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RECORDING YOUR OWN
CD IN A HOME PROJECT STUDIO - PART ONE
Excerpted from his upcoming book, “Guerrilla Warfare in the Music
Trenches”
By Greg Forest, musicoffice.com
INSTALLMENT 1 -
PREPRODUCTION AND TOOLS
With the price of
digital audio recording equipment now being a fraction of what it was
just a few years ago, many bands and artists are looking at a CD budget
in a new light. When they get out their pen and paper and add up what
they will spend in studio time, comp CDs and such, a band project studio
starts making economic and artistic sense.
A the end of the day when
the CD project is over, you still own the studio.
Will your home
digital project studio sound like a world-class room like the Record
Plant or other notable studios? Probably not but it is within the realm
of remote possibility. A great many CDs, some hits, have been recorded
in garages, living rooms and other primitive locations. In some cases
the primitive "garage" sound is desirable and many world-class studios
can't get that gnarly. On the other hand if you are technically
challenged and don't want to mix your artistic career with being a
computer geek - studio rates are dropping too as equipment prices drop.
There are a lot of studio time bargains out there too – especially from
bands who just finished their CD and have a leftover project studio.
You will have to weigh the decision.
There are a few
things to consider before going into a project studio. This series of
articles is focused on musicians who are living hand-to-mouth. We would
all love to be running our $3,000 microphone through a $2,000 mic preamp
into a $20,000 192kHz 32-bit recording deck but I am focusing this
series on artists to whom a hundred bucks is real money. For the
purposes of this series, I will be using very common if not the most
common music production tools. There are many different flavors of
recorders and plugins but in essence they all behave in the same way.
My standard digital audio production toolkit is pretty small in terms of
software. I do 95% of my work in Pro Tools, Nuendo, WaveLab or Sound
Forge. I have a few other applications in the toolbox but these are
usually for special uses outside of standard CD production.
GETTING STARTED
Just like the major
labels, the first step in your production line should be A&R (artist &
repetoire). You reply, "Yo dude, I AM the artist and I will be
recording MY songs. Don't need no stinkin' A&R." Really? Well Mr.
Artiste, what I am referring to is who is going to accompany you on your
CD? When are they available? What will they charge? What songs from
your vast repetoire are you going to record? In what key and at what
tempo? In what order are they going to appear on the CD? There are
lots of little lists you should start from the git-go to save time
during production and at the back end. You want the latest local rave
Billy Mzyekowski to play bass on the second cut? Billy who? While you
have him on the phone setting up the session you might be taking notes
about how to spell his name correctly on the CD to avoid later
embarrassment.
Let's assume you
have a song list, with the keys and tempos all figured out in advance.
If you are in a band environment the next thing to ask yourself is are
you ready to start tracking or is a bit more rehearsal in order?
Probably the coolest thing about a project studio is that, once the
equipment is installed and tweaked, the meter is never running. You
can spend 50 hours in the studio on one song if you want to - after all
it’s your studio. So even if you aren't ready to push the red button,
you can be rehearsing in front of the recording gear to start zeroing in
on input levels, headphone mixes, mic placement and the other things you
are going to have to figure out later anyhow.
THE GEAR
The price of
recording equipment falls every NAMM show. Although the newest slickest
products can command some pretty high prices, you can get into a project
studio suitable for a local release by buying the last generation of
equipment used at places like Ebay. We got a nationally charted #1
record out of my garage last spring (CCMA - Segovia, "So In Love With
You") with an audio arsenal you can buy on Ebay for under $1,000 so it
can be done. The first thing to ask yourself when looking to buy gear
is how many tracks you will need to record at the same time.
SOLO SINGER
SONGWRITER
If you are a solo
act, a 2-track recorder can fill the bill for you. You can still have
numerous instruments in your session - you can only add them two tracks
at a time but can add more on subsequent passes. If I were going to add
other musicians to my performance, my first pass would be a drum/click
track in stereo to play to later. More on this shortly.
BAND
If you are in a
band, a 2-channel Mbox won't cut it unless you are making a live
recording that is already mixed at the FOH (Front Of House) or other
live feed. I have found that eight channels is the absolute minimum
that I can live with for simultaneous inputs. Don't confuse the number
of inputs with the number of tracks. On my slightly dated Digidesign
DIGI 001, you can get 8 simultaneous inputs but have 32 tracks you can
mix with in Pro Tools LE after they have been recorded into the session
from one of my 8 hardware inputs. I also have an auxiliary input module
from Alesis that gives me 8 more inputs through a light pipe connection
between the Alesis device and the DIGI 001 input module. This lets me
record 16 tracks at the same time (eight through analog input on the
DIGI and 8 through light pipe from the Alesis) and was well worth the
extra $400 I paid for it. Here is how I might setup the first pass on a
rock quartet if I only had 8 inputs to work with.
-
Click
-
Bass
-
Guitar
-
Vocal
-
Kick Drum
-
Snare Drum
-
Drum mix
Right
-
Drum mix
Left
REGARDING A
METRONOME/CLICK/DRUM MACHINE TRACK
Many musicians would
be tempted to dump the click track but it can come in handy for a
variety of purposes. Post production editing possibilities are many for
a piece that is on tempo throughout the entire song. Maybe the song
gets a bit long-winded for radio and you need to cut the second guitar
solo. Digital recording makes this simple - if the song is on meter.
