Trust Your Ears and Instincts

There are many guidelines to follow when tracking or mixing music, but sometimes you have to ignore them completely.

On a recent session with a very talented singer that I hadn't worked with yet, I set my pre, EQ, and compressor at my normal starting points. The session got started so quickly that I didn't have much of a chance to dial in any settings, as we literally jumped straight into the first take. Everything sounded pretty good, but when I looked over to the compressor, so I saw something that made me jump a bit.

The 1176 needle was hitting the far left, past 20dB of gain reduction at 4:1 ratio. It sounded great to my ears, and had to fight the urge to bring down the input.  In my experience in tracking vocals, it's always better to err on the side of caution, and leave the heavy compression for later if needed. You can always add compression, but it's difficult to remove excessive compression after the fact.

With that said, I did use a high pass filter pre-compressor, and I rode the input knob of the 1176 a bit between songs, to compensate for difference in tone and energy.

When all was finished, after two days of doing scratch vocals on eight songs, and keeper vocals on two, I listened back to the vocals, solo'ed up, and found the tone, vibe, and dynamics that I was hoping I'd acheive, so I was pretty happy with the result.

The biggest thing I took away from that session was trust your ears and instincts, and break the rules every once in a while. Being creative is the most fun part of working in music, and if you follow protocol all the time, creativity takes a backseat.