Malcom Owen-Flood: 0:00

For the record, I think Benny and I disagree on this. I think Really, yeah, I am audience perspective. Ah shit, no man, no, no way.

Benedikt Hain: 0:10

No drummers. Perfect is the only way I want to add drum. Anyway, this is the Self Recording Band Podcast, the show where we help you make exciting records on your own wherever you are DIY style, let's go. Hello and welcome to the Self Recording Band Podcast. I am your Be nedikt Hain, . If you're already a listener, thank you, welcome for coming back. If you are new to the show, welcome, so stoked to have you. Please know that this is available on Spotify, apple Podcast, wherever you consume podcasts, but also in video form on YouTube, if you weren't aware. So just go to YouTube, search for the Self Recording Band and you can watch all our episodes there. Today we want to break down the biggest home recording mistakes that we've seen from working with self recording artists this month, so you don't have to make the same mistakes. We've done an episode like that earlier this year, I think in January, and it's time to do another one, because it's the end of the month, at least at the time of this recording, and there's always some things that we come across, some pretty common things that we notice, and we want to share them with you, so you don't have to make the same mistakes. And today I'm here again with my wonderful co-host and friend, malcolm Owen-Flood. Hello, how are you?

Malcom Owen-Flood: 1:25

Hey, benny, I'm great man. First off, yes, we want this episode to help you not make the same mistakes, but actually, benny and I just love to complain about things that get thrown on the desk all the time. Yep, that is right, that is correct.

Benedikt Hain: 1:38

We deserve this, yeah so, if you've been working with us, be ready to be called out. No, we won't. They call it.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 1:45

We won't throw you under the bus.

Benedikt Hain: 1:48

If you recognize or if you think we're talking about you when you're listening to this. We probably are. We're not saying your name, but it's good. But we're not only talking about you.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 1:59

No, we're bringing these up because it's happened multiple times. These are common issues and honestly, there's one of these at least two, I'm going to confess. Two of these are things that I've done and I feel that about. So, yeah, it's mistakes that I've made in the past too, and I see other people make, and we want to eliminate that from your future. That's the goal. But first off, benny. Benny ran an enormous amount, like just insane distances, over mountains and valleys, and I'm not even joking, benny, how'd it go, man.

Benedikt Hain: 2:37

Man, it went so well. I was last time I talked about it was the last episode was before the race and I wasn't sure if I'm going to finish or not and I was prepared to drop out during the race or whatever, but it went so well, like exactly as planned actually. So I had my strategy the pacing between the eight stations and what I'm going to eat when, and the nutrition.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 2:59

Remind the audience how far this run was, because it was 68 kilometers and it said 2,500 meters of elevation gain.

Benedikt Hain: 3:07

My watch says it was 2,800. So a little more than that, but anyway a lot.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 3:12

Yeah, a lot.

Benedikt Hain: 3:14

And so, yeah, my goal was just to finish and the dream goal was to place middle of the pack and finish in under 10 hours. That was the dream, but I didn't really think it was realistic because I only finished 70% of my training plan this year because of life got in the way and stuff.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 3:31

Coming to Canada to go on to weddings.

Benedikt Hain: 3:33

Yeah, exactly that, for example, and so finishing was really the goal, but it went so well and exactly as planned that I managed to achieve both. So I finished in nine hours and 43 minutes and I placed 42nd out of, I think, 95 male runners, which is awesome for my first ultra. I really love that. The first 10 people are so insane. There's professional runners and like world-class athletes basically there, and so Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, hold on Anybody that can run that now to distance is a world-class athlete.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 4:10

I mean, I don't know, you might not be in the Olympics, but you're in the top, like 1% of fitness people. Maybe I don't know.

Benedikt Hain: 4:22

Yeah, but within the hobby runners there I did pretty well, I think, and it was my first ultra, so I'm beyond excited. It was just such an amazing day and I didn't even suffer that much. I expected it to be so bad because it was unknown territory, you know, after anything longer than like 50K or so was completely unknown to me and I expected to be walking the past couple of kilometers or whatever. But the last 5K or so from I don't know past the 60K mark, I was still doing sub six-minute kilometers and I was like very surprised that this worked out and so I felt strong the entire time. It was hard, of course, but it was not the amount of suffering that I expected, and so I know I could do it even faster. It's just that my legs and everything I have to get used to that distance, just the pounding, it just hurt at the end. So I could have gone for longer, but it was just painful. So, yeah, that was really the only thing, but other than that, I had a blast. I enjoyed the entire day. Strategy was great. It was cool that I didn't overpace. I started at the very back of the pack, which was also good, because the entire race. I was just overtaking people, which was mentally really cool to make progress and move forward and see everyone else suffer while I was feeling pretty well.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 5:46

So yeah, just an amazing amazing day.

Benedikt Hain: 5:48

My kids were greeting at the finish line and it was just awesome.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 5:52

Yeah, oh, that's great. Super happy to hear that. Well done. It's amazing and terrifying that you're capable of that. Thank you, man. Thank you, let's see what's next.

Benedikt Hain: 6:02

I don't know, I'm already thinking about the next adventure, so we'll see.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 6:07

Yeah.

Benedikt Hain: 6:08

And today is day five after the race and walking still hurts. So it's going to take a while, until I get back into running, but I think next week or something I will start slowly again and then I'm actually looking forward to the off season now because there's a lot of training and I'm looking forward to more casual, shorter, fun runs and not the training plan.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 6:29

That's great. Well for some music-related banter. I am doing a show tonight, oh wow the day of this recording. Yeah, so that'll be fun. I borrowed back this Evertoon guitar I had that I sold to one of our podcast listeners and who came to the meetup, derek Madden and he let me borrow it back so I could play the show with it, and I regret selling it so much. So just a reminder to our audience don't sell gear that you need, and it was like that was stupid. Maybe you use a strong word, but Evertoon guitars. I can see them in need now.

