Do you need external mic preamps, or is your audio interface good enough?
All right so this week we're answering a viewer question from Mike Hilbun, and
also, if you're looking to learn music theory, or improve your guitar playing
Mike's got a really great channel on that. He's pretty new to YouTube as well
so I'm gonna leave a link to his channel below so check it out after this. Tell'em
Megatron. DO AS I COMMAND!! Ok, ok, geesh. But the jist of Mike's question is, do you really need an external mic
preamp, or are the preamps in your audio interface good enough? Is an external
preamp gonna help improve your recordings? So this is actually a pretty
difficult question to answer so let's start unpacking this. So whether or not
you actually need external mic pre's is sort of a yes/no it depends sort of
question. Now I think among people who are new to recording I think a lot of
them have this misconception that a really good preamp is going to
completely change their recordings which really, it's not. Now I mean don't get me
wrong a good mic preamp is always great to have, but at the same time a good mic
pre is just one component amongst a number of components that are gonna make
your sound. So in order to kind of best explain where a preamp would fit into
the mix, let's travel back in time. We'll go back to the days long before
Pro Tools, Logic, and computers, just to give you an idea of where the preamp
sort of sits in the mix here. So for sake of argument, we're gonna pretend we got a
24 channel inline console feeding a 24 channel tape machine. Now let's say
you've got a really great acoustic guitar player, playing in a really nice
sounding room. So there's components one and two. We've got a really good guitar
player and a really good sounding room. And I guess three would be a really good
sounding guitar. So now you stick a really good microphone in front of that,
now that signal is gonna come into the mic pre on the console, which along with
the microphone and how you position it on the guitar is gonna change the sound of
the guitar a little bit. Mic pre's is gonna add a little bit of its
own colour to it. Now from the mic pre, that guitar signals gonna come down the
channel strip, it's gonna hit an EQ, potentially a compressor. So two more
items that are gonna change the way the guitar sounds. Now that signal is gonna
be fed over to the tape machine, which depending on how hard you're hitting the
tape machine, that's also gonna change the sound of the guitar. Now coming back
from the tape machine, back into the console, we might be eq'ing that guitar
a little bit more, maybe adding a little bit more compression, again continuing to
change the guitar sound. Now again, for sake of argument let's pretend on top of
this guitar track, you've recorded a couple extra guitar tracks. Maybe you
track some bass, you've tracked some drums, and you track some vocals. All
through the same process. So now on the console
have your guitar tracks go to one bus, you're gonna have your drums go to
another bus. Bass, vocals, to their own buses. So the way that that console sums
these tracks together in the buses, that's gonna have an effect on the sound.
And now when all your buses are summed together to come out the main output, the
master bus that's gonna change the sound. Especially if you're using a buss
compressor or anything like that. And then that signal would eventually hit a
two-track tape machine. So that two-track tape machine is gonna change the sound
and then that two-track tape is gonna be sent off to be mastered which again, is
gonna continue to change the sound. Now even if you take the tape machine and
replace it with a Pro Tools rig, the process is pretty much the same. Except Pro
Tools isn't really gonna change the sound. It's not designed to do that
unless you're throwing plugins on it. So when you look at it that way, yes a good
preamp is always important, but it's just one component amongst a number of
components that are going to affect how you're recording sound. All right, so if
we fast forward to today, modern home studios, modern audio interfaces, even
inexpensive audio interfaces in today's standards actually sound really good. The
preamps are designed to be as clean as transparent as possible. The DA
converters are worlds above what they where even 15, 10 years ago. So in that
respect, we're kind of living in a golden age where we've never had it so good for
so little money. Now, that's not to say having a really great preamp or two, you
know, say Neves or API's, or some Universal Audio preamps isn't a good
thing to have, but there's sort of an upgrading priority order that you have
to think about. Now you have to remember that everything starts at the source. So
if you have a drum kit, heads are beat to hell, cymbals are all cracked and banged
up, and the loudest part of your drum kit is that ridiculously squeaky kick drum
pedal that you've got... Well if you take that kit and put it in a fantastic drum
room in a big studio, slap $50,000 worth of microphones on it, and track it
through a gorgeous Neve console... Well guess what? It's still gonna sound like
shit because the drum kit itself is shit.
So when you're putting your studio together you always want to make sure
that your sources sound really good, your instruments sound really good. You
want to make sure that the room that you're tracking them in sounds as good
as you can get it. You also want to make sure that you've got a pretty good grasp
on mixing and recording. Because if you don't know what you're doing with this
expensive gear, well then it really doesn't matter because you're not going
to get the best out of it. So that would be my recommendation to anybody watching.
Make sure your sources are good, make sure your room sounds as good as
you can get it, and make sure that you're recording and mixing skills are starting
to come together. Get those areas taken care of and then that's when you'd
probably want to start looking into nicer microphones and nicer mic preamps.
Alright, so hopefully I explained that in a way that makes sense to everybody
watching. If you have any further questions, just leave a comment below. And
again, don't forget to check out Mike's channel. I'll have a link in the
descriptions. And videos coming up, I think we're gonna do some videos on mic'ing
guitar cabinets and that sort of stuff. So keep a watch out for those.
Anywho, I've been mr. Jeff, ah, thanks for watching, don't forget to Like and
subscribe and all that sort of stuff, and I'll see you guys in the next video.