craigb


Hmm...  Even though I didn't specifically state it in my reply above, I don't want a mic-pre to color my tone, just to help me send a better, stronger signal to my audio interface.

So, that said, if I don't use any mic-pre, what are some good techniques to achieving this goal anyway?

Danny?

Hi Craig,
 
1. Good sound sources: First and foremost, you need a good sound that sounds good to the ears in its rawest form. Sometimes you need good gear for this. A cabinet for guitar or bass made from a Radio Shack speaker will probably not sound as good as a Celestion or JBL. An old Fender may not be the best choice for metal, an Ovation shallow bowl may not be the best choice for classical guitar etc. The sound source is the most important element in the chain and making the correct choices is where we need to focus more than any converter, soundcard, mic pre, mic or sound guru. If the sound sucks, the sound sucks. Better gear on a sound that sucks is even more unforgiving. Record a bunch of trashy old gear on cassette, 8-track, reel to reel and then do the exact same thing using digital stuff. You'll notice due to the warmth of tape as well as natural tape saturation, that it will literally mask the sounds and cover them up a bit. With digital, you hear what you really recorded which is why some of the old school dudes think it sounds harsh or abrasive which is not true at all. Analog is what colors the sound.
 
2. Clean line level signals that aren't too weak or too strong: I like to send signals into my DAW at -6dB. In my opinion there is no reason to go lower or louder and there are no apparent tests that tell me I'm right or wrong. Headroom, 24 bit realms and all that other jazz hasn't shown me anything in the real world of recording. I'm not saying it's falacy, but I'm saying people buy into this stuff more than they should. If you have a good, clean signal that is healthy and without noise due to using good cables that are not introducing hum or artifacts into your recording, you have a good signal. If you can achieve this clean signal without the use of a conventional mic pre, there is no need for one. When I run something through my Mackie 32x8 console or my Tascam DM-4800, I use very little pre-amp (if any on some things) and just about never use the onboard eq. From there, I like a small amount of compression so that I don't have any overs. I'm talking very subtle here...enough to keep me at -6dB without loss of dynamics or a dead give-away that I'm using a compressor.
 
3. Your mic vault: It's essential to have the right mics for the job IF you will be mic'ing instruments. One mic will not work on all things and the super pricey mics will not always work either. I have a U-87 that I can only use on my own voice when I sing in the key of G. For some reason, I just do not like the sound of my voice using that mic no matter how much it cost me. Sing in G, it's pure bliss...sing in another key, and I'm better off using my secret weapon of choice for myself, an old Equitek CAD E-200. It just works for MY voice on just about everything. The same can be said about guitars and drums. Everyone loves the sound of an SM 57 for rock guitar. However, sometimes the cab you use will not help this mic to be the right choice. Though we can list a million people that have used this mic on recordings we all know and love, it doesn't mean it will work for YOU on YOUR rig. You may need a combination of mics used at once in different positions. I like 57's on my 25 watt Greenbacks (at least 2 per cab), on a 45 degree angle at 4 inches away where the speaker cone meets the paper edge. I then like to run a 421 at about a foot or 2 away to give me a bit more depth in the sound. I may also run another 421 or maybe even an old EV 357 or 457 at a distance for a little room ambiance. This is the experimentation stuff you try. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But if you are going to mic instruments, it's nice to have a decent mic locker to pull from because this is what is going to make your sound. You'll know in 10 seconds whether a mic works for you or not. It should never be a question of "I think this is fair, I'll fix it in the mix later". Don't ever live by that and you'll never settle for less.
 
4. Your monitors: You can be the best engineer in the world and not even know it. Monitors that are giving you false representation are the death of 75% of home recording engineers. You can't make the right calls if what you hear is not really what is there. The best investment for anyone wanting pro sound to get, is a good set of monitors with a sub and some room tuning/monitor tuning. This is one of the most valuable investments you will ever make due to how much time it can cut down. Mixes and recording decisions that are taking your weeks and months, should be cut down to a day or 2 with the right monitor environment. Trust me, stuff like this will change your entire world over night once you invest in the above stuff.
 
5. Your knowledge: I've mentioned many times on this forum and other forums about how important it is to know what you're doing. A good engineer should be able to give incredible results with a stock pc and stock soundcard, Sonar and a good set of monitors. I've done it several times when people have called me on it. Again, yes there will be differences between me using a stock rig vs. my recording rig with all the bells and whistles, but the differences will not be incredibly huge. Different, yes, less audible or amateur sounding one vs. the other...never. Knowing when to boost and when to cut is the most important when using eq. Too many people are boosters when all they have to do is cut. When you hear too much bass in something, don't raise the treble...find out where the offending bass frequencies are and eliminate them. When too much treble is the problem, don't raise bass....and so on. Knowing how frequencies work in syllables of the english language are how I teach my students about understanding eq.
 
