A jumble of thoughts as I dig through session masters...
Lately, I've been going back through a lot of my early recording session masters. I'm getting them up on SoundCloud in high resolution (as a modern "safety" master). I also would like to start slowly posting articles on JimmyEther.com outlining the most interesting aspects of the sessions as best I can remember. It's a bit overwhelming, actually. I've been rather picky in the last several years regarding the projects I choose, so I didn't think there would be all that much to document. But it's amazing what you forget about over 18 years.
So, young engineers/producers/musicians... learn from my pain! One day you're going to want/need to go through your old work. Here are a few things I wish I had been better about:
Definitely get in the habit of documenting the hell out of all your sessions! I was pretty good at documenting some of mine, which is really helpful. Others... not so much. And it has made remixing some things, well, an interesting bit of memory mining.
I also wish I'd taken more photos and shot video of sessions. That would have been nice. That was kinda tough until 2001 or so (when digital cameras and decent video cams were prevalent), but with iPhones and such today... yeah, keep the hell out of that stuff. Archive it all somewhere safe.
Backups backups backups. One DVD-R backup (or usually in my case, DAT, ADAT, reel to reel, etc) doesn't cut it. In fact, so far my experience with DVD-R's is that they SUCK as trustworthy backups. CD-Rs have faired better, for whatever reason, but not by much. This is my primary rationale for storing tracks in the cloud. That's not really feasible for multi-tracks, but at least I can get to a decent mix master if needed. And as an added bonus, I can share them quickly with others when necessary.
For session archives, I'm starting to think a combination of 16GB Flashdrives and DVD-R safeties are the way to go. Then keeping the final masters in the cloud is the for ease of access and download. The cost of Flashdrives needs to come down a bit though.
Some other thoughts I'll probably expand upon at JimmyEther.com soon:
Rooms are way more important than gear. I've always known it and often professed it to others, but man is that apparent in these masters. The stuff I tracked in the most gorgeous sounding rooms was often -- as just happened to be the case -- tracked with either great old gear that was "extremely limited" and "in need of updating" or with whatever we could scratch together at the time. Many of the cases, we were even having to record full bands live in stereo to DAT or 2-track reel-to-reel with a live single overdub pass while we mixed down. Or, alternatively, we dubbed the live two-track of music down to cassette 4-track so we'd have two tracks for tracking vocals. And you know what? That stuff sounds AMAZING compared to many of the 2" 24-track sessions that we did months later in more fancy studios.
And the reason is simple: a few good mics and some really great sounding spaces. Arm yourself with a laptop and some portable recording gear and find some houses, churches, parking decks, bathrooms, whatever. You don't need studios (for tracking, at least). A good sounding space, a great performer and a mic good enough to capture it and you can't really mess up a recording.
And along those same lines, make sure you capture the space with ambient mics. Treat it like another sound source. If you just have a two-channel Mbox or something and are tracking a vocal in a nice sounding room... mic the room too! Do it well and it will KILL any possible reverb you might cook up in mixdown. Real space is real space. An emulation will never measure up.
Finally, try to track groups of musicians live in the same room with little separation (at least the basic instruments... vocals are a challenge unless the band is very quiet). This takes practice, a few mics and enough inputs on your recording system, but if the band is good it sounds so much better than overdubbing/stacking/replacing tracks.
Like I said, I'll try to expand on each of those last points later, and also get into similar topics like mic choice and placement. It's just amazing when I listen back to my different approaches to recording over the years. Certain techniques jump out as clear winners.
