MAXIMUM HOME RECORDING - PRE-PRODUCTION

Pro Recording

In a professional recording situation you have three separate and distinct groups of people working to create a finished product. You have the technical element, the recording engineer and assistant engineers. Then there is the production staff who oversee the budget and organize the personnel and are usually there to represent the client whether that be the band itself or the record label to which they are signed. Lastly you have the most important group of people, the musicians, songwriters, in short the talent.

Home Recording

In the home recording setting in many cases YOU are all of the above! You are Engineer, Producer, Talent AND Client! In order to produce the best possible recordings you must master some of the skills in each of these areas. This especially true if your goal is to eventually open your home studio to the public or build a more professional studio for profit. When you are deciding what instrumentation to use, what equipment to buy, what the order of the songs will be on the finished CD and how everything will be paid for you’re in “Producer Mode”. When you’re deciding what mic to use to best capture an instrument, which frequencies must be boosted or cut in order make a vocal cut through the mix you’re in “Engineer Mode”. While you’re writing the songs and playing the instruments you’re in “Talent Mode” . If you think about recording in these terms as you develop your own personal process of recording, you will begin to see the process as a whole and this will enable you to anticipate how what you do in the planning stages of your recording will effect the tracking and mixing process.

A Studio Setup

What you need to create is a controlled environment, a control room if you will. There are 2 reasons it’s called a control room. The first reason is that where all the controls are housed, your computer, mixer and other recording equipment. The second is more scientific. In science the concept of a control is a known quantity to be used as a basis of comparison. In this case your control room will be setup so that there is an even balance of low, mid and high frequencies. This will allow you to more accurately judge the characteristics of the sounds that you monitor before you record and the sounds you playback once they are recorded. You need to do this so that your final mixes will sound the way you intended them too when played back on other systems in other places. This very important step is overlooked by many home recordists and this is why many home recordings sound unprofessional.

The other room in a typical studio setup is referred to as the “Live Room” or “Studio Floor”. It is a good idea for this room to be treated with materials that absorb sound. The reason for this is that it is ideal for microphones to capture the direct sound from what you are recording with as few reflections as possible. This sound dampening material also serves to minimize outside sounds from finding their way into your recordings.

By isolating these two rooms from one another you are able to use tools like compression and equalization to get the sounds close to the way you want them to be in the finished product right from the word go. For this reason it comes in handy to have an accurate idea of what the final mix will sound like. It also comes in handy to have a track sheet where you map out exactly what instrumentation you are going to record, in what order and which tracks will need to be recorded in stereo as opposed to mono. Not everyone has two rooms to work with and so the recording and mixing method must be altered a little but some people may prefer to record in a single room.