Lessons

Lesson Info

Overview Leading up to Tracking

Just quick review from yesterday we uh so we went through a process and deconstructed the process of just kind of like the elements of getting a good guitar sound and we went through ah selection of guitars and for our demonstration today were so okay well, we have a guitar so we selected a guitar which is ben's signature dsp guitar um and then we further went down the line and then selected on amp now the amps are behind us but we were over by the speakers and get the sound at the end at the source and listening in the room in the element. So we did that went through a process of by using the same cabinet and as a control and then going through each head and picking the right one and then taking that head say we decided on this head which we decided on the mesa single rectifier and then from that selected a cabinet using the head is a control keeping that constant. And then we went through and figure out which was the best sounding head best sounding cabinet. We've selected the orange...

two by twelve over there and then having that constant I went through the selection of microphones I had to review again I have it's actually on the cabinet and I'm standing up here a kg for fourteen that's on the cabinet there's a nissim fifty seven sure, some fifty seven there's also sennheiser four twenty one over there on the stand and underneath I'm gonna just go over here really quick and show it hiding underneath the blue cover is an n o s active ribbon microphone s so we went through the each choice and then I think nick, you said all right, I think the four fourteen, so we're going to start with the four fourteen today so we said, ok that's the best one and so we went through in each process and locked in each choice along the way and said, ok, so let's we have ah, basic starting thing so quick a roadmap of today is now we selected are mike now we're going to get into mike positioning and I went through and I showed a few diagrams and I'm going to bring them up again. Um, I showed a diagram of different miking techniques and we're going to go through a few of them, but based on we'll start with the first home with a single mike and we selected the four fourteen and we're going to position the mike and the positioning is very, very important, so that's going toe we're going to a position of mike's toe dial in our tones and after that then we'll actually get into tracking and actually just certain techniques that you can alter and that I usually do when I'm working and working with the player and working in the studio, too, change the sound or alter the sound or make little adjustments along the way as they're playing too affect the actual tone that's coming out of the amt because I stated yesterday, the tone is in your hands and it's a big thing and move we'll get into that, and then we'll deal with punching in, um, punching it is the process of dropping in into into a previously recorded segment for those you don't know, um, I like to go for a full take and go for a live feel, but obviously, you know, sometimes you need to go back and adjust things and punching and fix things, then we'll get into some, uh, editing as well, I'm not a big editor, I'm not a big guy, I believe in performance base because I grew up making records on tape, which, you know, you couldn't really read it. You can edit the multi track because your slice literally slicing the tape, but you couldn't just take it then on multitrack situation, you couldn't take just the guitar and move the guitar around so, uh, here, nowadays with any d a w you can do that and it's great and it's wonderful, but I try to stay away from that as much as possible because I try to keep it is organic is possible uh but we will get into editing and to show people how to do it and mme or two in the editing on the editing side of things uh more toe get it to be again using your ears and using your instinct as opposed to looking at a screen and just moving something tio because you know, moving something because this is perfect and this is you know, there's no such thing as perfect and too perfect is never a good thing in my opinion I mean, there are some styles of music that that might work for you but we're dealing into my process in my my taste in my instinct and that's never to me the best thing perfect is never is boring um but we'll get into editing a little bit and then we'll get into reem ping which is the process of taking a direct recorded a guitar signal which will show you how to hook that up um and then so we're just record the just the signal from the guitar and that will be able to play from the d a w pro tools in our example and sending it right back out to an amp oh, and actually getting our own guitar tone from something that was previously recorded um we're gonna be doing that's um we have a few way have a few examples yeah, we have a few examples some people were nice enough to send in uh some, uh some die guitar tracks so we're going to pull some of them up and try and uh you know, gets him tony's out of them and then just premix just making sure everything's you know uh ready for mixing and making sure your tracks are organized and there's there's no cliques and pops and just making sure the all the edits and cross phase and all that thing all that's have a stuff to, uh just to make sure that mixes smoothly and premixed thing is something that I do is just a normal in my normal process as I'm recording, I'm usually cleaning up as I go, but some people don't do that and I'll just show you the best ways to do that and then final mix it'll be um you know, in a perfect world I always say commit, commit, commit, commit and that's fantastic but sometimes when you stack things