Studio Etiquette

[OliverBlackman]

10 hours ago, TimR said:

 

It doesn't. It makes it worse. 

 

If something really needs adjusting then fine, use it selectively on one phrase on the musician who has slipped. But running everything through beat detective and pulling it all together just because you can is a really bad idea. 

 

Next - autotune on vocals. 😆

It reduces studio time and therefore costs. Gone are the days when a record label would pay for the band to have weeks in a recording studio to get a decent take.

 

Ive only ever quantised on MIDI but that’s because my controller is crap and there’s little consistency.

[Downunderwonder]

10 hours ago, SteveXFR said:

This demonstrates it well

 

 

Thanks. I figured that would be the result that Tim wishes to avoid but not actually recorded since quantising became a thing myself. Hey, the guy doing it in real time enlightened himself by doing it!

[BigRedX]

15 hours ago, zrbass said:

The title is etiquette, It does seem to have morphed into general studio chitchat, which is cool. Anyway one observation. How does tightening up the tempo make the final recording good? Gazillions of old recordings made without post recording tempo management, and those old tunes are now industry standard gold. Maybe someone could help me out. 

 

The simple answer is "it depends". 

 

On the whole trying to correct tempo problems after the recording has been made is normally far too difficult and unless the variations are very slight, in which case it's probably not worth bothering with, it will nearly always introduce other less desirable artefacts into the recording.

 

I think also that you will find that most old tracks that would have benefited from a constant tempo are already pretty close simply because the drummer was good enough to be able to stick to the beat otherwise they would have been replaced in the studio by someone who could play to a constant tempo.

 

These days the best way is to try it out before you go into the studio. That's what I have always done. Some songs benefit from playing to a click and some need those tempo variations. Remember that a lot of drummers have always been the one in the band who sets the tempo and consequently have never had to play in time to something else. I've played with a couple of otherwise excellent drummers who simply couldn't play in time with a click because it put them off. It may be a difficult concept for the rest of us to get because we are so used to playing in time with the drums, that as musicians we are almost always following someone else for timing, so it seems easy when if you've never done it before it most definitely is not.

 

The trick is to make sure you have practiced before you go into the studio and don't try something unexpected and time consuming once you get there unless someone else is picking up the studio bill, in which case take as long as you like.

[BigRedX]

12 hours ago, SteveXFR said:

This demonstrates it well

 

 

 

Stupid click-bate video where someone is deliberately doing it wrong in order to preach to his sycophantic audience.

 

If he had a proper interest in showing how quantisation should be used, he would be demonstrating the right method, which is to create a "groove template" from the drumming as it is and then use that to tighten up the placing of any other parts that actually require it. Of course this method is far less interesting, and less noticeable on the finished track and doesn't pander to his audience's prejudices.

Edited December 4, 2023 by BigRedX

[neepheid]

19 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

Stupid click-bate video where someone is deliberately doing it wrong in order to preach to his sycophantic audience.

 

If he had a proper interest in showing how quantisation should be used, he would be demonstrating the right method, which is to create a "groove template" from the drumming as it is and then use that to tighten up the placing of any other parts that actually require it. Of course this method is far less interesting, and noticeable on the finished track and doesn't pander to his audience's prejudices.

 

My first reaction was "duh, it's on YouTube".

 

Sorry, I know there's some fine content on YT, but a lot of stuff on there has an axe to grind of some sort, or is clickbaity nonsense.  I'm too old to get sooked in by it, I see it and go "oh eff off SBL/everyone else who indulges in it, that's a pile of BS" and move on.

 

I always find myself answering the stupid "questions" in clickbait in my head.  "How would John Bonham sound today?" - tired, I'd guess.

Edited December 4, 2023 by neepheid

[Lozz196]

Yeah if you listen to some of the classics now they speed up/slow down something rotten. But they sound great.

 

 

[Erax Sound]

I think people are confusing constant tempo and relative time. Record in free time and it doesn't matter too much as long as the whole band is in time and it's not meant to be a massive change. Playing to a click, that's where a bad drum performance has to be sorted out.

