1/3 Must Know Recording Tips for Beginners — with Triad Recording and Your Heaven Audio

by Martin Lynn | Aug 14, 2017 | Uncategorized

Matt: My name is Matt Ricci. I am the Chief Engineer here at TRIAD recording in Warren, RI. I’ve been doing this since 2008, 2009, somewhere in there. My father had been a studio owner and a recording engineer for most of his life and all of mine. Even though, as a teenager, it’s not really necessarily what I wanted to do, I sort of fell into it, and I fell in love with it. I love recording and producing and making music. I’ve been in bands and I’ve done that thing as well but I’ve had some success in the past couple of years. I’ve had some Grammy considerations just this past year. I had a mix of credits on a number one on a billboard chart.

Martin: So that’s kind of ironic because it’s usually against most parents wishes that their children work in the music industry.

Matt: Yes. Yes. Usually it’s “Don’t make the mistake of getting into the music industry. Just do something safe, like… do what your father does.”

Martin: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: “Work for your father’s company instead of those crazy dreams of getting into music.”

Martin: Yeah right. And then when your dad was Bob Dylan it’s a difficult decision.

Just for the record, so everyone knows who you are, second generation audio engineer, and actually what was interesting to me was, before we actually started recording, I had come in and you had a student with you, so you were actively teaching somebody about audio recording.

Matt: Yes. I do teach audio as well so that that works out and I love it.

Martin: So what’s your in-house teaching program like?

Matt: Our in-house program is called TRAC. It’s the TRIAD Recording Arts Certification program. So again it was developed in house and anyone who works here now has gone through some version of it but it’s a full 26 week course. It takes a long time. Usually people take more than 26 weeks just because it’s very flexible, but it’s a full blown college level of course. There’s a lot of science in textbooks and reading and homework and projects and class time, so it’s intense but a lot of people have gotten a lot out of it.

Martin: Is it like college or you forget most of what you learned, or have you actually put any of it in to use.

Matt: Have I? I mean, I use, a great deal of it every day. But, I do this every day. So I mean, there are people that have gone through the program either with me, or from before I was teaching it, who have gone on to open their own project studios, or work in the industry, or do exciting things like that. For the students who have gone through it, it’s been very valuable.

Martin: That’s interesting. I had no idea that you guys did that. So it’s kind of cool to learn. Just for the sake of people knowing who I am, so I’m not just this sensual mystery man, I work for Your Heaven Audio. We make our own microphones which have their own special application. And then I personally have been a folk musician. But one thing that I’m actually really bad at is recording. And so the idea for this whole podcast is because you are really good at that.

Matt: I like to think so, yeah.

Martin: We heard the recording you did the last time when we came in and it was pretty solid, so take that for what it’s worth.

Matt: All right.

Martin: Yes so I figured just talking to you would be really productive from the point of just just having somebody who knows nothing, talk to somebody who knows a lot. And kind of like fill in the gaps.

Matt: Right. Happy to help.

Martin: So one question for me was… room noise is really aggravating. And I think when we were in the studio with you last time, there was a point where I watched you guys trouble shoot specifically where a sound was coming from, and then fix it. It kind of sunk in to me how important isolating sound was for you and so from a beginner’s perspective, when you’re looking at room noise, how do you how do you handle that stuff.

Matt: Well in the studio, it’s great because you’ve got a bunch of different types of rooms and there’s actual sturdy construction meant specifically to combat that. You need to get your super isolated booths and we’ve got our main room, we’ve got like pieces of hallway sectioned off to use for certain things, and so we can get isolation just by closing certain doors and doing things in a certain way. It’s much much harder in a home studio. So actually sound proofing a room at home is big money construction. People often confuse the term acoustic treatment and sound proofing. People somehow think that if you throw up some expensive styrofoam on your walls that now you’ve got like rid yourself of room noise which is not at all the case you’re still going to hear the trucks go by outside. So going to hear stuff through your not very well insulated window, you’re still going to hear the fridge in the other room it. Who knows.

Martin: So the first step is maybe like get a new fridge.

Matt: At home you can you can take some small steps Maybe record at times when you know that people are going to be moving their lawns outside and put the dog away somewhere far away and ask your family to shut up for a while and unplug the fridge and anything that’s going to be actually making room and making noise in your room. Just either get it out of there or deal it as best you can and get that one electronic thing that you can actually unplugged so you just throw like a bunch of blankets over it and hope for the best. I mean it’s you do it you can.

Martin: Unplugging the fridge is a lot cheaper than getting a new one. So yeah, I appreciate that.

Matt: And so I’m always a fan of going to somewhere else that has that sort of figured out where it is actually for soundproofing and for you not getting the outside world into your recordings.

Martin: The door in the back is pretty heavy it’s like it reminds me of locking myself in the ice closet when I used to work in a restaurant.

Matt: You mean the big iso booth?

Martin: Yeah, the big iso booth. It’s like you shut it and you’re like you’re in there.

