I borrowed this information from a site I spend time on as well as here, there are some very eexperienced folks over at
www.audiominds.com. One in particualr has helped me many times, is "Mac" he and some of the other folks there have straightened out a few misconseptions and helped me understand the art of recording. I have tried to share some of the things I have learned over the last three years both there and at Acidplanet.com and here at Cakewalk. So here is Mac's thoughts on recording, mixing and mastering, I hope it helps.
Recording: Proper Microphone Usage & Selection
It's important to get a good sound going in. Don't expect to fix a bad recording with EQ and effects. If the raw track isn't clean, 'go back, Jack, and do it again'. Laying down quality tracks is the key to producing a quality product. Take your time during setup to select the right microphone and mic placement. Recording a vocal or acoustic instrument? Have the artist play/sing while you listen in front of the performer. Pretend your ear is the microphone, and listen carefully as you move your head around. It’s amazing how moving just a couple inches can affect the sound. When you find the sweet spot, place the mic there. It’s also helpful to put on headphones and listen carefully as a helper positions the mics. Are you left- or right-eared? If you don't know, take time to find out. Learning to trust your ears takes time, but it's a critical element of recording.
Record stereo when appropriate. Acoustic guitars especially can benefit from a dual-mic, stereo recording. The phasing and frequency differences resulting in using 2 mics can add depth and fullness to a track. Also, using a 'room mic' (placed far from the source) can add natural room reverb to your vocals. You might want to record the tracks as a single, stereo WAV to start (easier for editing). Then when you're done recording and ready to mix, split the stereo track into seperate, mono tracks (easier for EQing & adding effects).
Awhile back, we had a great discussion in the forum on the 'Recommended Order of Recording'. These are Mac's thoughts, and Mac's thoughts are always worth noting. (Have you met Mac? Visit the forum and introduce yourself.)
You’re using proper equipment, right?
Low end sound cards have a mic input. It's best not to use it. Even an inexpensive mixer will have a much better quality preamp than a computer sound card. Connect your mixer (or mic preamp) to the sound card LineIn (bypasses the mic pre) instead.
Many higher quality sound cards house their analog-to-digital (and their digital-to-analog) converters in a breakout (external) box. This moves the converters away from the inside of the computer where electrical interference can create high noise levels. Sound cards with breakout boxes are more expensive but can produce much improved signal-to-noise levels. Some cards also offer balanced inputs & outputs. Again, this helps keep noise to a minimum.
DI (direct injection) boxes are invaluable when recording bass. An inline compressor is often wise for vocals and acoustic guitars. Have you tried a dynamic mic on that guitar cab? There are no hard and fast rules, but these are 3 setups that are generally accepted as best practices.
Record it dry
Most folks here agree that it's better to record tracks dry and add effects afterward. If you use effects during the recording phase, you’re stuck with them. Add them during the Mixing phase, and you have much more control. Of course, there are always exceptions.
Compression: Adding a compressor to the signal chain when recording a very dynamic instrument or singer can help keep the signal from clipping. It may mean the difference between keeping and trashing that perfect take.
Natural room reverb: Even the best reverb plug-in can’t match the quality of natural reverb. If you’re recording in a great sounding room, you may want to set up an additional mic (placed further away to pick up the natural room sound). Again, you may want to record the tracks as a single, stereo WAV to start (easier for editing) and later convert to mono tracks (easier for EQing & adding effects).
Electric guitar effects: This is often the exception to the 'record it dry' rule. Often, micing a guitar amp with full effects added (try an SM57) will give the most natural results. Record a sample of each, and trust your ears.
Record it hot (but not too hot)
When laying tracks, you want to capture a signal that has plenty of gain (volume). The higher the gain, the less chance that noise (every system has noise) will be heard. The process of setting each mixer channel for optimum signal-to-noise ratio is called Gain Staging. As you record, use the Recording LED to monitor the gain of the signal being laid. For the highest signal-to-noise ratio, the peaks of your track should hit just below 0 (zero, or unity gain). HOWEVER, shooting for 0 isn’t really wise for a couple reasons:
The performer may play/sing louder than normal and actually clip the track. If you’ve ever heard digital clipping, you know this is a bad thing.
You want to leave room (called headroom) to add effects. For these reasons, it’s suggested you drop the gain so your tracks peak around -6 db. Depending on the quality of your sound card (cheaper cards tend to be noisier) and the bit depth at which you’re recording (24-bit offers more headroom than 16-bit), a gain of -6 is a good compromise between signal-to-noise and the risk of clipping.
Keep it on time
For heaven's sake, start your project with a click track! most programs have a metronome, but many of us prefer to use a wave editor or drum sequencer to generate a click. Either way, convert it to WAV and import it into your song. This is the best way to assure a steady tempo. And a steady tempo is critical when doing overdubs.
Mixing: The Basics
Now that you've got those great tracks laid down, getting them to sound good together is the next challenge. Once again, you've got to learn to trust your ears. Nobody here can give you a foolproof method of mixing a hit. A technique that sounds great on one song might sound terrible on another. So, take your time and experiment. But here are some general guidelines that most agree are quite helpful. As always, we can show you the basics. But your success will depend on how committed you are to listening... really listening to your tracks and training those ears.
In the Recording section, we learned that moving a mic even an inch can greatly affect the quality of the recording. The same is true with EQ, compression, reverb, echo, basically every effect with which you'll come in contact. As you start to tweak your raw tracks, play with each settings and listen intently to how that change affects the track. Remember, presets are a convenience and a good way to get close to what the track needs. But the engineer who has diligently trained his ears will rely on them instead.
