How to record a song part 6/6: Keyboards and extra arrangements!

We are now in the final part of the recording session, and it's the part in which, once the basic elements of a rock band have been recorded, we must focus on all the additional arrangements.
Obviously it's impossible here to cover all the topics, because we are talking about an infinite variety of sounds that can be added, but we can narrow them down in 2 types: the real ones and the Midi ones.

If we are recording a real piano or other acoustic instruments, such a string ensemble, it's all about microphoning: for single instruments it's usually preferrable to do a combination of close miking and room miking, in order to take also the natural reverb of the room and blend the sounds together in the mixing phase.
If we are dealing instead with several acoustic instruments like an orchestra (click here for an article about how to record a string ensemble), we need to plan a bit more strategically: we can record the ensemble with condenser microphones divided left and right or by sections, and one or more room microphones to capture the room reverb and the low end: this way the mix engineer will be able to narrow the low end and open spatially the higher frequencies.

If we are dealing with keyboards/synths with in built sound, we can hook up the stereo outputs of the synth into our interface and record two mono (left and right) audio tracks.

Finally, if we are dealing with Midi controllers, the possibilities are endless: we can use any type of Vst instrument, for example a Virtual Orchestra, and the instruments can be either synths or samplers (click here for an article that explains the difference between them), and once you have done writing the Midi part you can enhance your sound making it more realistic, by adjusting the paramenters as explained Here and Here.

Now that we have also all the extra parts recorded, we should prepare our project for the mixing phase (click here for an article about project preparation): once we have covered all those steps, let's just go through this quick checklist on how to prepare the tracks for mixing, and we are ready to jump in our serie of tutorials about mixing: HOW TO MIX A SONGS WITH FREE PLUGINS!


CLICK HERE FOR PART 1/6: PREPARATION!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2/6: DRUMS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 3/6: BASS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 4/6: GUITARS!

CLICK HERE FOR PART 5/6: VOCALS!


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