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Old 07-11-2017, 10:02 AM   #1
bassburner
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
Posts: 25
Default Going Overboard aka Keep It Simple Stupid

I'm wrapping up my bands first EP which is the first time I'm doing everything myself. Our plan is to do the EPs DIY and then when there's enough for a full album that will be pro mastered and be a more traditional release.

Anyway, I find things getting out of hand with the number of tracks and number of plugins. We are a seven piece: drums, bass, guitar, 2 brass, 1 sax, & keys - plus vox. Pretty much every tutorial video I've watched has 10 drum tracks with sampled kicks and snares and every guitar track is doubled. On the other hand, I've read articles where hipster guys are recording only with tape and consoles with one Shure 55 on the drums. Now I don't want to go that far but I can definitely go more minimal.

I have ideas for the next batch of songs in terms of tracking because with these songs, I have 10 drum mics, 3 mics for each horn plus a stereo room mic for the horns, the rhythm guitar track is doubled and has two mics and a DI, and even recorded each pickup from my Ric bass separately. I'm definitely going to back off on all this.

But I'm wondering about my plugin usage. I tried mixing with purely Reaeq, Reacomp, Satson and a few reverbs and delays. I could get the individual tracks sounding as well as when using all the third party stuff but the whole mix was missing some cohesiveness that I was getting when using Slate's and Wave's stuff. I understand this is the cumulative effect of the harmonic distortion of the various layers of "analog."

Anyone try imposing restrictions on themselves so you don't end up with 10 layers of effects (if you count the individual pieces of VCC as individual effects) but not so much that it negatively impacts the overall sound?

I've heard about the channel strip principal to keep things simple but that wasn't any different than just using Reaeq and Reacomp. Anyone take this a step further and setup a template with a virtual studio in it? What I mean by that, deciding my "studio" is going to have 2 DBX160s, a pair of LA2As, one reverb unit, etc, and a max of 24 tracks/8 busses (or whatever). And you force yourself to stay within those limitations. I understand this is virtual and I can have 18 different compressors and EQs on each track but this just gets too distracting for a newbie and I ended up wasting too much time futzing around with various plugins.
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