Things I’m learning about recording

It’s nice being a beginner again.

Way back when—I’m talking the late 80s, early 90s—I worked as a sort-of-intern recording engineer. A roommate and good friend was one of the go-to engineers for the alternative Christian rock world, at least in the Los Angeles area, and he got so busy he couldn’t make time to sleep. So he trained me a bit, then gave me some of the easier sessions to run on my own.

I even got paid something like $10 an hour. Not bad, considering that interns rarely got paid at all, and minimum wage was hovering around $4 an hour.

Most important, I learned a lot. Not all of it applies now, since everyone’s gone digital, and I was working 100% analog on 24-track, 2-inch tape. But many concepts still apply. And most digital tools are based on analog, whether that’s general (e.g., compression) or specific (e.g., emulating the LA2A compressor).

However, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I was mostly flying by the seat of my pants and didn’t have the time or the training to become great, to really understand deeply what I was doing. Often, no matter how little I knew, I was the most experienced in the room; most bands that I recorded had never been in a real studio before, so I looked reasonably smart. But there was no Internet—no YouTube, no Produce Like a Pro, no PureMix Mentors—just a friend who needed sleep and, as they say, the school of hard knocks.

This past year, I’ve enjoyed listening to a series of long-form interviews where the accomplished (i.e., Grammy-Award winning) Andrew Sheps spoke to many of the most important recording engineers out there. I already mentioned his interview with Steve Lillywhite (Peter Gabriel, U2), but he also interviewed Al Schmitt (Steely Dan, George Benson—and, sadly, recently deceased), Jack Joseph Puig (The Black Crowes, John Mayer), Silvia Massy (Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers), and Susan Rogers (Prince, David Byrne)—and that’s only a handful from the first season. (I think this is the full playlist—57 interviews in all, most of them over two hours long.)

I began listening to these interviews with the expectation that I’d learn practical things about recording—mic placement, outboard gear, vocal chains—but quickly realized that this was silly. For one thing, they weren’t interested in such things; questions about plug-ins or microphone choice were often met with eye-rolling exasperation. But I came to understand that the tech is way down the list of things they find important.

Here are three or four (depending on how you count) of the most important things that I learned from these interviews:

The only thing that matters…

…is what comes out of the speakers

There’s a lot of angst in the recording community—or, I should say, the amateur/hobbyist recording community—about how things get done. Is autotune “cheating”? What about comping vocals (it’s clear where Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas fall on this question…)? Punching in? MIDI packs? Composing on the piano roll?

In the end, no one (aside from pedants) actually cares. If it sounds good, it is good. It doesn’t matter how you get the sound, just that you get it.

Coming out of the speakers, the only thing that matters…

…is the emotion.

The best recorded song—and with current technology, high-quality recording is available to pretty much anyone—will fall flat if it doesn’t move the listener emotionally. And if it does move the listener, the quality of the recording becomes almost irrelevant.

Indeed, in many cases, the emotion comes out of flaws—pitchy vocals, tempo variations, etc. The danger of modern tech is that we can iron out much of what makes a song connect with the listener.

There’s no “right way” to do things…

…so good engineers and mixers experiment.

This is good news for a novice like me, since everything I do at this point is experimentation.

But it also explains why they tend not to enjoy tech-focused questions. What is your go-to vocal chain? If you could only use one plug-in, what would it be? As they often point out, when answering such questions, if they have such a thing, it’s only a starting point. Engineering and mixing is about discovery, problem-solving, serving the artist.

Above all, the goal is never to become complacent. Lillywhite explained to Sheps that he has approached his entire career from “a position of not knowing”: “When I think I know what I’m doing, I always fail.”

The source is the most important thing.

A common theme across the interviews: Well-arranged, well-performed, well-recorded songs practically mix themselves.

I know this, intellectually. But in practice, I really struggle. My performances are sloppy—I’m at best a low-intermediate guitarist, and I have no sense of how I am as a vocalist. And working alone, it can be hard to get the recording right—partly from thinking about too many things at once, partly from wanting to move on to the next thing I need to do.

That fourth insight is probably the most important for me to keep in mind. I don’t have trouble internalizing the other three: as I said, I have to experiment by definition, and I don’t have a list of things that I consider “cheating”—I know that, if it sounds good, it is good.

But I need to slow down: to master parts before I hit record, to capture the best sound possible, and—above all—not to figure that I can just “fix it in the mix.” Mixing is already enough of a problem-solving activity (especially for me); I don’t need an added layer of a poor performance or recording.

Top photo by Silvestre Leon on Unsplash