Part V: Tracking Tips

When it comes to the actual recording of tracks let me try to suggest a few things to keep in mind. The first is understanding your gain structure. As signal travels form one piece of gear to the next and through the interconnections, your quality is only as strong as the weakest link. This is usually the cables, but lets me explain all stages.

If you are recording an instrument like guitar, bass, etc, your gain starts with that instrument. I went over some of the pointers for making sure your instruments are good in the previous installment. Your guitar or bass is sending what is called an ‘instrument level’ signal. This is a high impedance, low voltage signal. Remember impedance is just a word that describes resistance. Higher impedance is more resistance and therefore more strain on the current capacities of the equipment. But an instrument level signal is very fragile. Its also unbalanced meaning it has no third wire ground in it. So you will want to keep instrument cords short and high quality. Also you will want to keep your instruments and their cables away from electromagnetic interference coming from computer monitors and hard drives. You can step back from monitors or turn them off to eliminate this buzzing. Listen for it with volume knobs up. Microphone signals are also low. But they travel inside a balanced XLR cable and you can run pretty long lengths of this cable safely. Again, just keep cables new and in good condition. Treat your cables nicely! Don’t step on them or drop the metal ends on the hard floor.

If you have acquired a decent amount of gear, even inexpensive gear, and are looking for an upgrade, you can do very, very well by re-wiring your studio with high quality cables and keeping them organized. You’ll want to run power cords with each other, signal wires with each other, digital interconnects with each other and computer cables with each other. If you have to cross one cable over another, do it at a 90 degree angle so it only touches the other at one small point and does not run with it for a great length. If you do this and use good quality cables (Not Hosa brand, hehe), you will notice that your noise floor will go way down. You will be able to turn up the volume on your monitors and hear just low level, non buzzing hiss. Also, you should use a decent power conditioner like a Monster Cable two rack space unit or similar. You can get one of these conditioners for a few hundred bucks. A home theatre one will have different outlets with different kinds of filtering on it.

Ok, back to gain staging. Your low level signal, whether its instrument level or mic level, will travel along a high quality cable and into a mic preamplifier or direct box which is a preamplifier. Here the level goes up to +4 line level. Notice it was at instrument level or mic level, not it’s at line level. There are two standards for this level. -10 unbalanced and +4 balanced. Even if you are using unbalanced connections here and there, you want to work at +4 line level when you set your equipment up. You will see switches on your gear that will let you choose this option. Now if course if you are getting too high a level somewhere and you need to switch down to get the gain correct, do it. But in general, you want the extra gain that you get with a +4 level. By the way they call -10 consumer level and +4 pro level. Balanced connections which are three prong or three conductor are +4 and two conductor cords like guitar cords and RCA phono plugs are considered -10. A three conductor stereo ¼ inch plug can be either but usually is a used for s +4 level. The important thing to remember is that you want the highest level signal before clipping that you can. Adjust your preamp’s gain so that you get a good level out from there and you do not hear any crackling or distortion.

After a low level signal is jumped up to line level by a preamplifier it is ready to go into the computer interface box. The interface box might actually also have a preamp in it and maybe you are doing that if you don’t have a good outboard preamp. The main thing these boxes contain besides preamps is Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog converters. Your preamp signal is an analog signal. The computer needs a digital one. So these converters are in this box. Or maybe you have an outboard AD/DA converter box but if you have this, you probably know enough not to be reading my blog…. :)

When we are talking about digital recording, you want to get the highest level you can, but you never want to go above zero in the computer program or clip the A/D converter on the way in. You actually could afford to push the A/D a bit but usually it’s calibrated so that a clip on the A/D equals an ‘over’ on the computer. ‘Overs’ are digital levels above the calibrated zero level. In a computer program, the red light is always an indicator of a zero level and you don’t ever want to see any of those, ever. You can hit at .01 db below, but don’t go over.

Because you will not be able to fully anticipate the dynamics of the performance, you want to check to see what the loudest level you think you might get is, and then set your gain stages to let you hit 3-4 db below zero. Because digital is so clean, you can even afford to go lower but really just making sure you are a few db below absolute zero is fine. If you do hit zero by accident and you don’t hear a clipping sound on playback, never mind it and then keep an eye on things.

