Thread for offering up cool recording tricks you have used/heard about/read about etc:

There is actually a free plugin made by PSP labs which emulates that exact reverb method. It's called PianoVerb.

I have used a jumbo acoustic guitar as a reverb chamber. Set up similar to the speaker-on-piano trick: Put a small nearfield monitor on the body of an acoustic guitar lying on it's back and stick a mic into the soundhole.

I still use the old reverse guitar trick a lot, where I figure out how to play a melody or chord progression backwards, record that and then flip it over and line it up with the rest of the song so it's backwards. I love how weird it can sound with very little processing (often not even like a guitar because of the way the envelope changes), and it's also a fun challenge to play an inverted melody.

I've done that with vocals too, but it's a much bigger challenge to learn to pronounce words backwords.

A lot of times, to make a fake drum track sound a little more real, I will send it out of my computer through a reamp box into a tube amp and then record the amp back into the computer with mics and mix the result with the original track. For some reason I get much better results this way than if I just use reverb and/or some kind of saturation emulation on the track-in-the-box.

This is more of a mixing trick than a recording trick, but sometimes when the bass is competing too much with the kick drum I will run the bass through a comp and use the kick track to trigger it so the bass ducks the kick. If you set it up right with a relatively fast comp, it doesn't sound like your bass sound is being fucked with, and you wind up hearing both voices fine.

I used to have one of those CB handset things with the little megaphone-looking horn that kids can mount on their bike handlebars and then broadcast their voice through. I taped the handset activator down so the thing was always on and then taped the whole mic apparatus to the back of the drum on a 6 string banjo (the kind that are tuned like a guitar). I mounted the speaker on a mic stand and turned an sm57 straight down into it to record the thing. Bleed from the acoustic banjo would pick up depending where I stood, and the shitty toy mic was so close to the drum that it distorted all over the place. The thing sounded like an extremely overdriven electric guitar with no dynamics and no sustain at all. Almost like a guitar sampled at 8 bits or something. I'm not particularly lo-fi in general, but I loved the sound of that thing.

I've used a Digitech Studio Vocalist to get a trumpet to sound like a tuba. Worked pretty well, actually.

I'll probably think of more later. Great idea of a thread. I'm psyched to hear everyone else's tricks.

These are great, keep them coming!

One trick I heard about Albini was that he would use a tap delay with the taps set to prime numbers to thicken guitar tracks. Dunno if it's apocryphal or not and I've never had a chance to try it out yet, but it's a nice idea.

I did some drums for another band's record and we got got a cool effect by mic'ing the drums normally and then putting another mic (can't remember what kind) clear on the other side of the (huge) basement. Then we only applied reverb to the distance mic, and it gave things a big, 60's plate-reverbish type sound without losing any of the attack from the close mics.

I sometime use a Guitar/Bass/Baritone -> distortion -> random delay filter -> big arsed reverb (set 100% wet) for big cello like drones, not a common requirement true but it works really well.

The heavy metal trick of taping a quarter on a bass drum head where the beater hits the drum does bring out the beater sound more in a recording.

When we recorded drums, our drummer insisted on using this trick he learned from Alan Sp@rhawk of Low where you put an extra kick drum in front of the kick drum that the drummer is playing and then mic that extra kick drum. I'm not sure what this does (adds resonance/depth?) but I'll admit that it sounds pretty good.

Probably a sort of standard trick at this point, but I just discovered it last year, I love it, and it's really easy to emulate at home - on Simon & Garfunkel's "Only Living Boy In New York," the really HUGE yet intimate and wistful "Ahhhhh, ahh ahh ahh" stuff was made by them YELLING at the top of their lungs in an echo chamber, overdubbing it a few times, and turning it WAY WAY WAY down in the mix. My lazy/cheap version of this is to sing at reasonable volumes, echo the shit out of it, do a few overdubbed takes in this way, and again, turn way way down in the mix.

I just really love the texture of it, especially because all of my stuff is keyboard-sound based, so this really softened-out organic vocal thing adds a lot to my sound...

its unlikely Steve Albini used the digital delay line to any sort of distinctly audible EFFECT. he's been known to use very very slight delays to time-align several microphones that are on the same source but at difference distances.

if like me you're fascinated by the way that things sound as they come out of speakers you should get your notepads out for this guy.

i've been banging on about eq and dynamics at mix before but he says it much much better than me. He also gives away some top drawer techniques here - and no, you don't have to be mixing on SSL Quads to apply this stuff imo

4ndy w4all4ce