Home Music Recording

Home recording - the Essentials? - Part 1

What if you’re just puting the finishing touches on a composition you know can be the next big top 10 hit - and now your wondering where to record it.

These days, there’s no need to go to a major (= expensive!) [tag]recording studio[/tag]. That’s rapidly becoming a thing of the past. With home PCs everywhere, it’s now not only possible, but also affordable, to create a system where you can record, edit, mix and master music right through to the end product.

Current Trends

Until recently magnetic technology was used for [tag]music recording[/tag]. This required high quality analogue tape - very expensive. This process put home recording out of financial reach for most ordinary people and editing in the studio was painstakingly slow. On the other hand, analogue tape had it’s own distinctive sound, and this has proven difficult to emulate using more recent digital tape or digital audio engines.

Next digital tape arrived in two main formats:

• [tag]ADAT[/tag] (Alesis Digital Audio Tape - introduced in 1991)
  • eight track recording device
  • uses standard VHS formatted tapes
  • alternative to using standard analogue tape
  • limitation: to record more then eight tracks, you need more ADAT machines
• [tag]DAT[/tag] (Digital Audio Tape - introduced by Sony in mid-1980’s)
  • Similar technology to the ADAT, but superior because
  • uses smaller cassettes
  • longer playing times
  • improved durability
  • lower risk of deterioration

Current practice is to record and store music on Digital Tape or direct to a computer hard drive, then burned onto a CD. There are still some purists who use analogue tape to record before transferring to a PC or Mac for editing and mixing etc.

So How Can a Home Recording Studio Help

Probably the single greatest advantage is cost. Or rather, lack of it, compared to earlier times.

• Recording in a studio
  • can be expensive; time is money which means you haven’t the flexibility to work on ideas at your own pace.
  • means you have to have the tracks completed and performance-ready, to avoid needing too many takes.
• Home recording
  • opens up the creative door for possibilities, since recording onto a hard drive is not expensive. Provided you’ve plenty disk capacity, recording cost is zero!
  • You can re-edit and/or re-mix a track as many times as you like to get it exactly as you want.
  • The only real expense is your time and effort.

More importantly perhaps, your can design and set up your studio to be exactly as you want it. Based on what you plan to record, and how much you can afford, you can build your own tailor-made environment.

With some wise equipment and recording software choices, home recording studios can grow and develop through on-going additions and upgrades to allow the studio to keep pace with your maturing talents and changing interests.

If you’re wondering how to go about selecting the right gear for your home studio, make sure you get our free 7-part course “Choosing Great Gear” (top left of this page)

Coming in Part 2 tomorrow:

So what are the main types of Home Recordings Systems?

Next in this series we’ll be covering the following topics.

We can change the order of publication, if you tell us which is your priority.

We’ll publish the topics with most votes first.

(We’ll outline several scenarios, from $100 to $9000)