When the tables are turned for a recording engineer

Image by Dayron Villaverde from Pixabay

Yesterday I spent a day in a recording studio for the first time – As a client. I have been working in studio environments probably for thousands of hours and have recorded hundreds of songs. But I have always been the one in control of the recording process. A sound engineer recording himself as a musician is a completely different thing than a sound engineer being recorded as a musician, by another sound engineer. By entering the role of a client for just one day, I learned some lessons that aren’t apparent from the perspective of the sound engineer. This is an invaluable experience which can be applied in any domain, not just music.

I learned three important things yesterday. The first one is monitoring – the ability to hear yourself. I recorded with my Dreadnought acoustic guitar, A Gibson Hummingbird. And when I am practicing and playing I have noted that I prefer to play in rooms that have some reverberation, like the living room. It gives good support, I can hear myself loud and clear and it sounds pleasurable. If I practice in the bedroom, the room acoustics are “dead” due to all the soft materials. The guitar sounds boring, and I tend to play to hard because the room is too quiet. I had precisely the same experience when I was studying singing technique for a year. I practiced in a public garage, where the room acoustics sounded a lot more like an opera stage than my living room. But when I did my first concert, the stage was very “dead” and consequently, I used too much power in my voice to compensate which led to distortion and strain. A professional vocalist (or any other acoustic musical instrument for that matter) learns to control the voice regardless of the room acoustics. The recording room we used yesterday was “dead” and I also received my monitor sound through headphones, which is a completely different experience compared to listening to the acoustic sound. Now I now that the next time I will enter a recording studio, I will practice a lot in “dead” acoustics, with headphones, to become acquainted with the sound environment. That will be greatly beneficial. Note: Electric guitar is my main instrument, and I have thus never experienced this issue with monitoring, because room acoustics are normally handled with digital effects and a guitar amp.

The second lesson is that when you play live in a livestream or a concert, you can get away with almost anything. Small and even big mistakes are OK, but in the recording studio, perfection is the norm. This does not imply that you must only do one-takes or go home, but it does imply that small mistakes are acceptable – but only if they occur on different places in the song. If the same mistake occurs on the same place in the song every time you record a take, then you have a big problem and need to practice more. A lot more. If you record some takes of the song well in advance before you enter the studio, and discover that you mess up the same place every time, you know that you are not ready. But when your pilot study reveals that you can lay down five independent takes where the eventual errors occur in various places, you are good to go. But of course, if you practice until you can shoot one-takes consistently, you get a gold star.

My third lesson was also related to monitoring. When you record an acoustic guitar and get your monitoring sound through headphones, you need to use closed headphones, so that the microphones do not pick up the metronome clicks. That will be an issue if you use open headphones (which generally sound much more natural IMO). This means that the sound that you hear, is actually the sound of the guitar in the microphone position, which has a different character compared to your ears positions due to the guitar’s directivity pattern. The microphone is also likely on another source-receiver distance than the distance to your ears, which will introduce a phase error. If the microphone is placed closer to the guitar than your ears, you will hear it before what you are used to. And if the mic is further away than your ears, the sound will arrive to your ears later than what you are used to. This might sound nit-picky to you, but this experience is subjective. Personally, I am extremely sensitive to latency. I could never enjoy the game Guitar Hero because there was a considerable latency that destroyed the experience for me. Now I know that the next time I record a guitar player, I will do my best to phase compensate the monitor sound in the headphones. By the way, does anybody know of a “silent” metronome, that gives the click track with haptic feedback?

Last but not least, A big thank you to Kim and Zebra Studios for an enlightening day that resulted in me growing both as a musician and a recording engineer.