You can find a lot of great advice on popular recording techniques on the Interwebs these days. But some of the best tips are often found just under the radar — they’re not necessarily obvious. Here’s a collection of recording tips and techniques that might be new to you, and can help you take your recordings to the next level.
1. Start Slow
When you’re working quickly, it’s tempting to decide in advance if you want a compressor with a fast attack that squashes your audio transients immediately, or a slow attack that lets your transients through, and just reach for a preset or set your compressor or gate’s Attack Time parameter and be done with it. But remember, one size does not fit all — every source audio track is different. Take the time to adjust the attack to the audio. Start with a very slow attack, and gradually turn the knob to make the attack faster until you find the perfect value for your track. Your results will likely be better than just reaching for a preset.
2. No Bottom in the Top, No Top in the Bottom
This is a technique used constantly by professional mixers that is slowly starting to filter (pun intended) down to the recording musician. It’s also commonly used in multiband compressors and limiters. The idea is to process the high frequencies in your source audio differently from the low frequencies — maybe with compression, but let your imagination run wild: chorus on the highs, none on the lows. Delay on the highs, flange on the lows. Fuzz on the lows, filtering on the highs. Your favorite plug-ins may not be multiband plug-ins that let you divide sounds by their frequencies, but don’t worry, there’s another way. Make a copy of your track, and append “High” (or whatever you prefer) to the name of one, and “Low” to the other. On the High track, insert a highpass filter that cuts out all the lows as the first processor in the chain; on the Low track, put on a lowpass filter to filter out all the highs. (There are also plug-ins available, such as Avid’s Pro Multiband Splitter — featured in the Pro Multiband Dynamics Plug-in — that will do this for you.) Essentially what you’re doing is splitting the track into high and low components, like a crossover does in a speaker system. Then on each track, do whatever processing you want to that particular band of frequencies.
3. Sidechain Singing
One of the most common — and classic — uses for the sidechain in a compressor is to use the kick drum to trigger the compression. But that’s not the only thing sidechains are good for. In a dense mix, vocals can easily find themselves competing for sonic attention with the melodic or harmonic instruments (guitars, piano/synthesizers, strings, etc.). To give the vocals breathing room, put a compressor on the instrument in question and route the vocal to the compressor’s sidechain. Set the compression to react subtly, but still audibly: just 2–4dB of gain reduction depending on the source. Now, whenever the vocals kick in, the instrument(s) you compressed will “get out of the way” and let the vocals shine through more. Adjust to taste; too much compression, and you’ll hear the instruments drop too much every time the vocal comes in. What you want is just enough subtle dip in the backing tracks to give the vocal room to be heard.
4. That Tom Is Outta Tune!
This trick has been around for a long time and used by many artists and producers; Prince famously used it on his early breakthrough albums 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign O’ the Times. When you tune the drums to the key of the song, the drums can sound far more connected to the music, almost like a rhythm instrument that’s keeping the melody and harmony too. This is a whole lot easier to do when you’re dealing with electronic drums. But don’t forget you can accurately tune acoustic drums too! And with a plug-in such as Waves awesome new Torque, you can even adjust the tuning of drums after the fact.
5. Don’t Be Afraid of Commitment
In the DAW age, many of us try to keep every analog source as raw and dry as possible, then process the tracks after the fact, during mixdown. Truth is, sometimes you’re better off committing your effects when you record. If you have painstakingly designed a guitar sound using your favorite pedals, you may gain flexibility by recording your guitar dry, but you’ll lose the tone and feel of those effects that you built your part around. If you created a synth sound that relies on the internal delay of your instrument, it will lose something vital if you record it dry and try to add delay later in your DAW. Many times it’s a good idea to add processing after the fact, but if your processed tone is integral to the performance or tone, don’t be afraid to commit it to your track when recording.
6. Cut the Thump
Does your microphone have a highpass filter? There’s a reason for that — low-frequency rumble from noises made when you tap your feet or grab the mic stand, the neighbor mows the lawn, a truck rumbles by, and so on, can really muddy up a recording. Most mics have a highpass filter with a low enough frequency that it won’t noticeably affect the audible tone of what you are recording. Turning it on can really help clean up low-end booms and thumps and can also help optimize headroom in your preamp and track — those unwanted and unneeded low frequencies eat up a lot of energy!
7. A Big Empty Canvas
Preparation is one of those areas in which more really is better. Hopefully you’ve already set up a template for your sessions with empty, pre-configured tracks for every musician and part you’ll be recording. But don’t stop there. Include lots of extra tracks in case you want to do extra takes, someone gets an on-the-fly inspiration, you want to try the same part with different sounds, etc. Setting up too many tracks in a DAW won’t cost you anything, and it can save precious moments when the inspiration hits and you want to start recording immediately before the inspiration vanishes. If you end up not using the empty tracks, simply delete them when the session is finished.