Take It to a Pro
Jul 1, 2005 12:00 PM, BY PETER WETHERBEE
Although the advent and proliferation of various quality digital audio workstations may have taken a toll on the traditional recording industry, that doesn't mean you don't have a lot to gain by using a professional space for at least one portion of your next recording project. Using a pro studio can have a big impact at almost every stage of a project; for example, even though most home recordists now have access to fairly decent signal chains and microphones, professional studios not only have superior gear but also offer a controlled recording environment that most one-bedroom, urban or otherwise, abodes can't. And there are other issues — such as the accuracy of monitoring systems, analog-to-digital conversion, mixing and especially mastering — that professional spaces are much better equipped to handle, and each of these stages has potential pitfalls for the home recordist. There are ways, however, to keep the quality of your project at a high-enough level throughout the recording process that you will be in a position to take advantage of enhancements afforded by a professional studio at any step in the game.
THE WHOLE PICTURE
The most important “equipment” available in a pro studio is the engineer or producer, whose ears, experience and understanding of gain structure and signal flow are more important even than the million dollars worth of equipment you will find in a decent recording joint. Alex Perialas is a renowned producer and engineer whose credits range from R&B sensation Ginuwine to heavy thrashers Anthrax. And Perialas definitely sees the benefit of tracking in a professional studio. “In a professional studio, you will have the advantage of a facility that is wired properly, where you can really hear what you are doing with accuracy and certainty,” he says. “These are things that may be difficult in a home setting, and you won't have to do the kinds of damage control later that is often needed to fix the problems that show up after you make a recording in a basement or living room. When you listen to monitors that you can really hear on, the problems often rear their ugly heads.”
A professional studio provides an accurate listening environment that usually offers multiple sets of monitor and amplification systems. Acoustic treatment is indeed high-tech, created with precise measurement tools, architects and acousticians. Even if you have great monitors at home, the placement of the speakers and acoustic treatment of the room (or lack thereof) determine whether you are hearing what's actually happening with any certainty; moving a speaker just a few inches can drastically affect the frequency response of your monitoring system. This is a particularly pernicious problem with bass frequencies, which are most likely to cause standing waves that will either cancel the low end or make you think you are getting more of it than you actually have recorded.
Although it is difficult to pinpoint the accuracy of your system without reference tools, one way to get a general idea is to play a bunch of CDs through your system and listen to what parts of the frequency range sound enhanced or reduced. Common problems in recording at home are thinking that you have great bass sounds — which actually end up sounding light in the ass on a relatively accurate system — or finding out that what you thought was clear, defined low end is really just mud.
“Not having a good enough monitoring environment to hear problems is the biggest problem home recordists face,” Perialas says. “You can do things in a pro studio that you can't do at home because of your setup or restrictions that you have in that setting. Take, for example, recording a drum kit. This setup requires space, good isolation, lots of mic stands and high-end mics and mic pres. And a great headphone system for recording a rhythm section makes all the difference.”
Even if you aren't using live drums or other acoustic instruments and work strictly in the realm of electronic music, tools like preamps and compressors can make all the difference in getting your sounds into your songs properly. Improper use of gain structure — such as plugging in an instrument-level signal to an input that is looking for a line level — can cause you to have to crank up the gain just to get a decent level while most likely bringing a lot of hiss and buzz with the original signal, especially if you aren't using balanced cables and DI boxes. Crucial elements such as impedance and gain structure, as well as the appropriate use of often mystifying items such as compressors, are standard issues that are dealt with properly in a pro studio. By the same token, if you are able to record at home with optimal levels and signal-to-noise ratio, you will be ready to take your project to a pro studio for mixing if so desired.
I recently produced an artist's first solo album at his house in Ithaca, N.Y., under fairly primitive conditions. The artist had already recorded four albums in large studios with his touring band, but he wanted to do something different: experiment with various sounds and textures; combine a number of electronic and acoustic instruments; and have the time, freedom and lack of pressure from a ticking clock.
With a few tricks and a bit of gear finagling, we were able to get a big-studio sound with relatively simple tools. Most of the project was recorded and mixed in Digidesign Pro Tools using Digidesign's entry-level Mbox interface. A pair of input channels — consisting of an FMR Audio RNP8380 stereo mic pre and an FMR Audio RNC1773 compressor feeding a Lucid AD 2496 A/D converter — allowed us to bring higher-quality digital signals into Pro Tools than the Mbox's analog inputs were capable of providing. We also employed an Event Mona interface for capturing drums, which allowed us to record six tracks at a time, using the Mona's four analog inputs and my two channels into the Mona's digital input, as well as again using the Lucid as the master clock. The best mics we had at our disposal were Røde, Equitek and Oktava condensers, and monitoring was done with Alesis and M-Audio speakers. Other than the Lucid (which cost about $800), all the gear we used was low-end, relatively cheap home-studio stuff, but with careful attention to gain structure and signal flow, we were able to get excellent results out of our modest equipment.
