Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Two words... rap school. Learn the craft, ask questions, be interactive. Find out what makes the technical MC's so efficient at writing, and which areas you need to improve on.

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Alvin
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Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by Alvin »

Ok, so by no means am I the best, nor the worst for that matter lol. So here I am, one man, all alone, one team of I, against the world, on a site, with a tank of gas, and an electric bicycle.

Anyhow, this is my process, as wrong as I may be, or right. It may help you, or maybe you can help me.


1st.) I have a condenser Mic, so phantom power on, create new audio track, select mono recording, and check the levels, usually having the mic volume about 1/3 of the volume capacity.

2nd.) Import beat into its own track.

3rd.) Turn off speakers, create silence, select the monitor icon so I can hear myself through the headphones, stand about a foot from mic and project my voice past the mic while recording.

4th.) Deselect the monitor option, playback to make sure I’m satisfied, once satisfied, create another track, mono recording.

5th.) Reselect monitor option, proceed to record dubs, or words I want highlighted throughout my verse.

6th.) Once satisfied with the playback, turn the speakers back on, and set speaker volume at about the same volume capacity as elevator music, with speakers at ear level. (It’s important to not exhaust your ears with loud mixing, until you are ready for the loud mixing. Also, try and form a triangle with your head as one point and the two speakers as the others.)

7th.) place everything on mute except track 1 and open up track 1s (main vocal verse) effects input. I place a compressor(using a built in setting, [in case you don’t know, it makes you sound louder by raising your lows and lowering your highs until its even as possible]) and EQ (starting from a stock setting, hitting the knobs till I sound like a million dollars), tweak until it sounds nice.

8th.) Do the same for the dubs, not using the same settings because this Is not my PRIMARY VERSE. Once effects sound nice, I solo the main verse, and dubs, so I don’t hear the beat. I playback to make sure my dubs perfectly line up with the verse, and delete, move, shorten, etc. anything out of place.

9th.) Next I open my mixer and start playing with the volumes, making sure nothing is too loud, nothing is too soft, making sure my dubs are lower than my main verse. I fix the volumes to each track individually.

10th.) Once my volumes are nice, and I’m not longer clipping, I place a protection limiter on the main master volume(just in case I’m missing a sound) and boom. Pretty much done.

11th.) Export track as MP3, stereo flip. DONE


Now the above are steps I take for the simplest recording ever.
I also tem to add an FX channel, with another compressor, a slight reverb, and patch every track through there to combine everything. Adds me the nice all together sound, also increasing the volume of my voice without actually raising any volumes. Another tactic is recording two separate dub tracks and soft panning them each. Soft panning: panning works in numbers on my program, so instead of going to 50 R, which is all the way right (hard panning), I soft pan and go 25 R. same for the Left side. Anyhow, like I said, this is not the right way, this is my way. Explain your way, or give me tips, ideas. If you sound worse than I do, try my way, incorporate something I do into yours, erno, someone needed to do this.

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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by jayzon_black »

Pan,

Good stuff as always. And from my experience you hit it on the nail.

I mean from the setup (condensors with phantom, triangulated monitors, mic position) to the vocal layering, nice work.

One thing that might make the mixing process easier is the usage of busses, instead of sending everything to stereo outs, you can send the output of specific channels to busses to make audio groups, so say you know that you are going to do a lot of punch work (ie. punching in and out for a verse instead of going the full 16/24/36 w/e), you might want to send all of the main verse vox to one buss you can add effects/adjustments to one channel to affect all of the recorded material.

You can also use busses to add subtle effects to recorded work without changing the core channel properties. This is more for taste of workflow but it's an option.

Honestly you kept it simple and that should work for most people. From there all that beginners would really want to learn is how EQ and Compression works, and how to get things to really blend and tighten up.

EQ is like volume control on different frequencies and compression is just like Panda said a way to get the sound to exist on a tighter playing field by decreasing the loud and increasing the soft parts to find a happy medium (it really just squashes the dynamic range of the work, so keep that in mind as well if you or your vocalist is trying to be extremely expressive).

Beyond that, not much to really add on a general tip, but I'm always available for engineering advice, mixing, mastering, recording, hardware, whateva.
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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by Defiance »

thanks guys my shits going to be tight.
i appreciate it very much
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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by AntiMaTTer »

good stuff. now just send me some NEW RAM...so i can record...damn
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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by jayzon_black »

Anti, RAM is going for dirt cheap on amazon depending on the size and type you are looking for. Just do a quick search and you might be surprised at the results.
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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by AntiMaTTer »

jayzon_black wrote:Anti, RAM is going for dirt cheap on amazon depending on the size and type you are looking for. Just do a quick search and you might be surprised at the results.
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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by Tha Dark Prince »

this some good info guys..

I been wonderin though, is there a certain setting of eq that works well with vocals generally? Like, is there one y'all normally always use for vocals? I find it kinda irratating coz i can never get it perfect, my equip is kinda basic i've a rode podcaster usb mic and use audacity since it's simple, and this is basically the result
4shared.com/audio/e5OGfPBh/25_-_Takin_Ya_Back.html
does that sound right? I really wanna have 'em as perfect as i can

any help would be greatly appreciated

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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by jayzon_black »

Hey DP,

Not bad off top. The first thing I noticed is that the vocals are a little loud compared to the instrumental track, so I would either pull off on the make-up gain in the compression or turn the audio track head down in the mixer.

As for EQ, I like to start with a low cut, somewhere around 200hz that gets rid of any electrical feedback/unwanted boominess that comes from bad acoustical treatment/ muddiness from the vocal in general. From there you want to clue into where the vocal sits in the mix. Typically a track has the bass line which lives in the low frequencies, the kick which is lo-mid, the vocals which is mid, the snare which is mid-hi, and the cymbals which is hi. Any other layers that might be added go in there appropriate places but typically speaking this is the basic layout for sound frequencies.

So with that in mind, everything in your mix needs it's own space, EQ can help you shape out the sound to achieve that. Try rolling off the unneeded frequencies first (some people boost the wanted frequencies but that causes issues with gain and resulting levels). So for the kick, unless there is a refraction in the hi's you want to capture, roll off the hi's because most to all of the wanted sound is in the lo-mid areas. Keeping in mind that the bass line lives under the kick in most tracks you'll want to give the kick a low cut too so the bass line has a place to ride.

Use this same approach for the vocals and you should be fine. Roll off the lows to get rid of the unwanted, roll off a little of the hi's so the rim shots/rides/cymbals can breath and it's not too airy, give a slight boost to the mid-hi's to add some crispness to the vocal track and you should be good.

If you have some presets on your rig, start there and then try the tweaks I've talked about to see if you like it. Overall like anything it's about personal taste, a mix that sounds great to you can sound like shit to the next set of ears.
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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by Tha Dark Prince »

4sho thanks I appreciate that man, will be readin through this again when I'm mixin next
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Re: Help the Panda, Help YOU.

Post by Alvin »

Any other problems arise or questions... ANYONE?
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