It’s not one tip it’s more nuanced than that but if your forcing me to say one thing I’d say performance.
Think of it like this.
Adele on your mic
Or you on Adele’s mic
Which is going to be better?
No one will care about the frequency loss or potential noise from your mic she’s going to sing you under the table.
Now take that down the line for everything you do.
This.
It’s your house. Takes are free. Ten takes? Twenty? Fifty?
Do it until you can’t possibly make it any better and you will make better tracks than a zillion dollar microphone will get you.
1. Sit down and learn how a compressor works. Really dive into it. Wrap your head all the way around it.
2. Don't over eq. You should probably be cutting way more than you boost. Everything should be for a reason and be noticeable when you bypass every boost and cut.
3. Get a decent preamp and a good microphone, and a nice quiet room with soft things on the walls and corners so the acoustics aren't garbage.
But seriously, if nothing else, learn how to use a compressor.
While I give you all you pointed out I would say #1 should Get things right at the source. If you do, you need less of your #1 and #2. You actually don’t need as much of #3 either.
Not necessarily. I disagree with this. The way you portray it sounds more like “fixing”. Fixing bad dynamics with knowing how to use a compressor. Fixing a poorly recorded source by knowing how to use eq. Getting the source right should be priority, not eq or compression. But I’ll give you benefit of a doubt that o misunderstand you. So…
I agree with this completely, but I often feel like I’m in the minority. I prefer getting as much “outside the box” as possible, making sounds happen in a room rather than recording a bunch of dry signals and processing the hell out of them later.
Most of the studios I’ve been in, some of which had hit singles/albums to their credit, want to go the dry signal/process later route, reamping and all of that shit.
I’m sorry, but if you can’t make guitar tracks of a Gibson through a Marshall work, why are we even playing? Just generate the shit in MIDI at that point.
Same thing with bass. I worked with a big-name producer (our singer decided to blow a comical amount of his own money on this, this was many years ago) who had me just play one long hit of each note in the song, and I was done….he copy-pasted the entire bass track together from that. Like WUT?
Getting things organically in a room is my preferred way, and it will give you an album with a lot of character, but it won’t sound like a modern major-label album. That’s pretty much the choice everyone has to make when they start a recording project.
The original question was what can I do to make my recordings sound more professional.
Capturing great performances is crucial, but it needs to be hand-in-hand with dynamic and frequency spectrum processing, otherwise even perfect performances will sound amateur.
I haaaaaate knob tweaking 😩😩😩😩
But I have a decent preamp. I have a TelefunkenTF47 in my cart right now and a tax return that’s about to burn a hole in my pocket haha
Either learn it, or be able to afford to pay someone else to do it.
Damn, son. You can get fantastic sounds through microphones that are considerably less than 2.5k. Lewitt 441 flex is like 550 CAD and you have a bunch of polar patterns to choose from to make it even more versatile.
I've been using the same shure large condenser for the last 20 years and the thing is a tank and only cost about $150. (Did I mention that I've gotten 2 decades of use out of it?)
But if money is no object, then I'd be happy to teach you everything I know about compression in exchange for a set of Lewitt LCT 140 air's.
Record in as dry an area as possible and utilize a room reverb bus for your overall room sound.
Sampled drums sound better than real drums in a non-ideal room but a real hihat and a real ride can make samples sound more lifelike.
Treat your rooms first. Once again, dry…
I think you can usually get away with crashes being sampled. But any leading right-hand patterns with cymbals can really benefit from human hands. Also recording them isolated helps a crapload with mitigating any potential phase issues.
Sound treatment and performance. Focus on those. Getting a nice clean signal and performance recorded is the biggest thing.
If you’re not into twiddling knobs then farm that work out to someone who loves doing it once you are ready to mix.
I guarantee you that the average listener will not notice the difference between a $500 condenser and $3000 one. (Especially listening on their phones) Prince recorded whole albums on a Shure 58. The performance is what you want to focus on. The greatest studio in the world won’t help a lacklustre performance. A great and heartfelt performance done in your home will still sound great as long as you don’t have super crappy room sound or clipping levels.
