the tracking technique/anti-plugin thread.

I think it would be cool if people shared some cool things to try before reaching for a plugin. any cool tricks and ways to get sound that are outside-the-box (literally). I'll start: Instead of reaching for reverb and an exciter... I close miced and miced the vocalist from 30 ft. away then had him whisper into the mic on a third track.

before i'd use a compressor, i draw TAKE VOL. ENV. its wysiwyg, and sample accurate, afaik. also the best transient shaper i know of.

This will be obvious to a lot of you here but may be useful to some...edit your drum tracks before reaching for a gate...(cut excess noise/spill from toms,kick,snare etc...)

carefully listen to the differences of preamps/DI boxes/consoles/outboard in general before it hits the ADC. for instance tracking a bass guitar through the HiZ input of a dbx 163 makes sense most of the time. also having some vintage (read: trashy) 8 channel consoles around isn't the worst of ideas. at least for me. always to rely on "fixing in the mix" is something i gave up during the last months and it's so much more fun, you won't believe it!

I try to avoid effects as much as possible. I always physically double a track rather than using choruses or doublers. Even clean electric guitar, which the conventional wisdom seems to say must always be chorused when used in metal - that gets double tracked. Some parts get way more than doubled. I've been know to layer some parts ten or more takes thick. For delay, I'll duplicate the original track and shift the dupe to the right. This has the advantage that you can use a volume automation to bring the delayed part up front or lay it back depending on how you want it to interact with the original.

Great idea for a thread. - Try recording with a mic in the corner of the bathtub. Place the source anywhere (including in a different room). - Work your gain-staging: an electric guitar set to the neck pickup with tone control turned way down but the amp set with the treble cranked and the bass rolled off ("woman tone") sounds a LOT different than bridge pickup, tone knob up, and bass-heavy amp settings. Same with anything else: recording a vocal so it overloads the mic capsule sounds a lot different than recording a "clean" vocal and adding compression later, which sounds different than recording a "clean" vocal but overloading the input preamp. where in the signal path you make the adjustments matters a lot. - Off-axis miking: instinct tells us to point the mic directly at whatever we are recording, as close as possible. But that's not how we hear. We don't hear drums by having them all an inch away from our ears. OTOH, recording further back, from a natural "listening position" often means recording undesirable room sounds. A lot of recording and mixing work can often be saved through careful mic placement, for instance recording "room mics" pointed at the floor in front of a drum kit, or firing mics "across" the source instead of "at" the source, such as the "BBC" method of recording acoustic guitar by placing a mic near the 12th fret, firing across the soundhole.

I follow you, interesting thread indeed, given that you cant fix it all when mixing even with your powerful daw and $$$ plugins no relevant tips to post except the golden rule: spend on tracking at least the same amount of time I would normally spend on eq'ing/compressing/etc. all along my never ending mixing session etc.