Among the common criticisms you hear about electronic music these days is that things 'sound a bit softsynth'. It's an inevitable situation; now that everyone's working and mixing in the box so much, it can be tempting to use just the stuff that's right in front of you. After all, your DAW probably came with some great synths, solid multi-sample patches of strings and pianos, and it's stacked to the gills with high quality plugins. But even when you've got such a selection of options, it still makes sense to get some live sounds in there too: lots of the best music comes from the imperfections caused by a human player, or just things going wrong in the recording process. But if you don't have a full-on studio, you can't record proper instruments, right? Well, read on for a few options that can bring your productions that new depth without breaking the bank....
First things first; you're going to need some extra hardware for this. You'll need a microphone, of course. It doesn't need to be amazing, but obviously the more you can spend the better; if you just want to record a bit of percussion then a simple dynamic mic will do the job fine. A classic example is the Shure SM58, which is cheap, decent and almost indestructible (consider picking up a second-hand one). If you want to record more delicate sounds, like vocals or acoustic guitar then a condenser microphone is the way forward. These are more expensive, but are getting cheaper all the time; some of the models in the SE Electronics range now even include digital audio outputs to save on Soundcard requirements.What's the best stuff to record, then? If you're new to recording live instruments then start simple and cheap. Tambourines, shakers, bongo drums and any other percussive items are cheap to pick up - most people will probably have a couple lying around the house anyway - and easy to record. Get the microphone up close, and play along with the groove. You'll come out with patterns that you would never have programmed, and can easily chop the recording to be in time if your playing wasn't up to scratch. You may want to compress the recorded signal quite heavily - most sample pack versions are compressed hard too. This goes doubly for bongos and small drums; the transients can really stand out and give a thin sound. Compress them to add body. Or, of course, drive them hard into your desk if you have one and redline it a little bit. The distortion will tame the peaks somewhat, and can add some tasty crunch if you don't push it too hard.
Don't forget that some instruments don't need a microphone at all: An electric bass can easily be plugged straight into your desk and, if you're not a natural guitarist, is a lot easier to play than a six-string. You can record simple basslines easily, and if you need something busier, just record it in sections and chop them together. Again, you'll find yourself playing riffs that it wouldn't have occurred to you to program, and you'll get a much better sound than the stock bass guitar instruments that come with your DAW which are, almost always, rubbish. Again, try compressing hard, try driving the desk into the red, try making full use of everything you can that's outside the computer and will stamp a distinctive sound onto your recording that other people couldn't get just by using the usual plugins.Guitar players can plug an electro-acoustic instrument straight into a desk, or will be well aware of the potential for mic'ing up an amplifier with an electric guitar. For this, use a dynamic microphone if you're going loud (condenser mics are often too delicate for the sort of volume amplifiers can pump out, although will be fine if you're just using the amp for its sonic effects rather than cranking it up to eleven). You won't need to compress the resulting signal; the distortion caused by the amplifier will compress the signal heavily anyway.
Drummers are in for a much harder time of it. Recording a drum kit well is a notoriously tricky affair; you'll need a minimum of three or four microphones, preferably about eight, and a lot of practise. Instructions could fill an article twice as long as this, so we'll save that one for a later date.
In all of these cases, for electronic music it's probably easiest - especially for people who have not recorded live instruments before - to use your recordings not as the main feature of the track, but as part of the supporting cast. Which is why it's advisable to start with shakers, percussion and such. These will give you a live ambience, natural reverb, human timing imperfections, they're unique to your track, and they're easy to produce. An acoustic guitar, on the other hand, requires a good microphone and deft production to really do it justice if you're going to have it front and centre in your track - so again, team it up with some synths and virtual instruments to beef up the sound.
By combining sounds in this way you can get the best of both worlds - you get unique sounds that no-one else has access to, your productions will have a level of depth and timbre to their sound that is extremely hard to appropriate with synths and samples, and you don't have the stress of needing the live stuff to sound absolutely perfect before the track will work. Indeed, you only have to listen to a James Blake or Flying Lotus track to hear that lo-fi, clicky, noisy sounds can be a feature in themselves.So although it's often easier just to load up a plugin, try going that extra mile and recording some new sounds. You never know where it will take your tracks!