 

I do drum editing for a few producer mates who live in Canada. The sort of stuff they do is metalcore/thrash, so it has to be exceptionally tight. They favour absolute on the line positioning. Even when someone has played really, really well. Some genres get away without it. Most modern metal (especially if it's djent) will have been quantised within an inch of it's life.

 

As with all things, it's how you use the tools at your disposal, not what they are that makes them fundamentally right or wrong.

 

Loads of musicians can't play to a click. Sometimes that's a problem, sometimes not. It depends who it is in the band that can't do it and what order you choose to record in.

[cheddatom]

20 minutes ago, Erax Sound said:

...Most modern metal (especially if it's djent) will have been quantised within an inch of it's life...

 

I really don't get why they don't just program the drums for this sort of stuff. Loads of producers replace/layer samples and it's all so quantized and consistent it might as well have been programmed, and surely would have been quicker and cheaper!

 

My mate is the drummer in an up and coming metal band Static Dress and they make a point of leaving his real performances alone. I personally think it helps set them apart

[TimR]

It's not the drummer's job to keep time for the band.

 

It's everyone's job.

 

The arguments start when the drummer believes he is the sole person responsible. 

 

[SteveXFR]

2 hours ago, cheddatom said:

My mate is the drummer in an up and coming metal band Static Dress and they make a point of leaving his real performances alone. I personally think it helps set them apart

 

My daughter has one of his sticks from a recent gig in Bristol. She really enjoyed them. A bit emo for my tastes but very good at what they do

[cheddatom]

45 minutes ago, SteveXFR said:

 

My daughter has one of his sticks from a recent gig in Bristol. She really enjoyed them. A bit emo for my tastes but very good at what they do

 

He's one of my best mates, but honestly without bias he is my favourite drummer to watch. The guy's an absolute monster and capable of so much more than he shows with Static Dress, impressive as that is. His youtube is pretty cool https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLscwUeSlpdZdDUa86tx46g/videos 

[diskwave]

Feel like Im living a mad cap parallel universe. Go listen to any old heavy/power rock music recorded in the 70's. No click, no this and that or the other...and bloody brilliant!. If everyone cencentrated on playing freely with heart and soul you wouldn't need all this stuff.

[WinterMute]

As BigRedX notes, there is a big "depends" on al studio technology, and what it depends on largely is the style of music, if one was tracking a Jazz album, the entire band could be in the studio, which would have been selected for the job, there would be very little in the way of dynamic range control and the edit and mix stage would be almost entirely free of time-based correction. 

 

If it was a Math-core metal band, the drums may well be programmed, the dynamics smashed flat and everyone playing their parts separately with multiple OD and punch ins, all to click. The edit/mix could be a sea of elastic audio and quantised edits. It's definitely horses for courses.

 

I'm not a fan of one size fits all, you have to approach each and every project from the perspective of discovering the best techniques to capture and enhance what the band /artist (and producer) are trying to achieve.

 

Certainly playing to click and applying quantise will make the engineers job easier in the long run, but does it make the outcome sound better?  The answer is "it depends".

[SteveXFR]

51 minutes ago, cheddatom said:

 

He's one of my best mates, but honestly without bias he is my favourite drummer to watch. The guy's an absolute monster and capable of so much more than he shows with Static Dress, impressive as that is. His youtube is pretty cool https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLscwUeSlpdZdDUa86tx46g/videos 

 

That's some very decent drumming. It gets interesting from 2 minutes in this video. This is the show the young'un went to as well.

 

 

[BigRedX]

Nearly all the time a live performance and a recording are two entirely different things and serve entirely different purposes.

 

Unless the recording has been made of un-amplified music with a stereo pair of microphone direct to tape or some digital storage medium and the balance achieved by moving the microphones as a pair rather than the relative positions of the musicians, there will also be some degree of artifice to the final product. What degrees of artifice are acceptable is down to the whims of the artist and the producer and also the end listener, although they will rarely be in a position to know exactly how much of what they hear has been "tickled up" to make it acceptable for commercial release, and that is always considerably more than the typical listener would expect.

