the zen of minimalism in the age of gluttony

wow!
awesome!!
certainly there's more than one way to look at things.
and I am a dyed in the wool gear loving guy.
and I love lush beautiful arrangements and orchestration.
and beautiful counterpoint, multi layer melody, poly rhythms, Latin percussion and rhythms and all kinds of stuff.
that said, for years now, I record myself with 1 microphone, playing 1 unplugged acoustic guitar.
2 stages of mild compression on the way in. maybe an RND 542 (lately not).
trying to get a great front end capture.
listen back (when I do), with little to no effects (although I just started using the Klanghelm MJUC).
yeah, minimalist.
big fan of it.

What we're chasing with all our gear hunting is a satisfying level of quality. It depends on the intended use of what we're writing and recording, whether its satisfying or not.

A demo done to show a song to band members might not need advanced production. A song demo sent to publishers can be anything from a bare bones production to a near exact full blown production of what you hope the artists will do with the song. In that case, you've got work to do. There are so many factors to this it can become like a dog chasing its own tail.

In general, two things that make for great recordings are often missing when we self produce, first, a great room that inspires, second, playing in the same room with the other musicians. That usually makes me feel my demos aren't the real thing. Mainly, I gotta start getting a real drummer on my tracks, it's the key to feeling right, I think. That. or learn how to dynamically adjust Superior Drummers nuances a whole lot better than I do now.

So, my solution has been to work on getting the sound as good as I can get it at the source, and to me, that means outboard. A real preamp, compressor, and EQ for a vocal chain. Where I'm trying to "minimize", is by using less and less plug-in processing, a good vocal that sounds good from the start shouldn't need much.

That doesn't mean someone skilled using something like the UAD 1073 and LA2A, plugs can't get a great sound, but a great recording? I think it will take a group of great players in a great sounding room. Until I can have one of my own, I don't think my demos will ever be what I really want, which is for my recordings to be so good, they cross over from being a demo to being a record I put out.

Good luck Popmann, how bout posting a little taste of the new song you're working on.

* just listened for a minute to the Zep track, well, there you go, great players in a great room..

ah, you just reminded me of something I was thinking about.
Hendrix accomplished so much so young, and in a short amount of time.
many artists, we get to hear what they sound like, after having been honing their craft(s) for many decades.

While I have been hired by folks for various mixing and tracking duties, the original intent of any of my recording forays was for songwriting capture.

Last month I went through all of my finished material to try to assign dates to the song creation. It was a perfect little smiley face bell curve - the more gear I got, the less songs I generated. I started the process of simplifying a few years back, and it reached its zero bound this summer, where I set up one Messanovic ribbon mic into a BLA modded Apollo Twin as my sole input chain. This year I have created more than 2x as many songs as at any point over the last eight years, and generally with better performances.

I may be confusing causation and correlation, it's certainly a small sample size and hopefully some of its also due to overall improvement of craft - but it still was a pretty stark difference.

Now, I've already backed off a bit, bringing my KM84's and the 2192 back into the equation as I simply love the sound of those pieces, but I'm not going to stray too far from the concept.

Regarding John's observation about comparisons, something else I've noticed is a tendency to fixate on a particular A/B when mixing. However, you can really pick a small handful of excellent, well produced music and it will be pretty sonically divergent. For example take a Sarah Jarosz song or a Chris Thiele number (I love Gary Paczosa's work, if you can't tell) and then compare it to something else like Drew Holcomb's last album, Jason Isbell's latest or Ed Sheehan's stuff. All singer songwriter-ish, but totally different approaches to low end, high end, thump, reverb use - and yet they all sound appropriate and fantastic to me.

I guess the quote posted above is correct - at some point we have to stop worrying about the standard and allow ourselves to wander down our own paths a bit. Perhaps that is the path to musical integrity and originality.

Wow! This thread is getting really good! I personally can strongly relate to Svart's post. That is exactly what I am in the process of doing. I finished my CD (clips to be posted soon) and decided to apply the lessons learned. Ended up doing almost exactly what Svart did. I now have a half rebuilt studio that I am working to finish, with nothing in it but the best stuff I have. Which means a closet full of mediocre gear to sell in the new year. Couple that with good advice from a mentor/friend to focus on the monitors, and now I have a setup that provides top-to-bottom detail I had never heard before. I can't wait to finish the rebuild and get back to work writing and recording! 2016 is going to be a great year.

