Posts Tagged ‘recording music’

Recording Music

May 17th, 2011

There are so many people that ask why you would want to learn how to record music and this is a great question. It is important to know why you are wanting to record music because that is going to give you your starting point which is key.

What is it that you want to do with the music you record? Do you want to be a famous music producer, or do you just want to be able to record your own able to have something of your own? If you choose either way, or anything in between, you are first of all going to have to learn the foundation of recording music. After you have learned the foundation it is important which route you are going to take because if you are wanting to do this for money there is a greater path that you must follow. Whatever it is you have a passion for in music and that is what is going to drive you to keep going with music.

If your ambition is to having a recording studio you are going to need a lot more equipment than if you are only going to record a few times here and there. So where do you start? Whichever style of music recording you choose, you will start with the same basis principles.

When just starting out you can find some useful information about a few principles on the Internet about how to start your venture so I would recommend to check that out on Yahoo. This can be a very useful tool to use, but can also be very complicated as the recoding music industry is huge and can be very hard to find the the right information you need.

Personally I would advise those of you who are serious to do some research then purchase a book on recoding music. I don’t feel this is the fastest path, but it really teaches the core principles that you need to know in order to record music. If you are looking for something more than just a book, and are more of a visual learner or want to learn at a quicker pace, I would suggest a program.

Really I can’t put enough emphasis on that last point. Learning from experts in the music industry will not only prevent you from backtracking, but will save you months of heartache and frustration. This doesn’t mean that you have to join a school for recording music and spending thousands of dollars, just a program that will show you step-by-step the proper things that you need to be learning and practicing that will benefit you the most.

At the beginning there are times that will be difficult and awkward learning the proper way to record music as there are many things you will have to know. When you start recording, it won’t be the most polished sounding track that you have heard but with practice you will only get better. The more you practice and use repetition the faster it will come so you can be on your way to becoming a professional music produc

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Career Opportunities in Music Recording

May 17th, 2011

A countless number of music schools have spawned in recent years due to a renewed interest in recording music. There are many career opportunities in the field of music. Whether you’re aspiring to be a music engineer or a legitimate recording artist, music recording training has become one of the best career training options available in the world today.

Career Opportunities In Music Recording
Music is not all about a microphone and a piano. A top class music recording involves many sophisticated equipments in addition to a qualified professional music engineer. The demand for music engineers today is very high. Countless
music recordings are released each and every month and a good music engineer can earn a significant amount of money in a short amount of time. Music engineers will be in higher demand the more their name and reputation is established. This means they can command a higher asking price for their services. Fame can indeed accompany money for many music engineers.

The Role Of A Music Engineer
Some people have this misconception that a music engineer is dealing with wires and circuits all day. The fact is a career as a music engineer is something entirely different than that misconception. A music engineer is usually referred to as the recording engineer in the recording studio. The digital audio workstations that you find in a recording studio are the music engineer’s instruments. The role of the music engineer is to fine-tune the music that is being recorded. This job requires enormous skill and proper training.

The Music Career Training
While there are many music career-training programs available today, if you truly wish to shine in your music career, it’s important to find the absolute best training programs.
One of the best music career training programs available is the ‘Conservatory’s Master Recording Program II’.

Unlike other conventional music recording training programs, the Conservatory’s Master Recording Program II concentrates totally on the art and science of sound. Starting from the basic principles of sound, this unique program extends for 42 weeks and finishes with the most sophisticated concepts of audio engineering. One of the main features of this training program is that the training program covers eight main aspects. The eight main areas of this training program are:

1. Audio Recording and Production – This part covers all of the basic principles of sound and educates students about the basic fundamentals of music recording.

2. Music Business – Here the student learns about the various methods of making money in a music related business. This session includes classes about audio copyrights and record labels.
3. Digital Recording – This is the doorway to digital recording. Lessons are available for digital recording and other digital techniques in the form of computer based applications.

4. Pro Tools – This is the most important part of the program. This session familiarizes students with the sophisticated tools used in digital audio processing and recording.

5. Sound Reinforcement – This session includes studies related to audio signal distribution.

6. Troubleshooting/Maintenance – Basic electronic engineering skills and test equipment skills will be taught to the aspiring music engineer.

