Howdy there Mark,
Are you over in Arizona land? Cool!
Such a superb answer here as you offer an insight into your (albeit condensed) whole working procedure! Very
inspiring and so thank you.
DonutDude wrote:I almost always add a little reverb to enhance a synth's sound. I choose a reverb I like and record it directly on the track with the instrument. Lots of recording engineers record the dry synth and wet reverb signals to different tracks but I've found what works for me is to find the reverb I like and then that combination of reverb and synth becomes the sound of my instrument on that track (I don't use a computer for recording, if I did I might do things differently). I use two digital muli-effects units for my reverbs but there are sweet analog reverbs out there as well.
I have a hardware
LEXICON MX200 (model I think it is). It's the one with
MEMORY and
LED. I bought it for VOCAL's (during a duo a contract I was doing with a dodgey/cheesy duo playing in a Spanish hotel in Palma!). Anyway, so you record the
INSTRUMENT and
REVERB directly together? If an engineer was to, as you say, record a
DRY and
WET signal in the same
PASS, then would the SYNTHESIZER need to have
TWO separate
OUTPUTS (one going into the
FX UNIT then to the
MIXER, and the other going straight to the
MIXER?)?
DonutDude wrote:I have other hardware effects - delay, ring mod, murf, freqbox, flanger, pitch shifter, phaser, and distortion, but they don't get used very often in my current style of writing. Usually I'll be messing around with an effect and if I find something I like, I track it and then design a song around it. Again, for me, it is easier to find an effect I like and add it to the track with the synth when recording, therefore becoming the new sound of that synth. Does that make sense?
Ok, so you
noodle around feeding your
SYNTH thru various hardware
FX. Then, when you have found one you like (ie. it
INSPIRES musical ideas, you jam/compose a song/groove around the
ambience of the
FX. In other words, the FX (unit) is almost a
CO-COMPOSER! The result is that the FX is an intrinsic/integral (call it what you will) part of the
finished (composite) timbre. That is how I interpret what you are describing.
DonutDude wrote:When starting out I spent a lot of months researching the best ways to record. I tried to figure out how compression and EQ worked, and I tried to emulate what the pros did. Eventually I decided to just do what sounded good to me. The research is definately beneficial, but don't get caught up in it all. I'm a hobbyist like yourself, not a professional recording engineer.
Great point. I admit to being somewhat overwhelmed by the daunting task of trying to understand EVERYTHING! I have found that in the last 4 x years (basically since I bought
CUBASE) I my workflow has been very UNPRODUCTIVE (apart from my growing interest in
FM SYNTHESIS). Pre-
CUBASE, I would spent months transcribing Chick Corea solo's and writing out big band compositions etc. But over the past 2/3 x years I have been stuck in something of a musical rut and you just end up getting NOTHING done!
Anyway, study-wise, I have the two books
MIXING SECRETS (Mike Senior) and
POWER TOOLS OF CUBASE (L. Hepworth). Though they have been sat on the bookshelf for 18 x months unread! However, as I mentioned, my focus of recent has been very much on the
DX7.
Cheers,
Paul
)