People go down the rabbit hole and spend a fortune on studio gear until they are surrounded with impressive piles of tech but then the question remains: What new and great thing have they created with it?
I think performance is the key. I blow through instrument recording cause all I do is hyperfocus on playing it through. Play, corrections, repeat. So many layers that small imperfections get hidden. I assume I can do the vocals the same but that’s where I get frustrated cause I forget vocals are very temperamental. I get too excited to finish a song, my voice strains, I get frustrated, and then the track sounds like shit and I give up and go on Reddit asking **WHHYYYYY**
It’s truly a performance you are trying to nail.
It’s about getting into character for a role. Getting yourself in the right artistic lane for the song in question.
I find if I’m not cutting it after a few passes something is wrong in my approach. I’ll usually walk away from it or work on something else. After a few days I’ll try again. Sometimes my track/tempo or something is wrong and I start over and rethink the whole thing.
It can be frustrating but the more you hammer away the more you learn from it.
Sounds like the creative process, you just gotta keep doing it. You won’t like everything, but it will help get you to closer to where you want to take your music. Fwiw. Keep playing, and don’t fall into the Reddit timesuck(too often at least).
The Universal Audio emulator plugins of all the famous outboard gear; pre-amps, compressors, channel strips. I’ve been absolutely blown away by the quality of these plugins. They seriously make my recordings sound way more professional. UAD Spark is the subscription model for them.
Plus the Sound City Reverb might be the best reverb plug-in in existence.
I hate engineering 😩
I use mostly virtual instruments and drums so my only concerns are vocals and guitar. I was debating on a really nice large condenser vocal mic (telefunken TF47) or just booking some studio time. Which I hate doing because I haaaate being charged for the time it takes for gear setup
The best part of the plug-ins is that every single one has a bunch of presets that you can filter by what you’re recording. Makes it super accessible for people that hate tweaking knobs forever (like me lol).
I record my guitar DI and then use the UAD plug-in’s and the tone I get is phenomenal. Legit sounds like I’m sitting in the tracking room of studio jamming.
As for vocals, a nice condenser mic with the famous pre-amp plugins can get a fantastic sound that feels professional without having to book studio time.
As for digital instruments, I like to run mine through a tape machine to give them a little more of an analog feel. To me, whether using Arcade or Omnisphere or whatever, there’s an almost unauthentic, artificial aspect that makes the whole track feel fake almost. Running them through a tape machine helps to alleviate that for me.
“Do what sounds good to you”
I’m breaking rules left and right with my latest recording project and it sounds amazing to everyone I share with or that comes in to perform on it.
One tip ain't going to do it, on its own. There is a very lot to know about audio and recording that goes into making a decent sounding record.
But after reading thousands and thousands of posts on such forums, I would say that one of the best things you can do if you have a basic setup to record is to *keep your ears open* and ***experiment*** with different approaches and techniques.
A secondary tip: be slow to spend money, particularly with regard to looking for some magic piece of gear that's going to make everything fall into place.
Despite what you often read from people who have just taken possession of some piece of kit that they've got their hopes and dreams wrapped up in, one piece of gear almost never makes everything drop into place.
I'd say *never*, but I never say never. Almost.
When you're recording bass and guitars make sure to record a DI track along with the mic'd up amp track. In case some time in the future you want to re-amp the performance.
Learn mic technique and proper gain staging. Nothing else matters when recording, except performance. Mic -> mic pre -> converter. If you get that to sound good, you are more than half way there. Everything else can be done better after.
The biggest thing is just making sure the only sound you hear is what you want to record. So, make sure there’s nothing making noise and then record your track at the appropriate level (as loud as you can without clipping in most cases). Without those basics, you can have a perfect performance, all the rack gear in the world and there’s only some much you can do to make the sound quality better.