As an example you would go to 2:53 in the song and want to cut out 34
seconds. You zoom into the computer view and cut the second solo out
perfectly. When you rewind and hit play, the cut doesn't work! The
beat jumps and no matter where the cut is made - it sticks out like a
sore thumb. That is because at 2:53 the drummer is playing at 85 beats
a minute and 46 seconds later he has let the tempo drift to 87 beats a
minute. Doesn't sound like much but when you stick a measure of music
at 85 beats a minute next to a measure at 87 beats a minute a lot of
dancers will be stepping on toes. That is why the click track or a very
meter-minded drummer is a must if you think you will be chopping and
whacking when you go into the mixing and mastering phase. It’s at the
end of the project but thinking about it early will save headaches in
the long run. Remember, this is only the first pass. If the
performance is in time, for example, once you have the bass, vocal and a
guitar or two into the computer, you can recut the drums using all 8
tracks.
Here are the general
tools and features you will be looking for when buying a digital
recorder:
8 inputs and outputs,
both balanced and unbalanced, phantom power, SPDIF in/out, lightpipe
(fiber optic) in/out, master, monitor/control room and headphone stereo
outputs. The closest thing to look for is input/output (I/O) channels.
There are many recording units out there boasting many tracks but the
bottom line is how many can you get in at the same time? Is this enough
for your band? If you are Ebaying, you are looking at $300-500 for a
good used unit. Another very important consideration is the recording
sample and bit rate. An audio CD is sampled at 44.1 kHz with a 16-bit
bit rate. This is the absolute bottom line you should look for. You
want to be recording what are known as uncompressed broadcast .WAV
files. Many mini studio-in-a-box units have a compression scheme to
keep the file size on the hard drive down. Avoid these like the plague
if you want to collaborate with other computers and musicians during
your recording project. You will need to be on the same sample and bit
rate page as your collaborators.
A good set of
headphones
is mandatory to help
finesse the audio sound you are looking for. It is unlikely you will be
recording in an acoustically designed room or on the best playback
monitors. The workaround for not having great playback is to have great
headphones. I know great engineers that don't even turn the speakers
on during mixdown until they have everything in the pocket inside
headphones. A good set of headphones will set you back around
$125-300. I use AKG 240Gs.
A headphone
distribution amp if recording ensembles will be required.
If it is more than just you or one player at a time, it helps to hear
what everyone else is doing. The most primitive headphone amps will
send the band at least a "one mix fits all" to each player. You'll be
looking at about $100 for a new one and you feed it from the headphone
out of your recorder.
A
good microphone earns its keep.
There are a number of amazingly good mics out there now for very little
money. One or two good mics should be in every home producer’s
arsenal. My two workhorses are a Neumann KM 184 and a Neumann TLM-103.
Another great mic that is seeing a lot of red button time is a very
inexpensive Studio Projects condenser mic. I am cutting a lot of vocals
on this $225 mic and there are some aspects of it I like better than the
Neumanns believe it or not.
You should bite the
small bullet and buy good cables, mic and instrument cords.
A Radio Shack cord may produce a good bit/byte more noise than a good
Mogami cable. It hurts to pay $40 for a cable but an incessant ground
loop on a $10 cable will have you pulling out more hair than the savings
are worth. Keep in mind that many patch and insert cables at the pro
level are defined as TRS (Tip Ring Sleeve) balanced connectors. These ¼
inch jacks look like a normal guitar or other input cord but have an
extra wire to balance the signal. The rule of thumb is a ¼ inch jack
with two connectors is unbalanced and three connector types are
balanced. Most insert modules on mixing desks will also use a TRS
balanced output to split the insert signal in and out of outboard
effects.
Playback monitors
come in
all shapes and sizes and better systems at lower prices are coming out
all the time. I am using a pair of Mackie HR824s for my nearfield
monitors.
WIRING IT UP - THE
INPUT PATH
In regards to wiring
up your home studio, there are many ways to skin a cat. I will describe
the most common methods. Here is the audio signal flow chart for my
studio:
As you can see the
chain starts at the other end of my house in the living room. I have a
snake going down my hallway with the instrument inputs coming down the
snake into the recorder and a stereo headphone mix going back up the
snake to the headphone distribution amp. From the snake I am running
into a 24x8x2 Mackie mixing desk because I like the Mackie input preamps
and there are only 2 balanced mic inputs with phantom power on the DIGI
001. From each Mackie channel I use the record out on short 6' snakes
to bus the inputs into the digial recorder. Another plus to using an
external mixer as a pre amp is that the output signal levels will be
largely uniform and greater control over input gain in many cases.
Here's what an individual I/O channel looks like on the Mackie:
Using the mini-snake
I send the signals to the DIGI 001 directly or through the Alesis A/D/A
converter to complete my input module.
THE OUTPUT PATH
A nice feature of
the DIGI 001 and other 8-track offerings is that you get a number of
output options including monitor, main mix, headphone and two flavors of
digital I/O - light pipe and SPDIF. I am using the analog monitor
output to send to the monitors. I don't even use the analog master
output as the mix is either being sent to CD-R via light pipe or my DAT
recorder via SPDIF. For the headphones I have a stereo to dual mono
splitter cable that I plug the mono ends into the snake. I reverse the
process at the other end of the snake plugging into the headphone
distribution amp and onto the headphones.
TEST
IT
Now with everything
wired together, turn all the devices on. Hear any buzzes? Are all the
components working? Is the signal getting from one to the other and
back OK? If the answer to this is, “yes” then we are ready to move
closer to pushing the red button. We now have to look at how to get the
sound into the computer with the highest fidelity for the lowest amount
of money.
INSTALLMENT 2:
FROM YOUR AMP TO THE
HARD DRIVE - GETTING THE SOUND YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.
Check hchappenings.com and musicoffice.com for more information and downloads
that will accompany this series. Greg Forest is author of, “The
Complete Music Business Office” published by Thomson publishing and the
Entertainment Source Library published by Mix Bookshelf, owner of The
Music Office and a former consultant to the Texas Music Association and
the Texas Office of Film and Music. He can be reached at The Music
Office, 830.896.0405. |
