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It's been five years since we lost Al Schmitt, one of the greatest recording engineers who ever lived. He had an approach to recording that I think about often. If an instrument didn't sound right through a particular microphone, he would try a different mic or reposition the mic until it did sound good. In his sessions, the mixing process started long before anyone pressed record. That advice is still just as important today as it was when Al Schmitt was making records. Recently, I attended an AES education event where a well-known mixing engineer pulled up a session for the group. Before he touched a single fader or knob, the tracks already sounded close to finished. I raised my hand and asked about the secret to getting recordings that sound so good from the start. He talked about the studios in Nashville where the tracks were recorded, and the engineers who have spent years making mistakes, learning from them, and building that kind of attention to detail into their process. And he talked about how that attention to detail during recording makes his job as a mixing engineer a lot easier. You can see the same thing in your own work if you start looking for it. My YouTube videos are a pretty clear example of this. Before I added acoustic treatment to my recording space, I was running DeNoise and DeReverb on my voice just to make the recordings usable. Those tools helped with the reverb and echo, but they changed the character of my voice and introduced their own artifacts in the process. After I treated the room, I stopped needing those plugins. And now that I've fixed the room problems the right way (with acoustic treatment), I no longer have to destroy the tone of my recordings by fixing the room problems in post with intense processing. It's a little embarrassing, but the video I made a few years back about Al Schmitt's approach, where I show how microphone placement and mic selection can shape a sound before you ever press record, is itself a good example of what I was describing (and not in a good way). If you listen to the audio in that video and compare it to something I've made recently, you can hear the room sound in the recording and you can hear the processing I added as I tried to reduce the room sound. I was making a video about getting the sound right at the source while my own recording was a case study in what happens when you don't. Oh well, you live and learn. I hope the concepts I teach in that video will help you and will help Al Schmitt's style of intentional recording live on. I tell you all of this because I've made these mistakes too, and I continue to make mistakes today. But over time, I've learned that's what makes this stuff worth doing. Making mistakes and learning is a part of the process. Talk soon, |
