Zen and the Art of Recording

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Published in 2014 by Hal Leonard Books

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Jeff Mutschler

Book design by UB Communications

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mixerman.

Zen and the art of recording / Mixerman.

pages cm

1. Sound recordings—Production and direction—Vocational guidance. 2. Popular music—Production and direction. 3. Sound recording industry—Vocational guidance. I. Title.

ML3795.M58 2014

621.389'3—dc23

2014035146

www.halleonardbooks.com

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to:

John Dooher

Scott Paterson

The Saint

David Wozmak

Bob Olhsson

Jeff Lorber

Patrick Moraz

Adam Topol

Bill Gibson

Bernadette Malavarca

Tanya Rodriguez

Brandon Gresham

Wyn Davis and Total Access Studios

Adam Arnold (or Double A)

Tim Gilles

Jennene Mildenhall-Gilles

The Entire Big Blue Meanie Studios Staff

Jessica Tomasin

Steve Wilmans

Julian Dreyer

The Entire Echo Mountain Recording Staff

Joe McGrath

Steve Jackson

Pulse Techniques

Lewitt Microphones

Randy Fuchs

Antelope Audio

Dusty Wakeman and Mojave Audio

Royer Labs

Tascam

Jason Fee and Empress FX

Peter Montessi and A-designs

EveAnna Manley

Millennia Media

Steven Slate

Clayton Joseph Scott and all the boys in Brightside

The Broadcast

Max Sarafin

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Perception

Source, Source, Source

Source Player

Source Room

Source Instrument

Two Schools of Thought

The Overdub Method

Distortion

Capturing Performances

Chapter One: The Recordist

Recordist Roles

The Designated Recordist

Capture Appropriate Tones

Document

Listen

Deliver

Delivery Instructions for Mix

Naming Conventions

The Designated Recordist Rules of Conduct

The Musician Recordist

The Producer Recordist

Chapter Two: The Recordist’s Tools

Digital Technology

Evaluating and Choosing Your Tools

The Microphone

The Capsule

Pick-Up Patterns

Cardioid

Super-Cardioid and Hyper-Cardioid

Omnidirectional

Figure-8

Powered Microphones

Tube Microphones

Pads and Rolloffs

Microphone Types

Condenser Microphones

Small Diaphragm Condenser (SDC)

Large Diaphragm Condenser (LDC)

Ribbon

Dynamic

Piezoelectric

Speaker Mic

Stereo Mic

Direct Box

Microphone Selection

Phase and Coherency

Investing in Microphones

The Microphone Preamplifier (Mic Pre)

The Recording Console

Monitoring

Monitors

Monitor Varieties

Choosing Your Monitors

The Converters

The DAW

Processing Gear

Compressors and Limiters

Stereo Compressors

Limiters

VCA Compressor (Voltage Controlled Amplifier)

FET Compressor (Field Effect Transistor)

Valve or Tube Compressor

Opto Compressor (Optical)

Threshold

Attack and Release Times

Ratio

Sidechain

Parallel Compression

Equalization or EQ

Parametric EQ

Graphic EQ

Effects

Modulators

Flangers

Phasers

Chorus

Tremolo and Vibrato

Reverbs

Delays

Chapter Three: The Source and Capture

Microphone Placement

One-Mic Techniques

Stereo Techniques

X-Y

Blumlein Pair

A-B

ORTF

Spaced Pair

Mid-Side or MS Technique

Trap Drums

Source Instruments

Drum Heads

Accessories

Gating Drums

Top-Down Recording

Overheads

Rooms

Kik Drum

Compressing Kik Drums

Snare Drum

Toms

Hi-Hat

Compromise

Bass

Acoustic Bass

Electric Guitar

Amplifiers

Tone

Miking Electric Guitars

The Two-Mic Technique

Overdubbing Electric Guitar

Pedals and Effects

Acoustic Guitar

Acoustic Guitar/Vocal

Creating Guitar Textures

Piano

Piano/Vocal

Rhodes, Wurli, Electric Pianos

Organ

Hammond B3 and C3

Synths

Strings

Horns

Percussion

Vocals

Vocal Overdub

Monitoring

Miking a Vocal

Vocal Mic Pre

Double Vocals

Background Vocals

Chapter Four: The Business of Recording

Opportunity Knocks

Practice, Practice, Practice

Personal Relationships

Positioning

It’s Not About the Money, It’s About the Money

Home Recording Facilities

Conclusion

The Clips

Introduction

Anyone who is familiar with my writings knows that I do all that I can to avoid discussing technical information beyond the very basics. There’s a very good reason for this—musical decisions are of far more consequence than technical ones. However, in preparing to write this book, I realized there’s just no way around it. Recording is an art that requires some measure of technical understanding.

