Help me rock harder than I already do.

May 19, 2009 3:32 PM

Recording software/hardware filter: I wanna rock even harder than I already do... Give me some technical advise.

My friend and I write and record music. We sell it online, and we have actually earned ourselves a fan or two. However, we have one major problem: The sound quality of our audio is just not up to snuff. We are a low-fi outfit, recording with a MacBook Pro, using Garageband as our mixer. We record into a microphones that cost about $50, and sometimes even into the MacBook Pro internal mic. We play mostly acoustic guitar, bass, sometimes keyboard, and of course there are vocals.

What would be the top one or two things that we should do to get a more professional sound? Is it the recording environment that makes the difference? The microphone? The Macbook? The software? All of the above? If we only have a little bit of money to spend and we want to improve the sound quality, what will get us the biggest bang for the buck?

Thanks!

posted by crapples to media & arts (14 comments total)

garageband is fine, it's your signal path that sucks. get a firewire or usb audio interface and you'll notice quite a difference. Microphones would be next, but you can get Shure SM57's and SM58s for about that price and they are time-tested and true.
posted by rhizome at 3:44 PM on May 19

I don't have time to post more detail (and you need more detail than I'm about to give, obviously), but it's not the gear, it's the technique.

Listen to tracks on MeFiMusic. Most of the ones I have posted are recorded on a Mac Mini Pro Tools rig with an MBox 2 and mid-range microphones. But there are people posting stuff there that is done on Garageband with cheap mics and sounds way better than my stuff. Then contrast it with the two tracks that I posted from my two-man band two-day album thing. Those two tracks were recorded in a state-of-the-art home studio with hundreds of thousands of dollars in recording gear, preamps, plug-ins, etc, with mics costing more than my car, and engineered by my collaborator, who is unbelievably talented at production, mixing, and mastering. Even though they were each written, recorded, mixed, and mastered in just a matter of an hour or so each, they sound better than all of the rest of my stuff mostly because of technique. It's nearly all about technique.
posted by The World Famous at 3:48 PM on May 19

I love my Korg 8-track D888 hard disk recorder. Get a few Shure SM-58's for vocals and an SM-57 for instruments.
posted by Ironmouth at 3:59 PM on May 19

If you're not already doing so make sure you're using a really good quality pair of monitors or headphones to mix your music. You need something which is going to level out the sound quality, and a lot of speakers "excite" the sound so you're not getting an accurate result. Personally I love my Sennheiser HD 280 Pro's.

Also as The World Famous said, technique is extremely important. Pay particular attention to your instrumentation - the whole production should sound beautiful and cohesive before you even get to post-production. Good music really is all about solid foundations.

I hope that helps. All the best!!
posted by katala at 4:29 PM on May 19

If you could post a sample of what you'd like to improve, you might be able to get more specific advice about how to fix it. Technique has a lot to do with it, and sometimes you can fix your problems with some pretty cheap homebrew solutions.
posted by echo target at 4:40 PM on May 19

Would you guys mind elaborating on "technique" (mentioned by katala and The World Famous)? Does this refer to mixing? Fades, contrasts, and things like that? How would you define technique? Does technique take place while I'm playing the instrument, or while someone is mixing at the board? Or both.

Echo Target: Here is a song that we recorded recently. There are two things that I'd like to improve. (1) The overall sound quality is sort of "dull". When compared to a professional recording, it just doesn't sound crisp by comparison. This is most easy to notice with bigger nicer speakers. (2) It is sort of sloppy, I think. Sounds go in and out in odd ways, and the overall feel sounds amateurish.

Thanks for the advise.
posted by crapples at 5:12 PM on May 19

Technique is what you do with whatever gear you have. It's what kind of space you record in, where you place your mics, how you mix & pan them, and a thousand other things.

Your song sounds pretty good to my ears. There's only a few things I caught (admittedly I don't have my good headphones with me):
1. There's a few breath noises in the background throughout, probably on the acoustic guitar track. They're not terribly disturbing, but they can add to an amateurish (or at least lo-fi) effect.
2. There doesn't seem to be a lot of stereo panning. I caught a back-and-forth effect on the background vocal toward the end, but unless my headphones are malfunctioning, everything else is panned mostly dead center. It's best to put each instrument in its own place in the stereo field. This is especially true when you have two instruments with a similar place in the frequency range. If you think of stereo as your X axis and frequency as your Y, when you put two sounds on top of each other, they'll compete and muddy each other up.
3. Most importantly, the vocal sounds off to me. It has a lot of reverb on it, making it sound some distance away, which to me isn't appropriate for the otherwise warm tones of the song. If you record somewhere with a lot of bare walls and tile on the floor, you get lots of echoes. Have your vocalist sing into a microphone in a small, acoustically deadened space and you'll get a much cleaner signal. If you decide later on that you want a bit of reverb, it's easy to add to a deadened track, but impossible to remove from one that was recorded that way.