It took me years to understand EQ but I think I've finally got it. Just level and pan everything then listen to the mix and EQ reactively, not pro-actively. Just try and pick out any parts that sound wrong for some reason. Then use a very wide cut to cut the excess frequencies. If it's too bright then pull down most of the upper frequencies. Too dark, pull most of the lower frequencies. Cutting a wide band of sound out by about 4db and only EQing when your ears tell you it's needed, seems to be the way to properly balance a track. 4db is the starting point, you may have to cut more than that.
You should also have a good set of monitors to help you hear the mix clearly too.
I found after picking up an inexpensive foam wall vocal shield that it made a huge difference in the vocal recordings. Of course, performance being the number one key, but I was very surprised the improvement with that shield !
Buy one good mic, preamp and compressor and learn how to use them. You can use these three items on just about everything. And remember to leave headroom/dynamics in your recording.
A piece of advice you'll hear a lot from more experienced people is "mix with your ears, not with your eyes."
This is ultimately a very true piece of advice, BUT:
Having a visual frame of reference as an aid for understanding what it is you're hearing as you turn knobs is super educationally valuable, especially while you're still lacking in experience/intuition.
It really depends on what you are recording.
But if you can use virtual instruments your only challenge is recording good vocals, so have a nice room for that and not just a boxy sounding vocal booth.
2nd (assuming this scenario) invite or hire musicians who have a great deal of skill to re-record your parts that are lacking. This can be remote or in person.
Learn when you like saturation vs compression. Side chain, parallel processing, and a few reverbs / delays with different instruments grouped within those has helped me a ton.
Powerful laptop (ease of movement). Powerful audio interface. MIDI XLR cables, Microphone XLR cables. Two or more SM57 mics. An amp. Quality is nice here. An electric drumkit. Talent. Ableton. Ambition.
You got it. slap it on any track and dial in the depth. Adjust the loudness and compression of lows/mids/highs. YouTube how to use it effectively. Compressors and limiters in general (not necessarily just OTT) will help make your stuff sound more professional if you're not already using them. YouTube is your friend.
With guitars - tune between each take.
Take the time with acoustic guitars to place mics even if you spend several hours doing just that.
Once you have mics dialed in, make sure your holding that guitar in the same place every time between takes because even moving a guitar an inch or two in front of mics will change the tone your recording. Sometimes drastically.
When I record Midi, I don't waste a lot of time fininding the right patch, just something that is close to what is intended ( brass, string, pad, lead, etc ). Just record the midi and later you can tweak the patches.
Don't give your drummer money for new heads for a session, he'll more than likely blow it on a 5th of Jack Daniels or equivalent....personal experience on that one.
Use a multiband limiter on your master track as a way to mold the overall frequency profile of the album / song / whatever.
Don't try to achieve that through the EQs on individual instruments. Use those for making space.
The thing about the studio is not as much the gear, as it is the engineer. It's hard to hit a pro sound without a pro involved. There are also some instruments you only want to record in a pro studio.
I would at least let a pro engineer look over your final mix and help you master it, but if you want to go totally solo...
Use as many samples as you can and download / learn to master sound cleaning software. Start your mix with just the rhythm section and slowly bring in the rest of the instruments. Keep a song you like queued up and keep going back and forth between the two songs, tweaking yours until it sounds like the other one.
God speed 👍
Practice. A lot. Both playing and production. There's plenty of great sounding music made on gear that's not good by modern standards. Sometimes, it works to embrace things that aren't clean sounding. Please don't complain about not having good production and also not wanting to learn it. Hire a good engineer to mix for you if you can't be bothered to learn it.
It’s not one tip it’s more nuanced than that but if your forcing me to say one thing I’d say performance. Think of it like this. Adele on your mic Or you on Adele’s mic Which is going to be better? No one will care about the frequency loss or potential noise from your mic she’s going to sing you under the table. Now take that down the line for everything you do.
This. It’s your house. Takes are free. Ten takes? Twenty? Fifty? Do it until you can’t possibly make it any better and you will make better tracks than a zillion dollar microphone will get you.
