"Bad" Recording Quality

While the sound doesn't spoil the Erase Errata album it's tempting to wonder how good it would be if it sounded as awesome as the Beachbuggy one.

Take Nirvana's 'Bleach', 'Nevermind' and 'In Utero'. They're all easy to come by and quite cheap. I'd suggest listening on good headphones, failry loud and in the dark to block out other seneses.

Bleach is a fairly standard recording with a quality lots of studios and producers/engineers might be able to get.

Nevermind is done by top names in top studios, with lots of cash poured on and many people would probably say it sounds brilliant - and it does.

In Utero (by Albini again) is back to simpler/quicker recording techniques with loads of rough edges and in my opinion it's one of the best sounding albums ever. If you listen to Bleach it'll sound fine, but when you compare it to In Utero it's like Bleach is a photo of something while In Utero _is_ the something.

I agree with this totally. Often there isn't even an 'original sound' to capture.

Even if it's something as simple as a solo violin, then where do you capture the sound from? How close, what direction? Is it the sound that the violinst hears? The conductor? Who?

Take coltrane's 'my favourite things' off the 'last concert'. so when coltrane drops out you have pharoah snaders and rashied ali, after a while i can't hear much of what alice, garrison, or any bata drum, just those two.

that's enough. and a classic disc it is.

How would they know what that is? They're onstage with their monitors deliberately emphasisng certain parts of the music to make it easier to play, their own instruments probably sound loudest.

Do they want to emulate crummy soundboard tapes?

My own ecxperience with Jazz is that 'poor' sound quality often enhances the experience because Jazz is 'old' or 'classic' music and poor sound gives it a nice sheen of age and authenticity (yuk) like watching a blake and white movie.

Good recording quality = heavy post-production, lots of high end, lots of compressed gloss, layered density, neat stereo effects.

Good recording might obviate the need for heavy PP.

'layered density', if it means what I think it does, might be down to choise of instruments, tones and where/what they play.

Maybe.

But even cheap, moth eaten jazz comps usually sound pretty good, because of the fuzz.

it's in the placement.

What are these?
I'm going to look like an idiot for asking that.

excellent recording quality = vocals double-tracked into rented Neumann U87 by buxom chanteuse through antares autotune and vocoder plug-in, drums sampled from 70s R&B album and emphasized for extra high-end crispness, freq range from 12hz to 21khz, keyboard presets played through TC Electronic or Lexicon chorus and reverb FX with parametric multi-band compression applied individually to each channel, EQ tuned by professional audio engineer with a $1k+ sound pressure calibrator, monophonic bassline generated using $2700 handmade German workstation modelling synthesizer.

The Potions "Put some salsa up your ass, cause i'm gonna ring your taco bell"

Get a good pair of monitor grade headphones, a once of good weed, and a lot of free time.

Once you have those three things you need to go through your entire record collection and listen to nothing but the production aspect of each recording. Listen to the instrument/arrangement choices, the eq'ing, stereo panning, and the over all levels of the different instruments. Look for your favorite Drum sounds, guitar sounds, synths...

When you go through these records find the 10 best records that describe the vibe that you would like to put across on your own recordings. It doesn't matter what era the records are from, or if the mix sounds professional, or whatever else. Just find the sounds that you really dig, regardless of whether or not professional engineers in NYC or Nashville would scoff at the sound. Just find the sounds that you really dig.

Once you have this figured out, you just need start researching what techniques the engineers used and what equipment produced the sounds.
There is no such thing as a good mix, or a correct way to mix an album. You have to figure out exactly what kind of recording aesthetic you want on your records, and from there you have to keep making attempts at nailing that sound or getting something close to it or perhaps completely screw it up and come out with something unintentionally good.

I think the problem with all these guys who tell you how to make a good record is that they are so wrapped up in what you use to make a good record that they forget about the musical end of it. If you want to know how to make a record, don't buy a manual on it at guitar center, just listen to a lot of different music and figure out what productions you like and then figure out how they work as a mix. If you know how you want your record to sound, your ears will tell you if it sound right or not.

If it sounds good to you, it is a good mix. Brian Eno, Phil Spector, Sam Phillips, Derrick May, Robert Henke, Martin Hannett, and Tom Wilson are some of my favorite producers. They all sound good for different reasons with different production aesthetics; none of them are right or wrong.