As promised, here are a few tips and tricks to get you started:
General Mixing Tips:
Start with a rough mix - Different engineers have different approaches to building a mix. Some will solo one track at a time and work on it to make it sound the best it can. They'll then move on to the next. Others prefer to monitor all tracks all the time. They say this helps them make sure their tweaks help the track sit well with the rest (AudioMinds generally recommends this approach). Whichever approach you choose, it's wise to start with the big picture in mind. Listen to the song, with all tracks playing. Listen to it until you really know the song well. Get in the habit of asking yourself some basic questions; 'What are the main sections of the song?', 'What are the main instruments in each section?', 'What is the best setting for the song? Small, intimate room or big concert hall?', etc. With the big picture in mind, start setting levels for each track (understanding that lead tracks will need to be louder than bed tracks. See Limey's Pyramid.), and for each section (understanding that different tracks will take the lead in different sections). When you've got a basic level-set for the entire song, your rough mix is done, and you're ready to start tweaking individual tracks.
Make notes - We can't emphasize this enough. When it's midnight, you've been mixing for 6 hours, and you're tired, it's easy to forget what your plans were for the song. Write them down. Did you decide that the setting should be a small, intimate room? You'll need to remember that when you're ready to add reverb. Write it down.
Work on bed tracks first - Bed tracks (usually the underlying rhythm instruments) are the foundation of the song. Set the foundation before moving on to lead tracks. In other words, once the rough mix is done and you're ready to start tweaking, work on these first. For pop/rock songs, it's very important to get kick and bass sounding good together. So kick and bass are often a great place to start.
Use monitors designed for mixing - Regular stereo speakers are designed to make everything sound good; even a bad mix. Studios pay big bucks for perfectly accurate monitors. But decent near-field monitors are available for not much money (Radio Shack mini’s driven by a stereo amp work surprisingly well). Headphones, as a general rule, are not recommended due to their reduced frequency response and the way they distort a stereo image.
Mix at low volumes - This makes subtle differences in instrument volumes more apparent. It also helps prevent ear fatigue. If you've commited to working hard to train your ears, fatigue should be an important issue to you. You can't make wise mixing decisions if you can't trust your ears to give you an accurate representation of the material. If you can't talk over your playback, turn it down. Read up on and understand the Fletcher-Munson curve. Be sure to adjust the EQ on your monitors to take this anomoly into accound.
Give your ears a rest - The human ear quickly adapts to a listening environment. For the mixing engineer, this means that highs (especially) will appear to lose their brilliance rather quickly. Taking short breaks allows your ears to ‘reset’.
Do frequent level sets - Keep a professionally engineered CD handy so you have something to compare your mix to. When applying effects, compare the dry signal to the effected signal often. Occasionally switch your mix to mono and listen for phasing problems. Listen to your mix at low volume, high volume, from outside the room, in the car, on the home stereo, anywhere you can. Remember that you’re mixing for many different users listening on many different types and qualities of equipment.
Mastering: Ready to take your mix to the next level?
Mastering has been defined as 'the magical step that transforms your pumpkin into a carriage'. We see no reason to disagree. Those who do mastering for a living and do it well are held in high esteem in recording circles; and with good reason. Their craft is largely misunderstood, and efforts to duplicate at home what they do in professional mastering houses are often disasterous. Still, there is hope. With dedication and determination, the home hobbyist can achieve reasonable results in adding polish to their masterpiece. Thus, evermore determined, we forge ahead...
As you continue your digital recording education, you’ll find that mastering tends to be more art than science. Yes, there are plug-ins and programs that claim to automate the process; and many are helpful in adding sparkle to your final mix. But nothing replaces knowledge, patience, training, and attention to detail. As we expand our ear training to include the subtleties of the mastering process, one exercise continues to prove especially helpful:
1. Compare your work to commercially produced material
2. Ask 'what's missing?'
3. Make a small change and compare again
4. Evaluate what you've done. Like it? Move on. Don't like it? Go back, Jack, and do it again.
Unlike the mixing phase where you tweak a track/group at a time, changes made during the mastering phase impact all tracks in the song. For this reason, you gotta be careful and move slowly. Document your changes, take frequent breaks to rest your ears, and use those reference tracks as a reality check.
Generally, EQ, compression, reverb, and final limiting are added during the mastering phase (not always in that order). In talented hands, EQ can help give seperation to individual instruments and create an overall pleasant blend. Certainly, seperation is easier to achieve during the mixing phase when you're working with individual tracks. Care should be taken, then, to accomplish as much of this during the mixing phase as possible. Still, much can be done during mastering. Also, a high-pass filter to remove rumbling low end is usually appropriate. Now is a good time to A/B your work to a commercial CD of a similar genre. And don't forget to switch to mono occasionally to catch phasing problems.
Proper compression settings can bring life to an otherwise ordinary mix. Use of a multi-band compressor can give you more flexibility and power in doing so. Adding a touch of reverb often helps add continuity to a project. Keeping in mind what we learned about placing instruments in the proper room setting will help you choose an appropriate verb. Just remember to keep it light.
Another challenge in mastering is getting a dozen or so songs to sound like they belong together. The mastering engineer has the responsibility of knitting 12 unique songs into a cohesive whole. Remember that each song performs a role within the overall plan of a CD. In the same way that a soft section in a song helps make a loud section seem louder, a soft acoustic song which forces the listern to sit up and listen can add impact to the raucous rock song that follows. Resist the temptation to over-compress every song in an effort to make them as loud as possible. Softer songs benefit from a higher dynamic range. So, plan to apply different compressor, EQ, and verb settings to your 12 songs. THEN, you can link them together and render a single WAV file. Once rendered as a single file, you can crop the beginning and fade (if appropriate) the end. Then you're ready to apply the final (and gentle) limiting to the very peaks. Try a 2:1 ratio with a high threshold.
Take a break; you deserve it. Besides, you'll want to refresh your ears and then go back and double-check your work.