The Stereo Bus Blog - Daily Music Production Tips

This post focuses on the classic challenge of how to record a band in a single room and not have it sound completely awful.

Lots of us have small production studios and tons of bands have single room practice spaces.  Inevitably the question arises: “How can I record the band live in a single room and not have it all turn to mush!?”  There are some strategies for accomplishing decent results from this situation and, although it won’t sound like a record that was recorded in a multi-room facility or overdubbed, for some music that’s for the best.  It’s an incredible challenge that can be really rewarding.
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This post focuses on a technique for the tricky task of recording guitar and vocals at the same time.

One of the classic tricky engineering situations is recording guitar and vocals at the same time. Generally they bleed into each other and effects that make the guitar sound good make the vocals sound horrible and vice-versa. There are a number of things that can be done to isolate the two, including using a DI for the guitar, but I’ve found that there is only one really good mic arrangement that gets the job done.

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This post focuses on tracking the snare drum, both on its own and as part of a kit.

I’m going to do a series on recording various instruments, from drums to woodwinds, and I’ve decided to do the snare first. Drums are a tricky bunch of instruments. They’re loud, bleed like hell, and generally don’t sound anything on tape like they sound in the room. Snare is probably the most complex of the standard components of the drum set. The top head is usually fairly tight and the material of the shell can be anything from aluminum to solid maple, each with unique characteristics. The bottom has the snares, strips of metal that vibrate against the bottom head when the drum is hit, which gives the drum its distinctive rattle. The top head is where the attack happens, the bottom head is where the crunch happens, and the tone is shared between the two. This means that you really need at least two microphones to get a complete picture of a snare drum. I would argue you may even need three to get the best snare sounds.

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