Recording Techniques

[BlackHole]

I'm going to be perusing recording some of my projects PE/Industrial material this coming year and was curious about some of the recording techniques you guys use. How many tracks are typically used for a semi-layered and detailed PE arrangement and what are some of the equipment and techniques you use to do record them? I am working with synths, feedback loops, contact mic abuse, vocals, and a drum machine sparsely.

[F_c_O]

Recently 2 layers. 1 for the noise, 1 for the vocals. This is simply because I have yet to figure out how to make my voice loud enough to poke out through the noise while completely live. Gotta figure that out so I can get to the ideal situation of full live noise again.

As for how and with what I record, I use beat up tape deck I bought second hand for 40 euros. It has two tracks, left and right and you can choose the gain so you can control the saturation.

Thats basically my setup for recording.

[preta]

I just make noise with two mixers and I'm always turning volumes down because I'm afraid of not only blowing my speakers but sounding flat too. sometimes you might want to sound flat, ok, if you play with distortion a little bit you might find "interesting" flat sounds aswell. Basically, more mixers the better - than you need to feed them and you have just more options than you need (computer, cellphone/tablet, contact mic wtv) if you don't have more than one source just split it, go diy.
You can do everything in some daw like ableton or something but it's just like drawing in the computer with the mouse instead of having the paper and the pencil ahah

Btw, someone here have some advice about how to play real loud with some safety for the speakers? I just blown one 4 or 5 years ago... I didn't had a proper mixer tho

[BlackHole]

Sorry for the double post. I did indeed forget I made the previous thread.

[certainesthetik]

I think it's mostly the creative person being versed in their gear, no matter how simple or complex, as to use it like an instrument as much as any experimental whatever the fuck. Two people that post on this forum come to mind as having amazingly complex and advanced gear, and fucking shit, is that apparent in their sound, they both make aggressive, punishing shit 100% of the time - for some reason, this approach does not seem natural to me. I want almost pathetically stripped-down gear (well, most of the time).

I think the struggle and failure involved finding your own methods is necessary and leads to greater success later on - it's better to just get things and start attempting doing something coherent with them, refine and add/subtract things as needed. I know that's easier said than done, but I don't think anything about difficult/experimental/whatever kind of music should be easy (or even "fun" in the traditional sense, fuck it). I think part of the joy of getting sounds you want to hear is the tenacious amount of effort it takes to get what you want, so it should be hard at first, probably for a long while. Fuck it, I don't give a shit how ridiculous that might sound - I think finding your own way of doing things is the only way to do anything that isn't just a clone project or a one-trick-pony.

The only technical advice I can give you is: 1) you might get a mixer. 2) experiment with line in vs. microphone recordings.

You couldn't have said it better Peterson. When I first started experimenting, I was in a constant state of frustration because everything was a learning curve. It is definitely not always "fun", but the results are always rewarding. In the beginning, too often I was searching for the quick, easy way out of my "road-block", and lacked the patience to research things, or step back and experiment further until the desired results were achieved. The best part of all of this stuff is that everyone has a slightly (or sometimes radically) different approach, and you get to create your own.