Home Recording Should & Shouldn'ts

Bienvenidos! That concludes the Spanish lesson of the day, now on to studio stuff!

The focus of today will be integrating home recording with professional studio recording. There are many artists out there that do fantastic home recordings…for the most part. There are obvious factors that go into the quality of home recordings such as style of music, available equipment, room treatment, and the experience and ears of the person doing the recording.

Two of those things (equipment and room treatment) can be acquired by spending some money and doing internet research…again, for the most part. You can hop online, find some reviews for the best software, microphones, and outboard gear and be good to go in that department (using it properly is another story – read on). You can also find a multitude of websites that will give you very accurate direction on how to acoustically treat your bed room, apartment, or rehearsal space. Problem is there’s only so much you can do to a room with six parallel surfaces to make it sound decent. You could treat it as a professional studio would, but trust me when I say that is not an inexpensive habit to start up. A professionally built and/or acoustically treated room is one of the many “must-haves” to get a professional quality recording when it comes to certain instruments; especially drums.

This is where style of music also seems to have a huge factor in home recording quality. If the stuff is strictly acoustic guitar, vocals, MIDI keyboards, and maybe some light percussion it is possible to get a great sound at home. When you get into full band set-ups, you want to start considering integrating some professional assistance. Again, especially when it comes to drums. The first thing that will stick out like a sore thumb if recorded poorly will be the drums. “I know from experience, dude.” (Chris Farley/Bus Driver, “Billy Madison”…and me.) It is not uncommon to record some scratch guitars at home, go into a professional studio to do drums, and then record the rest back at home. That could potentially get you the basis of a great sounding record, as far as tracking goes. Then there’s mixing…

That brings me to the last thing, and arguably the biggest factor in all of this: The experience and ears of the person doing the recording and mixing. This is a factor that will directly affect every part of your recording process. Remember all that expensive gear you bought when we were back in paragraph three? Well if you don’t know what the ratio knob on the compressor plug-in does, then chances are you’re heading to frustration. And that’s just on the equipment end, what about microphone placement? That is one of the most important factors (along with a professional room) to getting a great recording.

So you have great sounding tracks on a hard drive, now it’s time to mix. I’ve gotten more questions about mixing a home recording than anything else. Any engineer will tell you, it takes years and years of experience to successfully mix a professional sounding record. Knowing how to gracefully blend the frequencies of dozens of tracks together, where to place them in the stereo field, when and where to use compression or reverb are all things where you’re going to likely require the assistance of an experienced mixing engineer.

So to sum up: If you’re going to record on your own and want to get as close to a professional sounding record you can, there are at minimum two things I strongly suggest getting professional help with. Tracking drums in a good room with an experienced engineer and mixing with an experienced engineer.

Until next time…