post005: your world, my mic booth
I always wondered why there was some sort of an industry standard in the recording of pop-music quality rap vocals. One time I remember Brother Jay from X-Clan told me that he wanted to hear me on a 10,000 dollar mic and then see what I came up with. I didn’t think that was a diss and I still don’t, I felt like he was on a thing where we all needed to be on some pro level shit in order to actually succeed and make a mark. I didn’t want to tell him how many thousands of dollars went into NOT recording on a 10,000 dollar mic because that wouldn’t make sense. However, I did keep that with me for apparently 5 years. When I did all the Weekend Science Experiment stuff, the whole twist was that it was done in “a studio” versus in a cardboard box. I hated that whole process because MTW was trying to whip me into shape to be a pro and I thought he was trying to whip me into shape to be a poor man’s Murs. I was way stupid, but I always retain information so I learned from my mistakes. When I got enough money to invest in a decent pro tools rig and cool mic back in 03-04, I was just trying to mix the best of both worlds. I figured that if I had the editing power and high bit rate of pro tools mixed with a condenser mic and a belligerent attitude when it came to home recording, I could make some shit. I did that and lots of it, made some money, sold the equipment 40 times and traveled around the world recording half-assed songs ever since then.
I like the “fuck-around song” attitude when it is pulled off by certified vets. I don’t like the same attitude when its someone not as skilled or someone PRETENDING to be on 100 xanax pills like Lil’ Wayne or whoever. On the other side of that, I also hate the dudes who make every song in their catalog a struggle. I like the people who make good songs in the moment, where all you need is a verse from them and that’s that. I also like songs that make you feel good even though they aren’t supposed to. To me, these are certified hits and they don’t need a plaque to show you so. With home recording techniques, I always subscribe to the “make it sound like something you would listen to” rule. You look around your room and do all the fundamental shit that someone in a recording studio would do (walk around looking for sound traps, weird reverb areas, whatever) and then you figure out how to make all that work in your advantage. An engineer who will remain nameless showed me the most useless piece of equipment on earth and he was STOKED to have the bitch. This rack wreck is basically an acoustic modeler and it works off the idea that it will model certain environments thru your speakers so you can hear some shit that doesn’t matter if your room is a basement in your apartment building. Not to mention that your “sound dead” mic booth is directly outside of a bathroom?!?
WHAT THE FUCK IS A SOUND DEAD ROOM GOING TO DO AGAINST LOUD PIPES THAT ARE IN THE SAME ROOM???
Not to mention when you are in the middle of a take and you stop just in time for some moron to go and take a shit in the bathroom while you are trying to record. Exactly…
Basically, if you (the engineer/producer/vocalist kind of dude) are comfortable with your sound and know how to get the best results from whatever, then you can record in anything. I hated and still hate the double standard that says that you can record an album anywhere on earth if you are in a band, but you have to record in Dr. Dre’s bathroom if you are a rapper. You would obviously think it to be the other way around since it still comes down to a dude rapping over a beat, according to the general populace. I think that since rap is still insanely racist and classist, you need all these false trappings and “emperor’s new clothes” ways of recording so it can justify and validate something that was looked at not that long ago as “niggers talking” for lack of a better term. To further prove that Hip-Hop (and in turn all of the sub-genres that spun off from it in a radically short time) is an actual music and not a game, people had to deconstruct it and run it thru a billion dollar blender in order to come with results.
If you listen to most old recordings (meaning the 80’s), the total decibel level is significantly lower than the music that came after it. This was due to all sorts of really interesting reasons, but the number one is as always, TECHNOLOGY. Tape was, is and always will be the line drawn in the sand for music. When you have a bunch of low level stuff going into it (tape) mixed by a dude that has probably never dealt with bass as a individual thing in their life, then you have to start plotting. When the bass tube in the back of the car came into play, all this shit changed overnight. Dudes were testing out their mixes in systems that didn’t even catch the higher registers on a wish or dare. Now you had cities all over the map that were just subbing out of control levels simply because that was the new thing! Mix that with people actually turning that into a genre and you had an entirely new way to engineer.
Why not invent another?
