A Decision Made

I'm pleased to announce that A Hypocrite & Slanderer will begin recording on Tuesday at Let 'Em In Music in Gowanus, Brooklyn.  The highly capable Nadim Issa will helm the session and hopefully tolerate the various questions and suggestions I proffer along the way.  More on the studio to come, but for now a little on how I made the choice to record in a pro studio.

Since deciding a couple months back that recording needed to happen with or without a band proper, I have been back and forth quite a bit as to how to approach the process, namely what amount of it I could realistically do myself with my own gear and what needed to be done in a professional studio.  My initial plan was to do all the tracking myself and rent time in a mix room somewhere to attempt the mixing, hiring a professional mixer if I was unable to produce an adequately listenable mix on my own.  Mixing at my rehearsal space was of course out of the question, as in no way could I consider what I hear out of the monitors there "true" or "flat" (a fault of the room and its setup, not the monitors themselves).  I could however conceivably do the editing, organizing and some basic processing there and just do final balancing and EQing in a proper mix environment.  My fear was that improper monitoring at the tracking stage sets up a situation where I may not realize the inadequacy of something like mic placement until it's rather too late and I could be forced go back to square one.  Still, it seemed a risk worth taking to save quite a lot of money, while of course maintaining the option of reevaluating my workflow if my first song attempt was a disaster.

I resolved to conduct "tests" of my engineering ability and equipment to assess what I can realistically expect to achieve on my own.  I've been tinkering around as an engineer since high school, with results ranging from awful to respectable, but I've yet to produce a mix that I felt was "releasable."  There are several reasons for that, the first of which being impatience.  Recording requires a saintly amount of patience, an amount further augmented by the fact that I'm often functioning as both engineer performer, playing at least one if not all of the instruments (though clearly some can pull this off exceedingly well - I'm looking at you, Craig Potter).  My tendency was always to move ahead when perhaps I needed to fool around a bit more with drum tuning or mic placement, or maybe I needed to do a few more takes to nail that transition.  Then I'd get to the end of the song and be thinking to myself "This is garbage, I've got to start over."  Another  count against me was a simple lack of sound engineering know-how, having next to zero hands-on experience in a real studio or with a trained engineer.  Most of what I do know is from my own research and trial and error, which are in themselves perfectly acceptable means of learning a skill. Regrettably, without access to accurate monitoring at any stage and using rooms that have unhelpful acoustic properties, trial and error learning can be frustrating and results can be misleading. Also, without guidance use of more ethereal implements of recording, like EQ and compression, trial and error often feels like a "shot in the dark."  Let's not even get started on how endlessly complex DAW software can be if one has aspirations of exploiting its full potential.


That said I have picked up a few tricks and have done pretty well for myself as a mostly self-taught engineer (see our reverb nation page for a sample recording, tracked mostly all simultaneously in a 9 x 11 ft. room, vox added later with an sm 58 and monitors blaring).  What ultimately tipped the scales towards doing as much basic tracking in the studio as possible was simply was the burning need to just get something done and fast.  I've been sitting on these songs for quite some time and busy as life can be, it's easy to put off things indefinitely, especially when they're hard.  And recording is hard.  Doing it all yourself is harder.  I can skip the endless debate over whether I need to acquire some fancy mic pres, stop worrying about if ceiling reflections are killing my snare drum, and not have to get up and down after every take to stop the tape.

I'm looking forward to not having to bear the full brunt of the responsibility for engineering, but I did learn some interesting things during my technical trials.  One example was which close mics worked on the drums.  I've got SM57s on toms, widely used in that capacity, and had been using an AKG C535 EB on snare.  But when I put my (limited) mic collection up to a shootout, I was surprised to end up with this configuration for the close-mics.

Snare: SM 58 Beta
Hi Tom: SM 58
Lo Tom: AKG C535 EB (Toss up with EV RE20, but wanted that for kick)

That's right, the SM 57 got shut out.  I think the engineer will probably have my neck is I ask him to put an SM 58 on the hi tom, and I'm sure there are better options available, but if there's one thing I take from this it's serious doubts about the old standby 57.  It's worth mentioning that the AKG was strong on both toms in my opinion.

-Terry