The Everything Guide to Digital Home Recording

Tips, tools, and techniques for studio sound at home

Marc Schonbrun

• Publisher: Everything
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781440501784
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théorie et appréciation de la musique

Leona Lewis, Lily Allen, and Colbie Caillat all became famous after their self-produced music was posted on the Internet. And now anyone who's ever practiced in front of the mirror for hours wants to try it too. This guide shows aspiring musicians how to turn their computers into a music studio.Professional musician Marc Schonbrun leads you step-by-step through the basics of home recording, including:

• Tips on how to make—and stick to—a recording budget
• The best digital recording software
• Microphones, mixers, and electronic hardware
• Recording for individual instruments and virtual instruments
• Mixing, mastering, and advanced recording techniques

For a fraction of the cost of recording, you can become their own engineers. You'll learn to create tracks complete with digital effects, virtual instruments, and sound quality that rival professional studios. In no time, you'll be ready for your time in the spotlight!

CHAPTER 1
Recording Basics

The technology for recording sound has been around for just a little more than a hundred years. But it has come a long way since it began. This chapter covers recording history and the development of an industry that was once exclusive and expensive and is now an affordable and practical alternative for home and semiprofessional musicians.

How It All Began

From cave paintings to the Dead Sea Scrolls, information has been written down and preserved for all to see for centuries. But recording sound has been around only since the late 1800s. Sadly, much of the history of sound itself has been lost because it occurred before it was possible to record it. Imagine being able to hear Mozart play his own piano pieces, or to hear Abraham Lincoln speak. These memories survive only through written words and recollections of the events. Recording sound has served not only as an important historical tool, but also as a way for music to be preserved and enjoyed.

A Brief History

In 1877, a man working in New Jersey single-handedly invented recording, the art and science of capturing sound. Thomas Edison recorded the tune “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a tin cylinder and played it back. Edison’s system recorded sound as indentations on a rotating tin cylinder, and the sound was then played back via a needle that felt the indented grooves and replayed the sound. This was the beginning of sound recording as we know it. However, tin was not a durable medium to record sound because it deteriorated upon playback. Tin cylinders were also limited to three minutes of recording time. The fidelity of the sound wasn’t exactly beautiful either, but it was a start.

Edison was not the only inventor working on sound recording; he just got there first. In the late 1800s, others saw the commercial potential in sound recording and sought to make improvements on Edison’s work. Other inventors devised different disks and cylinders made of various materials to improve sound quality, recording time, and durability.

The Art of Recording Improves

Edison pioneered the first audio recordings and brought them into people’s homes. Edison’s work on the disk phonograph in 1914 was one of his most significant achievements as an inventor. His disks were more durable, produced immeasurably better sound quality, and could record longer pieces than anything else available. After mass-production of phonographs began, their price fell and they became widely available. Record companies started popping up everywhere! This was the beginning of the revolution of bringing recorded sound into the home. Unfortunately, making recordings was an expensive and time-consuming operation, and very few companies had the capital or the equipment to do so.

Recording Defined

What exactly is recording? Recording is the transmittal of sound waves onto a device capable of preserving and reproducing that sound. Several components are necessary to make a music recording today. First, a sound source is needed—this can be an acoustic instrument, an electronic one, or, in the case of a computer-based synthesizer, a virtual one.

Then, the sound needs to be transferred into the recording device. For acoustic instruments, a microphone is needed to convert the acoustic information into electrical signals.

The first microphone was invented in 1876 for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone system, which received a patent that same year. Bell’s microphone picked up sound and converted it to electricity that could be transmitted and reproduced. Chronologically, the microphone predates all recording by one year!

Electronic instruments, such as keyboards, interface directly with the recorder, bypassing the need for a microphone, although it’s also possible to use an amplifier and then record the sound conventionally. Because all electronic keyboards output their sound as an electrical signal, recording directly this way and bypassing the amplifier ensures the purest signal.

Now that we have generated and captured the sound, we need somewhere to store it. Today, sound is stored in either of two ways: as an analog signal (a continuous periodic signal) or as a digital representation of an analog signal. A continuous periodic signal is like a wave in its periodic nature. Like waves breaking on the beach, first comes the crest of a wave, followed by a trough, then another crest, then another trough, and so on. Analog media stores the waves themselves as a continuous electrical charge. Magnetic tape is the most common analog medium.

Digital media store a numerical representation of the wave using a code consisting of only zeroes and ones, called binary code. In the early days of digital recording, the common way to store this binary information was on magnetic tape. Digital audiotape, unlike traditional analog media, recorded only digital information—there was no sound on digital audiotape. Today, an audio interface converts analog signals to a digital representation, called encoding, on the way into the computer and converts the digital representation to analog signals, called decoding, on the way out. These two processes are commonly called A/D and D/A conversions. A/D is read as “A to D” or “analog to digital;” D/A means digital to analog.

Analog tape recording has been around since the 1950s and is still favored by many artists and producers for its warm, rich sound. A reel of 2-inch tape retails for nearly $300. The same amount of information can be recorded to a computer hard drive or CD for a fraction of the cost.

