recording tips

[Anonymous]

nicked these tips off the internet …

1 Tune Your Instrument – People will notice if your Sax is out of tune.

2 Rehearse – Practice playing your Sax a number of times over until you are happy that you can play it relatively accurately in one take before recording it.

3 Use Headphones – listen to the backing track through headphones and not through speakers when recording with a mic.

4 Check Your Levels – don’t turn the recording gain up too high when recording your Sax to avoid adding unwanted hissing noises or other interference.

5 Check your Tone – check to see how the tone of your Sax compares to the backing track before doing a recording.

6 Count In – count yourself in so you start playing your Sax at the right place in the backing track when recording.

7 Background Noise – Record your Sax in a place with minimum background noise. Microphones can be sensitive so TV’s, children, aquariums, flushing toilets etc.. may be included in the recording.

8 Check Mic Setup – testing 1 2 3. Check the distance and angle your mic is in relation to your Sax (particularly condenser microphones). If you are using headphones you should be able to hear when your mic sounds best.

9 You’re Position – Think about the acoustics of the room you are in. Rooms have acoustic properties that affect the quality of the recorded sound via a microphone.
Consider where you are within the room. Sounds tend to bounce off walls and frequencies build up in the centre of a room to create “standing waves” which affect the quality. Stay off centre.

10 Listen Back Before you upload – listening back to your recording in it’s entirety before you submit it for consideration. If there is hissing, background noise, too much gain (causing distortion), significant mistakes or maybe you’re simply out of time or out of tune consider re-recording your track.

feel free to add more or dismiss as misleading or irrelevant

[William Cingolani]

Excellent tips sxpoet

[Anonymous]

Thanks William – i’ve been playing now 2yrs & 4 months, and compared to my teacher i class myself as a beginner.

The reason why i class myself as a total snd complete beginner as i haven’t got to the stage where i can practice any piece of sheet music and record it fault free for recording. It took me 6 months practice to create 3 fault free pieces for a exam.

So for the purposes of any uploads until my craft has improved through more practice, there is a cut off point where i will just have to upload until i get out of the beginner stage and move into the intermediate stage.

The last lesson i had recently with the blues, i was completely blown away by hearing the colour range of a selmar sax. I can now completely understand why these pro’s pull out a selmar for world class playing. There is no way i could make my yamaha sound and complete with the ease and grace a selmar shapes a sound.

[Jazz Cat]

good list …I’ve found I sound a lot better after warming up a good 15-20 minutes before recording, too…big difference vs 5-minute only warmup before recording…the horn literally gets a bit warmer & more responsive

[Anonymous]

Thats a very good point JC ! It takes me about an 1 hr to get warmed up, in my case its more to do with loosing up the vocal chords, lungs & embouchure than warming up the sax. The room temperature in our house is fairly constant so luckily my sax isn’t subject to drastic temperature changes.

I have no problems with reeds as i store them in liquid which makes them play straight away. The current box of la voz reeds, every reed so far has worked straight away, touch wood.

but yep, totally agree – warm up is essential.

[Jazz Cat]

it’s surprising what a big difference it makes… first 15 minutes sounds ok, but after that it gets a lot better…so i look at first 15 minutes as ‘clearing my throat’ before a speech, analogy

[john]

Good points guys.

[Kevin]

With a recording device that enables multi-tracks whereby individual track levels can be adjusted louder/softer or muted- it’s good to have a click (or metronome) track to follow. You could even compare the sax track to the click track after a take(other tracks adjusted down) to hear how your timing was. That also goes for intonation. Play back just the sax track with a capable tuner at hand and you can check the results of that…

[Anonymous]

Good tip Kevin – Logic pro x gives me the option of having a click count in, i find it very useful for my own backing tracks that don’t have a count in.

logic pro x also has the option of increasing/decreasing volume levels of any backing track through the headphones while recording the sax – which is useful when some tracks aren’t very loud, and im listening for change in chords for timing.

JF raised a good point in the forums – record your sax without headhones along with an audible metronome click, then use that as a playalong backing track through the headphones snd record the sax agsin, so it sounds intonation wise similar to the without headphones recording, then later on delete the without headphones with click.

i did some recordings in the past where i played along to the sax player – my teacher advised me not to do thst as it meant i would end up following the sax player, better to use the backing track and follow the drums/chords etc instead – in fact try an avoid recording with a metronome altogether – as when playing live in a band, you wont be using a metronome.

Has anyone got sny equalizer/compression tips?

[Author]

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