Kara-Moon Forum

When I record, I'm paying a lot of attention to the quality of the sound. I can't stand noise or hiss, and the sound must be right.

But, is that nesecary for good music?

Let me explain. Do you know Moby ? I think he's quiet famous. A friend of my borowed me his CD's and I've got Moby's "18" CD. The CD contains some of Moby's famous hits. But...

Have you noticed the quality of the recording. I've put some samples in the attached mp3 and you need to listen to them carefully. There is indeed a lot of noise, hiss and you'll notice that Moby uses a lot of "poor quality samples", well... in my ears.

But, who cares ??? I mean, his music is great and obviously a lot of people like he's music. Yes, he's the one who is famous because off the simple fact that he's paying more attention to the "musical quality" in his music rather than the "technical quality" of the samples or the recording.

Hmmmm... time to be less critical for the quality of my recording and focus on the musical aspect ?

Moon

First rule of recording-
"have something worth making a record of"...
Content is priority. Many great hits have had poor quality recording.
However, you should always do the best you can.  Some genres are more forgiving than others.  It's also easy to get caught up in layering synth sounds, etc., and spending way more time than the result is worth. 
 However, I like clean recordings.  If you can hear everything clearly you've done a good job.

I'd like to have a clean sound, I pay attention to the sound quality, but in the end even if I detect some noise or hiss I keep it as is (unless it's a major disturbing thing)

I'd like to get ridden of digital click, the one that happens when you paste two sound files and the waveform path doesn't hit zero crossing at the matching point for both files... :-\

cheers

@rharv
I think you got it in a nutshell there.

@LR
Audacity can do some remarkably click-free merges. I have absolutely no idea how it does it!

I'm not familiar with Moby's work,but based on what I've heard here,it seems to me that this artist is just going for authenticity here,by preserving the old recordings as they were,for a natural theme,to mirror the sound as it was then.

Thom

LagunaRising
 By zooming in on the offensive click it is often possible to eliminate it,  or at least improve it.  You can usually 'see' it in a good editing software and then cut a tiny section to make the zero crossings match up.  It often only requires a few samles to be cut out...  so timing is not an issue.  I usually cut and close the gap with the software I use, having them meet at zero and having the line continuing in a normal flow.  In otherwords don't have one hit zero on it's way down and the other hit zero on it's way down too. The line flow usually crosses zero in an up or down direction; keep that flow.

 Also a lot of audio editors have a 'smooth audio cuts' feature that helps smooth out the transition.

A "sound" will generally either promote the ambience of a performance/recording, or be at odds with it.

The sound need not necessarily be musical or on the beat to compliment a song. Likewise, a sound may be pitched accurately and right on the beat....and still clash with the music.

It never ceases to amaze me how a loosely structured composition full of dissonant tones can attract a listener and provide an emotionally satisfying experience. The Rolling Stones are living proof of this phenomenon ;D

Thanks ! I tried that and it works  ;D
It needs a bit of patience zooming in fixing, but it's what I was looking for
Thanks a lot for the advice

Cheers

It takes a lot of patience at first, but soon you'll be doing it in half the time.
Worth the efforts..

+1 to that advice..nobody's push button will do as nice a job as a good edit done right.

Wyatt

Thanks guys I'm getting used to this operation
I'm lucky it happens just a couple of times for each track  ;)

Cheers