Home recording

[Emphyrio]

Ordered a fairly cheap woofer for the current set up. Will probably be mainly used for playback, as opposed to mixing, and for making racket in general.

[if6was9]

I spotted the Behringer Umc series of interfaces lately when snooping on thomann for helping a friend get started on a setup for podcasting. Crazy cheap and while I haven't heard the interface, the Midas mic pres( if they're the same as the behringer desks)  are really decent. I've recorded loads of gigs with them and they sounded good. 100 euro for 4 inputs, 200 euro for 8 mic inputs with an option of another 8 over adat? thats for nothing. Every band should have one! When I started recording ( almost 15 years ago....) the barrier for entry was much much higher.

Been using the MT power drums free alternative to exdrummer lately also other have mentioned on here. Sounds great, has a much more natural snare sound. My only gripe is that the preset grooves are a bit shit. If anyone knows of a free midi groove pack worth getting then do point me in that direction! I record real drums for all my "real" recording projects but when I'm writing at home or demoing shit then I use this software.   

[ochoill]

I spotted the Behringer Umc series of interfaces lately when snooping on thomann for helping a friend get started on a setup for podcasting. Crazy cheap and while I haven't heard the interface, the Midas mic pres( if they're the same as the behringer desks)  are really decent. I've recorded loads of gigs with them and they sounded good. 100 euro for 4 inputs, 200 euro for 8 mic inputs with an option of another 8 over adat? thats for nothing. Every band should have one! When I started recording ( almost 15 years ago....) the barrier for entry was much much higher.

Was only chatting about these yesterday.  Actually a savage price for that starting out.  I have the scarlett 18i8 in the space for recording and love it but considering picking up either an 18i20 and swapping the current one for home use - at the price of the behringer ones i'd nearly just get the 200 quid one for home and adat use with the focusrite as option.  16 years ago meself and astfgyl went in on a tascam tape 4-track and it cost us more!!

[astfgyl]

Still have her there at the ready for that primitive BM album we are never going to record.

The world truly was our oyster with that thing

[ochoill]

Still have her there at the ready for that primitive BM album we are never going to record.

The world truly was our oyster with that thing

It comes back to what you said earlier about using the tools you had.  We made a fuckton of music on that and learned purely through experience and experimentation what worked best.  Great piece of kit at the time to be fair, and even now you could run the outs of a mixer into it and get live recordings with it to play with.  Reminds me a bit of that technique glenn fricker was on about with recording the guitar; generally why is sounds better is because it forces you to get the best tone you can outside a DAW, if you have to commit to your choices you'll move through the recording quicker and make more effort to get your own tone - not the technically best tone, but your own.

[astfgyl]

  No, definitely not the best

[ochoill]

Lol yeah I got a bit too nostalgic there, it was a fuckin horror.  Still though the points stand.

[astfgyl]

Ah yeah it isn't the size of your pipe and all that...

Sure I bought a new jack today and I felt like I was levelling up because it was a stereo one

[TurnTheAirBlue]

I don't do any recording but have started using Amplitube on my MacBook. Sounds fucking great!!! I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett Interface and a PreSonus E66 active monitor. The Mesa Boogie sims on Amplitube are excellent.

[Juggz]

For anyone interested in plugins, Waves are having a 50% off sale until the 11th. Use the code TODAY50

http://store.dontcrack.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=61

[Eoin McLove]

Any idea what the problems,  so to speak,  were that made Thergothon and the early Skepticism recordings sound so distant and strange? Is it that they aren't mastered or what? Is it even possible to emulate that sound with modern recording gear?

[Juggz]

Just listening to Stormcrowfleet, is this the kind of thing you mean? The drums are quite dampened so they don't ring out, it's all attack, no sustain,  and close-mic'd, almost like a 70's disco kit, and then a pile of reverb added afterwards, particularly on the snare. They might even have recorded the cymbals separately to the drums to give it that distance. The keyboards are taking up a tonne of space so there's not much room for the guitar which is very mid-scooped. It's definitely possible to do that sound today, there's nothing about it which is tied to technology.

[Eoin McLove]

Cool.  Defo going to aim for that sound with Bacterium but our attempts so far haven't hit the mark.

[Juggz]

It's almost like an anti-mix, for want of a better term. Where you'd usually expect the mixer to try to provide a bit of depth and have the instruments eq'd to give space to each other so they can all blend nicely together, with that one they've gone for extreme separation with the drums and the keyboard completely killing the guitar when both are playing. There's no depth to the sound aside from the snare which makes it sound so out of place.

Focus on the drum sound, it's the key to it. Everything is completely dead, no high end, no sustain, compressed and piles of reverb on the snare with a long decay. The more I hear it, the more I'd be sure the cymbals were recorded after the drums and they've probably put a high-pass filter on them too to remove much of the low and mid frequencies and, since the drums have no highs, they occupy a different sonic space. With no sustain in the drums, it's leaving a big gap for they keyboards in particular, which are really forward in the mix.

[Eoin McLove]

Cool,  nice one.  I actually had it in my head about the cymbals, or at least the hi hat,  being recorded separately because it's so loud in the mix.  Thergothon is even more dense and fucked up sounding.  I imagine it's just the worst thing to hear for an engineer as it's putting everything in the wrong place but it's great when your ear adapts to it.