Benedikt Hain: 7:06

Yes, totally, totally. And that was such a beautiful guitar in general, not just the Evertoon. I mean, I haven't played it, but I saw it and it was like it was the dream actually.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 7:14

It was silly. I'll see if I'll sell it back to me.

Benedikt Hain: 7:19

Why did you sell it again?

Malcom Owen-Flood: 7:21

Well, I'm not really playing anymore like shows anymore and I'm not producing bands anymore. I got it for the bands I produce, just to make their guitar tracking more affordable and efficient. So it just doesn't get. Didn't have a lot of use, but it is so nice.

Benedikt Hain: 7:36

Okay, have you borrowed it for the show now?

Malcom Owen-Flood: 7:37

Yeah, I borrowed it for the show and I don't plan to continue doing a lot of shows, but I think Evertoons are so good that even it's almost like the less you're doing, the more you need one, because it just makes it like one less thing to worry about.

Benedikt Hain: 7:53

Yeah.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 7:53

I'm playing guitar very much. Your intonation's a little shaky. Yeah, this thing just is like easy mode. It's just like oh, I'm good at this because my guitar doesn't go to tune.

Benedikt Hain: 8:05

Yeah, for sure we. We must stop playing right now, but the last show with Darian, because it's Darian, gerard, right, the show tonight.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 8:12

Yes, it is.

Benedikt Hain: 8:13

The last show you played with her was the Les Paul right.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 8:16

Yes, yeah, my Red Les Paul I brought out for Lake Townshake Town, which Benny came to when he was in Canada here, and that was fine. But I actually did notice that I was having a little bit of the infamous Gibson G-string tuning issues outside. It's just tricky to keep your guitar in tune on an outdoor stage or a new or club for that matter it's just always hard yeah.

Benedikt Hain: 8:37

So tonight it's probably indoor right this time of the year Indoor club.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 8:40

Yeah, it should be hot, sweaty, loud Should be good, Awesome, really cool.

Benedikt Hain: 8:44

Did you play with her since then? Is it the first one since then? No, no.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 8:48

We honestly just did our first jam since that show last night, so going in All right All right, all right, really cool, really cool, exciting, yeah.

Benedikt Hain: 8:58

So I got some music banter actually as well, because it's been a very rare new gig day for me this week, so I haven't bought stuff in quite a while, but this week I have and I'm excited about it. So I got this thing here. Can you show this into the camera? It's a meter, a TC electronic, the clarity meter thing. Oh cool that. I always want it, because now I don't have to have the analyzer as a plug-in open on my screen all the time and it's always open. I can not only analyze stuff in the DAW, but also Spotify and everything else and I can see the loudness and the analyzer and everything else I want to see on this thing. And it has a few cool features that I don't have in any software meter and it's not necessary, but I rely on metering quite a lot when I'm mixing and it's nice to have it on a separate screen, always visible and just something I've been wanting for a while. So I got this.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 9:58

That is by far the nerdiest audio engineer toy ever.

Benedikt Hain: 10:04

Yeah, it's kind of is, but it's really cool. Don't get it wrong, I'm jealous.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 10:11

But it's so funny. It's not like a distressor or some cool 2 pre-app. It's a meter yeah.

Benedikt Hain: 10:20

But it looks cool when you play music and there's lights and stuff going on.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 10:25

I get it. I'm sure somebody out there that's like what? Yeah, exactly.

Benedikt Hain: 10:30

No, it's not just that it looks cool and impressive. I actually know what those numbers are meaning. So, yeah, that is that, and then the other one. I think I can show this one, maybe I can.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 10:43

I've got two things.

Benedikt Hain: 10:44

Yeah, is this.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 10:46

Okay, I can kind of see what it is, but I can't really. Oh it's, is that an SSL?

Benedikt Hain: 10:52

Yeah.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 10:53

Wow.

Benedikt Hain: 10:54

It's not as cool as it looks actually. No, it's just a controller and I've been trying a thing now where I don't need any more gear or plugins or anything at this point. At the moment I feel like I'm very happy with everything I have. But what I've noticed lately is and probably because I took a break in the summer and went on vacation with my kids since I came back, I'm having a lot of fun mixing. I think it was really a necessary break and what I've discovered now is that I enjoy mixing intuitively and kind of I don't know differently a little bit than compared to what I did before. So I still use meters and stuff, but I really enjoy mixing, reacting to the music and kind of not looking at what I'm doing so much on like EQs and compressors and stuff. So long story short yeah, long story short, I use my controller way more than I did before, like my faders that I have here, and I use them almost like mixing on a console, more than anything now, and I wanted something where I could EQ and compress or control the stuff of my EQ and compression without seeing the plugin and with actually touching knobs. And so SSL has this controller that supports their native plugins that I use a lot, their SSL Challenge Strip and also the SSL Bus Compressor, and you can on this thing it looks like an SSL Challenge Strip and the Bus Compressor with the meter as well, and so you can't select any channel on that thing without having to select it in the DAW, so it doesn't show up on the screen. I can just select it here and then I can EQ with just the knobs and I don't see what it does on like a graph or something. And I always see my Bus Compressor at all times. I see the view meter moving, I see the parameters there, I see how hard I'm hitting my Mixbus without having to open the plugin, and I see the input and output of the channel that I've selected. And so I can now, with my faders here and this tool here do the entire sort of rough mix or first phase of the mix so basic EQ compression levels and automations and stuff without having to open a single plugin, which is awesome.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 12:55

I just see, you know.

Benedikt Hain: 12:56

I just hit play and I just go through the channels and just listen and react and then I can always go into the fancier plugins and do some fine tweaking and it's been a real fun way of mixing lately. And so basically what I'm trying to do is not get another tool for sound, but like trying a different workflow and seeing if that leads to different results. If it inspires me and if it's like a different way of mixing, that is fun, and if I don't end up liking it I'm going to send it back or sell it, but so far it's been a lot of fun. So fantastic.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 13:26

Yeah, no, that's really cool, man. I'm excited to see how this workflow develops for you and, yeah, if you're thinking it's getting better results ultimately because that's the end goal, I'm sure.

