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tribute album recording experience

- Eric Hsu

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As an original contributor, on "sweet ride" I recorded Tanya on 1-track, then recorded my guitar and voice on the other tracks so when I fade in Tanya's voice, it'll still be right alone with my parts.

On "slow dog" and "seal my fate", I recorded the drums first on 2-tracks coming off of a Mackie-1202 8-channel mixer. Recorded bass and guitar on the other 2, mix it down onto a second 4-track recorder (keeping the stereo sound on drums), then I recorded the 2 voices.
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(Hint to recording full band on a 4 track, although I am definitely not the best engineer there is):

  1. drum sounds is what makes the difference in a recording. To get the best sounds on a 4-track, you must use an outside mixer to put down the tracks to have full control of the drum sounds. If you don't have enough mics, make sure you mic the bass drum and snare, and get really good sounds out of those, and the rest (hi-hat, toms, crash, etc) will be picked up just enough by the 2 mics you have.

  2. The voice (although I completely screwed up the voice on my recording), always make the vocals loud, don't ever let the music drown your voice like I did. Bad bad bad thing to do.

  3. During mix down, play a professionally recorded CD on the system that you are mixing down to, and just compare your recording with the CD, and adjust the EQ on your 4-track accordingly. If you get the EQ close enough to the CD that you're listening to, most likely your final mix down will sound AWESOME.
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Eric (purple@purpleen.com)
http://www.purpleen.com/megalo
(Contributor of "Sweet Ride", as well as "Seal My Fate" and "Slow Dog" with band Megalo on the Tanya Donelly Tribute CD)

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