Living in the years of the fastest human development, where productivity and technology show the highest growth, our life has become so much simpler and people can have easier access to almost everything. Since the software revolution has taken over our world, a lot of changes have been made in the music industry.
For the first time a musician has the opportunity to set up a home studio working in the flexibility and confidence of his home, avoiding the expensive professional recording studios. There are a lot of recording software available in the market, some of them affordable enough, that can meet the expectations of a high-demanding musician.
The professional studios are called to face tough competition and some owners are complaining about financial losses. In my opinion the home studios have many disadvantages. 1) Low budget equipment, comparing to the professional studios, cannot give the best results. However it is not confirmed that with a very expensive mixer or microphone we can necessarily do a better job. Using a very expensive microphone but without knowledge of recording techniques is not an effective solution. 2) The room acoustics cannot be perfect or sometimes not even proper in the home studio. 3) The software programmes can be hard to use or very expensive. Mixing a song can be very difficult for people who have no sound engineering experience.
Despite that, most of the bands who want to record a demo don?t pay attention to the excelence of the sound. Performance is the most important and of course the low cost. In the home studio we can work the material unnumbered times without time pressure. The professional studios charge per hour or per day, therefore the artist must complete the recording in a specific timeframe that has been arranged with the studio.
The studio cannot provide more hours without extra charge. Consequently the artists cannot have a highly supported material, if the budget is not enough for their studio performance, mixing, editing demands.
In this article I will go over home studio recording but I would like first to make it clear:
1) The recorded and mixed sound of a home studio cannot be as good as the result of a professional studio unless the budget is high. In that case we have a very expensive home studio that shouldn?t be called ?home studio? anymore, because my definition of ?home? means non-professional, without high-class equipment.
2) Some record companies pay a lot of attention to the sound engineering. Demos that are received without professional sound can be rejected immediately.
3) Good sound is not only the result of expensive equipment. What makes a production perfect is the general attitude of the sound engineer based on appropriate knowledge of music technology. Personally I have a few demo works recorded and mixed at my home studio with better quality than material coming from a very expensive studio. However if I had the opportunity to work the same hard with the same knowledge in a class studio, undoubtedly the quality would have been a thousand times better.
4) The attitude ?if it sounds good to me, then I believe it?s fine? is absolutely wrong. There are errors in the overall that we cannot understand sometimes. From my personal experience once I listen to a non-finished work from different speakers I find a lot of errors. For example in my studio speakers the sound seems to be fine, however when I put the cd in the car cd player, then I notice some bass frequencies that should be reduced, the same happens if I give a song to a radio station to check how it sounds. What my reactions could be if I was just a typical listener? Not a lot of people have excellent listening skills, however a bad production could cause a subconscious bad feeling. Only a good sound engineer using the appropriate technology and with enough knowledge could balance it. This is one reason why the professional studio is always required, and it cannot be replaced by the home studio.
First steps:
The most important requirement in order to set up a mini home studio is the sequencer, as the audio recording software is called. There are a lot of sequencers that can be used and some of them are very affordable. I personally use Nuendo 2 which I believe is very reliable and provides excellent MIDI facilities. Some engineers prefer to work with Logic, Pro tools. Those are great programs but they require Macintosh system. Each of them has negatives and positives. The choice should be made based on one?s personal expectation and the budget. Some software do not wok perfectly in every computer, thus choose one that suits the capabilities of your system. For those without very high expectations, there are free software (demo versions), that work good but with a few restrictions.
I am sure cracked programs can be found, however I am opposed to piracy. First of all it is illegal, then a cracked software doesn?t have the same good level of performance as the original, especially those that rely heavily on the performance of the computer in which they are installed. Apart from that, if you use your studio for making money, in case of a piracy/law control you must provide evidence that you legally own the software, otherwise a lawsuit is possible.
What I would advise a beginner, is to practice the programme using ready sounds and its manual descriptions, adding different plug-ins and midi and then when you have it under control, you can start thinking about buying an audio card, more professional plug-ins, microphones, guitar effects. This will help to understand exactly what you need without spending money on something that you may never use.
Choosing an audio card:
Audio card is an electronic hardware device and its main function is to work as a digital sound processor connected with the computer. It works by: 1) Encoding the digital sound to analogue thus we can hear it through the computer 2) Receiving the analogue sound and changing it into digital with the use of the appropriate software 3) Connecting analogue devices like microphones, guitar effect racks with the recording sequencer.
