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I end up talking to quite a few musicians and others who are interested in getting started with home recording. I spent years cruising forums looking for advice, and some of the advice I got was really good. I was lucky enough to get to know people who did this recording thing professionally, and they had some solid tips.
Part of me loves to look through the newbie sections of home recording forums, but I've come to realize that for every good piece of advice, you can have many pieces of terrible or useless advice. And that sums up my struggle with forums. Everyone has an opinion, and forums gives everyone an immediate platform to share theirs opinions and ideas, which makes it nearly impossible to truly tell good from bad advice without a lot of experimenting. And if you're going to experiment, then why go to a forum other than to get a bunch of crazy ideas?
I'm not completely knocking forums. They ARE fantastic for generating ideas, and forums is how I got connected with many like-minded recording musicians.
But I got a LOT of bad advice on forums - even advice that sounded good, but really wasn't. The bad advice is the main reason it's taken me so long to release my second album.
And the thing with advice is that if it doesn't work in the real world, then it's not good advice.
So, instead of letting all of that bad advice go to waste, I wanted to share some of the best, game changing pieces of advice I've received when it comes to making your own recordings as well as some of the worst advice I've received from the forums.
Here's the first piece of game changing advice I received.
No matter what you are recording, if you are capturing it with a digital recording interface, the first rule of recording is to record it at at around line level (-18dBFS RMS, or 0VU) into your recording interface. Regardless of the digital gear you are using, it is designed to operate it's best at line level. This is a voltage and digital conversion thing, and it just works.
And the second is like it:
Take the time to learn how to properly gain stage. If you have a kick drum blasting a microphone, make sure that you first aren't distorting the microphone with Sound pressure levels (SPL) that are too loud for the microphone to handle. Once you have that under control, turn the gain down (or up) on your pre-amps so that the levels register at around line level.
The rule of thumb is this: If you slam the inputs of your digital gear, everything will sound flat and dull - if not right away, then it will most definitely show up during mastering where the mastering engineer will crank up everything in the recording.
Until next time,
Here's to your music
Ryan
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