On mailing lists and discussion forums for recording music you always hear stuff like “you need to get good preamps” or “you can’t use the DAW’s internal summing” or “you gotta spend at least $1000 on the microphone” and similar. Or my favourite: “You want to sound as good as X and they use Y”. Well, be happy you don’t have exactly the same equipment as X, because then you won’t sound “as good as” X. You might sound better, or worse, but most importantly: You’ll sound different.
After 20+ years of hobby music technology nerding, I have one solid piece of advice: Learn to use what you have until you know it’s not you, but the technology that is preventing you from sounding better. And when you get there, you will know where in the chain the problem is.
So, if you don’t thing the preamps in the A/D converter is preventing you from sounding better, then most likely they aren’t.
As an example:
I started out on a Yamaha 4-track. I soon needed more channels, so has a Boss mixer. This sounded like crap, of course, but it took me a lot of time to learn how to cram out every percent of sound of this. Then I switched to a Fostex 8-track. To my surprise, although things sounded “better”, in other ways it didn’t. The Yamaha 4-track has a sound that means that whatever you record, it will come out sounding like a unity. Simply speaking, the frequency response is anything but linear.
I got used to this, got better at mixing, and things started sounding as a whole again. But still like shit, and most importantly, very different in my headphones than when I mixed. Clearly, a stereo system no longer cut it. I got proper monitors. It was like putting on glasses. And Ivery soon realized that my Boss mixer sucked. So, I got a Tascam 24 channel. It sounds amazing. I could reach another level in my recordings. And I realized my reverbs sucked, so I got a new one.
Another stripping out of sonic unity came with me dropping the 8-track and starting to use a computer instead. I still mix everything through the Tascam, and it definetely has some sort of subtle sound, which helps a bit. If I would mix digitally, I’d loose that too, and I would have to become yet a bit better at mixing.
Now, if I had been given access to my current setup when I started recording in 1984, would the things I recorded then have sounded great? No, of course not. It would have sounded like shit. In fact, even more like shit than the did sound, because the Yamaha 4-track wouldn’t have forced everything to sound the same. None of the things I bought because my equipment limited me would have helped me if I bought it much earlier, because I wouldn’t have known how to use the other things I got the best way.
New equipment only helps, of it was the old equipment that was the problem. And with todays digital recording equipment, it’s very rarely the equipment that is the problem.
And yeah, some of that stuff I did on the Yamaha 4-track and the Boss mixer sounds, well, kinda like crap. But in a good way!