Benedikt Hain: 13:37

But the only bummer is I love the brainworks, ssl consoles and stuff so much and those don't work. With that controller you can only use the SSL native stuff. But maybe it's a limitation that's good. You know, if I figure that this is all I really need, then cool Five less plugins to worry about Manually write the MIDI to the controller. No, it is designed by SSL to automatically work with those.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 14:01

Like, every knob has exactly one function and it's just right, but it's ultimately a MIDI controller, right?

Benedikt Hain: 14:07

I don't actually know how it works. You need the SSL 360 software is what they call it. It's like a software mixer that recognizes this thing, and then you calibrate the meter, and then you don't have to do anything, you don't have to even select it as a MIDI controller in the DAW, it just works, you just.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 14:22

Right, I still wonder if you could go in and train. Oh, no, you can't Learn other plugins, no, you can't.

Benedikt Hain: 14:29

It's not a MIDI controller. It doesn't even show up as a MIDI controller in the DAW it just you install the software. It's plug and play. You install the software and then you open up a session and automatically the SSL plugins are on that thing and nothing else is. But you can't do anything else with it All right, at least the good plugins. Yeah, and it's exactly. It looks exactly like a SSL challenge strip, so every knob has exactly one function, and it's like it even has the same colors and the same knobs as the console, so it's very intuitive. I just look at it and know exactly what I'm doing.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 14:59

So yeah, cool.

Benedikt Hain: 15:00

Yeah, it's fun. It's definitely fun.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 15:03

All right, so that's about 16 minutes of band listening. Yeah, totally, at least some kind of listening period. Most of it was on topic yeah, exactly.

Benedikt Hain: 15:12

So let's get to the episode. Yeah, as we said, we get to work on a lot of different songs every month, and many of them are home recordings, which I'm excited about, because that's what we're all about, and it's cool to see so much art coming from home studios and bands from all over the world. But naturally, those source tones often have problems, right, because it's not professional to record them, and so we always try and optimize at the source At least I do, and I think you do the same, malcolm, with the artists we're working with. So whenever there's an opportunity to coach them or give them feedback, and we try to do it. But still, sometimes they're sending us tracks that where it's just too late, they can't do anything about it, and we have to kind of deal with it. So we thought, because we're explaining this stuff all the time to the people we're working with, we might just as well explain it to you, so you don't even run into these situations. And, by the way, these things are not only important if you're working with someone else, and not only if you're sending it to a mixing engineer, but also when you're mixing yourself, because you don't want to sabotage yourself and you want to give yourself the best chance of creating an awesome mix and make it more creative and straightforward and the less frustrating sort of experience and also, final note here, before we finally get to the mistakes, is that none of these things have to do with not having some sort of gear, anything that would like. There's nothing in it that would cost you lots of money. Everything we talk about here, these are all things you can control and fix with the things you already have. And, yeah, so let's get to our lists that we have here, or to a little list of a couple of things that we picked, and go through these, and there will be more episodes like this, because there are. You know, it happens all the time, unfortunately, and our mission is to do this as often as we need until it doesn't happen anymore. So let's start with the first one. Malcolm, just you brought that up, so I'm curious to hear the ins and outs of it.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 17:02

Yeah, I mean this is broad ultimately, but there's a lot of the ways this can go wrong. But it's arguably the most important thing about your drum recording and that is getting your overheads right, and we're going to talk about a couple common mistakes we see with overheads recording. I know we've said it before in the podcast, but if you're new, like overheads can easily be the most important part of your drum recording, and they can. They should sound like a really great drum kit just by themselves generally. There are, of course, exceptions where you like set them really close and low to like just be essentially spot symbol mics, but even then it still sounds pretty banging. When you get it right, it should sound like a fun drum kit for sure. And there's yeah, there's some things that go just terribly wrong, and the one that's like my biggest pet peeve is when you've got a space pair. So everybody hopefully knows what a space pair is. You know mics split off onto each side of the kit. Two mics are left and a right. We won't get into which is which if you're the drummers or the audience perspective.

Benedikt Hain: 18:07

But when they are, then there's only one right way to do it, by the way, sorry.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 18:13

You bastard.

Benedikt Hain: 18:15

There's only one right way to do it for the record.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 18:18

I think Benny, and I disagree on this. I think really, yeah, I am audience perspective. Oh shit, no man.

Benedikt Hain: 18:25

No, no way, no drummers. Perfect is the only way. I want to, I want to, I want to air drum.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 18:33

Anyway, go ahead, go ahead. You know what I notice when people I see drummers listening to my songs, they still air drum, they don't notice.

Benedikt Hain: 18:40

I don't believe it. I don't believe it, it's, but yeah, okay, okay Okay.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 18:44

And you know what Drummers also do at concerts they air drum to their audience perspective.

Benedikt Hain: 18:52

You're totally right, I guess, yeah, all right. So you got a space pair.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 18:56

If you're on YouTube you can see my goofy hand gestures here One that Mike over the hi hat side, one over the ride, and then my pep eve is when those get tilted in so that they're both pointing to the opposite side of the kit and to me that makes literally zero sense. It you've now got the mic farthest away from the hi hat, pointed directly at the hi hat, so getting a more on access sound of the hi hat and then the mic farthest away from the ride is pointing at the ride and that's your on access sound for the ride, which is farther away. So gonna be less, less clean of a capture of those two sources but also means that the mic, the sounds under those microphones, are off-axis and gonna be essentially worse usually, and so so you've got like your captures, kind of your on-axis captures told the opposite and and the theory I think why people think this is a good idea is because we always say like your snare needs to be in the middle. You know you need to get your snare center between those two. So you're kind of trying to point your snare at both the mics but in reality you're just gonna point the snare, but yeah, you're right, you're right. You know what I mean. Like they're kind of aiming them at the snare. Yeah and let I can see how that makes sense. But if you remember what I just said about the hot now, now your hi-hat is more directly in the far mic, away from it. Now your stereo image is just told the wonked right, so somebody hits the hi-hat and you hear it more clearly in the wrong side of the drum kit. It's a bummer.

