DIY Recording
In the age of smart phones and self-driving cars, who needs a real studio to create music?
Measuring a client’s room and testing speaker placement.
In reality, no one does. If you have the proper know-how and get it done attitude, you can create music with literally anything. That is the beauty of self-expression. However, when you want to finish a recorded piece of music, at some point you will want to interact with a professional studio. The reasoning is simple; you know exactly how your song should sound when you’re writing it. Experienced audio engineers, producers, and mastering engineers know what it should sound like when you’re recording it.
The difference between the two may sound small, but it makes a world of difference when played side-by-side. If you’ve ever worked on a song for hours only to have it sound tinny, muddy, unrefined, or boomy when you listening back in your car or home theater system, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Multiple mic drum recording setup - Rarefied Recording, San Diego, CA
The problem is that the devil is in the details. You may not notice that a microphone on your drum kit was bumped over an inch or so. But that’s enough to drastically alter the sound of your snare drum. Maybe your vocalist is leaning back from the microphone further than they were last take; that’s enough to make the current take noticeably quieter and “farther away” sounding. These details are not beyond your ability to control, but they may be beyond your attention at the moment; after all, you’ve been concerned with the music this whole time, not the recording.
This is where we come in. We can help, since we started out as DIY musician/engineers ourselves. The thing to remember is that the main goal of a recording session is to capture the purest representation of the song. The good news is you already know what that sounds like. We can help you better use your equipment to capture that sound.
Recording is as much a skill set as songwriting or playing your instrument. Setting up microphones, dialing preamp saturation, EQing a sound source, compressing drums to the get the right oomph and punch… These skills take time to develop. While you’re working on yours, use us to get your project done right, right now. Through a DIY Recording collaboration, we can help fine tune your mic placement and gear settings through video chat, and can walk you through basic and more advanced techniques for recording and mixing. And, of course, we would be more than happy to arrange, mix, and/or master your song as soon as it’s recorded.
