Recording - March 2020 - 65

Readers'
TRACKS
BY MARTY PETERS

Readers' Tracks is where respected engineer
and producer Marty Peters listens to your
recordings and critiques them, pointing out
where and how you can make them better.
Listen to the songs, read the reviews, and
submit your own materials online.
"Hugs at Home and Wages at Work" / Tim
McCarthy
Equipment: Audio Technica condenser microphone; AKG
K240 headphones; Tascam 2488 Portastudio recorder; Martin
acoustic guitar with LR Baggs pickup.
"Hugs at Home and Wages at Work" is a male vocal country
song. Tim did it all in his home studio.
The Music: Tim has submitted a stripped-down track done
on his standalone Tascam 2488 recorder, one that serves as
a nice demo in our opinion. The recording starts with a fairly
processed acoustic guitar laying down a solid rhythm with a
distinct rock 'n' roll edge. The sound here is definitely on the
plugged-in/onboard pickup side of the spectrum. Next in line
are the lead and backing vocals, pushed slightly forward in the
mix. These are mostly delivered without any over-compression
or artifacts, though in a few spots the phrasing gets off. Near
the fifty second mark, Tim brings in some guitar fills that act
as a nice compliment to the proceedings, though their level
is a bit high against the vocals through our monitors. Lastly,
touching back on the vocals, Tim seemed to have bumped
their volume a tad in the outro, leading to some noticeable
distortion as the track fades.
Suggestions: Relatively easy fixes are in order here. Starting
with the acoustic guitar tone, while Tim may have gone for
the direct plugged-in in approach for convenience, any time
there's a microphone available we urge folks to employ it on
an acoustic guitar. Having both the direct and mic-recorded
sounds available offers myriad options in terms of tone, ambience, placement and panning. Regarding the vocals, we urge
Tim to reference The Everly Brothers as a blueprint for his performance here; truly one of the gold standards for close harmony singing. In the meantime, a redo to tighten up the phrasing

would be advisable. Lastly, though it may be meager by today's unlimited track count DAW options, the Tascam 2488
multitracker still has a ton of firepower. We suggest that Tim
slap an onboard compressor across his lead vocal track with
a threshold ratio strong enough to tame the volume spike near
the song's end. We would also like to hear a somewhat wider
stereo field in play, and placing the lead guitar fills and solo
out from center a little more offers the perfect opportunity to let
it shine without overwhelming the singing.
Summary: A very solid start!

"If" / No-Body
Equipment: Steinberg Cubase and several virtual instruments; various audio samples; integrated laptop stereo speakers; AKG headphones.
"If" is a male vocal indie rock song, composed, performed
and recorded at No-Body's home studio.
The Music: In his production notes, No-Body relates that the
project was done entirely on a laptop, from the writing all the
way through to the mastering, and that the decision was a
self-imposed constraint. Well, for those of us who started out
on four track reel-to-reel machines, computer-based systems,
laptop or not, have plenty of firepower these days. Let's see
how things worked out this time! Starting with the composition,
everything here is genre correct-driving and quirky, with a
slightly disembodied quality. As for the recording itself, NoBody has done a pretty nice job here overall, with the exception of the programmed drums (more on that in a bit). The
synth bass is robust and drives the track along nicely, and the
other synths are well-programmed in terms of frequency, and
also panned quite effectively in the stereo field. The applied
delay creates a suitable ambience in a DEVO sort of fashion.
Predominantly spoken, all of the vocals are recorded and delivered sans artifacts, thank you! So far so good then? Well-it
would sure be nice if that banging bass synth had a partner.
It's called a rhythm section for a reason friends, and No-Body
has stranded his bass out on the floor while the drums come
across like a nervous boy standing on the sidelines at a junior
high dance. It's not uncommon for us to review submissions in
which the programmed drums are hidden back in a mix as an
apology for not having the actual articles. But, and it's a big
but, all of the drums in this genre were programmed during the
glory days, so hiding them is counterintuitive in our opinion.
Suggestions: No-Body did a fine job recreating an identifiable indy rock sound, and for that he gets our congratulations. All that's left to do now is to get those drums into the mix
where they belong. Perhaps the fact that he was mixing on
laptop speakers and headphones skewed his decision making, but in any case, we urge him to pump up the volume on
those bad boys!
Summary: Damn close.

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64 RECORDING March 2020

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Recording - March 2020

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