Quote:
Originally Posted by echo unit
Tonight I had a revelation that I hope will enlighten many of you.
Getting the sound the way you want for your mix should be done while recording when using digital recording technology because it allows to you take advantage of all of the important elements of sound while the sound is still alive and existing in real time and space.
This is the right time to make decisions. Not later once the sound is no longer living.
Once a sound has been commited to digital, it no longer exists in any real form, only a dead and virtual one that can be copied as many times as you want.
Anything that can be copied exactly is no longer a living entity. It cannot develop and grow like living things do.
All living things, including sounds - vibrations created by energy living in the earth's atmosphere are all different from one another and not repeatable in any natural way.
This is one of the laws of natural physics. It's pretty basic and when something is commited to digital encoding, it is then locked into a world of death where it can be repeated as many times as you like and can be the same everytime. The sound is therefore not alive. It is dead. This is not the time to try to make a sound grow and be something else other than what it already is. It's too late.
Any further attempts at manipulation of sounds once recorded to digital and locked into the world of artificial intelligence will only degrade and hinder the sound because the sounds are dead and they can not improve, grow or develop. They are frozen into the dead and still world of digital codes.
Changing your audio once in the digital realm is about as natural as cloning humans.
If you want your music to sound at it's best and to vibrate in a way that is most pleasing to you then it would be of great benefit to develop and create your sounds as you wish them to be in thier totality while they are alive during recording. Waiting for later to mull over the options is really just procrastination and now that you know from what I have said here that your sound is dead anyway, hopefully this will deter you from waiting unitl it is too late. Give your music the the most full and complete life it deserves before it has to pass on to it's death in the digital realm.
Good luck!
Thanks for your very interesting post! I like your analyze... Keep them comin...! I agree to a certain extent with you here. I think the importance of the tracking phase is generally underestimated. For sound quality it is a very critical stage. My view is that the more professional/creative/musical you want your sound to be the more selective you need to be with your instrument choice, especially when it comes to the key elements. I have a Fender Richie Sambora USA Stratocaster that I spent a lot of money on, I always end up with a smile on my face when I record that, even WITHOUT an amp...! I have been doing gigs with it when people have come on stage and told me how beautiful my guitar sounds. Of course the amplification is extremely important for this as well, but it's the guitar that sounds sweet, that's where the frequencies and the vibrations are coming from (expressed by the artist). So that's where the life is. In terms of vocals this life is coming from the soul. If the vocalist is having a bad day and hates everything it ends up dead sounding. But if the vocalist has a rock solid loving vibe, the amount of life captured is something completely different. If you use bad mics or have a bad miking technique you will of course limit this amount of vibe. Some teens or children can be captured extremely well for vocals due to this reason. Do you remember when Hanson made it to the top? The amount of life in those vocals was something I think it's very rare!
Once you have those very good sounding instruments to track, the focus will be on the mic choice. In order to better hear this you can use a transparent peak limiter and limit to different levels just for checking what's there. That should enhance the life within the instrument, since it focuses the frequency amplitude on different points on the velocity pitch depending on how much you limit. If the instrument sounds much better live you are using the wrong microphone, one that can't register the real sound preassure good enough. So this is where the life is. Then of course the conversion process is a very important step as well, extremely important, because now volts should be transformed into digits so that the natural decay is left, the natural velocity response is left, the harmonic content is left and so on. But let's face it, the converter WILL degrade the sound. So this makes everything before the converter even more important, since you need to compensate somehow for this loss of life and of course the converter itself is extremely important. So this is a very critical step in the recording process.
Then again I have to disagree about mixing not being a key ingredient for life. The mixer does decisions that can be good for those "life" frequencies or bad. Simply moving down the volume fader on the wrong tracks can limit the life of the mix very much. The same with the mastering engineer, he CAN damage the life of the mix.
But overall I agree about the early phase being the most critical and that's what most engineers struggle the most with, since the engineers generally are using their ears while they are mixing and mastering and notice when the life degrades. I think the focus on the rest of the process is often too high in comparison. This is often why professionals often track in a different studio than where they are mixing...