Each frequency has a presence...its own voice, it will speak to you if you allow yourself to get to know them. When you get good enough at recognizing eq, you know what you hear before you even throw it up on a scope. Thankfully I've been able to get a grasp on this. I may be a few increments off when I hear something and comment, but I'm usually in the right ball park at all times. This same practice needs to be kept in mind when you are mic'ing or creating sounds. If you put a mic on a guitar cab and it "whommfs" when the artist plays, you have to determine whether or not the sound quality is good enough to leave it or you alter the mic or try another. If you have a good guitar sound but it's just a bit "whommfy" you know that you can probably high pass 80 Hz or something and solve the problem. But you have to be able to identify the severity of the low end and figure out if it is degrading the entire track or just adding some bad rumble that needs to be removed. Again I stress, with the wrong monitors or lack of tuning to the room and the monitors and none of this has any merit.
 
6. Instrument characteristics: Knowing how an instrument is supposed to sound for a particular genre is of the utmost importance. If you have never worked on a blues project before, it's best to listen to bands that sound like the band you are about to record for a week in advance if possible. If you record mostly dance or R&B, you're going to be in for a rude awakening here. The same if you are a classic rock recording engineer and get a metal band in. Forget all you know about recording instruments in the classic rock realm. It's a totally different animal that needs different care. The drums are different, the guitars are different, the bass is different....the list goes on and on. So it's wise to wear many hats and learn as much as you can if you are to be working with a wide array of artists. There are techniques for every genre. Most of the techniques used bring out the instrument voices in a different way so they represent that style, they don't MAKE the style.
 
We need to make the correct choices based on what we are presented with at all times. I believe if I'm not mistaken Craig, you and I are into similar stuff....rock, metal, pop rock, extreme guitar music, right? If so, we have to abide by a different set of rules for what we listen to. The biggest offender in our style of music is the use of extreme gain in guitar sounds. We want the guitar to sound obnoxious, but it needs to remain warm. We want infinite sustain, but we don't want it to be so gainy that the tone trips over itself and soundslikearunonsentencewithoutpercussiveattacklikethissentencehere. LMAO! We want a nice mixture of tight lows, nice mids for warmth but not excessive to where we sound like we are too mid-range congested. We want enough highs to punch through the mix, but we don't want them to be dominant or piercing. Getting this sound is not as easy as people may think. Especially if you have to create this sound from scratch working with a guy that has a horrible sound to begin with.
 
But getting the happy medium takes time and some good ears along with at least decent gear. Once you know how to deal with this stuff and know what frequencies to push or pull, it's actually quite easy and the challenge isn't as apparent any longer. I'm not saying that recording is easy, but once you know the ins and outs and have some decent stuff to play with, it makes things 100% easier than you may be experiencing right now. The greatest thing that ever happened to me in this field was the day I could mix something in 6-8 hours and be done with it either in that session or one more session for an hour the next day once I gave my ears a break. The things I fix these days are mostly subjective levels in my mixes the next day. It's rare I've messed up on an eq so bad that I have to go and re-eq something. That to me is success right there. Levels are easy to fix...eq's and making everything work, can be an absolute nightmare...especially if you don't have the right listening environment and don't know how to best manage eq's.
 
Sorry for the novel, but at least you have a good start now. There are more than 6 things in the real world in this field, but I figured I best stop now before I lose your interest and type an E-Book about this stuff. LMAO! Hope this helps bro. :)

rockinrobby


I find that the high end (insert your favorite thing here) is typically more enjoyable than the (insert your thing here) street corner or wallmart alternative? Go figure... When I can afford the high end (insert your favorite thing here) I tend to spend the money on the (insert your favorite thing here.) Sometime's we have to save... But when you can spend? It's always fun to do so? Just ask ex Governor Spitzer?

LOL robby, I don't think any of us are talking about Walmart gear...that's definitely pushing things too far. Hahahaha! I used to like buying pricey gear too. Then you get a corner of your house full of it and you look back on how much you spent and how much you bought into hype that you probably shouldn't have. At least that's how it went down for me. :(

Yeah with guitars, it can definitely make a difference. Then again, that too can be subjective. I have guitars that are over $2000 and have others from $800-$1000 that play and sound just as good. Picking the right guitar is like picking a wife/soul mate in my opinion. Sometimes they cost you a bundle, other times they just love you just because you're you. LOL!