Best of luck to you!

It's a hard thing to do, to step back and admit that maybe you should shake up your whole process.  For me, it was shaking off the ego and the "I know what I'm doing" attitude more so than anything else.

It's also a hard thing to swallow when for years I was spending on mics and preamps, and not hearing that much difference.  

This situation keeps folks looking for that elusive "perfect" device.  Good money after bad, device after device.  Time wasted after more time wasted...

It's what drives GAS.

I didn't hear much difference between Neve preamps and Mackie at the time..  And instead of blaming myself, my attitude, or my monitoring, it must have been the gear still wasn't good enough, right?

Turns out it was the monitors for the most part, and my own ignorance that kept me from meeting my expectations.  New monitors and a new, humble outlook really showed me the path..

So I might sound jaded against things like DIY and gear lust in some threads on here, but it led me astray for years, and I see a lot of the same things said that I used to say to myself to keep myself from realizing my own problems..  Unfortunately people seem to take that as personal criticism rather than help, but what can you do?

Anyway, I sincerely think you are on the path to enlightenment.  Godspeed!

Yep...I'm down to two outboard pres, three compressors three mics and one bad ass acoustic.

This is becoming a great thread. When Svart said, " I realized I was trying to force my will onto the mic.", i immediately recognized myself in that statement. It took me a huge leap of faith to make a mic change recently, as the one I had was special, but just wrong for me. Instead of fussing with shootouts, comparisons, reviews, and lots of internet silliness, if I'd just have been able to afford to buy a U87 like I did before, I'd have been fine until I could afford something more refined.

In the mid-late 80's, I worked regularly in great studios, producing music I'd written for radio and television commercials. Smaller jobs came in that were 1/4 of the usual production budget, so I decided to do those at home. Now, I'd been in studios since I was 18, so I was comfortable around equipment, but had never done any of the engineering myself. I bought the highest end, simple system available that I could afford at the time. Tascam 8 track and 2 track tape recorders, a Yamaha mixer, Lexicon PCM 60 reverb and PCM 41 delay, DBX compressors, NS-10's, an Adcom amp, a patchbay, and last but not least, a Neumann U87 (bought brand new, plus an RE-20, an SM57 and 58.

That was it, and I used it every single day for the next ten years. Not one hour of reading a manual, installing plug-ins, doing any kind of fancy production, oh, and not one hour of down time to fix something broken. I didn't give the next best piece of gear a single thought, and just used what I had. So, what I was doing then, was just getting a good sound and printing it. Mixing was basically add a little reverb, balance levels, and only rarely did I need any EQ, because the U87 just made everything work, the Yamaha board sounded damn good, the Lexicon pieces had a great sound, quite modern at the time, and the DBX kept it all in place.

In a way, I'm trying to do that again, only being a little choosier about gear, but keeping it simple. I now have the UAD silver Apollo, Dizengoff D4 preamp, Warm Audio WA76 and EQP-1A, and the new Blackspade UM-17B, along with the Avantone Abbey monitors. I'd like to add an LA2A, withe the new Apollo or better converters or both, another Pultec, and eventually maybe a Sta-Level, and I'd be pretty much done, other than a mic or two extra.

With those pieces, plug-ins should barely be necessary, I'll use the UAD Ampex tape sim, and some channel EQ, basically using a HPF, with my Relab reverb. If I sell some music, maybe a Bricasti, but I'd have to be way ahead of it all for that to be worthwhile, as the Relab does a fantastic job.

Every time I get too "pluggy" on a mix, it ends up being harsh. I have yet to master gain staging and improve some of my mixing techniques, but I'm thinkingbof just using that outboard and very little else in the DAW. back to basics makes sense for me, as I could spend a lifetime learning more about audio engineering and never getting y music out there.

Also, this is something I've been working towards--being as digitally agnostic as I can. Summing has thrown that a curve ball....but....I want to be able to use whatever machine is around. So, I've been really woodshedding over the last few years of mixes in looking at WHY I like PlugX....how can I get that with relatively generic tools--because all software DAWs have a pretty standard toolset you can count on being there.

So, it's not like I just got some wild hair to strip back....this has been coming....working towards this.

That's criminal.

Of course, that was 36 minutes per song...lol...now THAT'S criminal. But if you're prepared and know exactly what you want to do, these guys are freaks of nature.