Lessons
Day 1
1Introduction and Overview
11:29 2Getting the Right Gear
30:05 3So What Do I Need?
35:39 4Single Mic Demonstration
37:49 5Drum Micing Techniques Part 1
36:06 6Drum Micing Techniques Part 2
18:26 7Preamps and Gain Staging - Drums
22:43Preamps and Gain Staging - Guitars
20:07 9Reamping Guitars
17:44 10Critique Session: Pig Snout
30:13 11Critique Session: Owl Parliament Part 1
27:35 12Critique Session: Owl Parliament Part 2
23:22Day 2
13Pre-Production
21:10 14Getting Drum Tones
27:27 15Recording Shells and Editing
41:52 16Recording Cymbals
34:34 17Tracking Bass
22:31 18Tracking Guitar
19:30 19Guitar Overdubs and Doubling
30:12 20Mixing Guitars
25:07 21Recording Keyboards
21:04 22Replacing Tom Samples
17:55 23Takeaways: Dos and Don'ts
24:45Lesson Info
Pre-Production
Well, that's kind of touch on what we went over yesterday first, um we talked about kind of the things to spend money on not falling into the traps of, you know, buying things just because you think you should buy it, um talking about borrowing gear, whatever you can like he can't afford something if you're thinking about buying something and if you have the chance to borrow it from someone else who already has it that's a great way of kind of comparing things um, even if it comes down to like instruments and whatnot, you know, someone gets cool guitar pedal and you think they say it's great borrow it first before you buy it so you can compare it yourself. Um, talk a little bit about revamping guitars, drum mic placement, and now I think we're just going to kind of jump right into tracking a song we're going to go, we're going to start by mapping out kind of doing like a little temple map and like a song structure map of the song um, and then we are going to jump into tracking drums we...
ll, after we do a scratch guitar tapping it out, and then we're gonna track drums and cymbals separately, which could be a new concept for some of you is its pre strange and we'll see how see how it goes today um but it's a cool way of kind of cheating your inputs but let's jump into it so here we go you ready? All right, so let me have you grab these headphones and hopefully we've got we definitely did not do a homework on this section of it worrying about cables being all tangled up through you break everything right? So all right, so before you put those headphones on when you get a level on that get har jam out a little bit for me on that play a part now I'm just gonna have you play a little bit I'm gonna have make sure the click track is okay and your headphones how's that level of the guitar in your headphones are you getting that? Yeah how's this click trapped level for you yeah all right let's jump into it and so have you started eight clicks and you know, we already have the tempo kind of tapped out for this but just for the sake of showing you guys have to do is home. Um if you're not sure how to figure out if you're tracking the click track and you don't know how to get the tempo for song um pro tools has kind of ah a tap temple feature in it um that lets you, um tap out the tempo um so I'm just gonna have you kind of jam on song right here, and I'll tap it out and hopefully it's close to what we already know the temple is so before, okay, so if you can see there as I'm tapping tea on the keyboard, it changes the tempo here in this little window, and I could do it here, and as you slow it down, it slows down also, so we know that the temple is one twenty five for the song, so we're just going to start there. Any questions on that? You know? No. Pretty simple, right? Okay, okay. Eight clicks in the world. Fantastic. Okay, so now, let's just kind of go over this, and what we're going to do is kind of going toe put markers, and mark is kind of important because and what markets are is at the top of the screen here you can see where it says start and you can put these markers anywhere within your session, too. They're a good idea to let you know what sections in the song you're working with. So if if your guitar player, if you're creating a song for the first time in the guitar player, is sitting on the back couch and says all man, I've got this really cool idea for the for like the bridge or something like it in my head right now, I need to play it it's really great to just ableto have that marker and just say boom, okay, I'm ready let's, go track it. Um, right, because a lot of times when you're waiting for things to develop into a lot of times, I can kind of kill some of the creativity. So it's, nice to feel to know where you are in the song at all times, especially if you're not really familiar with looking at wave forms and super familiar with the song, just being able to know exactly where it is, but that's really difficult to do, um, so let's go through the song and then just have you kind of tell me where like, you know, whatthe sections of the songs are cool and then we'll kind of market so the first section where it starts that's, starting with what you call that we'll call that interest in trump got a few bars before the vocals come in, ok? And then let me know in the vocals come in at the end of this river, right there at eleven vocals in there, maybe so that would be nine bars or is that eight bars? Booth was coming what happens at those markers what's that were you talking to at the enter good questions things I don't even think about now yeah so enter hits hits markers um the other thing you can do with markers is you can create selections to so if you wanted to right now I'm just hitting markers but you can