The upgrade thing is another good point you made. For some people, upgrading from an Audigy soundcard to a FF800 will be like night and day. Others like myself who went from a Layla 24/96 (which I still use) to the FF800, won't notice much of a difference in sound really. Another cool thing is, quite a few manufacturers of cheaper gear are really trying their best to give bang for the buck. Some of this stuff that's out now, I wouldn't even give the time of day 5 or more years ago. But working with it in a few instances has changed my mind. I'm all for "you should investigate this stuff and always buy what you can afford". I'm like that with anything in life. If we want something bad enough, we save for it. But we also have to really do some research in today's times because the world is full of marketing hype...and they make it way too easy for someone to buy into if they're not careful. :)

You're welcome Craig, let me know if any of it helps. Yeah the mic thing is a trial and error situation that pretty much relies on the gear you have going on. Each time it will be different. The beta mic's are actually quite good though I myself have not had much luck on them for guitar cabs that often. The 421 is a great mic for cabs both at close range and a bit further away, so you're good there. I'd also have at least 1-2 regular 57's on hand just because they do work well *most* times especially with Celestions. However, with vintage 30's, you may be better off with a 58 or the 421. I've never liked that speaker....for some reason it's always sounded a bit harsh in the 4k range for me no matter what I try. The 25 watt Greenbacks are definitely warmer without that English bite to them and they also break up faster so you can use less pre-amp/amp gain and allow the speaker to do some work.

Do you record most of your stuff via speaker sim these days, or are you still mic'ing things up all the time? Believe it or not man, I have the speaker sim thing down so well, I can't tell the difference between mic'ing my cabs and using speaker sim. If you have some good impulses, this can make a HUGE difference due to the fact that you can come super close to what gives us a mic sound. You know that air in between the cab and the mic? That's what we need to try and simulate, but you have to do it very carefully or you literally hear the effect. The idea is to not be able to blatantly hear it, but allow for some "space" so to speak without going nuts. THEN you put the guitar in a bit of a room after and it comes to life. I have better results with impulses than I do conventional reverb for stuff like this as the impulses are real rooms instead of synthetic verbs. The EMT 250 by UAD is quite the exception though. That freakin' thing sounds great no matter how you use it. LOL!

But in all honesty, you should be able to achieve great results with speaker sims too as well as guitar layering using different guitar pre-amps etc. That's what makes a guitar sound super thick...but then again, I've been shying away from that because it just sounds too full and kind of....I dunno....too polished? I've been going with 2 rhythm guitars these days and maybe 2 more additional ones for chorus parts only just to drive the tune to the next level. Even there I gotta be careful though because it's too easy to get carried away with guitar onslaught. LMAO! Good luck with everything brother...keep me posted. :)

mike_mccue


My music sounds electronic?

ok.


:-)


Let me preface this by emphasizing that I think of all the folks in the this thread as valued friends!!! I am going to try an state my opinion without rocking the boat to hard.



I couldn't respond yesterday... I was working with a guy name Bret Michaels before his show last night... he seemed happy with our work and he was adamant that me and the boys hang out on the side stage so we could "party" all night... but we told him we wanted to leave early to travel back home. We drove 620 miles yesterday and worked some too. Somehow folks find us and call us to help them. Brett's band has sold just about 18 million records. He knows how to have his people find guys to work with.


With regards to gear slutz listening tests.  98% of those make believe tests are improperly prepared and so all those tests prove is that some people are foolish enough to think they are testing something. There are maybe 2 guys over at gear slutz that make an attempt to provide content worth comparing. Rhythminmymind is the guy that does the best job providing content that is worth while. I admire his attempts to help. The rest of the stuff is a bad joke.

With regards to Tascam Portastudios... I remember the week Nebraska came out...  everyone enjoyed the novelty of listening to how good the songs were and how awful it all sounded. That project required expert, huge budget, noise reduction techniques before it was professionally mastered and brought to market. BTW my wife just purchased Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. If you are a fan of Nebraska... you'll know why I mention that.

I like the Beck album too... but it ain't hi-fi. :-)

With regards to the expense of good gear... gosh I don't know what to say... I make my living 99-1/2% as a sound recordists. I pay cash for my preamps. Cash I earn working as a recordist.  I sincerely feel sound of the gear I use is so much better than the inputs on any of the integrated circuit crap. The crap that inspires people to spend $350 to rent time on a Studer 800 plug in designed to mask the grain and transient response problems that you get with those circuits.

