How it works in my studio..

Electric instruments:
Guitars, Keys, Bass, etc all go directly into Amp modelers (such as the Pod). I’ve got one Line 6 Pod at my place and I think Biggie has at least a few for Guitar and Bass, in case either you or Phil don’t have a modeler. You can run additional pedals right into the Pod as if it were an amp. It used to be that running guitar right into a recorder or out from a combo effects pedal produced horrible results. But nowadays since the prevalence of high quality amp modeling pedals, it’s primo, and is a technique used on countless major label albums.

Acoustic Instruments:
The drums are always the biggest problem, but I have that solved by having a Clearsonic IsoBooth. This is a mostly sound proof enclosure that allows me to slam the skins without disturbing neighbors, my wife upstairs or our sleeping toddler. It’s effective enough that the in the room right above the drums (living room) my wife won’t have to turn up the TV or take a phone call in another room. And from my toddlers bedroom you can’t hear a thing. The drums are fully mic’ed up and run through the board.

Vocals are generally the only other acoustic instrument to deal with. Mic’s are run into the board and after some non-volatile effects (effects run only for monitoring, not to disk) they are blended and directed into the recorder.

The Mix:
The headphone mix is critical. I’ve spent a lot of time making sure we have the flexibility to make it the best mix possible. Within the recording hardware piece I have a separate mixer section specifically to manage headphone mixes. This allows me to have 4 distinct headphone mixes where I can blend 4 drum mics, vocals, bass, and 2 guitars individually for each of the 4 mixes. A headphone mixer manages the amplifier output for each of the 4 sub mixes, and each submix can drive up to 3 separate headphones. So I could actually tailor 4 mixes for up to 12 pairs of headphones… sweet.

Non-volatile effects are applied to help make the mix comfy and pleasing with some reverb on vocals etc. If you need more guitar, less drums, or anything it’s easy to adjust to taste. Because everything is coming in through headphones, you don’t have to struggle to hear what you need to, and you don’t have to deal with your ears ringing afterward.

The Recording:
I’m currently recording 8 tracks at 96khz/24bit. This is about double CD quality and allow for clean effects rendering before mix down to stereo 48khz for CD/mp3. I usually record in blocks of 2 hours (Pro-Tools max session size). That way everything we play is recorded and we don’t have to mess around starting and stopping the recorder between takes. Sometimes the best stuff comes out while we are messing around between tunes etc. Everything is captured. It also takes some of the stress out of recording. It doesn’t seem as much like the heat is on. After a few minutes you forget the recorder is on and you can just let go.

I’m recording and mixing with the latest Pro-tools 7.4 software with some nice plug-ins. They have some great live modeled reverb (TL Space) and some awesome compressors (Smack and Bombfactory) as well as a host of EQ and other tools for tweaking.

If a take is perfect, awesome, we’ve got it. If we need to re-do the vocals or other individual parts later… no sweat we can overdub to our hearts content. If I’m tracking for a project (not just recording a rehearsal) then the first goal is to get the drums nailed first. So if there’s a guitar or vocal mess up, we don’t stop the song… fyi. Then later we can overdub the part needed, or just try the song again.

Guitar re-amping:
Another cool trick we can do is re-amping. If the sound of the guitar or bass is missing something, we can run the guitar/bass signal out of the recorder and into an amp that’s miced up in my ISO booth. Then we record the re-amped signal from the mic. We might then use this signal instead of the straight guitar, or blend the two. Though, I don’t have to do this very often with the quality of the amp modelers these days.

Mics:
I’ve got a bunch of mics. I use Shure SM57’s on toms and snare, I use a Shure SM81 overhead and some Oktavia large diaphragm condensers as other overheads. I use an Audix D6 kick drum mic. When recording live rehearsal or run-throughs I would ask that you bring your own vocal mic and stand. Most folks are using the Shure SM58 vocal mic for live and that gives a nice live sound for the vocals. And we can overdub vocals with some of the condenser mic’s afterwards if we want more vocal presence or a more ‘studio’ sound.