First Lessons Learned

As I mentioned in my last blog, we have recorded our first session. Chris handed me the mastered CD the other day and I have listened to it a few times. I passed a copy over to Niki and he made a comment about the stereo panning on track 5 being off to the right. As soon as he mentioned it, I realized I had been hearing it but just put it off in the back of my mind. The more I think about it the more it bugs me and now I know how to fix it.

Because the track for the guitar was recorded in MS-Stereo the placement of the sound source is extremely important. If you have the sound source to the left or right of the mic rig you will hear the spatial positioning in headphones and it will sound placed to the left or right. Because the two mic feed mix is done in the Amek you can not easily go back and change the stereo panning like you can on a stereo paired left/right mic rig or panned mono.

What this means is that once you determine where you want the spatial positioning of the sound source you better damn well mark it with gaffers tape and keep it for all the tracking sessions. This is similar to recording the tuning of the guitar on tape and tuning the guitar to the taped version so that the guitar is tuned the same for every take. This process makes the sound consistent. So this is lesson one, always place your sound source in the same position take after take unless you are purposely changing the sound position.

Lesson two is tied to lesson one. Always, always do a headphone check on your mix. Now that we have a sound proofed location we can play our monitors at any desired level at any time we want. This is a wonderful luxury for us, because the old Cedub facility was under the bedrooms and late night mixing was only possible via headphones (which technically is a mixing no-no).

What happened this time is that we failed to run each mix through our headphones and this is why we missed the spatial position issue. With near-field monitors the stereo separation was blended more naturally and was much harder to hear that the guitar was more right centered then true center. Because headphones have two separate isolated sound sources your ears can pick it up.

All in all, I am still very happy with our first project. I think if we didn’t learn anything then something is really wrong. We won’t make this mistake again and that is really what is important.