As a general rule Eddie, you want to record everything completely flat, no eq, no effects into your DAW. Then you switch hats to a mixing engineer and that's when you go track by track and apply all of that. One of my friends is a very good keyboard player and singer. I had him come over to do a vocal track, I plugged a SM58 into my EMU interface, he threw on a set of headphones and sang. That's it. When you do that you hear every little thing and it sounds mostly like crap no matter how good a singer you are but he's a pro, he knows that already and also knows what can be done later. Same for a sax friend too. I had him record his sax just straignt into the mic, he hated it because he likes verb and some eq. I do have the ability to do direct monitoring but I didn't have it set up at that time. After he did the take, he stayed and watched me "fix" the track in RB. He was quite impressed. Once you've done that a few times and realize what you can do with a flat track you stop worrying about how you sound while doing the take and just concentrate on your playing.

There's a lot of guitar/bass players who will even record their stuff direct in and use the verious modelling softwares after the fact too. The thing is even if you have a good piece of modelling hardware for your guitar, your recording engineer may have 10 different ones to choose from in the studio and if you give him a good straight recording with nothing on it then he's free to apply all kinds of goodies to it. If you give him an already processed recording, that really limits his and your creativity.

I do some live on site recordings using my Akai DPS16 recorder and the last two bass players I recorded asked me if I could take them direct because they already know that and they're used to massaging their sound after the fact. One guy has a nice David Eden bass set up and I was going to hang a mic in front of his cab but he still wanted to go direct so I did both since I had enough inputs. I got a nice sound off the mic and I still mixed some effects on the second track.

Just remembered something that's a cool little trick. My singer friend brought his favorite EV mic so I taped them both together and recorded each mic on it's own track. You can have all kinds of fun with two separate tracks of the same vocal.

Bob

Last edited by jazzmammal; 10/06/11 01:00 PM.
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