Heres something ive always excited about..

[deadly_habit]

I plug in my guitar and try coming up with melodies that way sometimes, but I suck ass at guitar.

heh i'm pawning my acoustic for food and money
i suck at guitar

Food/money... Music...

Music.

morrison and garcia

[back2onett]

In dnb and other forms of edm, I can get down with acoustical instruments as source, but for dubstep, I just cannot stand any sort of actual instrument sound in the mix. They always stick out like a sore thumb to me. For some reason it's like the sounds have to by synthetic to sound right. Maybe with the exception of hand percussion.

with you on this, I can't get any acoustic/tradditional instruments to sit right in my tracks

[SunkLo]

I find organic sounds are way easier to mix together. I'm getting close to finishing up a jazzy chill house track with kind of a live disco vibe and the instruments sit fine already with no mixing. I've got a full drumkit, bass, Rhodes, trumpet, sax trombone, violins, cello, clarinet, a fucking shit ton of percussion, etc. Of course they're all programmed well-recorded multisample vsts so that could help. I think electronic instruments just take up too much space.
I'm really excited to get to the mixing stage though. I'm planning on having everything quite processed and produced, so it'll be interesting to apply the stuff I've used before to these organic instruments.

[Phigure]

I find organic sounds are way easier to mix together. I'm getting close to finishing up a jazzy chill house track with kind of a live disco vibe and the instruments sit fine already with no mixing. I've got a full drumkit, bass, Rhodes, trumpet, sax trombone, violins, cello, clarinet, a fucking shit ton of percussion, etc. Of course they're all programmed well-recorded multisample vsts so that could help. I think electronic instruments just take up too much space.
I'm really excited to get to the mixing stage though. I'm planning on having everything quite processed and produced, so it'll be interesting to apply the stuff I've used before to these organic instruments.

I've been thinking about the same thing lately. Came upon the same conclusion, just that electronic instruments take up too much space. I guess that's the trade off; you get a lot more versatility and complexity with electronic sounds, but at the same time, you don't, if you get what I mean

[hayze99]

Hm. All I really know is that in an interview, Daedalus said that he often uses rock drum kits, rather than hip-hop or electronic. He puts em through reverb and then a compressor to get that gushy sound. Here 'tis:



Man's a fuckin' genius.

[contakt321]

i'll mic my monitors quite often.

in the mixdown stage, almost everything hits hardware, even if it's just to get 5db of gain thru a mic pre and get some soft clipping happening.

Hey Sharmaji,

Can you elaborate some more on this? Maybe give us two or three different scenarios of what you might do w/ gear you use?

ie: I take a bongo track and run it through an ABC123 preamp with 5db of gain, and then ZYX987 Compressor with a 2:1 setting for tube coloration, blah blah

I am interested in learning more about this as I am using more and more outboard gear.

[nowaysj]

Man's a fuckin' genius.

At the very least, he has a chair to kill for.

[deadly_habit]

kenshin is a genius

[darigan]

I like to use a Boss-SE50, its a digital multi effects unit, but its got an analogue distortion circuit so ya can get some really nice warm fuzzy distortion. Bit noisey thou. Bought it years back caused I read Liam Howlett used it for all of his distortion (drums synths etc...) as well as a lot of the chorus, reverb and delay effects. Ya can pick them up cheap for around 100 to 150 euros.
The SE-50 is really popular amougst guitarists.

[deadly_habit]

I like to use a Boss-SE50, its a digital multi effects unit, but its got an analogue distortion circuit so ya can get some really nice warm fuzzy distortion. Bit noisey thou. Bought it years back caused I read Liam Howlett used it for all of his distortion (drums synths etc...) as well as a lot of the chorus, reverb and delay effects. Ya can pick them up cheap for around 100 to 150 euros.
The SE-50 is really popular amougst guitarists.

the old akai ad converters are gold i almost mis selling my boss/roland sp202 just for sending shit thru it

[Sharmaji]

Hey Sharmaji,

Can you elaborate some more on this? Maybe give us two or three different scenarios of what you might do w/ gear you use?

ie: I take a bongo track and run it through an ABC123 preamp with 5db of gain, and then ZYX987 Compressor with a 2:1 setting for tube coloration, blah blah

I am interested in learning more about this as I am using more and more outboard gear.

ez boss

tbh it's got less to do w/ which bit of gear you're using rather than what elements.