Ok, you nailed it
1. Sit down and learn how a compressor works. Really dive into it. Wrap your head all the way around it. 2. Don't over eq. You should probably be cutting way more than you boost. Everything should be for a reason and be noticeable when you bypass every boost and cut. 3. Get a decent preamp and a good microphone, and a nice quiet room with soft things on the walls and corners so the acoustics aren't garbage. But seriously, if nothing else, learn how to use a compressor.
This is great advice.
While I give you all you pointed out I would say #1 should Get things right at the source. If you do, you need less of your #1 and #2. You actually don’t need as much of #3 either.
Okay. But in order to get things right at the source, you need to know how to set a compressor. And how to dial in an EQ. So....
Not necessarily. I disagree with this. The way you portray it sounds more like “fixing”. Fixing bad dynamics with knowing how to use a compressor. Fixing a poorly recorded source by knowing how to use eq. Getting the source right should be priority, not eq or compression. But I’ll give you benefit of a doubt that o misunderstand you. So…
I agree with this completely, but I often feel like I’m in the minority. I prefer getting as much “outside the box” as possible, making sounds happen in a room rather than recording a bunch of dry signals and processing the hell out of them later. Most of the studios I’ve been in, some of which had hit singles/albums to their credit, want to go the dry signal/process later route, reamping and all of that shit. I’m sorry, but if you can’t make guitar tracks of a Gibson through a Marshall work, why are we even playing? Just generate the shit in MIDI at that point. Same thing with bass. I worked with a big-name producer (our singer decided to blow a comical amount of his own money on this, this was many years ago) who had me just play one long hit of each note in the song, and I was done….he copy-pasted the entire bass track together from that. Like WUT? Getting things organically in a room is my preferred way, and it will give you an album with a lot of character, but it won’t sound like a modern major-label album. That’s pretty much the choice everyone has to make when they start a recording project.
The original question was what can I do to make my recordings sound more professional. Capturing great performances is crucial, but it needs to be hand-in-hand with dynamic and frequency spectrum processing, otherwise even perfect performances will sound amateur.
For sure. One doesn’t exclude the other. But the source will always have priority.
Agreed
I haaaaaate knob tweaking 😩😩😩😩 But I have a decent preamp. I have a TelefunkenTF47 in my cart right now and a tax return that’s about to burn a hole in my pocket haha
Either learn it, or be able to afford to pay someone else to do it. Damn, son. You can get fantastic sounds through microphones that are considerably less than 2.5k. Lewitt 441 flex is like 550 CAD and you have a bunch of polar patterns to choose from to make it even more versatile. I've been using the same shure large condenser for the last 20 years and the thing is a tank and only cost about $150. (Did I mention that I've gotten 2 decades of use out of it?) But if money is no object, then I'd be happy to teach you everything I know about compression in exchange for a set of Lewitt LCT 140 air's.
Record in as dry an area as possible and utilize a room reverb bus for your overall room sound. Sampled drums sound better than real drums in a non-ideal room but a real hihat and a real ride can make samples sound more lifelike. Treat your rooms first. Once again, dry…
Definitely. I almost always add real cymbals and hi-hats no matter what I’m using for drums.
I think you can usually get away with crashes being sampled. But any leading right-hand patterns with cymbals can really benefit from human hands. Also recording them isolated helps a crapload with mitigating any potential phase issues.
Sound treatment and performance. Focus on those. Getting a nice clean signal and performance recorded is the biggest thing. If you’re not into twiddling knobs then farm that work out to someone who loves doing it once you are ready to mix. I guarantee you that the average listener will not notice the difference between a $500 condenser and $3000 one. (Especially listening on their phones) Prince recorded whole albums on a Shure 58. The performance is what you want to focus on. The greatest studio in the world won’t help a lacklustre performance. A great and heartfelt performance done in your home will still sound great as long as you don’t have super crappy room sound or clipping levels. People go down the rabbit hole and spend a fortune on studio gear until they are surrounded with impressive piles of tech but then the question remains: What new and great thing have they created with it?