This was especially evident on the Internet, where I found literally hundreds of posts asking how to set the attack and release times on a compressor. Many posters just wanted to know a preset that they could use for a particular source, which ignores a fundamental principle of what we do—listen.

As humans we are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns. Only an idiot savant could pick up a Rubik’s Cube and solve it within the first few minutes. For the rest of us, we must learn how to solve the puzzle, and if you experiment with the toy long enough, you will eventually pick up the patterns that will help you solve it.

Music also has patterns, as does recording music, and you will come across recognizable patterns over time that will help you to streamline the decision process. But before we’re able to recognize patterns we have to see them in the first place, and in the case of recording, we have to hear. This requires you to develop and fine-tune your hearing to the point that you trust it above all other senses.

The good news is that you’re already familiar with musical patterns, you just don’t necessarily know it. I could play three notes in such a way that most all of you will sing the next note in the series without prompting. If you play the notes C, up a fifth to G, and down a minor third to an E, most all of you will sing an F. That’s because the resolution of those notes forms a recognizable pattern. Scales are patterns. Chord progressions are patterns.

There is no doubt that we are far more comfortable with our sight than we are with our hearing when it comes to evaluating information. I’ve brought up this example before, but the original Star Trek theme sounds completely different when you’re not viewing the main titles along with it. The whooshing of the Enterprise flying past is far more obvious sans the picture, mostly because it seems almost random in nature.

When we discuss sound we often use terms that relate to our other senses, such as warm, dark, brittle, bright, like ass, transparent, etc. These are all feeling terms, which makes sense since the whole point of music is to evoke an emotional response. We tend to use feeling terms to describe sound because music and sound are inextricably attached.

Frequency information is often viewed more within the purview of the recordist than the producer, but this would ignore the fact that frequency relates directly to musical notes. Therefore, arrangement decisions can be made based not only on a part, but how all the parts work together within the frequency spectrum. Beethoven didn’t have EQ—he had to create frequency balance and contrast through his instrumentation and arrangement choices alone.

Tone is also often viewed within the purview of the recordist, but good tone requires good performance. As a producer, I listen to tone as an indicator of performance. As a recordist, I first need to pull a tone that inspires a performance. The musician is therefore an integral part of the tone. Which would explain why some people can make an instrument sing, and others can only make it sound. A musician who makes her instrument sing feels the sound as music, and that in turn will often evoke a reaction from the listener.

There was a time when a recording session required a designated engineer—one whose only job was the capture. These lines have been blurred significantly over the years, and more often than not, the recordist is operating in some other capacity, either as a musician, artist, or producer. And if you’re the chief engineer at your own studio, then you are likely a Default Producer—a role we will discuss in more detail later.

These days I operate as a Producer Recordist, which means I’m performing two operations that require my full attention. That’s impossible. Fortunately, many processes that I must perform as a recordist are nearly automatic, which allows me to prioritize the musical decisions.

Given the realities of recording today, it is often best to simplify the capture process, so as to allow you to concentrate on what’s most important—the music itself. That said, I can only simplify things for you so much, as there are still technical considerations that can’t be ignored. Stereo miking alone, done improperly, can cause auditory anomalies that will weaken the overall impact of a recording. The good news is, once you learn the sound of negatively interacting microphones, you will become virtually allergic to it such that it becomes difficult to make that kind of mistake in the first place.

There’s a reason why recording is so difficult. The thousands of tiny decisions that you make all day long are subjective in nature. This requires some modicum of self-confidence. If you don’t believe that you’re an adequate arbiter of what’s good, or more accurately, what’s effective, then your first reflex will be to leave yourself as many options as possible. Taken to its extreme, tonal decisions are often left in flux with the idea that you can make it all work somehow come mix time. Or worse yet, you’ll leave all those decisions to a third-party mixer such as myself.