 

Of course making it sound like it was captured live in a single take (if it is appropriate for the style of music) when in fact the end result has been painstakingly assembled from multiple takes, numerous overdubs and drop-ins (and that's before we consider modern manipulation techniques such as quantisation and Autotune) is all down to the skill of the engineer(s) and producer(s). I suspect that very few artists would want things that sound like obvious mistakes preserved for posterity on their recordings (I know I don't) and anything that can help the process in the studio should be embraced. Remember just because you can't obviously hear a technique doesn't mean it's not been used and most of the time the best fixes are the ones that are impossible to detect even when you know they are there.

[Erax Sound]

4 hours ago, cheddatom said:

 

I really don't get why they don't just program the drums for this sort of stuff. Loads of producers replace/layer samples and it's all so quantized and consistent it might as well have been programmed, and surely would have been quicker and cheaper!

 

My mate is the drummer in an up and coming metal band Static Dress and they make a point of leaving his real performances alone. I personally think it helps set them apart

 

That's exactly how I look at it. I make a point of leaving people's performances as alone as I can. I've done a lot of metal and it's more often been the case that I've managed to at least let the band discuss how the drums sound before replacing all the shells with samples. In most occasions I can show them how it'll make them different. 

 

That being said, I've done metal bands where the drummer has been left out of the material entirely in favour of me using Superior Drummer. Not my choice I hasten to say!

[TimR]

37 minutes ago, zrbass said:

Feel like Im living a mad cap parallel universe. Go listen to any old heavy/power rock music recorded in the 70's. No click, no this and that or the other...and bloody brilliant!. If everyone cencentrated on playing freely with heart and soul you wouldn't need all this stuff.

 

In the 70s you needed to be able to play live in the first place. 

 

Unless you had a load of money, you weren't going into the studio to record. You couldn't fix vocals or bad notes quickly. You'd have to redo and drop in  whole lines.

 

Audiences didn't have pocket video cameras. 

 

This had several effects but mainly people were used to hearing real music by real musicians.

 

Now music is so sanitised that almost anyone can put out something from their bedroom that sounds 'good', but everyone expects perfection. Top selling artists won't perform live as they are afraid of not being able to reproduce the studio quality that people have come to expect.

 

It'll only get worse with AI as 'engineers' decide that straight lines drawn by human artists must be over-drawn using rulers.

[BigRedX]

52 minutes ago, TimR said:

 

In the 70s you needed to be able to play live in the first place. 

 

Unless you had a load of money, you weren't going into the studio to record. You couldn't fix vocals or bad notes quickly. You'd have to redo and drop in  whole lines.

 

Audiences didn't have pocket video cameras. 

 

This had several effects but mainly people were used to hearing real music by real musicians.

 

Now music is so sanitised that almost anyone can put out something from their bedroom that sounds 'good', but everyone expects perfection. Top selling artists won't perform live as they are afraid of not being able to reproduce the studio quality that people have come to expect.

 

It'll only get worse with AI as 'engineers' decide that straight lines drawn by human artists must be over-drawn using rulers.

 

However you've forgotten that on the whole up to the late 80s sound quality at gigs was appalling compared with what even the lowliest of pub covers bands expects these days. For much of my early gig-going days (as both a performer and an audience member) the best you could expect from the vocals is that you could tell there were some that corresponded with the singer opening their mouth. Whether they were in tune or the correct words was anyone's guess.

 

Combined with the fact that all but the biggest PA systems sounded as though they were operating close to their limits meant you could get away with a lot of things live that could never happen now as it was masked in a wall of overdriven instrumentation.

 

And when it came to recording as soon as someone else was paying (i.e. the record company) any musician not up to scratch in a studio environment would be replaced in a heartbeat. Other than the singer(s) the musicians you saw performing at gigs wouldn't be the ones on the record(s).

[diskwave]

56 minutes ago, TimR said:

 

In the 70s you needed to be able to play live in the first place. 

 

Unless you had a load of money, you weren't going into the studio to record. You couldn't fix vocals or bad notes quickly. You'd have to redo and drop in  whole lines.

 

Audiences didn't have pocket video cameras. 

 

This had several effects but mainly people were used to hearing real music by real musicians.

