There is a famous saying often taught to medical students that goes: “when you hear hoof steps, think horses, not zebras”. The point is that the diagnosis, or solution, is almost always the simple and obvious, not the esoteric and complicated. But what has this got to audio recording, mixing or post-production? Producer William Wittman explains…
These days, audio recording is becoming so decentralized I think this is an important mantra to remember and let me explain why…
It used to be that most of us in the recording business learnt from mentors, in ‘proper studios’ with a ladder of advancement and real on-the-job training. At the very least we were exposed to other people’s methods and got to hear, first hand, right there in the control rooms, what the results were. “Oh that’s what that snare mic sounds like”, or “See when I combine these two mics now they cancel each other if I don’t correct the polarity?”
Those days, sad to say, are almost entirely gone and nowadays people are often trying to learn and improve their recordings on their own, perhaps from internet videos and discussion groups.
And there is certainly a lot of great information out there, especially if you’re discerning about who you’re taking advice from.
(Hint: Take advice from the people whose records you admire, not just those whose YouTube channel has a lot of subscribers.)
But one phenomenon I see too much of is that the internet just loves those ‘zebra’ complicated solutions. They are the ones that the inexperienced are drawn to. The reason for this is partly due to the fact that you are apt to get a lot more clicks on an article or video about this ‘cool’ way to mic a guitar amp that uses 6 mics and 4 compressors and a tame iguana and a vacuum sealer, than you would get on a piece (like this one!) that says ‘take one good mic and place it in front of the best sounding speaker’. Even if the latter is the better advice for 99.9% of cases.
Perhaps a corollary to this would be: are we looking for solutions to problems of our own making?
With those 6 mics and a lizard on your guitar amp, now you’re probably going to go online and ask about phase problems or why your guitars sound comb filtered. And guess what? You’re going to get a ton of advice offering plug-ins and DAW methods to ‘fix’ the problems.
But what if the real answer is to not start with the complicated mic array that caused the problem?
There certainly might be a really good reason for adding an extra microphone to a set up sometimes, such as not hearing enough floor tom in your drum mix so a spot mic on that piece of the kit becomes necessary. But too often the starting point is the overkill solution whereas less might really be more.
How many times have we seen online, someone asking ‘what do I do about my vocals sounding harsh?’ only to see a cascade of answers suggesting a long list of plug-in solutions?
Instead of multiband dynamic EQ and a de-esser, and a de-harsher, and two compressors on your vocal, perhaps you need a different microphone?
And of course, this brings us to a primary source of difficulty that manifests itself later on in the process, which is choosing the wrong instrument or amplifier (or player!) to begin with. A good simple recording that captures all the nuance of a good instrument, played by a great player, is always going to work better than applying a pile of processing to an inferior instrument. Of course, we all have to work with the limitations we have on hand. But do give some thought to selecting your sources from the options at hand rather than looking for ways to ‘fix’ or alter things later.
I’m often sent sessions to mix that include as many as 20 different drum microphones, and too often the result is a bit of a muddy mess when no attention has been paid to phase relationships or inter-mic leakage or even just how the overall drum picture works.
Now I can find ways to make the phase relationships better with fantastic tools available these days, such as Sound Radix Pi, and I certainly can, and do, make judicious choices in some cases to simply not use all of those microphones. But the point remains that they haven’t made their recording better by employing microphone overkill on their drums and certainly not by pushing off the task of making it all sit together nicely to the mixer in the hope that it will all turn out all right in the end.
Instead, the much better answer would have been for the drums to be recorded with fewer mics and care taken to have the drums already sounding good and clear before it was sent off on a wing and a prayer to a mixer.
This all comes back to the misguided mindset that maybe what you ‘should’ be doing is to use a complicated setup and then to use a complicated solution to the problems encountered later that stem from that choice.
While the once in a millennium technique might be more fun to read about and discuss, it’s rarely the best way to go about making a successful recording.
What’s more difficult is getting back to the mindset that says: get rid of the zebras and choose the horse.