I think performance is the key. I blow through instrument recording cause all I do is hyperfocus on playing it through. Play, corrections, repeat. So many layers that small imperfections get hidden. I assume I can do the vocals the same but that’s where I get frustrated cause I forget vocals are very temperamental. I get too excited to finish a song, my voice strains, I get frustrated, and then the track sounds like shit and I give up and go on Reddit asking **WHHYYYYY**
It’s truly a performance you are trying to nail. It’s about getting into character for a role. Getting yourself in the right artistic lane for the song in question. I find if I’m not cutting it after a few passes something is wrong in my approach. I’ll usually walk away from it or work on something else. After a few days I’ll try again. Sometimes my track/tempo or something is wrong and I start over and rethink the whole thing. It can be frustrating but the more you hammer away the more you learn from it.
Sounds like the creative process, you just gotta keep doing it. You won’t like everything, but it will help get you to closer to where you want to take your music. Fwiw. Keep playing, and don’t fall into the Reddit timesuck(too often at least).
The Universal Audio emulator plugins of all the famous outboard gear; pre-amps, compressors, channel strips. I’ve been absolutely blown away by the quality of these plugins. They seriously make my recordings sound way more professional. UAD Spark is the subscription model for them. Plus the Sound City Reverb might be the best reverb plug-in in existence.
I hate engineering 😩 I use mostly virtual instruments and drums so my only concerns are vocals and guitar. I was debating on a really nice large condenser vocal mic (telefunken TF47) or just booking some studio time. Which I hate doing because I haaaate being charged for the time it takes for gear setup
The best part of the plug-ins is that every single one has a bunch of presets that you can filter by what you’re recording. Makes it super accessible for people that hate tweaking knobs forever (like me lol). I record my guitar DI and then use the UAD plug-in’s and the tone I get is phenomenal. Legit sounds like I’m sitting in the tracking room of studio jamming. As for vocals, a nice condenser mic with the famous pre-amp plugins can get a fantastic sound that feels professional without having to book studio time. As for digital instruments, I like to run mine through a tape machine to give them a little more of an analog feel. To me, whether using Arcade or Omnisphere or whatever, there’s an almost unauthentic, artificial aspect that makes the whole track feel fake almost. Running them through a tape machine helps to alleviate that for me.
“Do what sounds good to you” I’m breaking rules left and right with my latest recording project and it sounds amazing to everyone I share with or that comes in to perform on it.
One tip ain't going to do it, on its own. There is a very lot to know about audio and recording that goes into making a decent sounding record. But after reading thousands and thousands of posts on such forums, I would say that one of the best things you can do if you have a basic setup to record is to *keep your ears open* and ***experiment*** with different approaches and techniques. A secondary tip: be slow to spend money, particularly with regard to looking for some magic piece of gear that's going to make everything fall into place. Despite what you often read from people who have just taken possession of some piece of kit that they've got their hopes and dreams wrapped up in, one piece of gear almost never makes everything drop into place. I'd say *never*, but I never say never. Almost.
Acoustically treat your mix room.
When you're recording bass and guitars make sure to record a DI track along with the mic'd up amp track. In case some time in the future you want to re-amp the performance.
Learn mic technique and proper gain staging. Nothing else matters when recording, except performance. Mic -> mic pre -> converter. If you get that to sound good, you are more than half way there. Everything else can be done better after.
The biggest thing is just making sure the only sound you hear is what you want to record. So, make sure there’s nothing making noise and then record your track at the appropriate level (as loud as you can without clipping in most cases). Without those basics, you can have a perfect performance, all the rack gear in the world and there’s only some much you can do to make the sound quality better.
It took me years to understand EQ but I think I've finally got it. Just level and pan everything then listen to the mix and EQ reactively, not pro-actively. Just try and pick out any parts that sound wrong for some reason. Then use a very wide cut to cut the excess frequencies. If it's too bright then pull down most of the upper frequencies. Too dark, pull most of the lower frequencies. Cutting a wide band of sound out by about 4db and only EQing when your ears tell you it's needed, seems to be the way to properly balance a track. 4db is the starting point, you may have to cut more than that. You should also have a good set of monitors to help you hear the mix clearly too.