As for electronic musicians who go on and on about gear, sample rates, frequency boosting etc... it's startling to me how little this knowledge actually helps many of them. They are frequently incapable of hearing really obvious problems with their mixes until someone who knows very little about engineering but who actually _uses their ears_ points it out tho them.

generally, I just keep fussing with levels and effects until i get things as clear as i can, and sounding as close as I want them to sound, and then i try to mix it so that everything is up front in the right porportions. even if you're ambitious with recording, it really doesn't need to be that complicated. trust your instincts.

The biggest part of recording music is just getting it done. You learn more every time you cut tracks about mic placement, getting levels and what works in a mix.

I'm pretty excited as I have finally got into a band a month or so ago and am going to be able to record some live drums on my 16 track for the first time last weekend in June. I've done 8 and 4 tracking for a long time, but in the past year or so, I have only done MIDI and demos recording.

First: SPACE. Everything's there, and you can hear it, but where is it, exactly? I don't mean just panning, either. Everything winds up taking a position, to the left or right, to the front or the back, to different ends of the frequency range -- and often, when listening to things on headphones, I feel like there's even an "up" and a "down" that's not strictly related to frequency. Some artists are really, really tidy about this sort of thing: everything sits in the right place, everything sits in an interesting place, and some things even move around interestingly. Other artists are like dirty bedrooms: stuff is just thrown around various places, with no sense of space between them. (Technique-wise I think this has to do with frequency separation: if things aren't socked into the right niches, they'll wander around drowning one another out.) As everyone says, either one can work -- either one can be fun to listen to -- but if you can take control of all those spatial arrangements and do interesting things with them, you obviously have more tools to make good music.

Missy Elliot, for instance, tends to be pretty good at doing this, and very simply. (The last time I was listening to Miss E I realized a really simple trick: if you want something to be in the center but you don't want it to fill up all that space in the center, you can put it on two tracks, pan them left and right, and change the effects slightly for one side. It stays balanced, but it seems to scoot off to the sides, leaving a nice empty space in the middle for other things.)

A lot of people doing things electronically put loads of their focus on that spatial arrangement, so it starts to seem like they're making maps and mazes as much as music. Some rock bands are great at it, too, though it tends to be less of an emphasis there.

And then: there's the space / SIGNAL interface. I don't mean in the tech-head pristine-signal way, just ... capturing tones well is a good thing. If they're too loud they start fuzzing and cutting out in a way that's rarely a good thing -- and we all know that sound, because it's the sound you get when you try to record something loud on a crappy little boombox. The sounds can also wind up distant and thin, and not in a good way -- just another way it might sound if you raised up a handheld tape recorder from the back of a concert. It's nice if things sound fairly clear; they don't have to actually sound like an instrument being played, but it's nice if you get to hear them with the same parameters. (If I play an instrument in front of you it's not going to start clipping if I play loud, and if I stop playing it's going to be completely silent. People like the same thing from their speakers, no matter what kinds of sounds they're actually making.) Matthew Herbert tends to be really good at making sure every sound is rich and right: even his weirdest unnatural tweaks sound like they could be happening in a real place, which only makes them more fascinating.

This probably isn't any better of an answer than before, but there you go, that's what I think constitutes "good" -- or anyway "technically well-done" -- recording. Recording nice sounds that behave like they exist independent of speakers, and then arranging them around a given space in an appealing and interesting way. (Like flower arranging -- nice looking flowers, nice looking arrangement.) If the instruments get loud it's nice to be able to feel the sound swell up; if they get soft it's nice for that to happen, too. If a new instrument comes in, it's nice to hear it join in in a particular spot. This is something I really love, actually: I love when a sound comes in and occupies a little nook that up until then I hadn't even realized existed as part of the "space" I was listening to.

All in all, I think "good recording" is basically a matter of sounding like you have control over these things -- of sounding like you put everything where it is for a reason. After that comes the "good production" question, of whether that was a good place to put it anyway.

And I know my saying this will seem inseperable from people hating the guy's music and his production jobs (and not without good reasons), but one of the nicest examples I can think of for doing all this stuff well = Jim O'Rourke on Halfway to a Threeway, especially "Not Sport, Martial Art."

Can I be honest and say that while I've enjoyed some of his stuff I seriously don't get how he's supposed to be as good as all this?