 

Now music is so sanitised that almost anyone can put out something from their bedroom that sounds 'good', but everyone expects perfection. Top selling artists won't perform live as they are afraid of not being able to reproduce the studio quality that people have come to expect.

 

It'll only get worse with AI as 'engineers' decide that straight lines drawn by human artists must be over-drawn using rulers.

Absolutely. Saw that horrendous Apple Mac ad the other night where she presses a button and then says shes written a tune...But the thing is, the "sample" used was originally created back in the day by an extremely talented musician. This entire thing is completely unsustainable...  Oh and just to bang on endlessly...yet more adverts aimed at 'young people' using "crappy" old'... pop stuff from the 70's. No Adele, Sheeran or any of them... and I think we all know why.

[Buddster]

11 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 

And when it came to recording as soon as someone else was paying (i.e. the record company) any musician not up to scratch in a studio environment would be replaced in a heartbeat. Other than the singer(s) the musicians you saw performing at gigs wouldn't be the ones on the record(s).

Sorry BigRedX, I usually read your posts and agree. But not this bit. 

I worked with many signed up/chart bands bands in the 80/90 who weren't up to scratch in the playing dept and they certainly weren't replaced. There would have been a mutiny if they had been. 

No, it was a lot of hard work and drop-ins to get a decent take. And a lot of late nights. 

On one single, a vocal consisting of L Vox, double track, and bv's took 725 takes. I knew what was coming so decided to count them up. Admittedly the producer was a bit ott, but still. 

[TimR]

I think we are going off at a tangent to extremes now. There's lots of stories of ghost players being ushered in after the band have left.

 

But I'm talking about regular normal bands who could play to the expected standard. What we have done is shifted the 'expected standard' to be a manufactured idea of perfection. Unfortunately I think its an engineers version of perfection rather than a musical version. 

 

 

[tauzero]

Back on the subject of etiquette, has anyone mentioned personal hygiene? Also consider what to eat on the night/morning before going into the studio - garlic and onion sandwiches might not be appreciated, nor anything flatulence-inducing.

[TimR]

Regarding Studio Etiquette. If I do agree to record again, I'll suggest turning up 3 hours after the drummer and if I have to do any drop ins, to do them without the band present. 

 

Red light fever is real. 

[BigRedX]

43 minutes ago, Buddster said:

Sorry BigRedX, I usually read your posts and agree. But not this bit. 

I worked with many signed up/chart bands bands in the 80/90 who weren't up to scratch in the playing dept and they certainly weren't replaced. There would have been a mutiny if they had been. 

No, it was a lot of hard work and drop-ins to get a decent take. And a lot of late nights. 

On one single, a vocal consisting of L Vox, double track, and bv's took 725 takes. I knew what was coming so decided to count them up. Admittedly the producer was a bit ott, but still. 

 

Sorry I was thinking of mid-70s and earlier in response to comments by zrbass, unfortunately that wasn't obvious from my reply.

 

I certainly don't miss the multiple takes and drop-in anxiety of recording to tape, especially at the budget studio end where limited track counts meant that each drop-in would replace what had been recorded previously on that track and you had to hope that each subsequent take was going to be better than the previous one, because there was no "undo" function.

 

It was all fine when the record companies were prepared to indulge and develop bands which meant serious time in the studio was a possibility. Has anyone here from a performer PoV spent more than a couple of weeks continuously recording and mixing an album in a proper commercial studio?

 

 

 

Edited December 4, 2023 by BigRedX

[Dad3353]

53 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

... on the whole up to the late 80s sound quality at gigs was appalling compared with what even the lowliest of pub covers bands expects these days...

 

Steady on, there, old chap..! I attended a fair number of concerts 'back then', and my (admittedly failing...) memory and rose-tinted glasses tell a quite different story. There were some ropy events, but, on the whole, I'd say that the quality was there. Special mention for Jefferson Airplane/The Door at Chalk Farm's Roundhouse and the Godshill, Isle of Wight Festival, and a Traffic concert at Bracknell; there were dozens more, but those, at least, stand out. It's true that some venues were rather, shall we say, 'over loud' (The Ox, at Brunel University, and The Marquee, for instance...), but I didn't stay around too long in those cases.