I have never been able to get a sound I like when trying to record/practice at home with plugins. I have Native, S-Gear and Amplitube, and today I just got a Strymon Iridium. I just can't seem to find the sweet spot that sounds good and inspires me or that i'm happy with when trying to add it to a mix. The Iridium sounds good with headphones, but when I plug it into my interface, it's incredible quiet, and the overdriven sounds are fizzy and not how it is with headphones.
Do I need a new audio interface? Or new ears? Do I send the Iridium back? Do I need to spend more money on plugins?
All advice greatly appreciated
This week's procrastination forum might be moved to sometime next week.
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You should be able to adjust the input gain in your DAW, or use some other clean boost to get the signal to the level you want after the fact.
With guitars, I invariably duplicate my track or record two takes to beef them up with panning.
Also, unless I'm directed micing an amp, I generally record everything clean then add drive / comp / fx in my DAW
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Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after youMixes are pretty complex since multitrack recording allowed you to keep piling on the tracks and the combination of all the different attack values of all the sounds (drums, guitar, vocals all have different attack/decay curves) can do weird things with a compressor added later in the mix.
Compression is a bit of a dark art, don't expect to master it quickly, (or ever, without a lot of work).
I am mostly using hardware these days but if I use a mix bus dynamics plugin it is usually the McDSP ML8000 or the Neve 33609 from UAD.
Contrary to internet lore I don't like the API2500 on the mix bus- I do on the drum bus.
But, you rarely need to spend more money on plugins- master the ones you have and try to use them sparingly.
It is mostly ears, not gears.
I say this time and time again- look to your room acoustics and monitoring first, before splashing out on plugins.
Your stock DAW probably has enough.
Read this:
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/production-expert-1/stock-and-premium-plugin-shoot-out-the-results-and-the-story-behind-it
One of the Experts team, the esteemed Mike Exeter, did a mix with stock DAW plugins vs fancy high end plugins and the results of the stock DAW plugins is more than good enough for release.
Why?
Because Mike has great ears and knows how to get the most out of his gear.
Spending money on room acoustics is boring and shiny new plugins are exciting so I full expect people to ignore this advice, but perhaps it will be remembered and acted upon down the line.
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so you can imagine my concern when I made the final attempt and bought an ox box.
I’m sorry. Everyone was right. I can’t tell the difference between playing with headphones or playing from my real cab. I’ve played more this week than the whole of last year. I’ve brought all my amps back into the flat with a safety cab hidden just in case my children or I accidentally open the speaker output on the Ox. And I’m using an old Presonus firestudio mobile sound card.
Hardware wise - Line 6 Pod XT/X3 / Kemper - used to love tracking with these at various points in the last 15 years, more than the later Line 6 stuff TBH. The natural decay of the notes etc made it feel much easier to track with than trying to play through plugins. While I'm not sure how the old Line6 stuff would compare to today's stuff, double tracking with it used to give some really usable sounds for basic cleans / distortion and lead. My tip when working with the old Line 6 stuff is (might be good for other devices too I guess), even if recording a distorted part, layer in the same part tracked through a clean amp model too with a more bass / low-mid focused sound. I recorded an album with the original podXT and we ended up triple tracking all distorted rhythm parts like this - 2 tracks of our distorted amp model (with different mic settings) and then one clean amp which would normally be just about audible in the mix to fatten things up. The tones weren't ground-breaking but they worked for what we needed so this approach might help you.
When you say 'Native', do you mean Helix Native?
My tip for compression, although obv I'm no where near octatonics level, is that the pros don't typically spend a lot of time fussing with the settings on compressors. They tend to have a couple of generic combinations of ratio/attack/release and then really do all the work with the input gain.
I us d to get all obsessed with trying to set the threshold but in reality people don't seem to use it.
I found this a bit of a revelation and I started getting better results. It also means that presets can be very useful and finding some you like can save hours of fiddling with no real benefit.
Might do a null test at some point to see if this is verifiable.