This stuff is all a matter of taste, of course. Breathing and clunks and background noises are charming in the Beatles Anthologies. Phil Spector based his whole sound around throwing together a bunch of similar-sounding instruments playing similar parts. And some great-sounding songs have a vocal that sounds like it was recorded in a different universe than the rest of the instruments. So take this all with a grain of salt, and don't let it hold you back from a great idea if you have one.
posted by echo target at 6:14 PM on May 19

Here's a good tip on listening volume while mixing.
posted by and for no one at 7:03 PM on May 19

That's a really cool song.

everything echo target just said.

Try to put your reverbs and other time-based processing on returns instead of in the track itself. This separates things and adds more depth. for example, on the vox, roll off the bass to about 250-300hz and send the signal to an aux with a reverb on it (you can do this in Garage band right?) pan the return to a different location in the stereo field than then vox. Add a bit of pre-delay, about 15-20 sec, if available. Also try rolling some of the highs off the reverb return to get rid of some of that sizzle.

If you pan the guitar to the side a bit, you will be able to turn up the bass a little and anchor the rhythm a bit. Also, adjust the comp on the bass to make it a bit more even.

Are you using a pop filter?

If you can find a long piece of eggshell foam (3ftX3ft or bigger), you can make a nice portable vocal booth in a pinch. Essentially a poor man's version of this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzTAAENvRkw). Clamp each end to a mic stand or something similar, but then bring the stands together so that it forms a U that you can look into. Inside the curve of this U, place a mic with a pop filter. This will help cut down on a lot of the wild reflections that get picked up on vocals and the like. This also works on guitars quite nice, but it might get hard to place the guitar in front of the mics with all those mic stands in the way.

Also look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV5Rl-IK-eo
posted by chillmost at 10:52 PM on May 19 [1 favorite]

Ugh. Falls to me to be the hater—The first thing you can do to rock harder is to write rocking songs.

First, the good—You've got good guitar tone. I don't mind the background breath noises, especially in a folky idiom.

Now, the bad—The vocals are a) flat, b) obviously out of place. Think about the environment you're trying to create with the song—why is the singer in the bathtub when everyone else is in the living room? Aside from the muddying reverb, there's little to distinguish the vocals tonally from the guitar and that synth… Synth what? Is that a flute preset? It's cheesy, and not the good cheesy (the space noises later are good cheesy). Instead, it's more midrange mush in a very midrange mush song.

Things that I'd recommend: I think you're getting some great advice upthread in terms of specific technical approaches from people who have been behind the boards a lot more than I have. Chillmost's suggestion for the vocals sounds like a solid one. But something I'd recommend doing is, before you record next, taking a moment to think about what you want the song to sound like in terms of space and tone. Stereo separation will probably help, as will thinking about getting the vocals moved away from the guitar. The drums sounded decent, and while you could probably get more pop out of them, I'd leave 'em alone for now. I'm not sure what you were going for with the synth—Jethro Tull? I'd axe it outright unless you can come up with a better part for it.

Finally, I'd recommend a band and a solo artist to check out—John Martyn being the latter, his Solid Air album especially. Corndaddy being the former, an Americana band that has managed to put out pretty cromulent recordings with not much more than what you've got.
posted by klangklangston at 12:24 AM on May 20

Thanks for the great advice! And klangklangston, no problem with being the hater. I asked for it and I've actually had that comment before (about the synth).

This is great stuff and might really improve things in the long run. I think I know what to work on. Thanks.
posted by crapples at 5:09 AM on May 20

It doesn't actually sound that bad. (except the reverb on the Vocals and lack of Stereo Width in the guitar).


I think the most cost efficent thing at this stage would be to get a USB or Firewire Audio Interface with Mic pre-Amps built in and a couple of better quality Microphones. Shure SM range is a good budget starting point.

Audio Card like:
M-Audio MobilePre USB Bus Powered PreamPWRDp and Audio Interface

has two Mic-preAmps + an "Instrument" in to DI bass guitar etc.

or Alesis iO-2 or similar.
posted by mary8nne at 5:10 AM on May 20

I got an Edirol UA-25ex...seems like all the cheap boxes have about the same quality, but generally crappy drivers. I haven't used it that much but it's worked well so far.

I'm not an expert...actually...I have no idea what I'm doing. BUT this has helped me lately: listening to recordings I love and thinking about each instrument and how it was recorded. In the same way that a photographer can look at a photograph and figure out how it was lit, where the lights were, etc, I'm finding you can do a lot of the same stuff with recordings.

So maybe pick some masterwork of recording, like a Motown track or something. And listen to it MANY times, past the point where you know what each instrument is doing. See how each instrument sounds. Does it sound like it was recorded in a big room? Small room? Bathroom? Was the mic close, because you aren't hearing much room sound? Or does it sound like the mic was really far away? Or maybe was there a close mic and a distance mic, and they are mixed?

I don't know much about recording but I've really learned to hear the different colors of mic placement. When I get around to recording more I think that thought process will help a lot.

Things you might read:
Tape Op Magazine
Sound On Sound

Take all this with a grain of salt. I'm a fanboy, not a practitioner. I learned a bit from reading my roomates Sound On Sound magazines, they should be right what you need.
posted by sully75 at 5:20 AM on May 20

Tape Op magazine is free, too.
posted by mecran01 at 7:03 AM on May 20