Home Recording Basics
In this article we will cover the home recording basics. The idea of doing professional quality audio music recording from your garage or spare bedroom may sound far fetched, trust me friend, it is not! With ever increasing technology and ever decreasing costs for that technology, creating amazing sound is within many a musician’s reach. The question now is, where do you start?
How does a home recording studio work?
Our overall goal is to take a sound source (voice, guitar, drums), turn the source into an electrical impulse, record this impulse, and put the final product onto a CD for distribution.
Converting your sound source into an electrical impulse requires an input device. The most common input devices are microphones, instruments, and sound modules.
Microphones let you record any type of sound that cannot be plugged directly into a recorder. They take in sound waves and put out electrical energy.
The majority of your input devices will come from instruments that can be plugged into the mixer or recorder. Used in this way, your instruments will be both sound source and input device.
Sound modules are drum machines or synthesizers that have MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) ports which allow them to be plugged into your mixer or recorder.
Once the sound source has been converted to an electrical impulse it will be sent to the mixer. The job of the mixer is to transfer sound from the input device to the recorder. Among other things, it also alows you to adjust the levels of each input before the recording process.
After the mixing process, the recorder will capture and store the audio content. The power and low cost of today’s digital recorders are a big factors in what make home recording studios such a great option.
Once recorded, signal processors allow several different types of adjustments to be made to your tracks. Dynamic processors handle volume balance and equalizers take care of frequency balance. Effects processors allow for many tweaks including pitch shifting, reverb, and chorus.
Fortunately, the home recordist does not need to purchase all of these pieces of equipment individually. Studio-in-a-box (SIAB) and computer based systems combine the mixer, recorder, and signal processors into one device. All that is then required is the sound source, input devices, and monitors.
Finally, now that your sound has been recorded, mixed, and mastered, it’s time to put that masterpiece onto a cd! This can be the most rewarding part of the recording process but there are still a couple things to know. You can use either replication or duplication. If your goal is to produce thousands of copies to your soon to be adoring fans, replication is the way to go. This involves creating a master from which cds will be pressed. There are some setup fees but this option works out cheaper for large quatities (>500). For smaller amounts, duplication is ideal. This process entails burning CD-Rs from an audio file and requires virtually no setup.
Now that you have a good understanding of the home studio basics, where do you go from here? Well, you’re in the right place. Feel free to check out our other articles and free email mini-course…and if you would like the ultimate guide to home recording studios, check out our eBook, “Home Recording Made Easy.”
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Want to get some awesome recording software? Trick out your home studio? Find a recording studio? See Audio Recording Center.