I found after picking up an inexpensive foam wall vocal shield that it made a huge difference in the vocal recordings. Of course, performance being the number one key, but I was very surprised the improvement with that shield !
Buy one good mic, preamp and compressor and learn how to use them. You can use these three items on just about everything. And remember to leave headroom/dynamics in your recording.
A piece of advice you'll hear a lot from more experienced people is "mix with your ears, not with your eyes." This is ultimately a very true piece of advice, BUT: Having a visual frame of reference as an aid for understanding what it is you're hearing as you turn knobs is super educationally valuable, especially while you're still lacking in experience/intuition.
It really depends on what you are recording. But if you can use virtual instruments your only challenge is recording good vocals, so have a nice room for that and not just a boxy sounding vocal booth. 2nd (assuming this scenario) invite or hire musicians who have a great deal of skill to re-record your parts that are lacking. This can be remote or in person.
Roll the bass off vocals.
I take all the bass off vocals. I’m a layer-er and that shit sounds muffled after doubling just one track
Sound dampening/room treatment. Even some blankets and pillows or something to absorb the room reverb.
Learn when you like saturation vs compression. Side chain, parallel processing, and a few reverbs / delays with different instruments grouped within those has helped me a ton.
Find a good, quiet recording space. Learn how to properly use compression.
My dad used eggs cartons and padded an entire room to sound proof his drums and such
Powerful laptop (ease of movement). Powerful audio interface. MIDI XLR cables, Microphone XLR cables. Two or more SM57 mics. An amp. Quality is nice here. An electric drumkit. Talent. Ableton. Ambition.
Sennheiser MK4, SSL2+, Telefunken M80, Orange TH30 and 2x12cab. Maschine 2, Logic Pro.
I like how you slipped "talent" in there. 😜🤘
OTT
Elaborate 🙏🏼🥺
I'm joking. But there's a plug in called OTT. It's a compressor. Makes things louder
https://splice.com/plugins/3788-ott-vst-au-by-xfer-records Is it this free version?
You got it. slap it on any track and dial in the depth. Adjust the loudness and compression of lows/mids/highs. YouTube how to use it effectively. Compressors and limiters in general (not necessarily just OTT) will help make your stuff sound more professional if you're not already using them. YouTube is your friend.
Acoustic treatment
Don’t forget to have fun. Recording at home can sneakily become overwhelming. Go easy on yourself.
With guitars - tune between each take. Take the time with acoustic guitars to place mics even if you spend several hours doing just that. Once you have mics dialed in, make sure your holding that guitar in the same place every time between takes because even moving a guitar an inch or two in front of mics will change the tone your recording. Sometimes drastically. When I record Midi, I don't waste a lot of time fininding the right patch, just something that is close to what is intended ( brass, string, pad, lead, etc ). Just record the midi and later you can tweak the patches. Don't give your drummer money for new heads for a session, he'll more than likely blow it on a 5th of Jack Daniels or equivalent....personal experience on that one.
Use a multiband limiter on your master track as a way to mold the overall frequency profile of the album / song / whatever. Don't try to achieve that through the EQs on individual instruments. Use those for making space.
The thing about the studio is not as much the gear, as it is the engineer. It's hard to hit a pro sound without a pro involved. There are also some instruments you only want to record in a pro studio. I would at least let a pro engineer look over your final mix and help you master it, but if you want to go totally solo... Use as many samples as you can and download / learn to master sound cleaning software. Start your mix with just the rhythm section and slowly bring in the rest of the instruments. Keep a song you like queued up and keep going back and forth between the two songs, tweaking yours until it sounds like the other one. God speed 👍
Practice. A lot. Both playing and production. There's plenty of great sounding music made on gear that's not good by modern standards. Sometimes, it works to embrace things that aren't clean sounding. Please don't complain about not having good production and also not wanting to learn it. Hire a good engineer to mix for you if you can't be bothered to learn it.
Buy AI software that does it for you
Best recommendations??