Ryan A. Mills wrote on Fri, 11 February 2005 10:57 |
I was having this discussion with my partner last night when we were discussing the direction of the studio we manage. I really like this pre that we have here and I suggested that we buy a whole lot more channels of this particular brand of preamp and he looked at me like I was nuts. He's very much in favour of having many different "colours" on a recording. I'm not really sure how I feel about it. I guess it's nice to be able to create an assortment of different sounds, but is it "better" than using many of the same preamps?
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Good question. Of course, prior to the modern outboard mic pre era, almost all albums were done using the exact same mic pre on every instrument, every vocal, every thing. There were certainly some excellent recordings made that way. No one ever thought it needed to be different, and there were some great audio minds and ears working.
Today, it is common practice to use outboard pre's of much variation, almost exclusively. Sometimes now, if I plug a mic into one of my consoles, rather than an outboard, the artist, or someone associated with the session will ask why I am doing that, implying that I don't care about the particular sound in question. That's come a long way from a few years ago!
I think it's great to be able to choose an API for drums, a 1073 for guitar, a DWFearn for bass, or whatever. But is it really better? I don't know...
I suspect it all really comes down to the song, the performance of the musicians/singers, the balancing ability of the engineer, and the vision of the producer, rather than the colour of the mic pre.
Terry