9 May
2009
9 May
'09
7:48 p.m.
Well, OK, I'm starting to get a picture in my
mind. And not a very
good one, but at least it's a picture and place to start, so let's
start... :-)
In general there are two ways I approach getting a new piece of music
on disk - record it live and then work on the pieces or start from
scratch and build it up track by track. Assuming that I correctly
understand that you are part of a band and you're new to this I'd
suggest the former and building from there. However that probably
comes a bit later.
That sounds good. I have made some experiments with recording
live with rather dismal results. The problem I get in the
practice room is that the drums drown everything else out. We
managed to get a live recording from one of our gigs from the
desk, but that was pre-mixed so I guess its not possible to do
too much with that? Some of the recordings are on our myspace
page:
http://myspace.com/kittencakeband
I'm now going to snip ALL the interesting but
possibly distracting
stuff in the middle and focus on the ONE thing I'd suggest you do.
<SNIP>
Fair enough..
One thing I was considering, if you are amenable, is to post both
songs in their raw (ardour) form - the first (professional-ish) one
was done in protools, but I have imported individual audio tracks into
ardour and have got pretty much the same sequence as far as I can
tell. The second has all the tracking problems I mentioned - bass
guitar for example, which was recorded by micing the amp in the
low-budget version has some boom where it hits the resonant frequency
of one of the nearby toms! Drums (although recorded with 2 mics only
has one track as the mixer/PA had no pan function!) I would really
appreciate it if you could listen to the raw form and then say how you
would approach them (could repost the mixed versions if you have the
time?) I would find this really educational, but I realise it is
asking quite a lot, so I am happy either way.
James
For me anyway I don't think this would be productive, at least not
yet. If your problems are primarily tracking, (or at least initially
tracking) which they sound like they are right now, then why mess with
a whole mix? Far too complicated.
What I would do is, for the purpose of discussion, focus on getting
one single good track on disk. Sorry, but I don't remember what you
said you play. (Or if you even play! I'm old an hardly remember dinner
last night.) None the less, let's say you played one of the guitars on
the studio production. I'd suggest we concentrate on duplicating that
sound as best we can. We don't need the PA at all, assuming you are
playing through some sort of amp. If you simply listened to the studio
mix and played your guitar along with it, recording it into Ardour,
then we'd get an initial indication of how the room, guitar, guitar
amp, mics, preamps, A/D and Ardour are working for you and what you're
able to do so far. We could then work on ideas for improving it.
I play bass, and for the studio recording, the bass was DI'd
straight in, so I wouldn't think there would be too many problems
reproducing that (aside from the fact I don't own a DI box yet!).
I can certainly work on getting a good guitar sound though -
although I'm not 100% sure how I would tell if I got one.
By the way, the mix I made of the low-budget recording (no
effects, no lead guitar yet) is here:
http://drop.io/pretty_monster
So you can maybe get an idea what the tracking was like? This was
really a quick take (30 mins max) to see if this method worked at
all, and I am pretty happy, although nobody liked their
performances, and the click from ardour was not loud enough
through the laptop soundcard to be used to play the drums to..
I can post one of the individual tracks from that if you want.
As I reread your email, I'm now confused as to
whether you are using a
mic preamp of some type or are using the PA itself as the mic preamp
and driving Ardour from that. If that's the case I think you're going
to have a very hard time getting the results you are looking for and
might want to consider even an inexpensive stereo USB preamp. If you
need to go that way then make sure you check out Linux compatibility
carefully as so little stuff really works under Alsa. But, to be
clear, if you are using your PA then post a single track of the guitar
playing the same part as something in the studio mix and we'll go from
there.
Yes, I was using the PA to mix it. I do have a mic preamp but was
not using it for the last recording.. I was just wondering what
is the best approach of the two (I could only use one mic if I go
down the mic preamp route) and whether I can safely unplug the PA
speakers when recording from the PA mixer.
And no, you don't absolutely need to buy a
hardware mixer to make good
mixes. Ardour has more than enough capability in that area. But you
can't make a good mix if you can't get good sound on the individual
tracks.
If you're interested in doing this then drop a note back. I understand
it might take a bit of time to get to it.
Thanks for all your help!
James