BTW, I seem to never sell my old gear... well I did sell that despicable sounding ART MPA... but that was because it sounded horrid. I'm not just using my memory to compare stuff. I actually use Mackies and stuff as frequently as I use my better gear. I sold an acoustic guitar to a friend once too. I don't sell stuff to buy more stuff. I'm too lazy... I'd rather just go work a bit make some money and move forward.

I don't have a UAD card nor do I spend much money on throw away stuff like plugins.

I guess we all know guys with $4k of plugins... some have even sold off their fancy preamps to pay for the plug ins. Life is a journey.

All my top shelf gear will still be working when I pass away and it will cost more and more and more money to make by then... my wife will probably sell it off for more than I paid for it.

10 (or less?) years from now the UAD card is going to be trash and people are going to have to decide if they are going to pay the hazardous waste fee or if they are going to slip it into the garbage can with out telling anyone.

At least my VSTs will just vaporize without leaving any footprint.

I'm not criticizing the UAD stuff... I've heard it... it's very nice. I'm just pointing this out because pricing seems to be something that the nice gear is criticized for... yet it is actually a very good value if you have the money to spend on that sort of thing. It seems to me that many people who say they don't actually do but choose to buy other things.

When I'm done buying great preamps, mics, compressors, and maybe one or two nice EQs I'll probably be in the market for a UAD card.




With regards to work flows in a studio... I think there are philosophical differences in working styles. I'm not working with guitarists who have to be taught how to not over power the band with their signature tone so I have a different philosophy.

I have moved on from working with cats that don't understand what a band and a arrangement is. I'm philosophically aligned with the guys and ensembles that sound exactly like they sound... and so the recording process is much much different than the labor of love, intricate mic placement stuff you read about so often in magazines that exist to help sell mid grade gear. In my experience, 8 out of 10 times set up goes quickly because the band wants to play the music and get back to all their other activities. They don't show up to practice... they have the stuff worked out and they show up to play. It's literally a race to get it recorded before they cruise.

In any event, I've been answering the OPs question with my singular opinion.

I do not disagree that one can work really hard with what ever they have and do great work. I totally agree it's all about the song.

I have specifically responded to both the topic of the thread and the notion that cheap underpowered integrated circuit gear sounds comparable to properly powered discreet class A design.

In my opinion it doesn't... it's like 90% there until you actually listen carefully... when you listen carefully it's 70% there. :-)

I don't disagree with the other ideas about hard work and making the best of it... but it seems like that is some other topic.

I do think that the generation of fix it the mix sensibility that so many people have adopted will, in the long run, prove to be a distraction. I personally find it is just too easy to get it right up front and move on.

Back to the budget thing; It is possible to work as a sound recordists and afford good gear. It took me many many years to transition from using low grade gear to gear I enjoy more... proof that it is possible.

We repeatedly see claims that we can work hard with budget gear and get good results. It's true, but gosh that is an awful lot of work. What I do is I work hard... get paid... and buy great gear. I keep working hard... just on different things than the guy struggling with budget gear.


Numerous people swear they are simply hobbyists (people who can remind you that the term amateur can be a noble description of a person with a passion for an avocation) that own several $4k guitars and lots of gear and expensive plugins. They choose not to enjoy the sheer beauty of a properly built preamp. Coming from my perspective of having worked my way through the business... it's heart breaking to think about. You all deserve at least one really nice preamp... and BTW I am not talking about a tubey vibe Manley or upper mid range Drawmer (which is a company that is primarily appreciated as a supplier of affordable compressors)... I am talking about a really nice preamp. :-)

I'm a guy who helps the guys that get the credits...  I don't expect to have much influence with people who use credit counts to estimate opinions.

In closing... I want express my opinion to anyone out there who really can't hear the difference between a well built solid state preamp and a compromise preamp... keep listening. The difference may become obvious some day.


all the very best,
mike

Mike, my apologies with the electronic comment. The stuff I had heard when I last clicked on a link to check your stuff out was stuff I think you were just messing around with. I didn't hear any vocals or real guitars or anything. I didn't mean to make you sound less credible or anything as I know you have worked in this business with success for a very long time. I just had never heard anything other than the link I clicked which may not have been your main music site. Again my sincere apologies if I was taken wrong. You never have to sell me on your credibility man....I know you've worked with some heavy hitters and know your stuff. Also, very good post and completely acceptable on all counts man. :)

Hi Danni,

I appreciate your taking a second look and reaching out. I want to emphasize that I do not really consider myself a musician... I'm a self taught hackster... my musical skills are sorely lacking especially when compared to cats like you who are real bona fide players.

