first look at our new logo

will leinweber

We just got a new logo designed for us over at 99designs.com. I must say I was blown away at the quality of all the submissions. It was tough settling on just one logo!

The designer also included desktop version, and you should probably use it as your computer’s background right now. I am!

Quick guide to big sound — multi mic it

by Adam Steele

Forget expensive recording microphones and fancy studios; anyone can get a huge sounding instrument recording. With the same setup as I described in the last post for a few hundred bucks, here’s how to get that huge professional sound. In this example, I’ll use an acoustic guitar, but the same applies to any acoustic instrument (violins, drums, horns, etc).

Setup

With an electric-acoustic guitar, we can record one track from the direct input and the other with the vocal mic described in the last post. If you have more microphones and more inputs, all the better. Where you place each microphone depends on the instrument. Each instrument has a sweet spot to put the mic. Just experiment with it. Have someone else play while you put on headphones move the mic around until it sounds the best. If you’re using two microphones with no direct input, try putting one closer to the instrument, and the other farther away. Or for a guitar, point one at the sound hole and the other at the neck. The point is, you want each mic to record the sound from a different perspective, so you can blend the sound afterward and make it sound bigger, more accurate, or at least give you options to make it sound however you want.

What to do in the recording software

Let’s say you want a huge sound. In your recording software, pan one track a little to the left and the other a little to the right. You’ll notice that when you change the volume of each mic, it’ll change the sound of the recording a lot. So just play with the volume of each until it sounds the way you like it. Then to make it sound even bigger, add a sample delay to each track. This delays either the left or right side which tricks your ear into perceiving a more stereo sound (a bigger sound). If you think about it, this makes perfect sense. When you listen to that instrument live, the sound gets to one of your ears at a slightly different time than the other.

Example

You can hear the difference in the example recording below, especially if you listen on headphones. The first time through the guitar riff is using one microphone, and the second and third time through is using 2 microphones, one panned a little to the left, the other a little to the right, and sample delay applied to both. It’s really easy, takes just a little experimenting, and sounds awesome.

Recording great sounding song ideas

by Adam Steele

Recording your song ideas has become easier and more affordable than ever in the past few years. With a few hundred bucks, you can make awesome sounding, studio quality recordings…the only other thing you need is a good ear (which actually is the most important thing…but to keep these short and too the point, one thing at a time). So keeping this as short as I can, here is the cheapest way I’ve found to make studio quality recordings of your song ideas.

Check out the sample audio recording in this post by Dan Willis - a merge.fm employee. When you’re listening to it and you hear the acoustic guitar sound change, that’s because Dan can’t sit still when he plays. He also made me write that he just made this up in a couple minutes after I convinced him to make an audio sample for this post; so it’s rough, but you get the idea…it’s just a song idea anyway right?

Guitar + Vocal Recording

Let’s assume you have a computer and an electric-acoustic guitar. The only other equipment you need is a reasonable vocal microphone and a way to get the signal into your computer (your sound card will work, but it won’t sound very good). So what you need is a USB or firewire interface to convert the audio signal to a digital signal for your computer, and you need a preamp+compressor to bring your sound quality up to awesome. There are hundreds of choices and combinations, but here is one that will work well and won’t cost very much.

1. Studio Projects B1 microphone ~$119
2. M-Audio MobilePre USB Interface ~$100
3. ART Tube PAC Preamp/Compressor ~$100

That’s it. All you need to do to set it up is:

1. Plug the vocal microphone into the ART Tube PAC with an XLR cable
2. Plug the PAC into one of the inst/line inputs of the MobilePre with a 1/4 inch cable (don’t plug it into the XLR inputs because then you will be using the preamp on the PAC plus the preamp on the MobilePre which will screw up your sound)
3. Plug your acoustic guitar into the other inst/line input of the MobilePre with a 1/4 inch cable
4. Plug the MobilePre into your computer with a USB cable
5. Use any recording software to record from your computer (Audacity is free, Garage Band comes installed on Macs, or if you want to spend more money: ProTools, Logic, Cubase, etc). Often when you buy recording hardware (like from M-Audio), it comes with free audio recording software that will work well. The main point with audio recording software is: you can get studio quality recordings with any of them, you just have to pick one and get used to it by doing a few tutorials or whatever.

A few more things to keep in mind to get great recordings

Set the knobs and buttons on the PAC to something like the following: gain knob set so only two or three lights come on when you sing the loudest into the mic (i.e. so it doesn’t clip), phantom power on (unless you’re using a different vocal mic that doesn’t need it), threshold knob set to at least -15, slope button not pressed, speed button pressed to auto, phase button not pressed, output set high enough so the computer gets enough signal when you’re recording (just experiment…doesn’t matter too much), and bypass button not pressed.

When singing into the microphone, either buy a pop filter or steal some pantyhose and use a coat hanger to make your own. This keeps you from blowing into the microphone when you’re singing, which screws up your recording with popping sounds.

The last thing is what you do in the audio recording software. Here, there is a lot of room to experiment to make it sound like whatever you want…everyone’s taste is a little different. I’ll save what I do for recording song ideas for the next post, since there are more than a few things to consider.

Also, since you are recording two tracks simultaneously in the software, there is even more room to experiment blending them together, which is one of the main reasons why you can make it sound so good. One of the easiest ways to make a great sounding instrument recording is to use more than one microphone to record it (in this case for the acoustic guitar, we are recording it on one track with the built in microphone in the guitar and another track with the vocal microphone picking it up in the background). Blending more than one recording of the same instrument is extremely powerful and I’ll go into more detail about it in a future post.

That should get you going. I was hoping to make this shorter, but I didn’t want to leave out anything too important. In the next few posts, I’ll go into more detail about adding effects, blending multiple tracks, and perhaps the most important thing that even some pros are not good at: EQ. These are all critical to making the final recording sound great, but they are all done after the actual recording and in the end, only really require a good ear to make it happen. The more you experiment with it and the more you compare your recordings to other music that you like, the better you’ll get at it. More detail in the next posts.

In the end, nothing beats writing a great song, but a great recording doesn’t hurt.