I use my great river pre for damn near everything these days; sometimes the FET pre's in the 2882 win but in general, if something's getting gain added to it, it's happening thru the great river.

but in general, yeah-- gain, compression, and filtering are the best way to sonically stamp something as being 'other" in a mix. Tunes that've gotten people's ears-- i've ran the drums to a bus and run that bus out to a hardware filter and done sweeps on the whole bus, like a classic old techno record-- the nice thing is that the sends off the snare, hihat, etc stay at full-frequency so you've got this shimmery bit of reverb, etc happening while the real meat of the drums disappear under a LPF. yes, you can easily do this in the box... but my filter has knobs

otherwise, in terms of micing up your monitors, i tend to drive the front end of the pre hard, and back off so that i don't digitally clip the inputs.

one other trick, which I haven't done in about a year but can save a drum track, especially something played by a drumming-challenged drummer:

take your drum channel (in this case, a snare drum)
solo the channel and gate the fuck out of it-- if you're working w/ a sample, this generally isn't a problem
get a good-sounding snare drum and a small speaker. route your signal so that it comes out of the speaker.
put the speaker on top of the drum
mic the drum both near and far, like you would a normal kit
record-- the signal from the speaker will excite and "play" the snare drum
time-align and voila-- live-played snare track that doubles, nearly exactly, your previous track's dynamics.

this can work for anything, but it's basically the old-school version of sample replacement-- and a cousin of routing things to 'natural' reverbs. get a speaker, set up a send to play out of it, send some signal into your kitchen, mic' your kitchen, record, voila-- instant "other" reverb.

for shit like this i tend to like small diaphragm condensors, just for accuracy's sake, but all it comes down to is seeing the tools you've got and using them. Gain, etc won't make the biggest difference, until you start dealing w/ varying kinds of distortion-- you still have to get it to sit in the mix. but go for it and use YOUR environment to get sounds!

[cigaro5676]

ive messed with recording guitar lines into a track then editing them and chopping them up.
been wanting to do a "metal" sounding breakdown in one of my dubstep tunes with recorded guitars

i think using real instruments could add a little flavor to the process

[contakt321]

tbh it's got less to do w/ which bit of gear you're using rather than what elements.

I use my great river pre for damn near everything these days; sometimes the FET pre's in the 2882 win but in general, if something's getting gain added to it, it's happening thru the great river.

but in general, yeah-- gain, compression, and filtering are the best way to sonically stamp something as being 'other" in a mix.

Thank you for the detailed write up!

I have a few follow up questions for you if you don't mind:

1. I understand the gain, and the filters - as for the compression, are you just lightly compressing everything as your record it for character and to prevent any crazy spikes?
2. I think you use Logic, but is your workflow for say processing a softsynth through outboard gear something like this: Route synth out of your soundcard, through your signal chain, then re-recording in a new track in Logic?
3. Any suggestions for which piece to buy first (well researched, medium cost/quality preamp or compressor)?

PS: Filter tip sounds great! I am gonna try something like that.

[Sharmaji]

Thank you for the detailed write up!

I have a few follow up questions for you if you don't mind:

1. I understand the gain, and the filters - as for the compression, are you just lightly compressing everything as your record it for character and to prevent any crazy spikes?

it depends. lots of stuff i'll record in w/ no compression, if i haven't decided what dynamic space i want it to take up. Vox i always record w/ compression, even just a little, for the sound and the increase in tone I get. drums, maybe, percussion rarely, synths-- sure, if it increases harmonics. I almost never record w/ compression just as a 'safety' mechanism-- i'll just keep the incoming levels lower.

2. I think you use Logic, but is your workflow for say processing a softsynth through outboard gear something like this: Route synth out of your soundcard, through your signal chain, then re-recording in a new track in Logic?

yep, that's exactly it-- just make sure you zoom in 100% and drag the new waveforms back so that they match up with the originals.

3. Any suggestions for which piece to buy first (well researched, medium cost/quality preamp or compressor)?

I think you'll get more joy out of using something that's got a particular sonic stamp. The joe meek bits that are out right now are pretty cool, and relatively affordable. I had a combo pre/compressor/exciter from them back in 2004 which i didn't really use to its full potential-- would be fun to have now.

The micpre and line amp boxes that electro-harmonix makes are fantastic-- i had a mixing/tracking gig w/ the Rapture a few years ago, we used the pre's in stereo to really dirty up the drums-- wonderful bit of kit for very little $.

TBH, for electronic music I think compression is well-handled in the box these days. I've been surprised how often a plug-in beats hardware for dynamic control when i'm testing out setups-- all about finding the RIGHT tone. Unless you're thinking of grabbing a distressor, there's so many free flavors of compression available in digital form, i couldn't really recommend a piece of hardware....though an alesis 3630 is a totally aweful box, it's pretty awesome for crunching up drumloops. sounds ugly on anything else. the FMR RNP is very transparent, a good way to learn compression but not really something that I had a continued use for-- again, I want my hardware to have character.

rockin
D

[Sharmaji]

also:

when in doubt, use a megaphone:

[legend4ry]

^ Hes just a genius, innit.

[upstateface]

On 3 February 1967, using a shotgun owned by musician Heinz Burt, Meek murdered his landlady before turning the gun on himself.

Joe Meek gear is tight.

[wirez]

though an alesis 3630 is a totally aweful box, it's pretty awesome for crunching up drumloops. sounds ugly on anything else.

Dat Punk use it for sidechaining

[Project_B]

Ya know, when you said "rock sounds" for about 30 seconds I seriously thought you meant this:




I was thinking you were on about recording seismic activity or some shit. hitting them together or with a hammer. Took me a while to click.

[nowaysj]

That's how passe rock is, that people actually think of rocks before they think of rock music when they hear the term rock. I'm alright with that.