As producer Trina Shoemaker puts it: “It’s not about getting a great sound. If not, always try to address this at source - not only before you hit Record, but before you even get any mics involved. Work on the source: Listen acoustically to the instrument/ensemble you’re about to record and ask yourself if it already sounds the way you want it to. This is especially baffling amongst cash–strapped recordists, as it costs nothing to tweak an instrument’s settings, adjust the way it’s played, or rearrange furniture to change the room’s acoustics. Ignoring The Sourceĭon’t waste the acoustic potential of the furniture around you - after all, it doesn’t cost you anything! In this session, for instance, you can see that two guitar amps have been separated from the drums using a sofa and a mattress, while the kick–drum mic has also been baffled against cymbal spill using a couple of armchairs and a pile of blankets.Top producers harp on about this all the time in interviews, so it amazes me how often I see project–studio operators fixate on their technology and completely overlook the fact that the instrument, the musician, and the recording room are far more important.
#SEPARATION STUDIO PINT KIT FREE#
Also, in case any of the technical terms I use leaves you scratching your head, I’ve included links to the capacious SOS technical glossary and numerous supporting articles from our free online archive. To help you understand things better, I’ve put together a media page on the SOS web site ( ) which features dozens of audio demonstrations and provides links to a variety of helpful online resources. I’ll list the 10 most common recording traps I hear project–studio producers fall into, and explain some no–nonsense ways to avoid them. What’s most galling is that the same basic tracking errors are to blame time and time again, so with this in mind, I’d like to help you cut hours (or perhaps days) off your mixing schedule. I wouldn’t expect a well–recorded band production to take more than a day or so to mix to a commercial level, but most project–studio multitracks I receive need three times that amount of work, and some Mix Rescue projects can take a solid week to disentangle. A few simple changes while recording could have saved me many hours of post–production purgatory. But long, tedious salvage jobs at the mix would be unnecessary if the recordings were better in the first place. Learn to avoid them and your tracking sessions will be transformed!Īs a long–time contributor to SOS‘s Mix Rescue column, I’ve tried to demonstrate that, with careful editing and processing, it’s often possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat when faced with poor recordings. The same pitfalls present themselves time and again in project-studio recording.