Benedikt Hain: 20:27

To the one above, but the other one is aiming at it, which is really weird. Thank you exactly so.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 20:32

Not only is the image told the wrong, your phase is super wonky and you end up with this very comb-filtery Kind of sound where, like all of the cymbals have this Kind of like getting to it and it's a blanket of badness across your entire mix for the entire song that you just cannot get rid of. It is so upsetting, yep.

Benedikt Hain: 20:53

Absolutely. In fact, I often do the exact opposite of that, especially when what I love to do is like with with ribbon mics where you have a figure of eight pattern. I slightly tilt them to the outside of the kitchen slightly, not drastically, because then the null of the mic is pointing to the other side of the kit, which is the opposite effect of what you just said. And then you have a very wide image where it's like a lot of separation between left and right. It's sometimes too extreme, but you know, if I tilt them, I do. I'd rather do that and get some more isolation between left and right. Then do the opposite, you know. So yeah yeah, yeah.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 21:26

So now the the general setup is to small diaphragm condensers. That's what we generally see people throw up, and what I would suggest as a starting point is to say him straight down, directly down, and. And then we, we still need to like you if you were doing this other way. Your, your assumption of getting the stereo image centered, with the snare Sounding like it's in the middle, is a really good thing to still try and do. But you don't do that by aiming the microphones. You do that by moving the microphone, still aiming straight down. That that's kind of the trick, and I Do want to point out that I'm sure somebody legendary has done what I just said don't do and had great results. Yeah, in general, you're gonna have better results if you don't do that. And I do Also see that technique of aiming them inward on stage at like every festival I ever go to, and there's got to be a reason. I'm not a live sound mixer, so I don't know why that seems to be the case, but I notice it all the time and I think it's probably a rejection thing that they're trying to avoid the spill of other Instruments and wedges and stuff like that. I think that's got to be why they're doing it, but I also don't really know. Yeah, but generally in the studio, like that will be a 25% easy improvement on your your drum sound by just changing the orientation of where your mics are tilted 100% yes period. Also, oh yeah, go ahead, Mm-hmm, same thing with your room mics.

Benedikt Hain: 22:55

Yeah, depends on where they are, but the closer they are to the kid, the more this is true. Definitely, if they are something like very far away in some corner or whatever, doesn't really matter.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 23:03

But essentially a mu-point. Yeah, but if they're like you know, the six foot away close.

Benedikt Hain: 23:06

Yeah, my kind of thing.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 23:09

Yeah, it's the same principle.

Benedikt Hain: 23:10

Yeah, now the only thing where it this might sound counterintuitive or like where you wondering why that then works, the only you know exception would be it's not really an exception, but what I want to say is, if you do an x y meaning the capsules are like a 90 degree angle, exactly aligned at the Center of somewhere in the center of the kit, above the center of the kit, it looks like you're doing a similar thing, but you do, you're not. So this works because a the capsules are in the exact same place, so you don't have any phase issues anyways, because the time there's no time difference between left and right, and then also One is facing that way, the other one is facing that way. If you're watching on YouTube now, it's a 90 degree angle, so it looks like they are sort of crossing, like in the example that Malcolm just described, but they are in the same place and so it's different. It you know, and and and you can all absolutely do that. But if they are apart and you're doing kind of the x y angle, then it's where you get into trouble, and not only because of all the things that Malcolm just described those are reasons enough but that there's other negative side effects actually that come with that because you might be pointing Like with any angle you have to be careful, because you might be pointing at the edge of a symbol, for example, and if you're not coming from straight from right above, but from somewhere from the side, the movement of the symbol in front of the mic like this will cause another sort of fluttering weird effect, where you know the symbol moves when you hit it and it every time it crosses, sort of where the microphone is pointing at. You have this null and then you have an increase and a decrease in level above and below that and so you have this fluctuating, moving, weird symbol wash, whereas from above, if the symbol moves, there's always sound pressure, there's no null at the at the moment where the symbol sort of moves past the microphone diaphragm if that makes sense and like a lot of these things and so yeah, go, come from straight above, and you have another episode. By the way, on this, it's called Overheads are not just symbol mics. So to me there's two approaches and and we've discussed this where they can either be symbol mics or they capture the whole. They always capture the whole kit, but the priority can be symbols or a representation of the entire kit, including shells. So you've got to make that decision. Either way, make sure, kick and snare our center of the image and then Decide if you want to focus more on the shells or the symbols. As I said, and whenever possible, I'd say, even when you focus on the shells, try and not aim at the edges of any symbol. Try to make to make the movement of the Symbol below the mic minimal. So, if possible, aim at the center, somewhere close to the center of a symbol, avoid drastic angles and just make sure. Basically, the only thing you really have to do is listen to the overhead recording, the stereo recording of those two, like pandemhar left and right, listen to it and make sure that kick and snare are centered and that the top end sounds really clear, like you can hear where the cymbals are. So the stereo image has to be clear and the highest shouldn't sound like a bad mp3, because that's what it kind of sounds like this weird cancellation thing in the top end. You've got to get used to it a little bit or you have to learn how to hear that, but you definitely don't want that. You want a clear, defined top end where with clear separation, a clear stereo image and the kick and snare in the center, and you just don't stop moving the mics until that happens.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 26:31

That's basically it. Yeah, you just listen, listen, listen. And I think it seems to me that hearing that comb filtering phase issue is tricky for beginners. I don't think they notice it right away. Maybe the monitoring is kind of not very well treated and it's just hard and drums are hard to in a DIY setup you probably don't have an isolated control room, you know. So if you're trying to listen, well, the drummer's hitting the drums, you won't have a clue what's happening right, unless you have like a perfectly isolated room because you're hearing the drums in the room so you have to record and then listen without the drums actually being played. That's a really good thing to think about too.