7. Career Management – This is an opportunity to gain knowledge about the music industry.

8. Internship- This final session provides students with an opportunity to demonstrate skills learned and acquired throughout training.

The program concludes with students hopefully becoming successful music engineers and realizing their dreams of having a lucrative career in music.

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Recording Tips For Guitarists

May 16th, 2011

Recording music is a totally different beast from playing live. And whether you’re going into a big studio or doing it on your own with a laptop and a DAW, there’s a few guitar-specific things you can do to make the whole process go faster and sound better.

1. Use new strings – You want your guitar to sound it’s best even if you’re working with a off-brand copy of Korean knockoff of a Strat.  And new strings are the easiest way to improve things.  They’ll give the engineer a good bright sound to work with.  Make sure they’re good and stretched out so they don’t go out of tune in the middle of the song.  I usually put my new ones on the day before recording.  If you’re doing a lot of recording on a regular basis, make sure to change them every one to two weeks.  Otherwise you can end up with different sounding strings on different takes of a song, making it more difficult to edit later.

2. Tune before every take – On a similar note, you should tune your guitar before every take.  I’ll admit I’m they guy the engineer is always yelling at tune before takes.  Extra weird when I’m recording at home.  Your guitar probably won’t be that out of tune, but keeping it fine tuned will, again, make editing takes much easier later on in the mixing process.

3. Pre-Production – Pre-production is a fancy word for “practice before you get there”.  You have some leeway here if you’re working in a home studio.  But if you’re paying for studio time, you want to get in and get out as fast as possible.  That means having your parts totally down before you step foot in the place.  And that means making sure your bandmates have their act together too.  And I always recommend playing the song live a lot before recording it, if possible.  It will make the arrangement tighter and let any natural changes happen so you can get the best performance possible on tape.  It’s like letting the song marinate before cooking it.

I made the mistake once of recording a whole song in the key of G.  Then finding out that I couldn’t sing it in the key of G.  We had to record all the pitched instruments again in the key of F.  You can bet that cost me a few extra bucks.  Learn from my boo-boos young padawan.

What about guitar solos?  If you’re the type that likes to compose your solos, make sure it’s done before getting in the studio.  If you like to let ‘er rip of the fly, that’s cool too.  But be sure that you’ve improvised your solo on that song at least 100 times before recording.  If you have to do more than 3 or 4 takes to get a solo you like, you’re blowing cash.

4. Leave off non-essential effects until mixing – The cleaner the signal going into the board, the more leeway you have to make changes later during editing and mixing.  You want to have a good basic sound recorded and you can add all the gooey reverb and delay you want later on.

So, what’s considered essential?  Maybe your overdrive or distortion if you’re working with a good amp and you want to capture that amp’s sound.  A real Marshall still sounds better than any Marshall-style plugin.  If you’re using a wah pedal, that should probably be in the original signal as well since it’s a real time effect.  In fact, anything that you have to control in real time should be used during tracking.  But ditch the reverb, delays, phaser, flanger, and other such things. That all gets layered on later.

Though I will say if you’ve got a particular pedal that you don’t have a matching plugin for, you’ll have to record it on the original signal.  But, also record a totally clean version of the take with no pedal in case you don’t like it later.  You can do that either by splitting the signal before the pedal to two tracks.  Or you can just play it again.

5. Keep the overdrive/distortion down – Crunchy is good.  But when you’ve got your distortion jacked up too high it will sound like white noise when you record it.  It will also sound thin and get lost in the mix.  Drop your distortion to half of what you use for live performance.  Start there and record some sample takes to see how it sounds.  A corollary to this is, let the engineer guide you.  Especially if you’re new to recording and you can afford an experience engineer, use his expertise and let him help focus your guitar tone.

6. Small amps can sound great too – You don’t need a wall of Mesa Boogie stacks to get a great guitar sound when recording.  Some of the greatest sounds on tape have been done with tiny amps.  Giant amps are used for giant volume.  And you don’t need that in the studio since you’re mic’ing and mixing.  If the amp sound good by itself you can work from there and still get a huge sound.

If you are using a larger amp, like a 4×12, mic only the best sounding speaker.  Placing the mic closer to the center of the speaker cone gives you a brighter sound.  Moving the mic towards the edge mellows it.

