On Home Recording…

As the YouTube generation has proven, content trumps production quality. You could have something done with the crappiest camera on earth and still be an internet success if the material is interesting enough.

Unfortunately, audio/music isn’t that forgiving. Your senses are narrowed down to one thing; hearing – and all judgment will boil down to your personal musical taste, and more importantly the actual quality of the recording.

I’ve always been meaning to put out a sample of my raw sources just to give people an idea of how much work I have to put in to “improve” the sound before I post anything on the site. Hopefully this would help them appreciate the songs a bit more (hey, every little thing counts hahaha).

I guess this is because for the songs in my site, I’m artist, engineer, and producer. I found that the latter titles put so much more pressure on me than simply being an “artist.” As an artist, fellow musicians will know if you got the chops or not, regardless of public opinion.

But the others… especially being a producer – you have the task of applying what you think should be the “proper treatment” of a piece that will be palatable to the public. Only people that have tried to “produce” can truly grasp the pressure one could get from that sort of responsibility.

Music by nature is meant to be shared (no one would make music that’s meant for their ears only – that’s just stupid), and is ultimately judged by the public… so yeah, what others think will matter no matter how “indie” you want to be – or how much of an “artiste” you claim to be. ¹ In fact, I’d go as far as saying that anyone who says “I make music for myself, I don’t care what others think” is copping out and simply trying to justify what could be a mediocre product.

So to give a semblance of “context” to all of my songs in terms of production, I hope can give some light of how much crap I have to go through production wise to come out with a half-decent sounding mix. I guess this is one of my defense mechanisms/insecurities. Even when the majority likes what I did, I personally was never happy with my output – and I don’t think it’s healthy anymore hahahaha.

I’m at the point that I really think that this is where the adage “it’s the indian, not the arrow” falls short (in the technical aspect, at the very least). I think the “arrow” (that is the hardware and environment) is starting to matter just as much to accomplish what I want to accomplish.

There’s a lot of dynamics already lost from my voice at the recording phase… and it frustrates me because it can’t be helped, and the frequencies I have to sacrifice are the frequencies where a lot of my voice “lives” in as well. I have two AKG mics and I’m forced to use the inferior one because the better one is too sensitive; and my room is noisy

To have an idea how noisy it is, I’ve bumped up the levels of the raw vocal track from my “Take Me Out Of The Dark” rendition. This is a microphone that’s already in a hyper-cardoid pattern. ² The most effective pattern to eliminate ambient noise apart form what’s directly in front of the mic Take note this is a processed sound; the ambient noise has been exaggerated just to make the point that it’s there – and its presence severely limits how much I “headroom” I can work with. Here’s what it sounds like:

You already hear so much noise even on an extremely directional setting. If I had used “ideal” studio input settings (and the “better” mic), it would sound like a warzone. I use the term because I was interviewed for PSN a while back and the host asked if I was in a warzone hahahaha.

Vocal tracking is always better when used with the most sensitive mics because what you’re really after is to get every detail of a person’s voice; how it affects the room it’s in, etc. And I cannot do that because of what you’ve just heard. Instead, I use a setting that’s better for live performances. The raw unprocessed sound of all the inputs are like this: ³ the earlier clip was already processed to exaggerate the noise present

It’s also worth mentioning I guess that I have no hardware processors available, the only hardware element outside of the computer is the mixer… which is more for convenience rather than utility. Any “processing” is done via software. The guitar, since it was designed to be used for a direct input, thankfully, is the least that needs to be fucked with… plus the fact that I’m on a Taylor T5 – so I’ve already got a really decent “arrow” on that front.

Before mastering proper, the best “base” vocal sound I can get after EQing, compressing, and gating the hell out of the track would be something like this:

Then of course the end result of this pretty simple song is as such:

Ironically enough, the vocals are always the weakest link in all my songs as far as recording goes… and to think those are supposed to be the most important element of a song which you never should compromise quality on hahahaha. Such is life.

So the “arrow” in question; I wish I were in a soundproofed environment to be able to use the better mic, with and better settings. While the “indian” (me) will always have areas to improve/learn… the arrow, in this case, does matter more.