What do you do if your sound is getting bad in the studio?

Visit http://www.dtguitar.com, Denis's guitar website


rewire

Ok, after a couple of albums ,ok 4 albums, my studio sound was kind of dying on me. It was getting me way down.It really bothered me. maybe I just couldn't record anymore, maybe 135 albums was it. I was just not pleased with my recordings or sounds in the studio. so much so, I was going to sell my mackie 32x8. I still might ,but for different reasons such as going with different mic pre's,except its working so well. anyway, here is what I did and it was a cure all!!!

Ok, first I unplugged it all and that was a big job. Turns out, the cables I was using were cheapo test cables, some were ten years old. Ok, next I did some reading and experimenting to hook up the mackie board. Rather than going direct though, I actually utilized the 8 buses. This allows me to mix some guitar sounds together before going to the recorder. Ok, the I also set the levels to unity gain. Also, and this was the big culprit, I had to reset my emu emulatorx sound card!!!

Ok, it turns out that the emu was causing a loop causing feedback. It was driving me crazy and the sound just sucked big time. Finally, I wised up and it turns out that the software mixer of the card was "hiding" the wav out fader" so I could not mute it when using the digital i/o. Anyway, after that my sound was back. That great sound that seemed to be disappearing. I thought maybe it was my playing, yet I thought I was improving. Well, I am and it was this card problem and rehooking up the mackie that did the trick. I did a short recording and it was just a fantastic sound, warm,crystal clear and clean.

Lesson learned: when your sound seems to be degrading, take a 1/2 hour and go through your setup as it was initially. I discovered that after a album or so, it is surprising how many settings need to be reset to their initial values. I will sleep well tonight to be sure!! I had forgotten that I had never swapped out my test cables, as I was eager to get to recording. Anyway, I did a quick test recording to be sure I had it right.

ok, you can hear an mp3 of the test recording which is made up of sony drum samples, bass emulation on guitar looped from one of my rack units & synced to midi and then a stereo clean guitar loopped via one of my pedalboards .Now I can assign any of the 32 tracks to one of 8 buses. This allowed me to test bus 1-2 to my gtr rack unit and direct digitally to inputs 7-8 of my digital recorder.Then I used bus 3-4 for the mic's (the clean stereo guitar loop) which went to track 3-4 of my recorder. Then I used bus 7-8 to track 1 of my digital recorder for the looped bass emulation. Cool beans, that leaves me bus 5-6 free which I will assign to tracks 5-6 for vocals, samples, extra guits whatever. Also, I can use bus 8 if using bus 7 only to do mono bass which I often do. I only use an 8 rack recorder as All of my recordings are performed and recorded live with overdubs.

Hear the test sample here: http://www.dtguitar.com/rewiretest.mp3

Now the p3 will degrade the sound a bit as it is only 128k,but anyway, I hope you can hear that the sound is clear. Its not mixed well and the bass emulation was done 1/2 assed really as here is a glitch in the bass sound where I had not done a clean loop,but it ok for the test; it served my purposes. Anyway, this was a really big lesson as I was getting really down about my sound!!