I’m going to look at the process I’ve followed to turn a fairly unimpressive recording of my band jamming into something resembling a finished song.
I started with a few tracks recorded using a Zoom R24 multi track recorder with some vocal mics in a practice room and imported them into Logic.
The result was 14 minutes of mainly, well frankly, rubbish! Here’s a sample
The next stage was to trim this down, so that I had a song length piece of music to work with. The performance is a bit rough, but I ended up with 4 minutes or so of useable music.
I then treated each track with EQ and compression to get them sounding better individually and balanced them with Pink Noise mixing so that the relative levels were good.
I tried adding another guitar part. by Tom, but frankly it wasn’t adding anything and there were two guitars on it anyway, so we gave up on that idea.
The main effects used at this stage were the Logic Onboard plug in Space Designer for reverb and the onboard compression. Using these alone, and pink noise for balance, I got a reasonable sound.
On this track, I thought I was going to be fortunate that the kick drum had been recorded quite well, but as I started to add EQ, I realised it was a bit weak so decided to replace it.
It’s a fairly straightforward process. First, select ‘Replace or Double Drum Track’ from the ‘Track’ menu
This creates a new MIDI track triggered by the transients from the Audio track and opens the sound library where you choose the drum sound you want. I have a ‘go to’ kick drum sound which is ‘Acoustic Kick C1 3’, which has a good balance of toppy click and thumpy bass tone.
Click OK, and you have your new kick drum sound palying the exact beats that the original one did, but sounding much better. You can then mute the original kick drum track.
After applying some EQ and other refinements, I ended up with this.
The snare benefitted from some quite radical EQ using the onboard EQ. The idea was really to get rid of some of the high ringing and to clean up a lot of the higher frequencies, which were just taking up space in the mix. Similarly, with the recording not being that great I wanted to clean up the bottom end as well and cut out an annoying low ringing from the snare.
I might not ordinarily go with such a radical cut but the recording needing a bit of cleaning up. The only other EQ is quite restrained with a bit of a boost at the lower mid range, just to ensure the snare still had a bit of body.
I employed a similar fairly radical cut for the ‘Timid Guitar’ track, for pretty much the same reasons.
Here I also boosted the high end to give it a more differentiated sound from the other guitar. I also boosted a little frequency towards the lower end because, well, it just sounded nice!
The bass needed a little boost around the low end just because it is quite prominent in the track, so needed to be quite bold
Finally the ‘Bold Guitar’ just need to be boosted around the top end, mainly so the feedback and general row it’s creating sounded a bit sharper and less muddy. It’s quite heavily processed before recording with a number of pedals so it needed very little else.
I also created a Bus with reverb on, which was applied to the snare, overheads and both guitars on the setting ‘Hansa studio’.
The other Bus I used was a Tape Delay on both guitars, which I intended to switch on and off to create some dubby effects.
I’m going to need to rein myself in with this because it is most effective when used quite sparingly.
In terms of compression I’ve started to experiment with the Universal Audio plug in recreation of the Teletronix LA-2A. I’m blown away by how good it is, but I wouldn’t say I’m an expert with it yet, so I’m using it mainly to level and boost, but I’m not getting much joy using it to bring out quieter tones.
On the bass track, I think I’ve used it quite successfully to really give it some power.
On for example, the ‘Timid Guitar’ track, I’ve used the onboard compressor.
It just seemed to give me more control and allowed me to boost the sound without it swamping everything else. I think it’s really a matter of what you know best, so I’m going to need to keep trying things with the LA2 so that I can use it to its full potential.
I also applied a Noise gate to the Timid Guitar because there was a lot of buzzing, (I think probably because the guitar was turned up loud in the room because the clean sound it was on was not managing to compete with the louder distorted guitar) and some pedals to give it some twang.
The final effect was a phaser on the ‘Bold Guitar’ because, well it had everything else on it…
There’s more to do on this; I think it needs to be a bit more exciting, but that can wait for another day…
Phil Wakely Audio 