Recording a Band at your Home Studio
Recording a band in a home studio is always a challenging part for today’ s aspiring home studio owners. Many have the fear that the desired quality might not be reached by recording in a home studio environment, especially tracking drums. While sound treatment is pretty crucial to take care of the room reverberation, flutter echo and bass build-ups, this does not mean you’ ll need to burn a hole in your pocket. Simple sound absorption panels on the reflected walls and bass traps in the corners should do the trick. Ok, lets us start with simple step by step approach to good recording a band at your home studio.
1. Let’ s start with the drums. First things first, make sure that the drummer always tracks to a click-track simply because it makes the entire post-production and editing process easier. Most people do not have an eightinput interface, so a four-channel input interface will do. Place a mic on the kick drum, one on the snare and two condensers for the overheads, this will capture the entire kit and give you a great sounding drum kit. There are plenty of mic techniques for drum recordings that require a minimal number of mics. The Glyn Johns Mic technique, for instance, only requires 3 microphones and it sounds stellar. Personally, I’ ve recorded an entire drum kit using just one condenser mic( a Rode NT-1A) and ended with a great, natural-sounding output. When it comes down to it, what’ s important is the sound and the placement of the microphones. For the kick drum, you can use an AKG D112, the legendary Shure SM57 on the snare and any pair of small or large diaphragm condenser microphones on the overheads. That should do the trick.
2. You can record electric or bass guitars through the direct input in your interface. If you want to record an electric guitar through a cabinet then place an Shure SM57 on the speaker. Also take another input through the DI, so you can choose to blend the two sounds if you wish. Always double track your rhythm guitars and hard-pan them to give it some width and more punch. Make sure that you vary tones while tracking a solo or lead section.
4. Finally, we come to tracking the vocals which is often the core part of the song. Place a dynamic mic or a condenser in the center of the room to avoid unnecessary room reflections in your recording. Use the pop-filter to avoid the popping sound caused by plosives. If your room is not treated at all, it’ s usually better to use a dynamic mic, like a Shure SM58, because it does not pick up unwanted sounds from your recording environment.
5. Try to achieve a good result during the recording stage itself rather than having a“ Let’ s fix it in the mix!” attitude towards the whole thing. Always apply the 80 / 20 rule, 80 % of the work in the recording stage and 20 % while mixing.
6. Try not to overload your session with way too many plugins. This will only push your CPU hard and is absolutely not required to get the required results. Try to use plugins effectively and only when required. Remember it’ s all about how your sound is finally translated.
Hope these tips will help you track a band more efficiently at your home studio setup. Have fun!
Author: Baba. L. Prasad. He is the owner and chief Sound / Mix and Mastering Engineer at Digi Sound Studio. He also teaches Sound Engineering and Music Production courses. For more details, visit www. digisoundacademy. com
The Score Magazine
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