I’m sick and have nothing better to do so I’m blogging about my experience with recording.  I’ll admit, I really have no formal training in this.  I just do what I can to make things sound the best to me.  So in other words, I’ve taken what I’ve learned as a musician and applied it to mixing and mastering my recordings.  Whatever I didn’t quite understand I read about... and when I started I didn’t know much.

I started recording with a cassette deck.  Cassettes are quite cheap and give you 4 recordable tracks.  That means with something like a tascam PortaStudio you can record and/or play back 4 different things separately then mix them when you are done, setting the levels and panning of each part.  The limitations would be that most cassette decks have a limited frequency range of 20hz to 20khz.  Which just happens to be pretty close to the range of human hearing.  However the lost frequency is still very noticeable.  The other thing to consider is how much money you can spend.  $100 can buy a 4 track recorder but just $150 ($250 duh) more gets you an 8-track hard-drive recorder from Fostex.

If you happen to be lucky enough to own a vinyl recorder then you can use those big black round things that grandpa listens to.  No, don’t use them, use blanks!  They have a frequency response range of about 7hz to 25khz.  Which if you think about it is better than a CD.  Well, if you really think about it, you have to be careful when recording high and low frequency sound on vinyl or you’ll get distortion and skipping respectively.  The problem is that it’s not very cheap.  But you have a really cool thing if you have a vinyl recorder and you might wanna sell it for some digital equipment.

If you do happen to have a computer laying around somewhere, I know they are rare these days, then you might try out Audacity.  It’s free and has many features to help you record to your hard drive.  It may require some getting used to but you can’t grow if you don’t learn.  It’s very easy to expand it with VST plug-ins making it very usable.  Using your computer may give the best results and if you already have one you don’t have to shell out money, unless you have a really old one.  You can then use a CD burner (I know, who has that?) to make an audio CD.  Audio CDs use 44,100hz split into 2 channels for stereo.  That means that per left or right channel, you only hear 22,050 snapshots of the actual original analog recording.  This also limits the highest frequency to 22,050hz.  You have 16-bits of amplitude per each snapshot.  That means there are only 65,536 integer values for volume.  You won’t really notice the difference from volume level 60,000 and 60,001 though.

Most people have MP3 players these days.  So if you download the lame MP3 codec and use it with Audacity you have a wide array of frequency and control over the sound.  You may also want to look into the FLAC/OGG codecs.  The problem with OGGs/MP3s is they are lossy.  They loose certain parts, depending on the settings, that aren’t needed to listen to playback of a given recording.  You get a significant reduction in data size and retain most of if not all of the audible parts of the recording.  FLACs however do not loose any of the quality of the sound.  They don’t decrease the data size nearly as much but it’s still a great gain.  The frequency in all this is limited by your own hardware.  A good sound card records and plays 96khz at 24-32bits.  The old SoundBlaster 16 cards do 48khz at 16bit which is just a little bit better than CD quality.  The major factor is hard drive space.  You probably want to record in the highest quality that doesn’t impair your computers ability to operate while recording and playing back multiple tracks.  Something that high quality uses a lot more space!

Also, don’t forget, writing down your music is a good way to record it.  If you don’t know notation then try tabliture or make your own method of remembering what you played.  I used to do that when I was a kid with my yellow Music Major keyboard.

Once you figure out how you are recording and you make your first recording, how do you make it sound great?  If you have everything on a separate track, what you do first is mix.  You set all the levels of each instrument so that you hear them the way you intended all the way through the track.  Yeah, that means you have to hear your own music a hundred times so you will be tired of it.  When everything is mixed (and nothing is clipping, ie. distorting) you can master it. 

Mastering can mean tweaking the levels of what you mixed together but it’s also about maximizing the sound.  Not just making it louder but making things sound like they are supposed to.  The bass should be low frequency and be at a level that allows the percussion to be heard in relation to it.  The percussion should probably be as dynamic as possible so try not to filter it out and try keeping high and low percussion on different channels/tracks so you can tweak them separately.  If you apply more than just high and low equalization to the mix as a whole make sure that you don’t negate something when you have a bunch of layers.  You may totally kill the impact of a certain instrument applying a slight drop in mid range frequency.  Basicly make everything as loud as you want but make sure it’s not clipping (or distorting rather) by making sure everything stays under 0 db.  That’s why I sometimes incorrectly mix the terms mixing and mastering since I’m doing both when finalizing things. 

Hey, if you have the resources, hire someone!  I would but I’m very picky.  Once someone changes my sound I know I’ll hate it.  It won’t be mine.  Unless I find someone who really feels me... but that’s just me.  There are some people who are willing to master for less than a hoity high lable type pro.  But just make sure they give you a sample of what they can do. 

To really be decent at mastering you’ll have to learn about compressors/limiters/equalization in your own time.  You may have the thing called the interwebs and can do stuff like "Google" these or look on that thing called... I think... uh, Wikipedia?  Heh, sorry for feigning ignorance!  the best piece of advice I can give is do what sounds right and if you have the slightest doubt let someone else hear it.

Try to record/master with headphones but also try your recordings out in all types of players.  More so with high end car stereo systems and home theater type systems.  You may be surprised at the sound that you never intended to sound so good.  Make sure that your master sounds fairly close to other professional CDs and you should be fine.  Then again, so what if it doesn’t quite fit mainstream industry mastering standards.  If you like how it sounds and others dig it then you win!  I’d have links to things but somehow Myspace really sucks at saving links in the html... I’ll update someday.

Laters!