Do You Know What You're Listening For?

When it comes to recording, the question you should be asking yourself is not “What gear will make this sound great?”, but rather “What great sound am I trying to capture?” Unfortunately many of us jump in head first without knowing what it is we are hoping to get back from our mics.

Via David Goehring Flickr

Choosing The Mic For The Job

When deciding which mic to use for a given application, you must know what you are listening for. If recording acoustic guitar let’s say, are you looking for a mellow finger picking tone? Or are you hoping for a bright strumming vibe that will cut through the mix of heavy guitars? If you know what you are listening for, then you can make the appropriate mic selection.

Without knowing what to listen for you will blindly try mic after mic (assuming you have multiple mics) hoping to somehow “know” when you’ve found the perfect mic. Realistically you won’t have anything to base your decision on so you’ll just pick your most expensive mic and move on. Not a good move.
 

Choose The Best Mic Placement

When trying to capture the best sound possible with mic placement (which is way smarter than waiting to EQ it later) how you can even know which placement is best if you don’t know what sound you are listening for? You can’t! You must have a sound in your head that you are trying to achieve through mic placement.

By simply moving the mic closer or further away from a sound source, or even changing the angle at which it points, you can dramatically alter the recorded sound. This is only helpful if you have some way to measure if you are getting closer to (or further away from) the sound you want. You must know what you are listening for.

Without Vision These Tips Are Meaningless

If you have no clear vision of your desired sound that you are listening for when recording, then all of the tips and tricks (and gear) in the world won’t help you. I can tell you that an SM57 a couple inches away from a guitar cab sounds great, but that’s pointless if the sound it captures is not the sound you want to capture in your studio. Make sense?

The more you listen to good music, the more you’ll develop taste (i.e. what you like to hear). The more you develop your tastes, the more confident you’ll be come recording time because you’ll have vision. The more vision you have when recording, the more decisive you will be when choosing mics and placement of those mics.

Do you know what you’re listening for?