I’m more than happy to make those decisions for you as your mixer, but this will likely lead to some surprising results, as you will have provided me with no clear indicators of intent. If all that you supply me are the DI’ed electrics on a guitar-driven track, you leave me with nearly infinite possibilities. When it comes to a successful recording, it’s far more effective to limit me as a mixer than to leave me so many options that I have no idea what you were trying to achieve. And if you’re mixing it yourself, I’m not sure why you would want to go out of your way to make the job more difficult.

There have been several scientific studies over the years revealing just how difficult a time we have when we are presented with too many options. Our brains are built to choose between A and B. Given the choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream, a selection is relatively easy to make. Given the choice between 30 flavors, you will likely find yourself nothing short of overwhelmed.

This is no different in recording. If you leave yourself every option imaginable, you will only manage to paralyze everyone on the session. I personally find an overabundance of options so overwhelming that I often ask someone from the team to produce my dinner for me. Perusing a menu full of options as my brain is subconsciously sorting through dozens of recording decisions can make a simple dinner selection tantamount to making a choice with potential global repercussions.

Since every decision in recording affects the next, everyone on the session can quickly find themselves confused, as there is nothing concrete to work on. You can’t know where your recording is at if you’re not willing to commit to both musical and sonic decisions along the way.

Those times in my career that I was working purely as a recordist, I was able to focus my creativity on recording techniques alone. This allowed me to geek out on sound rather than performance, as I had a producer who was in charge of that. I sought to apply my daily observations of how sound travels—especially how it reflects, as parabolas and long corrugated drain pipes can be used to harness and direct sound.

I’ve also spent an enormous part of my career ignoring creativity where recording technique is concerned. Whatev. I’m trying to make a record, I’m quite possibly behind, and I don’t have time to be creative in how I capture until there’s an obvious problem. That doesn’t mean I sloughed off the recording. It means my creative energy was best served elsewhere. Such are the pitfalls of working as both producer and recordist simultaneously—at all times one is suffering.

The good news is great performances usually result in great sonics, so long as you put the effort in to pull the appropriate tone in the first place. In fact, I can always tell when I’m in the wrong mindset as a producer, because I desperately want to touch shit. Balances and tones often fall apart as a result of performance issues. Good performances tend to manifest as good tone. And bad tone is inconsequential in the context of a poor performance. In the recordist’s mindset, I will first notice the bad tone, and in the producer’s mindset, I hear the bad performance. Make no mistake, if you pulled good tones before making your take, you would do well to keep your hands away from all knobs—virtual or otherwise.

It’s natural to reach for knobs when you’re just starting out, especially today, because the tools available for mangling tracks are far more powerful and plentiful than ever. And while that may seem like an advantage, in many ways, you’d be far better off learning how to record with a limited supply of recording gear rather than an overabundant one. Limitations force creative adaptation, which is an exceptionally good skill set to have in this business.

Meanwhile, as the price of entry into the digital world of DAWs and plug-ins has come down considerably, analog compressors and microphones still require significant capital investment over time. Which means your initial investment into recording will provide you enormous power to mangle, and limited power for accurate capture. That’s a bad combination, as it promotes all the worst habits when it comes to the art of recording.

This book is about recording music, so just about everything I present to you will be from that perspective. And when you’re recording music, your first allegiance must be to the music, performance, and production. Not the recording. Even as a designated for-hire recordist, you must often put the needs of the music first and foremost. Recording technique is nothing more than a means to an end—to capture a performance.

I’m certainly not suggesting that you abandon creative recording techniques. Quite the contrary. I encourage it. Especially if it’s on your time. The more skills you develop, the more effective you are in the studio, and experimentation is a great way to learn new things. As a producer, I give my recordist the latitude to get creative with technique. Believe me, I’ve gone down a great many four-hour (and longer) rabbit holes in search of a tone that lasts all of five seconds in the context of the production. And even when this sort of Science Experiment ends up unfruitful, it’s rarely a waste of time. Unfruitful ideas often lead to useful ones, and there is almost always something to be gleaned from your failures—even the little ones.

Anyone who has acted in some capacity as my recordist knows that as the producer, I will often grab the closest mic, even if it’s not the best mic for the job. That may seem strange. I mean, I’m a seasoned recordist, yet as the producer, all of that falls to the wayside? That’s right. Because as a producer-for-hire, I have to constantly consider time, and the closer the mic is to my performer, the sooner I can start recording her. The best recordists will protest my choice, and I will often acquiesce, so long as I can record my performer in relatively short order.