on top of each other they, uh something's tend tend to get lost or maybe the intent of what you actually recorded is getting lost and you might need tio two you know, do a few different things with the compression, maybe some effects, you know, reverb, whatever just to make the guitar have the original intent that you tried to capture when you first recorded you know, like I said in a perfect world it's always going to be exactly how you get it you know you pull it up it's like oh, I recorded this is great and then you pull it up in the final mexico it still sounds great it's fantastic, but when you deal with especially in today's era, you know, sometimes mixes I have sixty, seventy, eighty tracks on them mohr whatever, you know, like ridiculous amount of information and ridiculous amount of density in the audio and you know, the guitar just is getting buried it's just like, wow it think it's how was so bright now? It's dull it's like, well ok, so we're going to need teo teo be right exactly all your truck so right and you're trying teo and again, we talked about this yesterday that you know you want a huge guitar, a lot of especially metal it's like why I want this huge guitar sound a wall of guitars and it's like okay, but sometimes it's the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If you try and get the biggest guitar sound possible, that doesn't always translate sometimes if you try to make everything big than nothing winds up being big so, you know, sometimes the smallest guitar sound when it's isolated, you listen to it, and you're like, you know, what is that? But then when it's all together, it's, just this massive sound, so try and, you know, just figure out how to achieve that. We talked about this lester day, like, you know, deconstructing other sessions that are out there, and if you listen to some of the old the old recordings that sound massive, if you solo some of these things, they sound horrible on their own, but they all have their place nothing's competing, and together it sounds amazing. And, you know, in this day and age where you have the ability to re sampled drones or do guitar tones that are sometimes even simulated or mimicked directly from massive guitar tones or even multiple guitars at once, you have the ability to make it sound amazing and processed and huge without taking into consideration the whole recording. So I think that some of the things we started to show at the end of yesterday, but solely and deconstructing a dillinger session, and steve will show you a lot more that today, we're gonna just show some more examples on some of these songs that, again, it's, like one particular sound, would be it was perceived as one guitar sound but it's actually a couple of layers of different things that combined to make the one sound so we'll be showing how to do that and when we get, you know, part of the thing in plane when we get it one guitar center we'll get our mike position and everything but then it's like, ok, well, now maybe we need a second a second rhythm part and it's like sometimes you need the same sometimes we do two of the same sound just pan left and right sometimes it's two completely different sounds and like and maybe even playing a different inversion on the court, you know, playing a bar court on this side and playing more of an open court on this side just to make the one perceived big guitar sound and you know, sometimes the two sounds together sometimes the two same same sounds sounds huge and sounds great and then sometimes like, you know, maybe we should try a different guitar, brighter guitar, darker guitar, you know, a semi holla guitar you said yesterday it's about it's about chess games about thinking five ten moves ahead and some of the questions from the internet audiences were really good they're asking about, you know what makes what, whatever the best guitar simulators and things like that and it made me think about the fact especially watching steve move mike's around and explain phase and different amps on the night positions that is not necessarily about what's the best it's about thinking of everything as frequency ranges yeah, when you're moving a microphone, you're killing the guitar tone when you're using an app theory queuing that qatar tone when you're choosing guitar, you're returning to talk to him so what frequency range are you trying to fill that nothing competing and so that the whole is greater than you know some of its parts I mean, a lot of these two frequency wise, you know you almost think of it especially what we're dealing in the mix that you know again ideally you want those stones are all right but then you sometimes there's holes when it's all together and in the final mix it's you got to think of almost like a jigsaw puzzle that, like, you know, ok, well, this is a little, you know, the guitars air great, but there, when you put the basin it's too money so it's like, what do you do? You need to, like, do something and filter out, you know, little bottom end of the guitars to make them fit with the base or, you know, with the guitar solo, okay, it's like, ok, well, the guitar solo you know, usually is in, like, a certain frequency range, because just think, usually single notes and it's, like, you know, you're trying to get it to kind of poke through so it's like, well, then, do you carve out a little notch in the queue to make the guitar solo sit inside the rhythm guitar. So it's not competing. So there's, not a big buildup of frequencies. And I'll show you a little bit about that. Um, so, yeah, that's, that's, the roadmap of today. That's does our four segments, and they're kind of some of them will kind of be blending into each other and be jumping forward and back a little bit.