Benedikt Hain: 27:08

You want a good picture of the entire kit from just the overheads, basically, until it sounds like a drum kit. It doesn't have to have the most like the punchiest shells or whatever, but it should sound like a drum kit where everything has. You know, everything is in place, everything is where it's supposed to be, because this also tells you what you have to support. So you will notice if some cymbal is quieter than all the others and then you know you've got to put a spot mic there. It tells you a lot about what to do with the rest of the mics. So that is one thing. And then what always helps is just listen to a lot of your favorite recordings and productions from other people and just learn to hear the top end properly. Just listen to those records, listen to just the cymbals. If you need to, just pull them into your DAW, put a like a low cut on it and just listen to the top end and compare it to yours, and then you'll at some point you'll notice what we mean here and you should notice a drastic difference in clarity and separation and stereo field in general. And just repeat that exercise. Listen to a lot of records that way until you get close to it.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 28:11

Yes, now I got two pro tips and techniques to discuss here that I think are really important. Number one is this panning thing Benny just mentioned. Pan one hard left and one hard right and listen to them together to get your stereo image, and that is 100% correct to do that every time. And why I'm mentioning this is because you might have seen on some mixing tutorials somewhere somebody changed that panning to correct stereo image on something they're mixing and that is because it wasn't done correctly in the tracking phase. If they'd done it correctly in the tracking phase they would just left it hard left and hard right, but it's because the staring kick weren't centered in that image that they had to manipulate it to try and make that happen with panning. So when you are tracking 100% hard left, hard right and move the mics, not the pan knob, to get that image right.

Benedikt Hain: 29:02

Absolutely, because you mentioned it when we started talking about our outline today. Bonus thing maybe you got the mic positions exactly right and everything we talked about and it still sounds weird and like this kind of phasy top end. Another reason for that could be that those mics are very close to the ceiling and there's no absorber above it, or the drum kit is very close to a wall without any absorption. So if you got any kind of early reflections from like hard surfaces, the walls or, most commonly, the ceiling, you get not only the sound directly from the kit into the overheads but also the reflection from that ceiling or the wall and because it's so close it will arrive almost at the same time as the direct sound and it will be. So what the mic is going to be capturing is a mix of the cymbal sound and whatever's coming back from the walls, and this will also cancel out, will sound phasy and can create a really big mess. And so having a cloud above the drum kit, some sort of thick, loose absorber type of thing, that just helps so much and also around the drum kit, if you can build a forward or just put mattresses against the wall or whatever, it's just the closest walls. If you can treat that, it's going to be 100 times better. You're going to have less bleed in every mic. You're going to have less phase issues. The walls further away are not so much an issue, because sound takes time to travel across the room and then we'll perceive it more as a room sound and our brain can separate that from the direct thing, but anything that's really close to it avoid it at all costs. This is really oftentimes the case. It's one of the most common problems with small room drum recordings.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 30:41

I'd say yeah, I can't believe we almost missed that. That's almost the same thing, as, like I can instantly hear if the drums were recorded but the mics pointed in, and then I can instantly hear if it was recorded with a low ceiling. Anything you can do to get a taller ceiling is good.

Benedikt Hain: 30:57

Oh yeah, taller ceiling helps as well. If the ceiling is really high, you maybe don't have to have any sort of absorption In most small rooms. Definitely put something on the ceiling there and you know the thing about the overheads. Why it's so important also is that it's the one thing you really have to get right when you're recording real drums, because if there's a problem with the close mics, there's ways to fix it. We can work with samples, we can manipulate it in all kinds of ways, but with the overheads, unless you want us to completely reprogram the drums, the overheads are going to stay there and they are such a big part of the sound of the record and honestly, they are often what makes a record sound expensive or amateur Like. If that just isn't right, it's just not right, it just doesn't work, and so it's so important. It's really the one thing you have to nail, even if you get everything else wrong.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 31:45

I'd say Absolutely, yeah, 100% agree. It's not really fixable. You can just polish it a little bit and try and try and try to like, honestly, if we had a worst case scenario low ceiling, no treatment, and they're crisscrossed and not there's no stereo image taken into consideration I'm going to try not to use them as much as possible and try and let bleed through on other mics. Sometimes that will sound better than the overheads for the cymbals and hopefully you've got a room mic that can save the day.

Benedikt Hain: 32:17

It really can just be like a total deal breaker, which is why Benny and I are so passionate about this, yeah absolutely Funny side note when we started the self-recording band or when I started it four years ago I think 2019, and I sent out the first couple of emails and I wrote some blog posts. That was how I started. I remember a mastering engineer, a pretty famous mastering engineer from Germany, who I've worked with before. He signed immediately, immediately signed up to my email list back then and he got one of the first emails where I was just asking people about the biggest problems, what I should make content on and I just wanted to get a feel for what problems are. And that mastering guy who's worked for all kinds of very big artists as well I don't know thousands of amateurs, probably in home recordings he immediately got back to me and said overheads three exclamation marks, so that mastering guy has had fixed a lot of weird top-end mixes, I guess. So that was the first thing he immediately sent was like tell people how to record overheads properly and balance them.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 33:18

Totally, totally. We still had a couple of things here. If you have a low ceiling and, like Benny said, do whatever you can to staple something to the ceiling, I don't care, give her, but play with your height. The lower you go, the trade-offs to go. In low they become more spot-mic-like. The cymbals are going to be much more direct sounding if you get low, but the ceiling gets farther away. So you are changing that signal-to-noise ratio of the reflection and improving that, and that can be necessary.