Traditional analog tape is very expensive and hard to get, more so now than ever. Because of the tremendous size of modern hard drives and their low cost, they are a great choice for storing music. The format you ultimately use is unimportant; every recording format does the same basic job of recording sounds.

The final step in recording is playing back the recorded sound. Both analog and digital media must convert information to electrical signals, which are rendered as audible sound waves by speakers, called monitors, or through headphones.

Early Recording Techniques

When tape recording first gained prominence, all recordings were done live, as opposed to recording in a studio. All the sources converged onto one track of a magnetic tape. Because there was only one track, there was no way to adjust the individual levels of the recorded instruments after the initial recording. If you didn’t get the balance right the first time, you had to record the entire track again. Overdubbing, the process of adding live tracks after the initial recording, was impossible because of the mechanics of early tape recorders. As time went on, though, tape recorders divided the width of the tape into multiple tracks. In time, it became possible to record four or eight tracks, allowing each of the tracks to be manipulated individually.

Les Paul’s Innovations

Before jazz guitarist Les Paul came on the scene, overdubbing was virtually impossible. To understand the difficulty in overdubbing at that time, you first need to understand how the analog tape machine works. In an analog tape machine, three electric heads—the record head, playback head, and erase head—handle the recording process. The record head magnetizes the tape that flows beneath it, transferring information to the tape; the playback head picks up the information from the tape and sends it out to the speakers; and the erase head erases the tape when necessary. The three heads are set up one after another, so that as the record head writes, the playback head picks up tape farther along in the recording. Because each head is reading a different part of the tape, they aren’t synchronized. For overdubbing to work (such as layering guitar sounds one on top of another), the artist needs to listen to the previously recorded track to know when to start, when to pick up the tempo, etc. Unfortunately, since the playback head is in a different spot than the record head, the recorded signal will be out of sync; it plays back later than the artist played it.

Les Paul revolutionized the art of recording music, but he also had a profound impact on music itself. His design for a solid-body electric guitar was so impressive that Gibson began producing it with Paul’s permission in the 1950s. The Gibson Les Paul is one of the classic electric guitars.

Les Paul was a very innovative man. Not only did he invent the solid body electric guitar as we know it today, he also made overdubbing and multitrack recording possible. Paul had the idea to combine the record head and the playback head into one unit, allowing artists to overdub in real time with no delay. Les Paul died just before the completion of this book in 2009. His legacy as one of the most important innovators in music will live on.

Les Paul’s first multitrack guitar recording was the song “Lover,” which was released by Capitol Records in 1947. It featured eight tracks of guitar, painstakingly overdubbed one track at a time. This was the first multitrack recording in history. The rest of the music industry quickly picked up on the technique.

Paul’s records were revolutionary; no one had ever heard such a thick, lush sound. Based on Paul’s discovery, the company Ampex released a four-track recorder with Sel-Sync (Selective Synchronization) in 1955. However, while this innovation made overdubs possible, most bands still recorded live and used overdubs to add solos, harmony parts, or additional vocals.

How Multitrack Changed the World

Multitrack recording was the single most important innovation in audio recording. The ability to record instruments on individual tracks, have control of separate volume levels, and add other parts after the original recording changed the recording process forever. No longer did you have to settle for an imperfect live take. If the singer were off key or off tempo, you could go back and rerecord individual parts. Guitar players could layer acoustic guitar backgrounds with electric guitar rhythm parts. The possibilities were endless.

The number of tracks available increased over time. At first, the four-track was common. The Beatles, for example, recorded “Strawberry Fields Forever” on two separate four-track tape machines, for a total of eight tracks. Modern recordings can be twenty-four, forty-eight, or, with the help of computers, several hundred tracks. For the home-based musician, this process allows you to slowly build up arrangements one track at a time. You can start with a bass line, add a guitar part, and track some vocals later—all by your lonesome. The finished product will sound like one large, live band even though you played it all yourself.

But home studio owners aren’t the only ones who work this way; Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails always multitracks. He records alone in his home studio, multitracking to build songs. Tom Scholz of the group Boston records the same way, playing each instrument one at a time.

Modern-Day Developments

We live in the digital age. Everywhere around us, technology is changing the way we work, play, and communicate. The computer has become a fixture...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Top Ten Reasons to Record at Home
• Introduction
• 1: Recording Basics
• 2: So You Want to Cut a Record
• 3: Elements of a Home Studio
• 4: Recording Equipment
• 5: Recording on a Computer
• 6: Computer Recording Tools
• 7: Loop-Based Software
• 8: Setting It All Up
• 9: Microphones
• 10: Mixers
• 11: Recording Individual Instruments
• 12: Digital Recording Software
• 13: Virtual Instruments
• 14: Editing
• 15: Tweaking Your Sound
• 16: Using Other Effects
• 17: Mixing and Mastering
• 18: Advanced Recording Tips and Techniques
• 19: Amazing Technology in Your Home
• 20: Share Your Music
• 21: Tips for Recording a Demo and Getting Some Work
• Appendix A: Recording Equipment Manufacturers and Suppliers
• Appendix B: Additional Resources
• Appendix C: Glossary