Matt: It’s a little uncomfortable. You can if you’re sitting there and it’s silent. You can like hear your heart be loud. Well and it’s just a creepy

Martin: Interesting. Ok so like maybe some like myths about room noise right. Like within your own house. What do you think about egg cartons

Matt: Egg cartons. You know… I can’t say. I haven’t tried it. There are some companies that I’ll not name that sell what amounts to very expensive styrofoam. Some people have found suitable DIY [methods,] you know, buy cheap bulk styrofoam and do their own cuts even though there are some things that you need to be sort of measured.

Martin: And what about the traditional mattress in the closet and mattress in the closet method?

Matt: It’s not the worst thing in the world. So again that’s essentially creating an iso booth. So I mean anything that’s going to absorb a lot of sound is better than being in you’re being kind of empty square bedroom where everything’s just all rings and flutter echoes every time you open your mouth. So, it doesn’t solve all of your problems but honestly going into a closet full of clothes and blankets and mattresses is much better than nothing.

Martin: That’s interesting. Yes I was thinking about this the other day and I realized that when I started recording in my bedroom I was actually completely incapable of hearing the room. It’s like it was something that it didn’t pay attention to. And so I couldn’t figure out why my recording sounded so bad. And then after spending time listening to other people’s recordings and singing in different rooms as a as a performer I was able to start to hear the sound of the room noise the difference between the noise that my voice was making and then the really rapid reflection of that sound coming back at me from the walls inside of my own room.

Matt: So by room noise you’re talking about like the acoustics and the reflections of the room as much as anything that’s actually making noise in the room.

Martin: As a layman they’re equivalent to me.

Matt: Right. Even though they’re completely separate they are problems sort of separate because there’s there’s like acoustic treatment and then there’s like I’ve got a really loud computer fan that’s sitting there humming away in the background. And then every time I make a sound it’s reflecting off the walls and a really unpleasant way. Yeah. So there’s a sort of separate. Yeah but it gets tricky in the home studio to solve really both of those problems.

Martin: So there’s that old story about like how Led Zeppelin recorded like the drums for Berani Harrar or something like that. And they went to this like giant like mansion probably out in California or like England somewhere and they just put the drums at the base of this like enormous staircase that like went up some turret or something and they played it and they hung the microphone down from the top of the top of the spiral staircase

Matt: So you get that enormous reverby sound. Which they created just with the actual space they were in.

Martin: Right. And so it seems like to me the easiest way for a layman to circumvent going to a studio is to like seek out places within their community that have these like natural acoustic properties which is like fun but also like can become somewhat impractical over a longer period of time because every every time you want to record you have to go back to that place and hope no ones like using it currently.

Matt: Yeah, and if you don’t have control over those places, who knows who’s going to be walking in and out and ruining your recordings and you have to obviously haul your set up over there, and who knows if things are going to work right, or like “Oh, this is the perfect place to record, but I can’t find a power outlet!” Certainly, if you can, pull it off by all means. Go across the world far and wide to find interesting places to record sound. But I’m a fan of studio or it’s we’ve got a super dead booth and a really great natural sounding live room and a really really reflective sort of reverby chamber all right next to each other, so it’s just, “Well, which one do you want to set up in and use in the next five seconds?”

Martin: Yeah. Roll out of bed and hung over and walk into the room and then walk into the next room and bam it’s a hit.

Matt: Not a mobile setup you know, everything works. Yes, but yeah, definitely, like the the environment that you record in makes an enormous difference.

Martin: How did you develop an ear for sound?

Matt: I’m still developing an ear for sound. It’s an ongoing process. I started when I was 18. I was oblivious to a lot of things. It’s just a lot of practice and learning from mistakes. You do the best work you can at the time, and in the early days my career I’ve done work with clients who were very happy to pay me for my abilities and I gave them a final product that I was reasonably proud of and then a few months later I listened back and go “Oh my god how could I have let that go. That sounds terrible.” Not that I think I’ve ever released anything that’s truly awful. But yeah you know, definitely your your client base grows along with you, you know. So you find people whose whose expectations and musical skill level sort of matches your ability to handle that so you graduate to pickier and pickier artists and clients as you yourself become more able to deal with picky people because you can hear things yourself. It’s an acquired skill like anything else.

Martin: Sure. It’s like drinking coffee

Matt: Just like drinking coffee.

Martin: So another, softball question for you is “What is a good first mic?”

Matt: If you’ve never owned a microphone before, I would say in most cases if you’re going to be recording acoustic instruments whether that’s vocals or whether that’s like acoustic guitar acoustic anything then probably some budget condenser what the budget condensers are are constantly changing there’s always new ones being released there’s a million microphones on the market now but it’s a very broad question just because the genre and what you plan to record matters. If you’re going to be recording an electric guitar in your bedroom and then you’re going to be doing screaming metal vocals and probably you want to like, an SM-57 or maybe some better dynamic mic but if you’re going to be just doing rap vocals then maybe you just need some fairly cheap condenser microphone. Or, if you’re going to be trying to do like clean and beautiful acoustic guitar pieces, maybe you need something a little higher quality.

It’s a broad question with a lot of answers but really, if I had no idea what the person did, and they asked me… “I’m going to go buy one microphone” and I felt cocky enough to give them an answer that I thought might suit their needs I’d say, you know, look into a few-hundred-dollar condenser microphone. I don’t know what you need I don’t know what your budget is I don’t know where or what you’re going to be recording so I can tell you.