7. Use two mics – One close, one far – If you’re in a good sounding room or studio, this will give you a nice natural reverb you can mix with the dry signal.  Place the second mic about 5 feet from the amp.  If your room doesn’t sound so hot or you just don’t like the sound of it, you can always trash that extra reverb track later.

8. Double track to thicken – This is the studio equivalent of a wall of Marshalls.  If you want a big thick sound, double track your guitar parts.  While you could just cut and paste the track, it’s the tiny variations in performance of multiple takes that really work nicely to beef it up.  Do at least two tracks.  Or go whole hog with the old Metallica trick of layering 30-40 tracks of the same guitar part. Just make sure the rest of the instruments don’t get lost in the mix.  You and I both know the guitar is the most important but sometimes your bandmates thing they deserve to be there too.

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How to Prepare Your Computer for Recording Music at Home

May 16th, 2011

Here are tips to improve the reliability of your computer for use as a recording studio for your music.
Working with Audio can place a high demand on your computer’s capabilities – from the CPU to storage and memory.Below are some tips that will increase the performance of your computer and make it less prone to crashes when you are recording or editing your music.
Preparation:
Before you install recording software check the following.CPU speed and memory-
Most modern computers that are only a couple of years old will have a processor that is equal to or exceeding the minimum CPU speed your editing software requires but it is still worth checking – particularly if you have machine that is earlier than this (be aware that processor speed, along with memory will determine how many tracks of audio you can record and the number of effects you can have running simultaneously.
The same goes for required RAM (most good recording programs state a minimum of 512 megabytes) More is better- a gigabyte or higher (in fact increasing the memory of your computer can compensate for a slower processor to some degree and is probably the cheapest way to add more speed to your machine).

Storage space –
In most cases you will have enough storage on your operating system hard drive to install the software and related effects – what I’m referring to is a second drive dedicated to storing your songs and all the files they are created from.
This is a must, because having both your software and songs on the same drive will place a high demand both on your drive and CPU as it tries to find, read and write and execute a program all at the same time from one location.

Also note that music files are large so you’ll need a lot of space – one five minute recording can easily be 250 megabytes or more – multiply that by eight for a song consisting of eight different instruments, (each on an individual track) such as drums, bass, guitar, keyboard and vocals and you begin to get the idea that a 40 gigabyte drive will fill up fairly quickly so go for something bigger (say 150 gigs or larger).
Choose a reliable brand and get an external drive to keep your files backed up.
While we are on the subject of hard drives – if you are planning on using an external drive and writing directly to it, choose a unit that has a cooling fan.
Enclosed drives can generate and trap a lot of heat and if you are doing a long session without much ventilation you can cook your drive and cause it to fail prematurely. (internal drives are less prone to this because they usually receive cooling from the power supply fan and you can mount them in such a way that there is an air gap between each of them for circulation).

Removal or disabling of other programs.
The absolute best computer based recording studios in terms of speed and stability are those that are dedicated units – in other words they are set up to specifically record and edit music.
This means they are not connected to the internet (except for updates and registering the software), they don’t have anti virus running, screen savers or other widgets running in the background that use up memory and CPU.
The result is that dedicated computers are far more reliable and tend to have significantly less problems.Windows is particularly notorious for having many programs running in the background and can cause havoc with your audio work. Mac is less so.Consult an expert when disabling background programs – some are vital for the operation of your computer and should be left alone – others are ok to shut down (you just need to know what can and cannot be touched).

If you are financially able, and serious about recording – try to get yourself a computer just for audio work and keep your current machine for the internet and any other work you might be doing.If you can’t do this and are stuck with just one machine – do the following.

Upgrade the RAM if you need to.
Uninstall any programs you don’t use and do a thorough clean up.
Disable background processes that are not essential to the running of your machine (This applies to Windows only) – again if in doubt get expert help.
Close your internet connection and disable automatic updates and anti virus etc while you are recording (you can re-enable them later when you are done).
Use a plain background as wallpaper.
Defragment your hard drive and (make sure your operating system has no errors first and is up to date) before installing your recording software and any drivers you might be using for your sound card or external inputs.

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