actually create selections whereas right now if I click on this intro marker it just brings me to that point but if I wanted a create a selection that had the whole intro um mccall's insured too if and then to open up your windows I mean your markers windows just apple five weird on the new system so but if I was tio select intro it takes me to that spot in the song but if I put the selection of intro to it's the whole section cool which is kind of cool so if you just wanted a punch in for like the whole verse or something or the whole intro you can click on that selection but if you wanted to start playing the intro um good question okay so vocals in started here and you can see the screen right? Yeah so the end of this next part marks so four bars and then uh let's call it a pre chorus use of course starting here break its little instrumental break before the chorus it's well why are you in britain um the question so we're tracking to a click track um and I guess the grid is really easy for when you're working with a click because so every if you can tell right now so every time in quarter notes and so every time and I also might clicking quarter notes, so if you can see here every section of this grids and quarter notes so every time you hear the click it's on a quarter note and it's just kind of really easy to, um well, for the sake of the song that we're doing since we're talking to a click after we tracked the drums, I'm just going to show a little bit about, like, drum editing and, like, totally gritting like a performance, and then, um, I may go into a little bit about trying to edit drums without gritting them and just fixing the things that need to be fixed. Um, but yeah, I mean, grid now, because we're tracking to a click track a lot of times I'm tracking not to a click track, the band is playing live, I won't really worry about grid mode, because then from there you don't really have these kind of visual cues to rely on is just all here, so this is the question right? Okay, so from break one, wait here's the chorus and you know, this probably seems pretty boring for you guys at home watching this, but these are the types of kind of preparation things that really make things fly faster later on in the recording, especially when say, it comes time tio to mix or do anything any other sort of overdubs and you're getting notes back from the band saying, you know, like the vocal in course to this and that and you're trying to remember, like, what the heck is the court's song is like ten parts I don't know what they called the chorus that's another reason why it's important for for you to call the sections of the song, what they call the sections of the song because sometimes a band might call, you know this like, oh, we have break one break too, and then we have, like, parts a and b and then there's like the heavy part, and then it goes to like the breakdown part and then it's like the kind of chill park that goes into the super sketchy part, andi, just like, ok, so where's the chorus, you know, so it's important to get the right terminology with band you're working with, um okay, so of course, this whole section here is the course, so you call that a bridge than expert and shorter and the reason why I skipped over this whole section is kind of what I was talking about before, when you're looking at wave forms, you can kind of tell that's like the course because, you know, it's kind of have your part so just in the business of saving time just skipped it first thistle actually, this is another bridge in the recording of this song, this will just be based in that section, but scratch track purposes I played along to very track three it'll kind of played variations of this riff until the very end, it goes back to the chorus in the softer section, and then there's should be about eight bars past that is that rift that comes in a little bit heavier, it might be worth marking that section as well. That's not so if you just saw what I did there as you're selecting things within pro tools here, another nice thing about being in grid mode as you're selecting things, you know, you may not have, you know, if you don't want to wait for kind of like, ok, can I go to exactly? And as I'm moving my selection, you'll notice up here in this window it shows exactly how many bars and beats that I'm selecting, um, so you can see that. But as you're as you're kind of quickly going through, you can just and I went, ok, whatever. I'm just gonna type in eight hit, enter and that it does eight. Exactly. So that gives me an idea of where it is, so that what was that called griff or something? Call. We can just follow the pattern bridge for war, and it should be another eight or sixteen bars. You'll see the way form get quite a bit quieter at the end there, and that's, the last course, this's chorus tricked and then it's, just kind of and that's in it right the whole day. All right, cool. Well, then, I guess we're done with that and ready to kind of move on to some drums.
Class Materials
bonus material with purchase
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
A lot of great info here! Awesome getting to see Beau's workflow and hear his thoughts on the methods he uses. Would love to see him do a class on micing guitars, bass and show his methods in more detail/time. He gets some of the best raw tones in the game. Feel like this was more of a great overview and would like more time for details seeing as he is a very knowledgeable dude. Thanks Beau for the great class and for sharing this info with us.