MusicRadar

A 'head back' vocal pose can actually result in a better take.

View in gallery

9. If you find mechanical noise is clouding a recording (saxophone keys clicking, for example), try placing the mic behind the player or to the side, so that it’s partially shielded from the offending cacophony.

10. The ideal distance for an acoustic guitar mic is around 35-45cm away from the soundhole. Place it any closer and your sound will be overly boxy – much further away and you’ll pick up too much of the room’s ambience.

11. Get your musician to try playing in a number of styles (eg, picked and fingered for a guitarist). You never know which might sound better, and you then have layering options for mixdown and different versions for your arrangement stage.

12. If your vocalist is struggling to hit the notes, try washing their monitoring signal with a lot of long reverb. They’ll then be able to use the reverb on their voice to better detect their own pitch, making it much easier for them to make adjustments.

13. A handy tip for school music teachers: the best way to record an upright piano is with two condenser mics behind, placed left and right and pointing slightly down, with the top and back of the piano removed. If you can’t remove the back, open the top and place the mics left and right, about two feet above.

14. If you’re using a classic electric piano riff, try recording it using an amp or amp modelling plug-in for that authentic live stage sound.

15. Struggling with the performance of a riff? Thanks to timestretching, you can play it slower and more accurately, then ramp it up to the right speed later. It’s not cheating if nobody knows and it sounds great!

16. Does your building have an interesting-sounding hallway or other acoustic space? A really bright-sounding bathroom, perhaps? Put a microphone in there, play your track back and record the room’s natural reverb, ready to mix in.

17. For decent vocal recordings, create a small area packed with duvets and blankets – a wardrobe is ideal. Of course, you need to ensure that you have enough light to read the lyrics and enough space to be able to stand a decent distance from the microphone.

18. It sounds incredibly obvious but when you’re recording an instrument or voice, make sure that the backing track only plays through well-isolated closed-back earphones with minimal noise-bleed, so as to record a clean signal.

19. Always get loads of ad-libs from your vocalist, and make sure they try singing sections of verses and choruses in separate takes, holding notes so that the tail of one vocal section can be laid out to overlap the start of the next. This can create a really energetic effect.