Making Home Recording Studios Work
With technology advancing faster than ever, more musicians
have home recording capabilities than ever. While this may
seem like enough to record professional sounding music,
there are a lot of things neglected when creating a home
studio. While it is not necessary to have everything a professional
studio has, one can certainly learn a few pointers by analyzing
them.
Some professional studios are mainly used for tracking,
while others specialize in mixing and mastering. Although
there are some noticeable differences between the two of
them, they share a lot of similarities. Both of them are
optimized for work flow, and both share a lot of audio gear.
Although work flow may not seem as important as the audio
gear to some, it can affect the recording process as much
as anything else. Often musicians buy very specialized recording
gear, but can’t seem to finish any of their recordings.
Sometimes the lack of results is a reflection of the lack
of planning and organization. Although these are the kinds
of qualities musicians are not necessarily known for, they
can be very useful when setting up a home recording studio.
If you want to streamline your work flow, you have to think
about the process of how you work. Are you someone who rarely
or never plays out live, or are you someone who is gigging
every weekend? This can have a big impact on your studio.
Do you have a lot of audio gear and effects that you want
to be able to set up quickly and use for whatever purpose
you think of? Most professional studios have a large amount
of outboard effects and processing wired up in a studio
rack. Now, most people don’t want to put a ton of equipment
in an enclosure that’s difficult to get to, which requires
them to get behind the unit with a flashlight to decode
the path of the wires.
This is why patch bays are used by most studios. You can
plug the ins and outs of all your gear into the back of
the patch bay, and leave everything plugged in. When you
want to plug this particular effect into that particular
signal, you simply plug instrument cables into the front
of the patch bay. The front of the patch bay is really just
a bunch of ins and outs for all of your studio gear. You
can imagine why someone who gigs a lot might not want to
use a patch bay, or a rack. If you’re using only some of
the same effects in your home studio as you are at the gigs,
you’ll constantly be plugging and unplugging stuff. If you
are using the exact same rig recording as you do live, you
can load everything into a rack and make it reasonably easy
to access for both recording and studio work.
In addition to patch bays, there are other ways to optimize
work flow. If you imagine what the majority of your recording
entails, you can set up your studio accordingly. If you
mainly record drums you may want to leave a drum kit set
up and tuned, with all of the microphones in place. This
will seriously reduce setup and teardown time. It will also
allow you to hone in on a consistent drum sound. If your
main recording is done with an electronic keyboard, your
setup should be very different. You will probably set up
your main keyboard or keyboards within reach of your computer.
If you are frequently plugging and unplugging things from
a mixing board, you will want to place this board within
easy reach to swap cables. There are some things you may
be able to keep plugged in, minimizing your cable time and
confusion. It may be as simple as using color-coded electrical
tape wrapped around the end of your cables to make identification
easier when plugging large numbers of cables in. There are
a lot of different ways to make work easier, and quicker.
The easier it is to record, the more likely you are to sit
down and do it.
The other thing to consider when setting up your home recording
studio is what kind of audio gear you need. Are you planning
on buying the latest software plug-ins for effects and constantly
keeping them updated, or do you want to buy external effects
and not update them again for quite a while? If you use
software plug-ins you will be able to tweak the effects
at any point in time. This is quite handy, but software
plug-ins often sound different than their physical counterparts.
They can also be quite expensive for professional sounding
versions. They do work incredibly well for pitch correction,
however. Auto tuning software can be very useful for tightening
up a vocal performance’s pitch. Often, this can make the
difference between something completely unmarketable and
a solid gold hit.
If you do not wish to pay a lot for software plug-ins and
you don’t want to worry about keeping them updated, you
can always use physical hardware effects. These units can
be purchased for the same as a comparable plug-in, but will
last far longer. The sound quality of hardware varies depending
on the manufacturer and model, but can be quite impressive.
Software plug-ins are typically made to mimic their real-life
counterparts, after all. One of the only downsides to using
hardware for effects is the repetition. You have to re-record
a track if it was recorded with effects. If you don’t want
to re-record tracks, the best way to record is without any
effects. You can then route the track through an effects
unit, and record it on a separate track. Simply send the
effect less track out through one of your outputs while
soloing the track. Plug the output into your effects input,
plug that output into an input on your interface, and set
another track to record that input. Now you still have your
original track that you can mix in a little if you want,
but you have a nice new track with effects. This can sound
great, but I would recommend listening to the effect setting
with the track before recording it. Once it’s recorded,
you can’t tweak the settings.
The technology today is cheap enough, fast enough, and
better than ever. With so much of an edge more musicians
should be recording than ever, and more of them should be
successful at it. If you sit down and think about how you
are going to be using your studio, you can optimize it to
increase your recording output. If you are just starting
to record, setting up your studio properly can make the
difference between wanting to record and being overwhelmed.
Now, get out there and clean up your studio! Your recordings
will thank you, and you will be much more relaxed about
recording.
