Recording - April 2012 - 8

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Double trouble Many of our readers are enjoying our Sound Advice enewsletters, which bring useful tips on topics like recording guitars, mixing, acoustics, mastering, and more to their inboxes on a monthly basis. While the feedback has been universally positive, we do get the occasional question... Hi. I read your Sound Advice article on mixing, the one about setting up your console to record acoustic guitars, but I just can’t understand what you mean in the paragraphs below, particularly the passage about doubling acoustic guitars. It says: “If, as often happens, you want to double the acoustic guitars on a song, the first track is recorded in the above manner. But don’t set up two more channels to record the second acoustic track: besides taking up two more tracks, you should remember that when there are two acoustics doing more or less the same thing, they’ll typically be panned hard left and right. Therefore, the easy way to double the acoustic guitar is to simply take one of the previously recorded tracks out of record, and put the second acoustic track on top of one channel of the first pass of acoustic.” “Look what happens; by disarming one track (with the push of a single button), you didn’t have to move any microphones, you didn’t have to re-patch anything, you didn’t need to change the settings on the preamp or the compressor, and you didn’t even have to change the pan setting on the console—you just hit one button and the second guitar pass is ready to record.” I was with you up to that point. You have two tracks, now you want to double them without adding two more tracks. To double, I would just make copies of the first two in my DAW. I must be missing something; I just cannot get the picture into my head. “Take one of the previously recorded tracks out of record, etc...” Read it ten times, still don’t understand. Can you elucidate a bit? Thanks,
Jeff Drazin via emai

History can be good for you Jeff: Thanks for writing and sorry about the confusion. Before we clarify how this trick works, let’s clear up a misconception of what it means to “double” a track. You say that to double a guitar performance, you would just make copies of the already-recorded tracks in your DAW. Sorry, but that doesn’t work. If you make a copy of an existing track and play it back at the same time as the original, all you are doing is adding together two identical waveforms, which add up perfectly to make a larger version of the same waveform. In other words, if you play back two tracks of the same guitar performance, you will hear it as one guitar... just louder!

In live performance, or if you want to thicken up a single guitar part, there are so-called “double tracking effects” (essentially chorus/slapback boxes) that use time delay to fake the feeling of two guitars. But to truly double a guitar part, it has to be played twice—even if the guitarist tries to play the two takes exactly the same, there will be many tiny variations in timing, phrasing, and timbre, that communicate the reality of two guitars played together. Now for the console trick. Usually when you double a guitar track, one take is panned left and the other is panned right, but everything else (mic position, processing, etc.) is the same. Let’s take advantage of that to keep the guitarist focused and the session moving fast! Start by setting up to record one take to two channels at once; get a good (mono) guitar sound, and run it through the console and then to two channels on your recorder or DAW interface. Note that this is not a stereo track. It’s two identical mono tracks. For supporting parts like doubled rhythm guitars, mono tracks are easier to work with; you can place them to the sides and leave the center open for your kick drum, bass, and lead vocal. After recording the first take, you say to the guitarist, “That was great, let’s do another pass to double it up,” rewind to the start of the take... but before you hit Record, you pick one of the two tracks and disarm it. Now that track is safe. When you record the second take, you’re recording over the other track, and when you’re done, you have Take 1 on one track and Take 2 on the other... a doubled guitar part, ready to mix. See? You rewound, disarmed one track, and hit Record. You didn’t make the guitarist sit around and lose focus, and you got your doubled part in no more time than it took to play it. This is especially valuable in studios where you’re recording to analog or digital tape or to a hard disk recorder, where your track count is limited and every track is precious. In our modern era of DAWs with infinite numbers of tracks and the ability to rapidly capture and save stacks of multiple takes, this trick is not only a time-saver but gives us extra creative flexibility. We can do several takes of the guitar onto two tracks each, save them all, and then mix and match two different takes for the left and right sides of our mix, choosing which two passes sound best to make up our doubled track. I hope this clarifies things. Thanks for reading!— MM

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RECORDING APRIL 2012

Recording - April 2012

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