I'm a sound technician through and through and my love for music forces me to make some myself... the stuff you find on my site is not the best example of my work... my real work, with real musicians, is floating around out there with other people names on the credits. Sometime I feel like I should yank my home brew music off my site. :-) When I read your comment I thought... "oh great, another one of my real musician friends is giving me a reality check". :-)... which, believe me, happens quite frequently. :-)

I will always admire your passion and full on commitment to the art and I think of you as a very good friend.

all the very best,
mike




edit spelling

mike_mccue


Hi Danni,

I appreciate your taking a second look and reaching out. I want to emphasize that I do not really consider myself a musician... I'm a self taught hackster... my musical skills are sorely lacking especially when compared to cats like you who are real bona fide players.

I'm a sound technician through and through and my love for music forces me to make some myself... the stuff you find on my site is not the best example of my work... my real work, with real musicians, is floating around out there with other people names on the credits. Sometime I feel like I should yank my home brew music off my site. :-) When I read your comment I thought... "oh great, another one of my real musician friends is giving me a reality check". :-)... which, believe me, happens quite frequently. :-)

I will always admire your passion and full on commitment to the art and I think of you as a very good friend.

all the very best,
mike




edit spelling

Hi Mike,
 
Not a problem....I'm just sorry about the confusion as well as my comment. Nah I would never give anyone a reality check unless someone says "hey, check out my stuff and be brutally honest...leave no stone unturned and rate my musicianship abilities". LOL!
 
I'd love to hear some of your full productions where you were in control of everything. Anything you can point me to? Stuff where you were the head engineer etc? I'd love to hear it to be honest so I can pick your brain. :)
 
Ah man don't be too hard on yourself. It sounds like you play well enough to do whatever you want. And there are some good writing ideas going on in some of that stuff. With your connections bro, sky's the limit. I'm actually a hackster myself. I play lots of instruments to the best of my ability, but I'm really not proficient at anything. You know how it goes...you mess with something until you kinda get it down enough to where you don't make a fool of yourself, then you move onto another instrument. That's the story of my life. LOL! Learn a bit of everything...never master any of it. Kinda sad, but it works for me for now. I thank you for the kind words though. :)
 
Nah I'd not remove that stuff you have up there now...but I definitely would include some of the big jobs you've done if you're allowed to. Not for the sake of bragging rights or name dropping, but to show a difference between "hey these are some fun ideas I came up with" and "now here's the real deal production I've been blessed enough to take part in." I'm kinda like you though. I have worked with some insane, credible big names. I never drop them, I don't put samples of the work on my site and never make a mention of it unless something comes up in conversation. Some things are just better left unsaid, ya know? :) I admire your passion and all that you've done around here man...I think of you as a good friend also and again I'm sorry if what I mentioned came out wrong and made you feel uneasy.  

The big thing for me, the ah-ha moment, was finally seeing how tones interact in a bad way. I would spend DAYS trying to figure out why my bass sounded horrible, then why my guitars sounded horrible, and so on, when it was in fact that they sounded horrible TOGETHER, because I had no real clue about how to slot instruments into their own frequency ranges and make room for them. It took me so long to finally get what was going on there, and to hear when they were conflicting in a bad way.

Then, the next big ah-ha was levels. Something that sounds like crap at one level relative to everything else might sound great at a different level relative to everything else. You have to not to just mix in context, but track in context as well if you are the tracking guy (which is hard for a self recorder who has to lay down those initial tracks in mostly isoltion, so you have to learn to hear it in your head first and I still struggle with that a lot.) I've come to accept that the initial tracks I lay down will likely have to be redone later when more stuff is in place and I can understand the context better.

I'm still struggling with these things, but at least I know now what I'm struggling against. And we newerbies can be happy to know that we aren't alone. I watch a crap load of documentaries, and at various times I've heard people talk about the making of their (very huge) albums and how they had no idea about some of these issues, especially the "every instrument cannot be huge" problem, which many artists seem to deal with in their first albums. So we are in pretty exalted company really.

