Six Home Recording Studio Secrets

Here's six home recording studio secrets. Follow these guidelines on your next project and take your home recording to the next level.

1.) Great Mic+Great Preamp= Great Tone

This is the single most important element in the home recording chain. If you can only afford to spend a few hundred dollars on microphones, DON'T buy an assortment of mics. Buy ONE good mic and ONE good preamp. If you're on a budget, the Audio Technica AT4033 is a terrific mic for the home recording studio. If you can afford to spend a little more, the newer, Shure KSM 32 is nearly impossible to beat for the price.

Match either of these with a good quality tube preamp and you are on your way to great tone. If you can't swing the price, consider borrowing or renting one from a friend, local music store, or recording studio. Many mail order stores offer a 30 day money back guarantee on their merchandise. Most home recording sessions could be finished in less than thirty days ;-) If you can't find any way to get your hands on a decent mic and preamp, either try harder, or don't bother reading the rest of this article. You'll just be wasting your time... which brings us to rule #.2

2.) Garbage in... garbage out

This is one of my favorite home recording studio expressions. It basically means that you should always try to improve the sound at the SOURCE, or at lease as close to the source as possible. For instance, if your gear sounds like #*@#, no amount of fancy studio gear will ever make it sound like a great rig. If someone tells you that they'll just fix a problem "in the mix", tell them politely to stop and fix it NOW. If you're paying that person to record your band, pack your gear and get out before you waste any more of your money! Remember, always try to get a good sound at the source. The next two tips offer some advice on ways to improve your "source sound".

3.) Use a track sheet to keep track of your tracks!

Writing down what you record, as you do it will save you LOTS of headaches in the long run. Use a separate track sheet for every song. That way you won't get confused when one song has a harmonica on track 6 and the next song has a vocal harmony on the same track. I also like to make notes about each track I record. I write down mic placement, EQ, and amplifier settings. That way I can reproduce the sound (or at least get close) later if I have to. You can buy track sheets, but the easiest thing to do is just get a calendar, or print them out on computer. Use a different page for each song.

4.) Eliminate background noise

Before recording every track, turn up the volume on your control room speakers or headphones. Now listen for background noise. What do you hear? Can you hear cars on the interstate... hum from ceiling lights... your dog barking outside... washing machine...sound of an air conditioner vent right above your overhead drum mic? Try to eliminate as many of these problems as possible. Turn off the AC and the dryer while you're recording. If you have a dog, make sure he has something to chew on-who knows how many of the best guitar solos ever recorded had to be scrapped, because Fido started barking halfway through a truly zen moment. Finally, find a lamp that won't hum... or play by candlelight. The intimate vibe often brings out the best in singers.

A little bit of background noise may seem like no big deal, but when you add that little bit from each one of the tracks you record, it adds up. If it's not part of the song, keep it off the tape!

5.) Add effects at mixdown, NOT during recording.

Sometimes, it's hard to get a good idea of how the elements of a song will blend until they're all recorded. If you add effects while recording, you're stuck with them! You'll be pretty upset later when that perfect vocal track that took you all day is washed out with reverb, and there's nothing you can do about it! There may be limitations, depending on how many effect sends your mixer has. If you want to use more effects than you have sends, you may have to do a little planning ahead. On the other hand, if you have lots of sends, you can add all your effects after you finish recording the tracks. You can even add guitar effects (stomp boxes) this way. Just remember that you should only add those effects that you would normally put in your effects loop of your amp (delay, chorus, flange, etc).

6.) Have a plan

* Proper planning will save you loads of time, and insure that your final product reflects your musical vision. Chart out the structure of every song before recording it. Write this down. Now, decide on a tempo. Be SPECIFIC. Use a metronome to find out what bpm (beats per minute) the song grooves at. Write it down.

* Now decide on the melodic focus. Look at the song structure and decide what is the most important element at each section. There should be a center of focus that is traded off throughout the song. For instance, during the verse, the focus is usually the vocal (there are exceptions). The spotlight might then move to the guitar for a solo, or a melodic bass line in the bridge. Decide on these things early in the game, so you know how to build around them.

* Chart out the energy of the song as a graph. A song should move and take the listener somewhere. This is the number one mistake that I find in songwriting, in relation to planning. The best way to give part of a song an incredible feeling of energy is to start from nowhere and build it up to a climax. A good example of this is a bridge that totally breaks down, then slowly builds into a loud rocking outro chorus. This technique is about as standard as peanut butter and jelly in popular music. Don't let that keep you from using it. People do it because it's effective.

* Chart out the instrumentation. Make sure that parts are not redundant. A piano part that is in the same octave range as a clean guitar will get cluttered. You can only fit so much into the sonic spectrum. Try to keep each part in a separate range, so they don't fight each other. If you do well at this, a good song, recorded well will almost mix itself!

I hope these home recording tips make life easier for you in your home recording studio. I got some neat sounds from experimenting when I was a novice. Ultimately though, I had to learn from the professionals to get the results I wanted. You could figure out all that stuff on your own, but it would take forever. Why do that when you could just learn from someone else’s mistakes.

Find someone who knows more than you and learn from their experience. There are also a number of good online forums for home studio recording. I recommend HomeRecording.com. If you have a slow modem, it may take awhile to get around. This particular forum loads very slowly. But there is a lot of good information in the home recording studio archives.