Benedikt Hain: 33:52

So keep that in your back pocket and then also, the lower you get if you have a space pair, the bigger the difference between the mics relative to the distance to the kit, the less likely you are to run into phase issues. So yes, there's a trade-off. It's more direct, but it's also less likely that you get run into phase issues because the mics are closer to the direct source and those sources are different from one another and so you get less phase issues. The higher you get, the more similar the things are that those mics are recording, the less likely you are going to run into phase issues. So there's pros and cons to both. But when in doubt, I'd say in small rooms, try going a little lower and still find a spot where it doesn't sound like you're just making one symbol.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 34:37

Definitely, definitely, and with your mics aiming down. Not I would say, the lower you go with your mics facing in, the worse things get.

Benedikt Hain: 34:47

Maybe that is also a reason, though, why people are doing it, maybe because of I haven't thought about it, but think about it maybe because of the low ceiling, and then trying to get away from it and trying to stay close to the kit that, in an effort to still capture the whole kit, they angle it to, not just get the symbol below it, right.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 35:03

So maybe they're trying to get you know.

Benedikt Hain: 35:05

Aim across the kit in an attempt to capture more of it so that I could see that you know.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 35:10

I could see that, but the same thing applies just move your mic, not your, do an X.

Benedikt Hain: 35:16

Y in the middle of the kit though, because in small rooms and the room sounds terrible and you need to get close to the kit. Just do the X? Y, because then you have the angle across the entire kit but you don't have to phase issues. You can get close. You will have more punchy shells and everything, and then if you feel like a symbol is too quiet, just put a spot mic there. But I would rather do an X? Y than try to do some wonky, you know, space pair.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 35:39

Yeah, we keep stumbling upon like we're trying to fix a problem, but it could all be solved with X Y. X Y is so hard to mess up and it does sound really good. I prefer a space pair generally. Yeah, if done right if done right in the right room with good gear, generally with with great symbols and XY is just like a this is gonna work. Just go for it. That's a great point. But on the topic of doing space pairs, still, I do want to mention measuring, and this is like there's no reason not to do this, in my opinion. A measuring tape is a fantastic thing to have, of course, and you can just measure from your center of kit or there's schools of thought here. I like to do like this line through the kick and snare and figure out like a center of kit kind of spot that is gonna put both of those instruments in the center right, because you're kicking your snare aren't in a line. If you're looking straight, it's kind of diagonal them.

Benedikt Hain: 36:41

There's a trick to getting that right. By the way, I don't know if you do that, malcolm, but you can use a cable and you hold it. You hold, like, the end of the cable down at the center of the snare and then you take the cable and you know, make it straight and touch one of the mics and then the other, and like somewhere in the middle of the cable You're touching the mic and then the other end of the cable goes down and you Fix that, like you attach that to the center of the kick drum, so you have this triangle, so between the snare and the kick drum, and you have a triangle, and then you keep it Both of both sides of it straight and then you move the entire triangle to the other side and try to reach the other mic and that way the distance to both the snare and the kick is the same. You don't? always have to do it exactly like that, but there's an easy, an easy way of achieving that.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 37:26

Yeah, yeah, the. The entire principle is make it the same distance to all all things. But that is a great way of pulling it off and, yeah, you can do it with a measuring tape or, like Benito said, I'm like cable will do in a pinch, right, it doesn't really matter. I mean, there's definitely people that would say it does matter what amount of inches You're going with. There's recommended inches based on the height of the room and based on, like, the height of your snare off the ground and stuff like that. And If you're gonna be doing multiple drum recordings that you want to match, you should actually note that stuff. I think that's really smart so you can try and recreate it closely. But in general, who cares if it sounds good? So just get them to match. So, yeah, just why not measure it right? Then you're not guessing on if your mics are placed pretty well and you are gonna get frustrated. You're gonna be like, oh, to make my far Overhead the same distance? It's now like way inside past my ride and my floor tom. So how do I? You have to like shift things and figure it out and and make it work.

Benedikt Hain: 38:28

Yeah, and what? What's gonna happen? Likely is that it's not gonna be what you often see on stages, for example, where the mics are in front of the drummer, left and right, but probably one is gonna be somewhere between the Like, from drummers perspective, the left crash and the hi-hat, and the other one's gonna be somewhere over the floor, tom and right, which is totally fine, and if you feel like the second crash, you know to the right of the drummer, is like Too quiet then or whatever, just put a spot like there. But it's usually you know, those mics are gonna be left and right off that line through the kick and the snare. Basically, so one is gonna be somewhere, you know, over the right shoulder of the drummer, like to the right somewhere, and the other one is like to the left front and that's perfectly, perfectly fine.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 39:10

Yeah, yeah, that brings up a great point, benny, in that they're not. Again, if you're facing the drummer, if you're like in line with the kick, they're not parallel, or, yeah, they're not. I Don't even know how to describe this. They're not the same distance away from you, right? It's added at this kind of Angle and and that looks unnatural, and I definitely had. I was doing this documentary on drumming and the the director was like is this right? Because like one's further back and like yes, trust me, yeah, exactly, totally fine.

Benedikt Hain: 39:42

And and when you listen to it and you hear the picture, you won't question it because it just works and it's the right way to do it. Yeah, and of course there's always the exception. I know people are gonna be like, yeah, but as you said, I've seen this picture where they did exactly the other way. Sure, there's always the exception and not every everyone. You know measures the distance and stuff, but if you do it, you won't be far off, at least like you're gonna be in the bar park ballpark. And I think you should only break rules if you intentionally break them and you know what you're doing. And if you're not sure what you're doing, then just stick to those best practices and you won't be wrong.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 40:14

So yes, yeah, I we're kind of beating the dead horse, but I think really, picture that Mike's in and why that's a bad idea Concept in your head and you'll learn a lot about phase and how to set up mics in general. Yeah, you just picture the time of you know that imaginary hi-hat reaching that far mic versus the mic right above it. That really does good things for your brain and understanding. Oh right, that's kind of a weird thing to do because people do stuff like that all the time on stereo mic in all sorts of stuff. Yeah, true, true.