Oh, no, definitely not that. I have enough fiberglass in there to kill a generation of construction workers pretty much. For a room the size of mine, it's stupidly flat. And that's only a slight exaggeration. I have a foot of 703 across the floor, ceiling and wall corners, 4" on the side walls, 8" behind the monitors, and 18" on the ceiling. I spent weeks moving traps around to different spots and measuring the response, getting the desk in the optimal position, etc... And I have monitors capable of good low end at the (also calibrated K-system) levels I monitor at.
 
I'm a very technical geek type, so all of this stuff I really take seriously, the bits that are science based and proveably very efficacious. It's also pretty dead as well of course with all of that trappage in there. But that's sort of the tradeoff if you have a small room like mine.  The rear is less trapped and has heavy curtains, so it's a little more live back there for recording purposes.

Really it was just my lack of understanding about keeping the low end of guitars and synths and such out of the bass' way, and/or vice versa. And that was why it was so frustrating. I could hear that the individual bits didn't sound bad really, but they never sounded good together. And of course the problem would constantly move around because it's basically interactions between the instruments which changes over time as they are playing different things. So I would hear something, and try to EQ that out. Then hear something else and try to EQ that out. Eventually I'd have almost nothing left, which after you do it enough times you kind of figure out that obviously there has to be another answer :-)

Eventually though I figured out that everyone on the block can't have a house that takes up the whole block, and you have to give instruments their own place to live in the frequency spectrum if they are playing at the same time. It makes all the difference.

I think that most every newbie probably goes through this. I figure there's sort of a Seven Stages of Music Production, kind of like Stages of Death, that go something like:

1. Complete confusion. What is a track? Why do I need them?
2. Basic understanding of how to use the tools in order to record things and use processing and such, but still your stuff sucks complete bovine boy parts. EQ and compression and F/x applications are pretty random experiments at this point.
3. Finally understanding the importance of composition and complementary tones and frequency distribution, but still not quite being able to make good use of it because your recording skills aren't quite there yet.  Also starting to master EQ and compression reasonably well.
4. Ability to record individual instruments is getting pretty good, but not yet understanding how to fit it all together in order to create a working group of tones that would make up a section of a song.
5. Ability to record instrument conbinations in a way that is starting to work well as song sections, but not really able yet to string such combinations together into song parts that work together and flow nicely and blend together and have variety. Starting to really understand how to apply processing to achieve a pre-conceived result.
6. Ability to record individual sections and string them together into a coherent song structure with pretty good variety and some movement and mojo, but some sort of magic is still missing.
7. Finally getting all of the above and getting that magic dust on it that comes from not good but really good composition, not ok but energetic and confident peformances, and not good but really good recording technique and tones that are exactly as blended or separated as you want, where the mix has movement and energy, etc...


Maybe some people go through those a little differently. And perhaps dedicated engineers go through somewhat different paths than the self-recording artist. But that's more or less the path I seem to be flowing along and kind of in the upper end of #5 some days, and working up into #6 on some days. I understand what I need intellectually, but ultimately you have to just keep doing it until you can massage that intellectual understanding into techniques that achieve the actual fact.

I've always listened to the stuff that other people post, and I see other people going through these same phases. Lots of us are in that phase where we can finally post a nice little song section that works well, but we don't have quite the grasp yet to take it up to the next step, so it turns out to be 'riff as a song' type stuff, you know the type of thing. And you hear folks (like me) who are putting together songs now and they aren't bad songs, but they aren't quite there either.

And then you hear the folks who have the confidence and energy in their stuff that puts it up there where there's no more need to appologize about it. Though, I have to say that these days a LOT of people use the tools available to cheat their way up so that they are often posting things that are probably a stage or more above what they are actually capable of doing. But I always post what I can actually achieve because I'm mainly interested in mastering the process, not impressing people at this point.

I use BFD/BFD2 myself, for that reason. I can't do real drums, being in an apartment. So I do the next best thing and use a drum synth like BFD that really makes me mix them like real drums. though it gives me no experience *tracking* real drums, I think that I could do OK with mixing real drums now, given a nicely recorded drum kit.

You can cheat in various ways but I try not to. You don't have to use a gate or fader rides to get toms out of the snare or kick out of the snare and those types of things that you would probably do with real drums (though these days a lot of pros probably just go through and cut the bleed out directly from the track I guess, so they aren't exactly doing it the way of our forefathers either.)

I try to keep it as real as I can, and only use digital instruments that I just cannot afford or don't have room for or that would get me kicked out of the house. I have a Tetra I use for synth parts, so that I can do real synths. No real burning B3 organ and leslie of course, sadly.