What is your favorite studio 'trick'? (07-06-01)

[Lucky]

Sounds kinda silly, but you get the old "Stairway to heaven" acoustic sound by taking a pair of headphones, and putting one side in and one out, clamping them around the bottom of the guitar, and plugging them into the mixer. Pretty cool "Lo-fi" effect. On the other side of this, I've heard a story about a guy who must have just been totally bored, but he used 2 small radio shack mics as speakers (miced the guitar with 2 SM-57's) then mic'ed the speaker mics. How much free time do you have?

[blacko3788]

I took my trumpet and played into a radio shack employee's but.

[MidiMagic]

Using a 4-bus mixer, a Radio Shack ground loop isolator, and a few patchcords to mix matrixed surround sound.

My second favorite is miking a practice amp to get that classic Chuck Berry sound.

[flattop100]

A 50 watt open back combo amp on a stool. 4 wireless microphones each taped to a different blade on a ceiling fan. Pan accordingly during mixdown.

And the wind noise is intentional, right?

This would be a sweet setup for miking a leslie!

[MidiMagic]

But how do you keep the mic cords from twisting up?

[Ed Belknap]

Originally posted by MidiMagic
But how do you keep the mic cords from twisting up?

He did specify wireless mics.

Note that, along a similar vein, a stereo-miked Leslie speaker can function as a sort of "Mechanical Auto-Panner" without the fuss & mess of wireless mics or tangled cords.

[sylk]

What is your favorite 'trick' - i.e., using a piece of gear in an unconventional way to produce a result seemingly unobtainable by other means? (We know we're asking you to reveal one of your professional secrets, but work with us here, alright?)

Making rhythm pump with a compressor. There's no other way to get that feel to a drum track.

[analoguepilot]

recording a source using my "real ear" method. standing in the middle of the room i take two condensers and place them ear level facing in slightly towards my ears about 6 inches away from my head on either side. reverse polarity on one of the mics and pan the left mic far left and the right mic far right. place the source in varying areas of the room to get different sounds from the source. i love using this when recording layered vocals or when recording found sounds...

[Smithcok]

Well, what do you do when you have to isolate two guitar stacks, but only have one iso room (and the hallway and bathrooms are already taken up as "iso" chambers?)

Raid your home and friends home for carpet and matresses and
BUILD A BIG ASS WALL DOWN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM!!!

This actually works pretty darn well, assuming you can come up with 7 matresses and a roll of carpet padding.

I'll try to get pics up, its actually quite funny. Maybe I should get some audio up too so everyone doesnt think im a looney.

[analoguepilot]

youre not looney at all i was recording an punk/emo band a few years ago at a church(!)and they were tracking live so to keep the cymbals and snare from bleeding like a stuck pig into the lead vocal's mic, we grabbed a bunch of conference room dividers, jackets and pillows and made a custom drum shield- it looked like a homeless guy's dream mansion but it worked! then, one day recording in my bedroom/project studio awhile back, i was getting alot of noise coming through the window, so i cleared off my bed and jury-rigged my mattress over the window- worked like a charm

[5454stevef]

I use a Pod for a fair number of my guitar tracking chores.. no, that ain't the trick...

the trick is, in order to simulate the acoustic feedback from the amp to the guitar, (always missing from the experience of playing thru a pod) I sometimes strap a set of cheap headphones on the body of the guitar and feed the pod output into 'em. a mite unpredictable, but it gets a nice, loose, verge-of-uncontrollable feedback sound if that's what you're after.

[Kallahan11]

I used a bug the tube delay pedal in a version of gearbox and my guitar to record my pulse then used that as a rhythm track.