Benedikt Hain: 40:47

All right, let's get to the next one here, because we have two more and those will be a little quicker, I think, but just as important.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 40:52

So, yeah, we started on the juicy one Exactly.

Benedikt Hain: 40:57

So what's the next one? That's all that's also coming from you, malcolm. So what? What happened?

Malcom Owen-Flood: 41:01

So this one is about clipping that you can't see on your interface, because that is most interfaces these days have something to indicate that you are clipping it, right. You know, if maybe there's a meter like my Apollo twin here has a little meter that goes from green to yellow to red, and red is a clip and there's even a little C that tells me clip and that is bad, generally right, we can safely assume we're not trying to clip our signal on the way in. We want to, you know, have a clean, unaltered signal and the. The problem that we're describing here, though, and the mistake that we've seen come in, is that that's not the only place something can clip. If you have anything else in your recording chain, there's potential for clipping at each, at each input stage, essentially so, or output stage actually. Yeah so so say, like the. The easy example would be running into like a compressor. If you rented a compressor for your vocal recording or something. Not all compressors have like distortion notifications, essentially you know like you can. You've got a gain meter that moves and shows how much compression you're doing and that doesn't tell you if you're distorting it. Right, that just tells you if you're compressing it and that's like generally what you're trying to do. So if you crank the heck out of that, you're gonna get distortion. And some compressors have little input preamps as well that you can clip, like there's. You can clip any stages. I'm just saying the same thing over and over, but Boiled this down to its concept is that you need to gain stage correctly at every single opportunity through your entire chain. And the. The mistake I most recently saw I won't call it the band, but it's fine, I've done it too guys is a UAD console plug-in which, if you're not familiar with the UAD interfaces, you can record through plugins and record through them. So it's like destructive recording. So you, if you use a compressor or, in this case, a need preamp To record your vocal through and you drive that preamp too hard, you will clip and distort that signal on the way into Pro Tools. And there's no. Or, your dog, there's no taking that back. You've, you've committed it as if it was a piece of hardware, and that can be good if you do it correctly. But in this case it was bad. And why it happened is that this distortion option, this driving this Preamp plug-in, doesn't get represented accurately on the meter of the interface itself. So you're not seeing red on the interface. So they just assumed, well, there's no red, we're not clipping, but they were in fact clipping. So it's really like you have to be more careful than just looking at one spot, looking at the first, the meter on your interface, for example. You have to check everything else, and you really have to do use your ears as well, and then, as a an extra safe backup, you can actually look at the like the wave file that you recorded and see if it is chopped off.

Benedikt Hain: 43:57

Yeah, yeah, totally yeah, and it's yeah, nothing to add here. I think the one thing I kept thinking about is when you went to intentionally use those plugins to create a sound and clip them, and when it's a bad thing, you know. But if I'd say, if it's like as always, if it's not intentional, it's probably bad, and if it's right, random, where just the peaks are Clipping, it's mostly bad. So if you want to distort something, you probably want it to be some sort of like consistent distortion or saturation. So yeah, and when in doubt, just don't do it probably. Just do it intentionally if you really want it and otherwise Be careful with yeah, the problem isn't clipping, the problem is not knowing your clipping.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 44:38

Yeah, exactly that's what we're trying to educate about is just like you need to Make sure that all of the input stages are set up correctly and and you know, even honestly even your microphone can clip like there's a potential for clipping anything so you just have to make sure that whatever is meant to be happening is happening.

Benedikt Hain: 44:58

Absolutely, absolutely. By the way, talking about microphones and gains, totally unrelated, but it just came to mind. Did you hear the new about the new, sure SM7 thing?

Malcom Owen-Flood: 45:08

Yes, they released yesterday. I think it's relevant for our audience.

Benedikt Hain: 45:11

But, like I will just tell you guys, if you don't already have an SM7 the mic that we always recommend like a dynamic mic, that sounds really great. Sure, it just released a new version of that yesterday, which is the exact same mic, but they finally integrated like a pre amp into the mic so you don't have to have a cloud lifter or a fat head anymore. I haven't tried it yet, but that's what it's supposed to do and I think I we can trust them that it works. So now you finally have an SM7 with more gain and less noise, and so you can now record beautiful levels Without you know the noise floor. That was always annoying. So now is the time to get an SM7.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 45:46

I think totally yeah, I want one yeah.

Benedikt Hain: 45:51

Although I have one, I kind of want one too, just because I think it's so cool yeah yeah.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 45:55

I sold mine and got this, this pod mic, which is great as well. But, I think I preferred the SM7. It was just I didn't like having to have the extra accessory to make it loud, so it kind of solved the problem for me.

Benedikt Hain: 46:07

Okay, oh, don't you use the cloud lifter or the fat head with that one.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 46:11

I do not know really oh.

Benedikt Hain: 46:13

Because I know quite a few people who have that same mic but still use a fat tab because it's got kind of the same problem as the SM7 at least that's what they're telling me.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 46:21

I don't find that to be the case. I'm not turned up much at all.

Benedikt Hain: 46:24

Okay, yeah, and you have. You ever have a good preamp Also, so yeah, I do.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 46:27

Yeah, that is definitely. Yeah, maybe with a focus writer.

Benedikt Hain: 46:30

I mean yeah.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 46:30

I haven't used a focus ring so long. I got to stop ragging on them. Their newer ones could be totally fine, but they're they are actually their gen 2 would have, you would have had to turn it up a lot.

Benedikt Hain: 46:40

Yeah, I've heard the difference just not not too long ago, between the, the gen 3 and the gen 4 of the scarlet that just came out. The Gen 4 and Because I've heard good things about it and I got finally got to hear it, and from just a quick test that I was impressed. That preamps are less noisy. The monitoring, like. The conversion sounded like really better you could tell, which is not often the case these days, because converse are generally good, latencies, cool. They got an auto gain feature now, so I don't think at this point like I might start recommending those again. So I didn't with the past.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 47:13

We have our heartfelt apology.

