You no longer have to spend hundreds or thousands to go in a studio to record a cd. With tools such as pro-tools, anybody can produce a cd with a decent desktop computer, a handful of plugins, a decent microphone, and the interface, a cd can be recorded right in the comfort of your home.
Before we get all technical, I will be willing to bet that you already have a good computer right now, huh? May not be the best for the job, but with a Pentium 3 or higher, at least 1Gb of RAM, and Pro-tools and interface, you are ready.
Getting that out of the way, here are some tips on how to make a high quality cd at home:
- Amplifier and mic placement – This is tricky. As a guitarist, I used to run through my preamp straight to the mixer. This was the WRONG thing to do because a.)I didn’t have enough effects to simulate an amp, and b.)I couldn’t control the tone of it. I finally tried putting my amplifier in a closet full of clothes. The sound is similar to a studio because the closet is tonally dead. I then got rid of a traditional mic stand but placed a pillow under the mic. This completely got rid of all of the unwanted tones.
- Recording drums and percussion – Use a good set of drum mics makes a difference. Also, after watching the Metallica video where they were recording the Death Magnetic album, I took notes of drummer Lars Ulrich’s microphone setup. In front of the drum set and all of the drum mics was a condenser microphone placed approximately mid room. I later experimented with this and the sound quality of the drum tracks increased drastically, though I did have to use filters to filter out the hiss. A good limiter and DeEsser cleans it up nicely.
- Recording vocals – If you are recording vox, you should have a decent condenser microphone. The key to a pristine vocal track is to record the track through a condenser mic with as little background reverberation and noise as possible. If you place the condenser mic in the same closet that you recorded the guitar from, you will get the best results.
- Recording bass guitar – For the bass guitar, I usually run line in. It is okay to do this with a bass guitar because you can add free effects to enhance the bass guitar.
- Recording all other acoustic instruments – I always set a shotgun condenser mic up about 6 inches from the sound hole of the instrument, slightly off axis. This allows for the fullest tone and sounds good to my ears. You can experiment with the best mic placement for your tone preferences.
- Recording keyboards and other instruments that have line out capabilities – You can record these instruments via line out/line in remembering to keep the instrument levels pretty close to the levels of all the other tracks. If you can keep the levels right, it will make life easier for the mixdown process later.
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Once you have recorded your song, now comes the fun of mixing the song down. It will be a cinch if you remember these couple of tricks.
- Download free plugins – At the bottom of the article you will see a list of free plugins in the resources section.
- Get a good cheap home theater system or home stereo system. (You will need this for the mixdown to get the bass levels, etc. right.)
Ready to mix? Great. Now the next part of this may sound retarded, but believe when I tell you, DO IT! You will first want to highlight all but one track and make them inactive. (Yep, I have completely lost my musical mind, eh?) This is important because what we are going to do is now highlight only the active track. Now we want to duplicate the track to two other tracks. Why do this? It just fattened your tone up to the point that you are at studio quality, no longer home quality.
Add eq’s, reverb, etc. to make the track sound like you want it to. If using ProTools, you can press CTRL+ALT+B or click file->Bounce to Track. Bounce this to a .wav file named whatever the instrument is.
Once this is complete make this track inactive and proceed to the next. Do the same thing on every track except the vocals and the bass track.
On the vox track, you may or may not want to add additional effects such as DeEsser and possible chorus, etc. If you use chorus or other effects, here is a key to making it sound right. Only add the effect to one copy of the track. Pan that track to center and the other two tracks left and right between 85-93%. Lower the volume level on the center track a touch to where it can only barely be heard. This is the one of the most effective methods of making the vocals stand out.
On the bass track, you should use some sort of filters that can send the bass guitar to sub levels and super-sub levels. The Pluggo plugin group has a spectral filter with the pre-defined settings already there. If you use the pluggo plugins, here is the best way to set it. Add super-sub to one track, sub to one track, and bass guitar to the last track. This gives you all three sounds coming from the instrument and will make it stand out on small computer speakers or huge subwoofers.
Once you have bounced each individual instrument to it’s own track, it is time to now begin final mixdown. Load all of the tracks into a new session with ProTools. Make sure that when you play the track back that no instrument is louder than another.
Go ahead and create a master mix track. Though a lot of people don’t recommend it, you can experiment and see if it works for you, add a reverb or a final eq to the mix. Make sure, and I mean sure that the sound meter doesn’t go into the red on the master track. This is vital to the quality of the recording.
When you have it like you want it. Add the Massey mastering plugin to the master track. I always set the left knob at -1 and the right knob will need to be turned to around 8 or 9. This will squeeze dynamics from the song that may have been lost in recording back to the top of the song.
Now your song should sound like a professional song. Bounce to .wav again and burn it to cd.
RESOURCES
<a href=”http://www.izotope.com/” target=”_blank”>Izotope Vinyl</a>
<a href=”http://www.cycling74.com/products/dlpluggo.html” target=”_blank”>Pluggo plugins</a>
<a href=”http://www.masseyplugins.com/” target=”_blank”>Massey Plugins</a>
<a href=”http://www.nomadfactory.com/downloads/index.html” target=”_blank”>Nomad RTA Bunle</a>
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