How Green Day records their songs

[Marc.]

that would be kinda hard recording the vocals without music (to me it would)

but I know effects are last

nah the singer is in a sound proof room wearing head phones with the music playing through it ive seen that episode the making of ai they had the band in another room playing while billie sung

[Dai.]

why do you care?

dejavu

[Zynester]

I'm not really sure how Green Day do it, but it doesn't really matter. They sound awesome!

My band just usually go into the studio.

Record the song on drums & guitar just to get the structure for the drums.

(drums are in a seperate room, with mic's on each drum)

Delete the guitar track and re-record it perfectly. (Guitar plugged into amp, amp plugged into computer)

Record the bass track (plugged directly into the computers)

Then vocals (in a sound proofed room with a condenser mic)

[CarnageXB]

wat i think is there in a studio and they record it wow that was difficault but on another part they could record the song first and then add the guitar and drums and bass but i think they do record the music first cause then the noise of the instuments would over rule the voice

[Heart_Like_A_Hand_Grenade]

Carefully.

[mechanicalman]

What difference does equipment make? Apart from good equipment beats crap equipment. But all good equipment is the same, isn't it?

[Peter.]

What difference does equipment make? Apart from good equipment beats crap equipment. But all good equipment is the same, isn't it?

There's differences between good equipment, like, a guitar might have different characteristic in the sound that you want for a special song or something or an amp might have a natural heavy sound that does well for metal etc.

as for how they record..

They use microphones for everything, it's just the best way to get it to sound good.

First they do drums, then bass, then guitars, then vocals, backingvocals and other percussions

[Sugar Demon]

There is no single best way to record. Different producers, engineers and bands have various recording techniques. That's what makes their sounds unique. It's sort of like painting a picture. You could have two different record producers take a band and record the same album. It would come out different because they have different visions of what it is suppose to sound like. They don't "paint" the same.

As far as recording fundamentals, many songs start out with a simple click track and the musicians work up from there. And bands use BOTH miked and direct to the board recording. There's a load of different variables in miking an amp. Most everything is done synthetically these days with recording plug ins like DirectX and VST, but the old days were pretty ingenious. A lot of the echo you hear on old recordings are things like having the amp inside a giant outdoor water tank and picking up the natural echo inside the water tank. The reverb you hear on Frank Sinatra vocals on the old Capitol recordings are nothing more than Frank in the studio upstairs in a recording studio, his vocal is piped to a small PA system in a long narrow concete corridor in the basement beneath the Capitol Records building in LA. At the other end of the concrete corridor, there's a single mic that picks up the vocal with the natural echo from the corridor. Hundreds of recordings were done that way.

The largest advance has been going from analog to digital and making it inexpensive. Use to be, you had to be a REAL GOOD MUSICIAN because you played the whole song and any mistakes you made were on the tape.......for good. Now, you can easily fix your screwups by "punching in and punching out" while the track is playing, essentially playing or singing over and overwriting the screwups. Played the wrong note? No problem. You can do audio micro surgery and edit that single note on computer, ..changing its pitch, changing its length, changing its timbre. Can't sing in tune? No problem. Software programs like Autotune will correct your pitch.

Professional recording studios are multi million dollar enterprises with $10,000 Neuman mics and $35,000 compressors and power amps and mixers and crossovers and nearfield monitors and on and on, but home recording is cheaper than ever. You can get a four track cassette recorder and a cheap mic for under $150. You can get 8 to 12 digital recorders for $3-400, record your tracks, bounce it down and burn it on a CD. And in the end, it is STILL all about the song. A sucky song produced in a million dollar studio is still a sucky song.

Oh, and Green Day's CDs are anything but "warm". The signal is punched up and compressed so much in an effort to make them as loud as possible (like most of the modern CDs today), it creates premature ear fatique when you listen to them for long periods. The more signal that I can compress and squash into a certain aurel bandwidth, the louder I can make that CD. Unfortunately, you lose some things in the process, like some of the dynamics and instrument separation. But hey, that's the current preferred sound.

[Peter.]

^You forgot to mention Hired Studiomusicians..

[Mauri]

A sucky song produced in a million dollar studio is still a sucky song.

Couldn't agree with you more about that...

[Milan.]

Onto a computer you fucken tarts, then they mix it

[Melly.]

lol.

[Milan.]

They Get into a studio, record the song and overdub it till its perfect, then turn it into a million dollar song thats still crappy but makes them money

[Marc.]

They Get into a studio, record the song and overdub it till its perfect, then turn it into a million dollar song thats still crappy but makes them money

indeed indeed

[cam-greenday-fan]

if u ever meet green day go up 2 the and say how do u record ur songs and waste your question

[GreenDay-Idiot]

I don't know. Money influence I think.

[Sugar Demon]

Here's a visual example of how much Green Day (& others) compress their songs these days to make them louder on CD. I did these screen shots taken from the actual CDs. There are TWO blue sqiggles because one is the right channel and the other the left channel. First is an 80s song by The Cult - Lil Devil.

Note: The top and bottom gray lines represent where the threshold is for clipping (distortion of the signal). As you can see, there are peaks and plenty of dynamics, but still a lot of room within the bandwidth before you get a lot of clipping.

Here's a 90s song by Pantera - Cowboys From Hell.

Now HERE's American Idiot by Green Day. Notice anything different???

When you squash all of that amplified signal into the given bandwidth, there's very little dynamics and almost the entire song is way past the clipping stage. The only part that is below the clipping stage is the opening guitar riff and the part where he says "It's going out to Idiot America".

There's a function called Hard Limiting where the signal is digitally pushed up to the max, but doesn't move past the clipping stage. American Idiot disregards that threshold and washes right over it for almost the entire song. Pretty wierd, huh.