So your band is set to record some new songs. Everyone’s excited to head back to the studio. Except you.
You remember the last time you recorded… you remember paying the studio engineer for the hours he spent dicking around with your songs as if they were his own personal experiment. You remember the drummer refusing to pitch in for gas during the 50-mile commute to the studio. You remember how the album was delayed three months because that’s how long it took to schedule the singer to get in and fix the two-syllable section he messed up in one verse of one song. You remember how the guitar player kept referring to his meth-addict girlfriend as “the producer. And you know that there’s definitely no way you’re going to put yourself through all of that again.
So then you start thinking about taking the reins yourself on your band’s next project. It’s not always such a bad idea, and you’re certainly not the first one to have it. As long as you maintain a good attitude and realistic expectations, home recording can be a rewarding experience with surprisingly good results; it can also save you a lot of money and allows you to work around your own schedule.
But it takes more than reading a few back issues of Tape Op and plugging a Radio Shack microphone into the back of mom’s computer. There are several issues that can absolutely cripple your attempts at making a quality recording without the use of a professional studio; let’s take a look at three of the most common home recording mistakes and figure out what you can do to avoid them.
1) Arrogance
The biggest mistake you can make as a semi-professional recording engineer might be to start calling yourself a “semi-professional recording engineer”. Because you’re not. You’re some dude with a computer and a lame band recording some crap in his parents’ basement. Remember that. That’s what you are when you start; that’s what you’re going to be until you’ve spent 2,000 hours mixing songs you hate and have invested in your own million-dollar studio somewhere. You are stupid, you know nothing, and you should consider yourself extremely lucky if even a single beat of this atrocious “album” you’re about to make sounds halfway right.
I didn’t mean to be rude there, but you have to expect failure. I promise you’ll meet that expectation the first dozen or more times you try to record. If you think your hotshot bandmates will be impatient and angry with you for practicing your recording techniques on them, just lay down tracks alone, or with some buddies who are also interested in learning about home recording. This works especially well because several people learning the same thing at once are able to feed off of each other.
Play around with microphone placement, micing instruments versus plugging directly into the mixer, what amps and instruments sound better in which parts of the room, etc. Play around with this stuff for hours; if you get bored with this stuff right away, you’re not cut out to be a recording engineer.
Sometimes, a musician who tries to set up his own home studio will take on the mindset that he’ll be able to record easily because he “knows music”. He figures that as long as he plugs the microphones in correctly and sets the knobs to the right levels, his recording will come out perfect. He sees audio engineering as a rudimentary skill that can be simply memorized, as opposed to a true craft that must be learned. If you go into your first session with this mindset, your recording will be shit. And you’ll deserve it.
2) Using the Wrong Computer
Unless you’re still digging cassette tapes, or have access to some new-fangled digital media recording contraption, the business end of your home recording rig will probably be a regular old home computer. But it shouldn’t be. Regular old computers have viruses and spy ware eating at their resources. Regular old home computers have resource-hungry security applications and Spongebob Squarepants screensavers running in the background.
Regular old computers have only one hard drive when all of the good audio recording suites prefer to work with two. Regular old computers are what your wife will nag you to get off of when you’re having a brilliant two-in-the-morning mixing session because she needs to check eBay. Regular old computers will turn your low-stress home recording project into a nightmare 100 times worse than whatever you faced at the studio.
Inevitably, somebody will tell you that you need a Mac for home recording. Please shoot them. I’ve done years of video and audio editing and Macs have failed me miserably over and over again, but my modest PC-based rig rarely ever gives me problems. A PC specifically built or modified for the purposes of home recording will outperform a Mac of comparable specs any day. I promise. Because you can only buy Mac parts from the fascists at Apple, Macs are basically impossible to customize or modify unless you want a chain of 100 FireWire devices laying all over your desk. Macs are for people who have too much money on their hands and are too lazy to work on putting together a real, personalized audio/video rig.
The truth is that you can use a cheap PC–even an old PC–but it needs to be modified and stripped down to be converted into a decent recording rig. If you’re not good with computers, get help from a friend who is.
First, you need two hard drives. You want one hard drive on which to install software (Windows and your recording suite) and one hard drive to actually record on. If they’re both internal drives, put them on different IDE channels. An external USB or FireWire hard drive is also a good choice for your recording drive, especially if you think you might end up working on more than one computer.
Second, delete all software except the operating system (probably Windows XP) and whatever you use as recording software (ProTools, Cool Edit, etc.) Do not use security software. Do not use screensavers. Do not even hook this machine up to the internet.
Third, you’ll an input-output other than your built-in soundcard. As an example, the Delta 44 by M-Audio is an excellent (and affordable) choice; check the internet and music stores to find something that meets your particular needs and budget. I’ll admit that I still use the 1/8″ stereo input on my computer’s soundcard when I need an extra independent input and have no other options, but you’ll want something beefier for the bulk of your work.
3) Attempting to Home Master
Mastering is what you’re supposed to do after mixing; it’s the final step in making your song sound like a “real” recording. And you can’t do it. Almost everybody who attempts to master a track themselves on their home-PC system ends up pissing on their final mix by running it through a seemingly-arbitrary series of compression, equalization, and maximizing effects. After hours and hours of work, the song ends up sounding dead and amateurish, when the idea behind real mastering is the exact opposite.
Real mastering engineers listen to the same song over and over and over again with 100 different speaker systems, making extremely delicate adjustments that your ears probably wouldn’t even pick up on. Trust me: you don’t want to be a mastering engineer, so don’t even try to play make believe on this step.
If you don’t have the means to send your recording to a real mastering house, the best thing to do is simply normalize the volume of your mixes and call it good.
In the end, the best advice I can give you is to just try and have fun when you’re making your recording. But you probably won’t. Because it sucks. On second thought, just go back to that shitty studio anyway… it’s probably for the best.
