrome, once it was all prettied up and compressed etc.
you will get the truest COPY of the master digital file on chrome since you don't need the headroom safety net like during actual recording

[jibberish]

one last thing: the cassette deck makes a huge difference in what your recordings sound like. 
a piece of shit sounds like shit.
extra hiss, noise, wow&flutter, bias and eq error, loss of potential freq response and more distortion added.

although, a certain lo end machine may make the sweetest musical nasty tapes you ever made, so you never know until you work with the machine. a flutter problem is more of a deal breaker than poor hi freq performance for example.

i guess you look for "musical" and "non-musical" defects. the non musical ones are mutherfuckers

and feel free to try "wrong" bias and eq setting on your cassette for recording , or eq on playback. you cant hurt anything, just not optiomized levels for optimum recording blah blah

cassettes are sweet, end of  jibber jabbering.

[Lumpy]

Interesting, thanks for that.

[JemDooM]

You're like a bottomless pit of knowledge jibbs

[JemDooM]

So in what circumstance do you decide to make mono tracks into stereo tracks?

My tracks are mono and I read about making them stereo using the duplicate and delay technique to make the songs sound fuller, but when I tried this with the guitar/drums and bass/drums tracks I didn't like the result as much as before the change. When I tried it with the leads or vocals I'm hearing no more of an improvement than just a difference which I'm also not sure if I like better....

I'm also so damn sick of mixing and listening and mixing now, it's been over a week!

[lordfinesse]

I'm also so damn sick of mixing and listening and mixing now, it's been over a week!

That's way too long. No reason it should ever take that long to finish mixing a recording.

[JemDooM]

Hmmm i suppose that is dependant on experience, iv found it to be beneficial to mix, then leave for a day, listen, mix, listen over a few different formats/speakers, mix, listen for a couple of days, I had a trip to Scotland in the middle of it where I had a few listens on my iPod, also spent a couple of times experimenting, as this is new to me such as trying to find out if I can avoid using the limiter which it seems I can't and also the mono to stereo thing, it's been fun and interesting but I don't feel like facing it today even though I need to bring the vocals and leads down a touch and add another lead which I felt would be good...

[MichaelZodiac]

I try to make decisions like these as quick as possible, the less time you spent on it, the better in my perspective. Make a mix with decent headphones, try it out on quality speakers and some less hifi equipment (car stereo, cheap-ish earplugs) and done. Alter the mix a bit if you feel that the balance isn't right on one of these or just say: fuck off and go with the earlier mix. I always go for a walk (smoking up before) with a new mix on my iPod to feel it out.

[lordfinesse]

Hmmm i suppose that is dependant on experience, iv found it to be beneficial to mix, then leave for a day, listen, mix, listen over a few different formats/speakers, mix, listen for a couple of days, I had a trip to Scotland in the middle of it where I had a few listens on my iPod, also spent a couple of times experimenting, as this is new to me such as trying to find out if I can avoid using the limiter which it seems I can't and also the mono to stereo thing, it's been fun and interesting but I don't feel like facing it today even though I need to bring the vocals and leads down a touch and add another lead which I felt would be good...

I was joking. It takes however long it takes. Sometimes years.

[JemDooM]

Oh I read your comment and was like, oh no! what am I doing!

Zodiac I'm thinking your probably right there!

[Lumpy]

Didn't you use more than one mic? Pan one mic slightly to one side, pan the other mic to the other side.

[jibberish]

So in what circumstance do you decide to make mono tracks into stereo tracks?

My tracks are mono and I read about making them stereo using the duplicate and delay technique to make the songs sound fuller, but when I tried this with the guitar/drums and bass/drums tracks I didn't like the result as much as before the change. When I tried it with the leads or vocals I'm hearing no more of an improvement than just a difference which I'm also not sure if I like better....

I'm also so damn sick of mixing and listening and mixing now, it's been over a week!

whoops, you tried that and didn't like it.  i had to edit out telling you to do just that lol, ahem....  

maybe you have to double your parts by hand. lots of bands double the vocals and guitars.

here is an example of a doubled guitar part. you can ignore my bullshit vocals, but notice after the first full phrase, how the second phrase, and the rest of the tune, is much richer sounding (covered the rhythm to cathedral's north Berwick witch trials song) just 2 guitars and the metronome drum machine is in there, nothing extra

[soundcloud]https://soundcloud.com/doktordeath/myberwick[/soundcloud]

[JemDooM]

Your link is invisible dude unless its my phone not loading something? :*

Most people I know who've recorded layered up the guitars several times by hand which I'd love to try out in the future but I'm feeling that its good to keep things real and natural too, as for trying to thicken it up through mixing I think I'm actually ok with the sound of two mics each mono, I'm just not sure if I should be making the tracks stereo, but like I say I didn't hear a significant improvement from doing that...

Am I right in thinking that instead of using a delay of milliseconds when duplicating mono tracks you could instead eq them differently for the same purpose of making the separate tracks distinguishable?

I think I'm finished mixing this now, even more so because we gave the tracks to Soggy Bob for his latest show which was awesome of him

So much to learn....