Benedikt Hain: 47:17

Yeah, no, I want to apologize for it. I talk a shit about the old ones but the new one is. That is really good. No, I mean, people have made great records with the old ones too.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 47:28

But it's totally the only crappy product that I've constantly still recommended, because it was actually the value was totally there, they were so affordable, yeah. Good, good Um back again now not crappy apparently.

Benedikt Hain: 47:40

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it could be a good combo. Then you focus right plus the SM7 and you got a great, you know a little change there. Cool, awesome, which is crazy to think about, by the way, because, like, you spend 700 bucks or something and you got a really, really cool, you know, recording setup, which is my boy. But yeah, okay, final thing on the list here this is a classic. We've had it in another episode like this, but it was a slightly different situation. I think, and this is the eyes and amps are not the same take, and so, even if we already had that in the previous episode, sometimes, you know, there's the saying we need to be reminded more than we Need to be taught, so I'm gonna say it again the last time. I also think I was talking about them trying to send the same take, but they messed up the comping and so it wasn't the same take. This time I'm talking about an artist who actually two artists who sent Di track for each guitar and an amp track for each guitar, and they, they did it because they thought they were doing the right thing. So I don't, you know, I don't want to. You know that the intention was was great and they, they, they did want to do the right thing, but they misunderstood something. If you do that, if you send or if you track a di and an amp for one guitar part, you want to do it for the same take. You want to split up the signal and record the di and the amp or amps, or Mike, or whatever at the like, with at the same time, you want to record the exact same take and you have to make sure that it stays that way. What they did was they recorded a di or an amp and then they did another pass and recorded the other thing and then they sent the two together, and this is not the the way to do it. I mean, you can't do that and I can, then, you know, use it as a double or whatever, but it's not that you can mix, you can blend the two, because what they did was they sent those things and they said you can create a blend or you can, you know, re-amp the di and blend it with the other thing, but yeah, this sounds like two performances Then it's not the same thing. So if you really want to create a blend between the two or give me the option to use either, or Make sure it's the same, it's exactly the same take, split it up.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 49:43

Yeah, yeah, that's. It's just, you're doing extra work For less results if you're double tracking it and I've had that issue a couple times as well this isn't a common one, but when it does happen, it's like ah, I feel sorry for them.

Benedikt Hain: 49:56

Yeah, because they they said oh, I'm gonna, you know, I hear here's the guy as well, in case you know and I feel bad for them because, yeah, but I can't only use either, or I can't use them both, or I can't do what I would usually do with it, and it's not like the safety net thing.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 50:10

It's like two different takes, so yeah exactly, and, and what I found is, when that happens, both aren't that great, it's? Like they've kind of like split their focus and and like, yeah, you think you can just hear them being bummed out as a recording justice di track with no amp sound, yeah, and it can't be that great performance.

Benedikt Hain: 50:29

Yeah, and it totally and you can't be that great because they did it didn't send the one awesome take like you you're supposed to commit the one Perfect, like best take you could pull off and it should have both the di and the amp and and when you send both, one of them will be better than the other. Inevitably it's not gonna be the one take and then I either have to guess which one is better or you have to tell me which one is better. And it's not ideal, like send the one take for each part and ideally record both the di and the amp but at the same time.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 50:57

Yes, that, that really is it.

Benedikt Hain: 50:59

Yeah, all right, those were our mistakes of this month. We got a few more that we didn't include because we've already been going for almost an hour. So we're gonna do another episode like that and I think these are really fun. So it's it's for us, it's fun to talk about these things and I think it's really helpful for you too, because ultimately, that's what it's all about. I think it's much more oftentimes like any sort of education I feel like is more about avoiding mistakes than it is about, you know, doing things exactly the way someone else does it like. If you avoid the most common mistakes, you will be much better off than before and you will be on the right path. You don't? There's a lot of different ways to get to the goal. As long as you avoid the most common mistakes, you know you can take, you can find your own path, you can do whatever you want, but don't like fall into these, into these traps and I think it's.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 51:47

I think it's easier to understand why we recommend certain like the you know techniques when you see, like understand why something that doing it wrong is a mistake, right. So like in theory of understanding the phase problems introduced with a bad overhead setup Gives you an understanding of how to set up Proper techniques, and not just you know. We talked about space pair for most of that episode, but the same phase principles apply to any any overhead setup, so it's like it gives you just an understanding on a deeper level when you think about mistakes.

Benedikt Hain: 52:20

Yeah, totally, and and I always think about it like if someone asks me for a way from here to there, you know they are here and they want to get to this point. I think of it as like a map, and I don't have to show them the exact way, as long as they know like here's a cliff and here's a trap and there's, you know, a train crossing or whatever. As long as you avoid these deadly things, you will get to the other side and you know there's different ways to get there, but just don't fall off the cliff, don't cliff, don't fall into this thing and don't get run over by the train.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 52:48

Yeah, and in fact you might have missed a turn.

Benedikt Hain: 52:50

So you just gotta go backwards and they, you know, yeah, exactly so, and so I think these, these are valuable episodes, absolutely definitely cool.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 52:59

Yeah, all right it was about 15 minutes of running and ever tuned trats. 40 minutes of Malcolm pissed off about overhead set up and then we hit 10 minutes to cover the second two options.

Benedikt Hain: 53:14

This just goes to show how important the drum thing is. Yeah, yeah, I wonder if people if there's a way to mess it up with like program drums. But probably if you use a good sampler it's not because they're attract well, so yeah, it should be pretty straightforward in that case.

Malcom Owen-Flood: 53:27

The issues would come in the mix at that point.

Benedikt Hain: 53:29

Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for listening and, as always so, yeah, talk to you next week, take care, take care. Bye you.