In order to take full advantage of the massive technology advantages available in the world of home recording, we have to accept that we’ll be working with computers.
It has been our going-in assumption that pretty much anybody and everybody these days is computer literate, by which I mean familiar with and adept at the basic user commands in today’s consumer computers. That’s what I consider to be about where someone needs to be in their “comfortable-ness” with computers in or to really get into home audio recording. You surely do not need to be any kind of computer geek or programmer or anything approaching that level. But the fact is there are still lots and lots of people out there, very smart and capable people, who are uncomfortable with or even intimidated by computers.
We’ve been blithely talking about how easy, inexpensive, yet powerful home recording is now, assuming a level of computer literacy that may not be reflective of reality (a fancy way of saying “wrong”). We received a comment on a blog post yesterday that basically said:
I’m a musician and really into harmony, and would love to do what you are doing with the harmony recording, but I am computer illiterate and feel like I don’t understand what to do in order to get involved.
Well that was an eye-opener. So in response, we plan to publish more articles and guides geared toward the folks who are, as they call themselves, more computer illiterate than the average joe. This content will attempt to provide the minimum computer literacy needed to at least do the cool audio recording stuff.
Thanks to the Home Brew Audio readers for opening our eyes to this bias we’ve had! We hear you and hereby commit to make this magic world of home recording available and practical for ALL our readers.
Cheers!
Ken
EQ And Compression Techniques For Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Compression and EQ techniques for vocal and guitar are explained here. Compression is the technique of evening out the loud and soft parts of the vocal or instrumental music. EQ should be used to subtly color the sound of a particular track. While doing so, it is usually more effective to pull out some frequencies rather than adding some.
Read the full article from the ProSound Web site here:
EQ And Compression Techniques For Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Creating Space And Depth In Your Recordings
One of the most important areas that have to be considered in the production of any media is creating realistic sound. Creating realistic sound is not an easy task. Some of the methods that are used to create three-dimensional sound are through the use of room mics, Re-Amping, Echo, Hass ffect and Reverb. In case of room mics, we have mics set up at different corners of the room to record the sound giving rise to sort of 3-D effect. In the case of re-amping we have the already-recorded media played through a guitar amplifier (usually) in a room with mics at different places and then re-recorded to get the realistic sound. With echo, you can stay inside a box and add echo to instruments, which will place that instrument in a space. The Haas effect is a psycho-acoustic illusion that humans experience when the same signal is played just slightly delayed from a copy of itself and panned left and right. We hear only a single sound until the delay between the two signals reaches around 50 milliseconds, at which point we start to hear these as two separate signals to help create a realistic sound. Reverb, like echo (well, they’re really the same thing technically, but…) gives space to a sound and helps to make it sound a little further away from the listener.
Read the full article here:
Creating Space And Depth In Your Recordings
These Are Audio Myths – Myths, I Tell You (Even Number 1 in My Humble Opinion)
A List of Audio Myths To Help You Improve the Quality of Your Home Recording Studio. The author, however, calls a few of them true, so…not myths? Anyway, my favorite one is.
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10. You need better gear to make better recordings.
- False. You need the correct gear for the recording at hand. You need better ears to make better recordings. Instead of just investing in gear, invest in knowledge, invest in listening, invest in new techniques, invest in improving your ears and understanding. You can also make great sounding recordings and mixes on a budget.
Here is the original and full article from “The Pro Audio Files”: http://theproaudiofiles.com/10-common-audio-myths-debunked/
Find out more about producing pro quality audio on a regular person’s budget here Home Recording
Getting a Good Mix With Cheap Monitor Speakers
Someone asked the following question on the Home Recording forum yesterday about cheap monitor speakers:
A few days ago I asked a question on different forum about really cheap monitors as I need some.
Well, I don’t have much money to buy myself..let’s say.. krk rp 5. I just need a cheap pair of monitors. I was thinking about Alesis m1 320, but then I was told that there’s no sense buying cheap monitors as they sound worse than computer speakers. What do you guys think?
And here is how I answered the question:
Hi Edward,
I agree with others here that for the most part, cheap studio monitors are usually better than computer speakers, at least they should be more “honest” than computer speakers, which are designed to make things sound good. You don’t want monitor speakers to “make things sound good, you want to hear the truth…or as close to it as possible. But also, consider this. If you’re doing your critical listening and mixing in a room in your house/apartment like most of us, even accurate/flat speakers are going to lie to your ears because boxy bedrooms (some worse than others) are simply going to accentuate certain frequencies (bass almost certainly), and eat others, causing you to add too much of the frequencies you don’t hear, and subtract too much of the frequencies you hear too much of. Then when you listen to the mix somewhere else it’ll suck (not enough bass and way too much in certain mids or highs for example).
So is all lost? Of course not. As with anything else in this biz you need either time or money. If you can’t afford good monitors AND room treatment (which can be expensive and easily done wrong), what you do is the “mix hokey-pokey’ (my made-up term
). Mix in your studio first. Then listen to the test mix on as many systems as possible, including the car (very important), ipod, other computers, your “good” stereo/entertainment system, etc. Make lots and lots of notes, come back to the studio and mix again, tweaking according to your notes. Repeat the process until it sounds good on all systems. That’s my advice for getting by with cheap monitors in a home recording studio.
I hope that helps!
Cheers,
Ken