Quick Production Tip
Create Interesting Music Dispatch, 5.30.25.
Happy Friday from Create Interesting Music!
No dispatch tomorrow. I’ll be sending a link to a full video for the Sunday edition. (Thinking of it like the New Yorker’s “Long Reads” email they send out on Sundays… I think that’s the New Yorker.)
Here’s a production tip I gave to my student Sam, who’s working on developing an acoustic-guitar-and-voice-and-synth song from a mono (one mic on her guitar, one mic on her voice, MIDI synth straight down the middle) demo into a full song:
In short:
Record in stereo (use two mics).
Perform the same part multiple times and put one performance on the left and one on the right.
Keep the original guitar track in the middle.
By playing with the presence of these three parts, we can create the feeling of transformation in the sound that we associate with fully-produced recordings.
It’s amazing how, even if we’re working with super cheap mics and recording equipment, the feeling of transformation in the sound can get us out of demo world and into something that sounds rich.
I just popped on the beginning of Bon Iver’s “For Emma” (actually a record I’ve only listened to a few times; I’m more a fan of the self-titled and 22, A Million), and bam: I can hear that this was recorded with SM-57’s (or 58’s; the internet is unclear about this).
These guitars are recorded with one mic a piece, but they’re panned far L and R. The drums are straight down the middle, and they sound mono. We have multiple voice takes panned variously straight down the middle and soft right and left, all being sung at once, so the voice sounds “wider” than it would sound if it was actually just one take.
Notice that these are multiple performances of the same part; not different parts. Justin Vernon isn’t filling out the sound by adding more and more parts, he’s just thinking about how he wants to place the parts he already has within a wide image, to create a full sound.
If the sound is full and wide, and we have high frequencies and low frequencies, we can use cheap mics. We’ll still get the feeling of a full sound. If we use a really nice microphone but only record one take each of midrange sounds, and pan them straight down the middle, we’re not going to get something that sounds full in the same way.
These are supposed to be a 3-5 minute read; I got a bit carried away here.
Let me know if this helps. Drop comments, questions, etc, below, and we can get the conversation going.
//Create Interesting Music.