OUT OF THE BOX
Possibly one of the most attractive aspects of using a professional studio is the opportunity to spread a mix out across a console and mix within an acoustically accurate space. Although it is a subject of ongoing debate, many recordists feel that mixing in this manner yields tracks that sound far superior to those mixed strictly in a DAW environment. Perialas emphasizes that mixing projects “in the box,” as he puts it, exposes another Achilles' heel of home studios: the master summing bus. “Although in the case of strictly electronic stuff it's possible to achieve decent results, I have a real problem with the sound of most DAWs when people mix in the box,” Perialas says. “I find it to sound cloudy or hazy.” In this area, a real mixing console can make all the difference. Perialas typically runs Pro Tools tracks through a Neve console with Flying Faders automation, which, in his opinion, keeps the master bus sounding rich, clear and open.
If you have never mixed a project on a high-end console with racks and racks of high-end signal processors, it's hard to explain what it's like, but cloudy and hazy are not words you will come away using. And if you wonder why your in-the-box mixes don't sound as juicy and powerful as some of the records you listen to, you might be coming up against the master-summing-bus wall. Even at 24-bit resolution — which affords much higher dynamic headroom than the 16 bits most professionals used for most of the past decade — there are subtle but significant problems in bottlenecking a bunch of tracks down to a final stereo mix in the box. Another common problem in recording and mixing within DAWs is that all digital processors are usually not slaved to a single master clock, causing another subtle but destructive problem called jitter. Jitter can be imperfectly described as a “smearing” effect that makes everything sound a little cruddier.
In the case of the album project I was working on, we used the Lucid as the master clock throughout, synching the Mbox to it via S/PDIF, thereby avoiding jitter and maintaining clarity at each stage of the process. We tried to compensate for summing-bus issues by inserting the Waves L3 Multi-Maximizer plug-in on the master bus — just barely hitting the ceiling a few times per song — with moderate success. Although I would always prefer to mix through a real console, L3 did make an improvement in the bus summing.
THE FINAL, FINAL STEP
I took my album project to Perialas for mastering, which is a process that cannot be underestimated in terms of how crucial it is to achieve the best possible final result. A decent mastering facility has three essential elements not available to the vast majority of bedroom producers: really expensive and accurate monitor systems, really expensive and precise EQ and compression tools, and an engineer with really great ears who knows how to deliver your baby in its best possible form.
Our approach to mastering this album was to dump the digital mixes to analog tape. Using an ultra-high-end Prism Sound Dream DA-2 D/A converter, we sent the mixes to an extremely well-maintained Studer A820 half-inch tape machine with a fresh reel of 996 tape. The results were phenomenal, aided by some very expensive outboard gear and the facility's Neve console. The lesson learned is that at a certain point, you often can't beat what happens to a signal when it hits tape, and analog processing simply imparts a quality that's hard to beat for many projects. Paying for professional mastering is the best thing you can do for your project — even if you can't afford to track or mix at a professional studio. “Every studio has a rate,” Perialas says. “Find a rate that fits your budget and that gives you the technology that you need to do good work. After all, it is your art we are talking about!”
FROM THE TRENCHES
Before booking that studio slot, take some cues from a few Los Angeles-based studio engineers about how to best take a project from a home studio to a professional facility.
Confirm ahead of time that the studio rig has the plug-ins you want for your project. If you've been using a key plug-in to make something sound how you need it to sound, you have to make sure the studio has the right plug-in; otherwise, bring your own install, serial number, authorization code or iLok key. Only render or print your effects if you absolutely have to, and be sure to bring a dry copy of the track, as well. You don't always know exactly how the effect should sound, especially ambient effects, until you've heard the rest of the mix through the big board and speakers.
Label your tracks in a sensible way so that someone who is unfamiliar with the sessions can make sense of it. “Guitar O/D” or “BV3chorus” is a lot easier to figure out than “Joey wankin” or “sleazyvibe#69,” which might have made sense in the heat of the moment but is a waste of everyone's time for an engineer to sort through this as his or her introduction to your project.
Don't take tracks burned to an audio CD and expect the engineer to be able to line them up with tracks from the same session. This is a common problem from both professionals and home recordists alike who often bounce down rough mixes, burn them to an audio CD and then expect the tracks to lock with the imported CD tracks. The subtleties of different CD burners, speed of burning and playback characteristics of CD machines are significant enough to cause a track burned to an audio CD to drift away from the original tracks as they sit in a session. A great way to test this is to bounce out a file, burn it to a CD, import the stereo mix into a session and then make a tempo map of the burned track. You will be surprised at how much drift there will be, and this can be enough to wreak havoc on an otherwise orderly session.
The issue of moving tracks from one DAW to another, such as moving a Cakewalk Sonar session over to Digidesign Pro Tools, is another area in which problems arise. The only surefire way to do this is to export or bounce each track out as entirely new audio files that each have exactly the same starting point if you want them to line up in another program. On the other had, utilities and functions built into most of the well-known software programs will export files using the OMF standard that is also used in film production, but careful attention must be paid to ensure that every track is exported exactly the same way.
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