There’s a natural push and pull between time and creativity. Time restraints push us forward, as creative forces pull us back. A balance must be achieved between the two, regardless of whether you have stupid amounts of time, or far too little. Frankly, given the choice, I’d choose the latter. An unlimited budget removes time pressure as a tool for pushing the session forward.

Recording an album without time constraints requires the kind of discipline that would prevent most of us from attempting it in the first place. I’m not talking about the discipline to work. I’m talking about the discipline to finish. I know several musicians who have been remaking the same album for over a decade. Needless to say, you’ve never heard of them. What’s worse, the more time it takes, the more pressure there is to deliver something worthy of the time. We’ve all heard about great albums that took a week to make. But how many great albums took 10 years to make? I can’t think of one. Nothing can live up to the inherent hype of that. Great art is made with intent to its completion. No album requires years to make.

Art only exists if it’s been completed. A finished work is a clear expression of an artist’s intent. Conversely, a work in progress has no intent whatsoever. How could it? How can we determine the artist’s intent from an unfinished work? The prima facie evidence of intent can only be found in a completed work, one in which no excuses can, nor should, ever be made.

If you’re the kind of person that has trouble finishing things, then you would do best to curb this tendency if not eradicate it completely from your recording personality. One album does not a career make, especially if it’s never done in the first place.

I’m a big proponent of aggressive recording techniques. I advise that one records with intent towards a finished product, even when you’re just learning, partly because it promotes good recording habits, and partly because it’s the most effective path to quality results. One of your more important duties is to keep your artists and musicians in the right mindset—inspired.

Given the opportunity, I want to make my decisions along the way, and record towards a vision. If I want the cymbals distorted, I record them that way. If I want the guitar to swim in a spring reverb, I choose an amp with a good spring and record the tone that way.

Of course, this methodology has its pitfalls. Sometimes you fuck up, and bad. When that happens, you’ll surely curse me. To which I say, I can’t save you from your bad decisions, nor can I prevent you from making them in the first place. That’s also kind of the point. Working aggressively creates good decision-making habits that will benefit you in the long run, no matter how badly you might fuck up in the short run. When you record aggressively, you will make mistakes. That’s okay. That just means you’re doing things right.

Working aggressively will force you to think about the end game. Believe me, you can record with intent, and still leave yourself some wiggle room, and we’ll talk about how throughout the book. But there’s really no better way to overcome the debilitating effects of fear than by operating in a fearless manner. A phobia of flying I can understand—irrational as it may be, death is a possible consequence. To date, and as far as I know, there have been no documented reports of death by bad recording and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. So what are you worried about? Your reputation?

Well, you should be worried about that! But not at the expense of learning how to record well in the first place. If you approach recording with trepidation, if you worry about doing things the wrong way, you’re going to retard your improvement. I assume you’re reading this book in order to advance your skills. Recording aggressively with intent is the best way to accelerate the learning curve.

As a pure recordist, your job is to capture sound. If you record music, your job is to capture sound as it relates directly to music. If you’re both musician and recordist, then your job is the same, it’s just that your musicianship is considerably more critical than your recording skills. As a performer, you’ll have far more to do with the quality of a track than you ever will as a recordist, that is, unless you’re getting in the way.

You really have to work in an assiduous manner in order to fuck up a recording from a technical standpoint. Oh, it can be done, and likely occurs on a daily basis, but that’s often a result of trying too hard. You want to simplify the recording process, not make it a chore. Once you get your instrument to sound exactly the way you want it in the room, recording becomes a straightforword process of placing a mic where it most accurately represents the tone.

The tone of an instrument in isolation is almost irrelevant. Your tones must work together to form one coherent recording, and I can provide you with the key to success in this regard. Think musically! Don’t think sonically. Don’t think technically. The moment you start to think in musical terms, your recordings will improve a hundredfold.

I’m not a technician, not even close. So if you’re looking for a book about recording that focuses purely on the technical aspects of electronics, then this is not the book for you. In fact, none of my books are. I record music, and therefore, I’m a student of music first and foremost.

While we must discuss a number of technical realities where recording is concerned, I can assure you, there will be nothing in this book that can’t be conceptually understood by anyone with an interest in recording. For the most part, we will discuss the art of recording in terms of both musicality and practicality.

