Island Studios - Upptökuhljóðver - Recording studio - Hljóðver - Fréttir

When it comes to actually recording in your home studio, there are seemingly limitless options of how to go about laying your tracks down. Whether it’s different techniques or mic placement options, you have a lot to sift through. I’m totally fine with that. The art of recording is just that, an art. It isn’t just science, so there isn’t just one or two ways to get a great sound. In fact, I want you to spend a lot of time getting unique and great sounds.

So what’s the problem? It all starts with this revolution of recording we are living through…the hard drive era. We no longer have limitations of how much tape we have to record to. In fact, with the price of storage so low these days you could almost say we have unlimited space available too us. And you know what that leads to…unlimited takes!

Mixing is a lot of fun. It is that magical stage in the recording process where all your great tracks come together and create a unified and cohesive song. It is also the most dangerous area of music making today.

Because today’s computers and DAWs offer seemingly unlimited tracks and plugin effects (mixed with powerful automation), many people feel the need to use it all. These countless options can actually lead to longer than necessary mixing sessions. And on top of that, the mixes don’t even sound that great! What’s the point of using all your plugins and spending all that time if at the end of the day you don’t get a great mix?

Let’s Do The Time Warp, Again

If you go back 20 or 30 years ago, the typical album was mixed on an analog console with a fixed number of available tracks, usually 24 or 32. Effects were achieved through the use of outboard gear, that you would “plugin” to the mixer as an insert. If you had one vintage Fairchild compresser for example, then you could only use it on one track. The same went for your reverbs and delays, etc. You had a series of constant limits to how much you could do.

The reality of this recording revolution we are living through is that many of us write, record, edit, AND mix our own music. The debate still exists as to whether this is a good thing for music or not, but regardless of where you stand on the issue one thing is for sure: if you are mixing your own work, you need feedback from outsiders!

The great thing about mixing your own music is that you know the songs inside and out.  You know each part that was recorded and why it is there. You know what to listen for. This is also the WORSE thing about mixing your own music. You are biased. You can’t 100% hear things clearly as it were. What you need is a second (or third) pair of ears to listen through the mixes and give you honest feedback about what they hear. Let me break it down into the most important elements.

The following is a guest post from my good friend and fellow recording blogger Joe Gilder fromHomeStudioCorner.com. Check out his site for some awesome tips and tutorials on making music in the home studio!
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Do you have that nagging recording project that just seems like it will never be finished? Do you work and work and work and work, and there seems to be no end in site? Perhaps you’re getting too caught up in the details and missing out on the big picture.

The 80/20 Rule

You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule, right? It’s this magical little formula that tells us that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but I’ve seen it apply to almost everything. When I was in sales, I found that the majority of my sales came from a small percentage of my customers. After running my own business for a year, I find that less than 20% of the tasks I do are actually income-generating tasks.

If you caught one of my posts last week then you know I was out of town doing a remote recording project. When taking your studio far away and trying to think through the simplest setup you can bring, it’s good to have great sounding, compact, and reliable gear. One piece of gear that I could NOT have done this project without is the ADA8000 from Behringer, an 8 channel preamp and AD/DA converter that fits in a 1U rack space.

The Behringer ADA8000

I’ve written before about how easy it is to expand your audio interfaces inputs with an ADAT connection and how many choices you’ll find on the market for products that do just that. But I have to say from the countless recording projects I’ve used it on, the Behringer ADA8000 is the hidden gem of affordable home studio gear.

Not every idea in the studio is a good one. During the recording process it is a good idea to be open to creativity and innovation. You don’t simply have to capture the parts you’ve written, you can also explore new arrangement ideas, instrumentation, and sounds. But the flip side of all this brainstorming is the raw truth that sometimes you have to commit to saying “No” to an idea.

Learning A New Word…”No”

Why is saying “No” important? Well to put it simply, not every idea is going to work. I think we can all understand that concept. But in an age of limitless hard drive space and unending takes, we tend to record everything we can think of and then “decide later” what to do with all that audio. This is a bad idea for 2 main reasons:

Having a home studio isan absolute must for every musician (IMO) for many reasons, the biggest one being that your DAW can be theultimate songwriting tool. Not all musicians approach the songwriting process in the same way, so how to best use your DAW in the creation phase is very open ended. Today I want hit 3 quick tips for taking max advantage of your computer recording setup specifically in the realm of songwriting. Let’s take a look!

One of my favorite bands of the last few years has been Thrice. This southern California rock quartet has come a long way from the hard and heavy scene to, more recently, a fusion of melodic blues rock with a raw epic twist. I’ve written briefly about them before regarding their recent move to self recording at home rather than doing the big studio thing.

Last year they released their most recent self-produced album Beggars. For the last two albums they have setup a studio in their guitarists house, brought in their gear, and simply jammed, written, and recorded new music. In this video interview, Riley (drummer) talks about the benefits of recording at home and how it has helped them make better music.

Some things to take away from this:

If you play electric guitar then you might be able to identify with this. I play guitar and sing in my church bandeach and every week and depend on my gear. I only have one guitar amp currently and it’s a workhorse. But two weeks ago, said amp started to have electrical spurts of noise and was going wacky on me; totally unuseable live since it could “explode” at any moment. My other guitar players have only one amp as well so there was no extra amp to fill in for me until I could get mine fixed. So what did I do?? I turned to a $30 piece of gear that is now my guitar amp insurance.

The Wonder Pedal

A few weeks back I did a video review of the Behringer GDi21 amp modeling pedal. It’s a great little box that I use for overdrive on my pedal board. I’ve also used it for recording on my band’srecent recording project. But when my amp blew and I didn’t have a backup amp or time to get it fixed before Sunday’s service, I turned to the GDi21 as my “amp.”

We all saw it coming after the launch of Avid’s brand new line of audio interfaces for Pro Tools HD a few weeks back. The new wave of Pro Tools hardware is coming in full force, piece by piece, and adds a new chapter this week with the unveiling of the redesigned Mbox line of portable audio interfaces. Much like a new generation of video game consoles emerges every 5 years or so with completely updated power and capabilities, we are witnessing the newest incarnation of Pro Tools interfaces from Avid.

So What’s New?

The first thing you’ll notice with either of the 3 new Mboxes is the completely redesigned exterior. Made out of metal (as opposed to the old plastic) and sporting a sleek new black look (shedding the blue of yesteryear), the new Mbox is clearly a statement from Avid that things are different from the ground up.