Alright, assuming you have set your preamp levels well and you have recorded a clean track into the computer, move on. I will explain more about this in mixing later but just remember that your gain stages in your computer mixer are additive so the more tracks you have, the more volume you will create down at the master fader. I usually start a 24 track mix with all channel faders at -13.and the master fader at zero. A 36 channel mix might have all faders at -16. But this depends on how loud you record your track into the computer. If you keep an eye on levels, you will never need to move your master fader below or above zero.

On now, never normalize or apply any kind of processing to any of your raw tracks. You will only degrade them and make it harder to keep quality high and gain structures in order. Normalizing only brings the level up to the highest possible level and this means you get no extra quality but that you will be feeding these higher levels into all your channels and plug ins. You will then have to turn them down and every time you make an adjustment in a digital mixer, it has to make mathematical calculations that potentially can degrade your sound. In the perfect situation, you would mix everything at such a level so that you would never have to turn down the master fader, never have to turn down a plug-in fader and only have to adjust the channel faders. Most experienced engineers can achieve this and this is what you want to go for.

Ok I think that is about it for gain staging. Now, let me talk about things to keep in mind as far as the logistics of tracking goes. There are mono and stereo tracks. A stereo track would be needed for a keyboard or a sound sample file. All other tracks you will be using in your computer workstation will be mono files. (Except stereo FX channels but tracks are your recorded files and channels are what they are played though.) Even cymbals will be two mono files. One panned hard left and one panned hard right. Recording a mono track into a stereo file is a waste of storage space and limits your flexibility and your plug-in power as well.

You want to name your files perfectly. Name all your channels and your aux sends or busses. Also name all the tracks you mix down and anytime you name something do it with forethought. You will be doing a lot of cleaning up of files down the line and you really want to be able to remember what is what when you do that. Let me give you some examples:

“Rhythm Guitar L 2 Neve” This is the second rhythm guitar track that was recorded through a Neve preamp.

“Mike Vox OD 3” This would be the singer’s 3rd vocal track that is not the main track but an additional “Overdub” take.

Another example might be bass parts that have been recorded as three separate tracks. “Bass DI”, “Bass Comp”, and “Bass 421” This would be one track for the bass that was just recorded direct with a direct box. “Bass comp” was sent through a ‘channel strip” outboard box that had a preamp and compressor in it and you turned on the compressor on this track. “Bass 421” was the track that came from the bass player’s amp and speaker cabinet that had a Sennheiser MD-421 microphone pointed directly at the center of the cone. With this kind of track naming, you will remember exactly what you did to each track. Just naming them “Bass 1”, “Bass 2” and “Bass 3” tells you nothing and you might get lost in the mixing process. Or if you or another engineer ever has to work on this session, they will need really well named tracks because they were not there to remember anything about how things were recorded. Keeping a track sheet and notes is also a very good idea.

Also when you make mix-down files of your mixes, you will want to name them in the same descriptive way. You can keep them in folders that are also named descriptively like “Cannibal Test Mixes” and in there you would put files like “Bloodthirst test mix 1” and then later “Bloodthirst test mix 2 vox up 1 db” Keeping track of names and folders this way is extremely important.

This also applies to your outboard gear. Get yourself some white ‘board’ tape or use blue painter’s tape and tape and mark everything. You can mark knob positions, mic positions, write names on things, etc. Tape and mark everything. Speaking of tape, you will want to tape down cords to the floor so people don’t trip on them and tape mic cords to the drummer’s drum cage, and things like this.

Now, let me talk about doing takes. If you are using Pro Tools, you have an option of making takes that overlay in a fresh window and then going back through them all. With other programs, you will want to punch in over older takes and just leave the takes lying on each other. Or make new well names channels for these takes. You always want to walk the line between pushing yourself or whoever the performer is to get the best take but not go so far as to burn the person out. If you cannot get something, go back later and get it. A fresh head will often cure any problems like this. You can usually try a few times and if it needs more work go back later or stop and practice it more. The studio is really stressful and it’s always good to be patient and also optimistic and open with options.

oh, if you are wondering what that rag is doing on the nut of the guitar in the pic above, thats a trick for limiting open string noise when tracking solos or certain rhythm parts, try it. Slide it over the nut more to get more dampening.

I’ll add to this installment as I think of more things….

Cheers,

Colin