Perception

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the first time I recorded myself. It was sometime in the 70s when I was just a lad. My best friend had moved to Chicago, and long distance telephone calls were expensive (according to my mother). Rather than writing a letter, I decided to record one on a compact cassette recorder instead. Imagine my surprise when I played it back.

That’s not what I sound like!

Yes and no. It was me, obviously. But it wasn’t a perfect replication of my voice, certainly not as I heard it.

Much of that perception has to do with the fact that our ear canals are nestled within a resonant chamber—our skull, which is, of course, attached to our beautifully absorptive body. This greatly influences how we hear ourselves, which is somewhat warped in comparison to the way others perceive us. In an age where a microphone and a camera are never more than meters away, most of us have experienced playback of our own voice and the usual discomfort that follows.

Oh, I did everything I could to alter the way my voice sounded on playback. I tried speaking in a softer tone closer to the mic. I tried speaking louder from a distance. I tried altering the pitch of my voice by accentuating certain words, much like a television announcer. After a number of hours of experimentation, dejected, I gave up. And while I’d managed to improve my results through trial and error, I was far too uncomfortable with the tone of my voice to continue.

Just about all of you have likely experienced this. Disdain for one’s own voice is common, especially when we’re first exposed to it. Eventually, most of us get over it. These days, I don’t even notice my own voice. Recording countless radio shows, interviews, an audiobook tends to do that.

Then there was the time I recorded my high school rock/ska band with a single microphone in the guitar player’s basement.

That’s not what we sound like!

Again, yes and no. The recording was certainly skewed, as a single mic placed randomly in an acoustically flawed room is not an ideal way to record a band. Upon playback, the drums were overbearing, and the singer completely garbled. Clearly the mic was too close to the drummer. Move the mic, try again.

That’s not what we sound like!

Too much guitar, not enough vocal. Move the mic closer to the PA speaker.

That’s not what we sound like!

Too much vocal, and you know something? This mic sucks.

The balance of the instruments captured by a single mic clearly had everything to do with the placement of the mic. Of course, it was a $35 dynamic mic at a time when a Shure SM57 was just under $100. In other words, it was a piece of shit. It was also all we had. Besides, we weren’t looking to record a track for purposes of release. We just wanted to hear for ourselves what we sounded like, and if memory serves, it was somewhere in the range of atrocious and horrendous.

Recording is like a mirror. Unfortunately, it can sometimes feel as though we’re looking in an airplane mirror—which is typically magnified, warped, and lit in the most unflattering manner possible. I imagine this is done purposely to prevent people from spending countless hours admiring themselves. A recording is similar, in that it will reveal your flaws with brutal accuracy.

Our basement recording was a mess. The snares rattled from the bass. The low end was uneven, at times blossoming and resonating uncontrollably and thereby consuming the recording. And that stupid mic picked all of it up!

At the time, we chalked up the poor recordings to our subpar equipment. And while that surely didn’t help, the bottom line is, it did reasonably pick up what was happening in the room, at least how it sounded from that location. Frankly, a high quality mic and pre would have only managed to illuminate the truth of the matter. The problem was us. Put in recording terms—the problem was the source.

The room sounded like shit. Our instruments sounded like shit. And we performed like shit. The recording, while somewhat obfuscatory in nature overall, revealed these particular maladies with absolute fidelity. I mean, how could we listen back to a recording of our lousy playing, on our crappy instruments, in an awful acoustic space, and still manage to blame the gear?

Human nature, I suppose.

Had we recorded the identical poor performance in a stellar recording space with the same crappy mic and receiver, we would have significantly improved the recording, as many of the room maladies would be eradicated. A larger space would give the low end more room to blossom, thus preventing a frequency buildup that consumes the recording and rattles everything in the room.

Had we hired well-seasoned studio performers the results surely would have improved significantly, even on our crappy instruments. And were you to give these great performers instruments worthy of their talents, the difference would be staggering, even using a single crappy $35 mic to capture the performance.

Most of you reading this (certainly anyone born after 1985) likely had childhood access to far more sophisticated recording gear than I did. As much as I’m a proponent of analog gear, a cassette deck captures with considerably less sonic fidelity than even the crappiest computer soundcard. That said, were you