Choosing a sound card depends on the type of studio you will operate. For a professional studio a multichannel card is required. The best is a digital mixing console especially if you are going to use it for more serious projects than practicing, like working on official material, hiring or making money. Otherwise you can invest in a monochannel audio card but this will not allow to record two or more instruments together. The user should avoid working with the audio card that comes together with the computer as most of them are not professional. The right choice of an audio card is important. Even if the rest of the equipment is the best, using a cheap audio card the results will never be good. There are several types of audio cards, and it would be better to be advised before the purchase.
The plug-ins: In music technology we call plug-in a digital effect. It works in association with a sequencer or as a single source, providing digital process and effects, eliminating the use of an external hardware effect. Not all the plug-ins are compatible with every software. Nevertheless, some audio sequencers come together with a selection of the very basic plug-ins but not all the times all of them are satisfying. There are different types of plug-ins:
1) Reverb: This is one of the most common effects and works as a room simulator. The listener can hear the sound directly from the source followed by the reflected waves. Those reflections are a multi-complex series of ?echoes? merged together giving us the feeling of a room/space. Different rooms give different reflections (stadium, small room, church?). There are different types of reverb. Most of the sound engineers use it for snare drums, voices, guitars or other percussion. Without reverb the production sounds soul-less. In some situations, such as big stadium reverbs or venues, it helps singers with powerful voices make the audience feel more included in the song.
2) Compressors. This is a very important effect for every studio. I would advise to find a compressor with an additional limiter plug in. For those who use Nuendo or Cubase they can find an excellent dynamics/compressor effect that comes together with the sequencers.
Compressors are very common amongst FM radio broadcasts. For example, during a radio transmission when no one is talking or there is no music it?s possible to hear noise and hiss coming through until music starts back. That happens because of the compressors. It works by pumping the gain; therefore we can get every ounce of volume. Only audiophile albums support that “no compression” was used as something positive, but most of the professionals use it very obviously. The top songs in the charts are always compressed in every detail so when they come across the ordinary speakers, radio shows, TV, public places, they are absolutely listenable.
The compressors can be used 1) once you have your audio tracks recorded on your computer (to each one individually) by simply adding this plug-in from the list 2) in the mixdown, by adding the plug-in to the master track, just before the final export. All you have to do is turn on the limiter with zero reference, then lift up the gain. After a level the sound will come distorted and clipped. You must not raise the gain higher to that level in order to make the whole thing come out louder, polished and stronger.
3) Graphic equalizers. It allows the user to see, customize and control individually a number of different frequency
bands or to filter the sound. Some graphic equalizers are potentiometers, each one associated with a different frequency and by moving them up and down we can customize the sound. The best graphic equalizers are curves. Those are more flexible and you can customize the sound by moving the curves of each frequency up and down, or you can associate a curve with an optional frequency in order to make it work closer to your demands.
4) Noise gate. It works by muting sounds lower than a desired volume. While recording drums (mainly snares and kicks), or live concerts, the microphone picks up sound not only from the desired instrument but from all around. This plug in reduces the sounds coming from the other sources, making thus the production cleaner, more frequency controllable and polished.
The computer that the recording software will be installed in is something very important. I always advise people who want to work professionally not to use laptops for recordings but to invest in a powerful and flexible desktop. I know the laptops are transferable and the user can work the recorded material anywhere but they have a lot of disadvantages. Even a laptop with exactly the same technical characteristics as a desktop, has lower performance: 1)The processor and speed are much lower. In that case digital/analogue processing is much lower and this can affect the final mixdown. For example, if we have added 10 different plug-ins in a project, the sound in the mix down won?t be perfect if the processor is low. 2) The desktops can be more fixable and upgradable. Changes and replaces can be made more easily. For example if a user needs more memory, bigger hard disk, better processor, another monitor then a desktop allows unlimited flexibility unlike laptops where there are a lot of restrictions. 3) The life expectancy of a laptop is lower. 4) Laptops can be stolen more easily than desktops.
Some sequencers require more than 3GB in order to work well, otherwise we can experience cracklings, stopping or even sometimes the program can crash.
Those are the basic steps to start your own home studio. However there are a lot of important issues like what microphones you can use and how, working with MIDI. These are chapters that need to be dealt with separately with more details, which happens in the second part .
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