My best shot with the new Canon 70D DSLR

What do photos on my new Canon 70D have to do with recording?

I was really into photography when I was young. Really into it! I won a minor award for my work and even made a tiny bit of money from it. In my early 20’s I realized that I did not have enough time or money to do both photography and music at the level of mastery I was aspiring to. I chose music. I think I made the right choice.

Venice Beach Skate Park. Canon 70D

This month I bought the awesome new Canon EOS 70D camera. It is a DSLR, a camera primarily designed for still photography, but I bought it because it can do great things with video and I am investing a lot to try and up the quality of video production for a new series of audio training videos I am working on. In my free time I have been playing around with the still photography capabilities of the camera. It is rekindling my love for photography. I have been shooting lots of photos and having a great time using the giant range of digital filtering and manipulation capabilities we could not even dream of when I was first obsessed with photography decades ago.

I took this shot of a skateboarder down at Venice beach, capturing him in mid-air with a fast exposure. I then used a filter called “Focus 2” to artificially make the background out of focus to draw attention to the action. I was pretty happy with the 10 minute experiment.

Marina del Rey Canon 70D

I took this photo from the back of my boat and used a program called ColorStrokes to make the boats and water black and white but the sky blue and filtered to be a bit more painting like.

As much fun as I have been having with all these filters, the photo I am most proud of and show off the most is this next photo of Venice Beach at twilight. What cool photo filters did I use on this?

None.

Venice Beach Canon 70D

Aside from slightly cropping off the left side of the photo, I have not done anything to this. It came out as the best photo of the month because the scene I captured was beautiful in front of the camera, I used good gear to capture it and I did not screw it up.  So why am I thinking about this and putting it into an article about recording…….?

This weekend I was teaching a Recording Boot Camp course and working with some students on projects they had in the works. I was teaching the guys how to use various analog and digital tools to process sounds to either make them work better in a mix or be more interesting, but we all noticed that the sounds and parts of the mixes that we loved the most, we did almost nothing to. As a guy that has worked on thousands of songs in the studio it is amazing how often I see this over and over. Most of the time, the sounds that are the most exciting, most engaging and work best in the final mix, often have them least done to them in the mix. The magic happens before the mic.

The secret to most great records is that the magic happens before the mic. So many of the great classic records we love from the 60’s and 70’s were mixed in minutes rather than the hours or even days that people can often spend mixing now. How could they do it? Engineers using good gear captured magic and great art and blended it together quickly. Those records sound great and still touch people musically all these decades later.

Wayne Hankin on the Pearlman TM-1

While I am not suggesting we need to spend only 20-30 minutes on our mixes, one thing that almost every experienced producer or mixer can tell you is that most of the truly great records are truly great because of what happened before the mic: in the writing, the performance, the quality of the instruments, etc. It is always worth it to try and make your tracks sound great before the mic. Even if you are using virtual instruments, spend the time to make sure that your arrangements are great and that you find the absolute best sounds to serve your songs.

If you have done your “production” right, you should be able to push up the faders and have a cool record, and everything else is just the polish and frosting to step it up a level. You will probably find that the work you end up loving the most had way more to do with the performance and core sounds than the things you did to try and ‘fix” the productions.