Martin: Yeah. I find I ask a lot of people simple questions like that on purpose because I’m usually pretty sure that the answer is going to be like “Oh my god, I don’t know what you’re doing. This is a really complicated simple question that you’ve asked me.”

Matt: You’ll find that in audio especially, even though there are a lot of technical specifics, the end result that people are trying to achieve is so subjective and all over the place that I mean, I’ll pretend to give you answers, but really the answer to every single question is probably “I don’t know because nobody knows for sure because there is no one answer for anything when it comes to music.” It’s just, there just isn’t.

Martin: Yeah, that’s that’s good to know. So I guess on a certain level it’s like, no matter how much you know or learn, there’s a specific point in the day where you just have to make a judgment call. What you’re hearing.

Matt: If I know what you’re trying to do what your expectations are what your talent level is, what your budget is, then I can be much more specific with a recommendation for something like what piece of gear should I use.

Martin: It’s so many different things, a bit of a loaded question. So there was another question that I had written down here which is “As a studio owner or a technician within a studio, why would you have 100 microphones?” and I’m assuming the answer is because you don’t know what anyone is going to be doing who walks into your studio.

Matt: Exactly. So there’s a couple of answers to that question as well. You can think of microphones sort of like the metaphor that gets thrown around a lot. It’s a lot like like an artist having a whole bunch of different kinds of paint brushes. So just different tools for different jobs. If you are recording something like quiet and delicate and detailed you need a different mic for that then a blazing loud guitar amp where you don’t want all the all the volume in detail. There’s different situations call for different things. And really every microphone sounds different even if you’ve got two microphones of the exact same model within quality control of the manufacturer and they’re going to sound different and so it might be that if you’re recording a vocal you try ten different microphones. None of them are going to sound the same and it’s going to be kind of a pure taste which flavor you like so.

Martin: I feel like the two things we’ve we’ve learned so far is you’ve got to use a judgment call because there’s so much complexity within the situation you get only as much as you can and then make a judgment call and then hopefully five years later you’ll be able to look back at it, you know you’ve gotten so good at what you do that you can go like I can’t believe I ever made that judgment call

Matt: Right and it’s not even to say that you were wrong, just your tastes have changed. You used to like things that were really scratchy and aggressive. It hurt a little bit. And then later in life “actually I like sounds that are a little more mellow and laid back and have a little more body to them.” But you know, back 10 years ago, you’re all excited about things and you just want everything to be super bright and clear crisp and maybe you just changed

Martin: Yeah, the transition from the young punk musician to the married father who loves the domestic life.

Matt: Exactly, yeah.

Martin: These marriage analogies. Sorry, I don’t know what is with me today. So another question is, you know you don’t have to go into exact budget and details but… how expensive is your studio compared to a home studio. I mean how achievable is it for a musician to build a studio that the level and quality of what you have

Matt: To build a studio of this caliber. I… we even moved into this place when it was already built out to be a studio, we inhabited the husk of a former studio. I would say unless you are planning on sinking a significant amount of money to start a business, it would be unachievable and at the very least foolishly impractical to get into this level of stuff or just do your own projects unless you hugely independently wealthy or you know who knows.

Martin: So like there’s a certain amount of of that money that goes into gear and personnel and training which is very necessary. But then there’s a certain amount of it that goes into building the room out and getting sound isolation and is that a significant budget for you guys? I mean I know I feel like your answer is going to be yes.

Matt: Yes. And like I said this this facility was a legendary recording studio back in the day and it’s been a recording studio largely ever since. So I mean a lot of the shapes of the walls and the materials and the booths and the traps and the major construction stuff was largely done. It needed a lot of renovation which even just the renovations were a substantial investment. But yeah, I mean even to build something like this from scratch might have been even totally unachievable for us. It’s it’s really it’s built to be a studio. You see that the walls are all crazy angles and the main room. And that’s because it was very intentionally designed to be a studio from the start.

Martin: So if I know how to put up an angled wall I have a good start to my own home studio.

Matt: I would seek out the help of a very knowledgeable crew, which I’m not. But yeah, when people are serious about really building a room to be a killer environment for recording they’ll seek out the help of a studio designer and an acoustic version because it’s really a whole other art into itself, like how do I build my walls.

Martin: Yeah. My dad got a master’s degree in engineering and then promptly joined the music industry. So there’s this book on his wall about optics. I opened it and it explains the technical specifications of how light refracts through a lens I’m assuming that sound behaves in a similar way that’s really scientifical. It’s the difference between using the camera and building the camera to take the video. A different guy does that.

Matt: Yeah, the science of sound is definitely a deep subject. Even when I teach, I teach the basic stuff that everyone should know, even if they’ve got a place that’s already pretty well set up to record in. So again, a lot of it was was here and just I just used a lot of it was renovation and honestly other people that are better at the studio design and construction and renovation part of things did a lot more work than I did. I definitely was here for a lot of the renovations. I helped with as much as I could but that’s just not my strong suit.