The Twang! Keeping It Real (Pt 2)
Steely Dan guitarist and session legend elliott randall delves into the world of DaWs to offer some tips ’n’ tricks that will help you get your head around digital recording
Last issue, we were talking about the new landscape of the ‘Recording Musician’. The (quaint) job description of ‘Studio Musician’ has become a title now belonging to recent-past history, like ‘cinema projectionist’. Now to add a little science to the discussion. One major difference between recording to tape and recording digitally is this: tape recording is a totally contiguous process. As the tape moves forward, everything that flows through the record head goes to tape. Different tape speeds, the size of the magnetic recording heads and noise reduction (if you are employing it) produce subtly different sounding results, but oh the warmth! Digital recording is completely different. It’s all numeric ‘under the bonnet’. It’s a computer – nothing but zeros and ones. You won’t need to worry about that, though. What you do need to be aware of are certain other numeric values, which I will now explain.
Virtually every DAW presents you with certain choices for ‘bit rate’ and ‘sampling rate’. Your most common choices for bit rate are 16 and 24. Choose 24-bit as, in this case, more is better.The most common flavours for sampling rate are 44.1kHz, 48kHz, and 96kHz. While many of my clients do their projects at 48kHz (which is fine), I prefer to record at 96kHz. Those numbers represent how many slices (samples) are taken in one second. So, 44.1kHz means that there are 44,100 slices recorded per second.At 96kHz, 96,000 slices per second. More data!
Take a perfect circle. It is one contiguous line, right? If you were to sample that circle at 96kHz, you would have that circle represented by 96,000 dots. (You can use the pixel analogy here.) It’s not really a full circle, but rather many dots coming together to form what looks like a circle! The higher the sampling rate, the more harmonic information exists in the file, and your mixing and mastering engineers will love you, because they have more of the sound spectrum to work with. Incidentally, the higher the sampling and bit rates (and they contain the most audio information), the larger your files will be. But with storage as inexpensive as it is today, this should not be a worry.
Still with me? Good – because now it’s tips ’n’t ricks time. I’ve developed particular habits that have proved most useful in doing ‘remote sessions’. Clear communication is essential. As much as I would like to have my client in the room while I’m overdubbing, it doesn’t happen nearly as frequently as I’d like – not even Skype or FaceTime – so it’s generally over email that I ask essential questions about bit and sample rates (do they prefer .wav or .aiff?), things that will make their lives a bit easier when receiving my completed overdub files. I always ensure that the reference track(s) they send are at the exact beginning of their ‘session’ .All must sync up perfectly! Still, I include the first 0.5 second or so of the audio from their track (on mine), so they can match my incoming tracks with total accuracy.
When I record, I generally have a DI (pure) track as well as a mic’d amp track. In the event that the client would like the option of using a completely different sound on my performance, they can use my DI track to run it through an amp locally, or use whatever cool plug-ins they have to hand. I also use this technique when recording for my own projects. One never knows when a wild idea for a new sound on an already completed performance could be just the right thing!
Of course, there’s always the 2am scenario. You get a great idea and decide to record it without waking the family, so it’s direct in, then into an appropriate amp plug-in, and we’re off.To be perfectly honest, I’ve done many a recording using just an amp plug-in and, trust me – you’d never know that it wasn’t an amp. The technology has come a long way.
Here’s one thing I find important.Try to not be lonely when recording. If the client isn’t available, have a friend whose musical sensibilities you trust hang out with you for the session. Music is social! Of course, if your friend is a DAW operator, doubtless you’ll be able to learn a few things from each other.
Oh, did I ever tell you about the time I was hired for an overdub that emanated from a social network ‘friend’ who had some good money to spend? I sent him his overdubs. He was thrilled. I made sure that the abovementioned 0.5 second of sync reference was on my track so the timing would be right. When he sent me the finished mix, something was terribly wrong.The guitar solo was about three beats behind where it should have been. It was just awful! Chords changed before I did, and some of the notes were just dreadful. Long story short, even though he’d aligned it correctly, at some point the solo was moved in his session. But we caught it in time; he went back to the session and made the required alterations, and all was good in the world. To quote an esteemed old rocker: “It goes to show you never can tell.”