to record dry or not to record dry

 I am new to shs7xl and i have a question for everybody.  Do you record dry and add effects in the software or do you record guitars and such with effects already added. A book I read"guerilla recording" advocated the wet system.  I just wanted to hear some other opinions.

Depends.  Guitars and such the player might need his fx to play.  part of the sound, don't cha know.  Same w/ synths.  Sometimes that will clutter up the soundstage w/ each instrument being in a different environment, so be careful.

Vocals and most acoustic instruments - dry.  there will usually be some room tone anyway.  But it is easiest to add the reverb etc. post factum.

I do use comps a lot going in - but only if they are high end.  I often don't even apply compression, but just like the sound of the unit, esp. on transformerless and budget mic pres.

Guerilla recording goes back to the early and analog days, when you had a (severly) limited number of tracks (and outboard) and would print them wet.  I can understand why it is done, but don't really agree w/ the ethos.

@

MY 2 centavos.....


I always record everything dry...except: guitar.

Vox will sound strange recorded dry.... but that allows me to add what I need...compression, reverb, etc... after and I'm NOT locked in to a specific one. I track with the end in mind..... I know what it will sound like finished so I don't sweat it when listening to the mix in the cans..... 

Start dry and leave your options open.

All other instruments are done the same way except for the guitar.

On guitar, I always get the sound I'm looking for first. Even adding reverb and echo and what-not to the sound. I tend to "try" to keep the fx levels low, because I know there will be verb adding regardless in the  mix..... and I have, once or twice, had to go back and record some guitar parts over....with less moisture applied to the initial track.... but it's a learning process.

Some, but not all of the synth sounds I use have FX built into the sound, mostly reverb, so I have to go with that, and for that reason the reverb used in the mastering is generally very light, or non-existent.

I use a bit of limiting on vocals to keep any surprises from clipping the track.

I usually split guitar with a direct box, while mic'ing the amp with all the normal efx the guitar player is used to.  I've found in mixing multi-layered guitars that the live tracks often have too much high freq distortion to sit well in the mix when summed together. (Some pedal type distortion efx are pretty nasty throughout the spectrum). I can usually re-amp or use amp-sims on a couple of direct tracks to solve the problem.

Am I too late to cast my vote?

Old schoolers and new schoolers ... with both ... "finished is better than ...(anything else)".  IOWs, for me:

Acoustic guitar:  DI or mic'd.  It doesn't matter!  Really!
 
Electric guitar:  DI or mic'd.    It doesn't matter!

Fx's:  Pre-DAW or In-the-box. It doesn't matter!

IOWs, there are thousands of ways each artist wrestles with beauty!  None is guaranteed best or worst.  At least my cronie ears can't tell a bit of difference.

Of course, if you have decent outboard guitar gear, I'd gravitate toward that gear and forget a lot of the DAW-in-the-box fxs.  (I, personally, have utterly failed with NI Guitar gear to color guitar tones sweetly.  I, personally, have cherished outboard processors ... like the Ax-Fx-Ultra ... that enables me to utterly DI the simulated Mesa Boogie, the simulated fuzz box, the compression, MCC, Pitch, reverb, and 90% of fx's ... pre-DAW)

Yeh!  I require a decent rack for pre's and guitar gear ... pre-DAW.  Otherwise, 'I'm lost as Dorothy'.

Are you performance-driven or samples-driven?

Most of us wretched desperados do slice and dice samples to wits end.  ... possibly due to our haughty performances being so dis-respected by our spouses'.  (like when she leaves the room the moment I 'jam')

A guitar loser like me ... must be content to slice and dice his way (guitar samples) before making it to the top of the guitar rat-race. 

I'm hoping Yoyo will chime in.  I'm sure our attention will incline to his latest techniques.

Or as one artist suggested (LanceInStudio I think): "Just make it cool".

am new to shs7xl and i have a question for everybody. Do you record dry and add effects in the software or do you record guitars and such with effects already added. A book I read"guerilla recording" advocated the wet system. I just wanted to hear some other opinions.

I record guitars with outboard gear. I don't record guitars dry. I get better sound with outboard gear and I get better performances from myself when I hear the actual sound i want to record
I record vocals dry, with maybe some slight compression. I do monitor the vocals with reverb, but it doesnt get printed
I record bass wet, meaning I build the sound with my gear/equipment and then record it into sonar. just like guitar
I record drums dry, but I use a little compression on them
Cj

So, what limiters/compressors are yous guys using?

I want to thank everyone for their input.  All the responses echoed what i was thinking. Record electric guitar with the sound you are looking for going on and use the software efx for vocals and such. I have tried using vst for chorus on a guitar and it never really sounded right. 

I have been looking at other peoples home studios on websites and see that they have all this outboard gear and I just couldn't figure out why.

thanks again for all the input guys well done.

> maybe a little compression and very minimal verb

What are you using to do this?

There's no consensus on this point. Some folks who are great engineers, who created some of the best stuff ever done, will say that they prefer to print EQ, f/x compression, etc... because if you don't know it's right, you shouldn't be pressing record yet, and that by having everything sounding like it's going to sound, you are building a more correct picture that lets you know how to then correctly record all the subsequent parts.

Of course most of those folks probably worked back in the day. And yeh, having less gear was probably part of it, but also having musicians who could do it was as well. These days, when most songs were never remotely performed the way they sound, it's a whole other ball of wax. If you have to manually correct every performance after the fact, then the above is a luxury you can't afford.

I take the purist view. But I'm self-recorder. So, if I screw it up, I screw it up, and I'll go back and do it again. But, each time I sock away the lessons learned and as I move forward I'll hopefully get better and better at it. Eventually, I hope to get to the point where I do almost no mixing other than some 'juice it up' automation here and there.

I spent five nights over the last week or so working on a bass part, to try to figure out how to record it so that it sounded exactly like it needed to sound as recorded without processing. Someone else probably would have taken the part I recorded the first night and just mangled it after the fact into whatever shape it needed to be. But, I just kept at it, and I learned important lessons that will let me do that a lot faster next time. And I learned a lot about my gear and how to adjust my playing style to 'mix with my fingers' along the way.

But, ultimately, no one who listens to my songs cares how it was made. So it doesn't matter in terms of the delivered product, per se. It might matter to purists, because I think that the purist approach makes for higher sonic quality. But to most folks, no one is going to care. I do it for my own satisfactions (slash self-abuse.)
 
Those hugely reverbed guitar solos on Dark Sid eof the Moon were done live, with David providing the reverb. That of course would make it almost completely uneditable, so you either get it right or do it again. But how could you remotely get to that place as a player without actually hearing that come out of your amp?
 

I think a lot of guitarists would argue that's not really very much like a reverb pedal in the actual chain and in the room, so that the amp and room is reacting to the reverb, particularly with heavy reverbed solos like that. And I was assuming a pedal of some sort, not something like an amp spring reverb.

I think I would definitely do any delay effect on a guitar via a pedal while playing, because it's so much part of the tone of the guitar part as the echos interact with each other and the new stuff. Of course you could always use two amps. Many delays offer separate wet/dry outputs so you could record them separately, but still get that very realistic 'through an amp in the room and through a mic' type sound.

forgot to add:

When using a delay effect as a loop phraser... I simply do that with a groove clip... because loop phrasing is cool... and it's so darn easy with a modern DAW.



edit spelling

There's nothing wrong with committing to a sound or effect from the very beginning if you know exactly where you're going with a tune.

My sentiments too. 

Did you forget the quotation marks?

Or is there a delay in here?