There are several limitations that can keep you from recording a complete band in your home studio. To name some, equipment, environment, space and many other factors hamper the process of recording, unlike the big studios where there is no such obstruction. When recording at home, you often tend to use your living room, bedroom or basement that makes it more troublesome. So, does that mean you have to buy a fully furnished studio or quit your passion for recording? No way, we always come up with some great solutions for you and this time here we offer you the best way to record your band in a home studio
- Pre-Production :
To successfully engineer recording sessions at home studios, it is important to manage the pre production activities. From pre-production activities we mean that each member has the knowledge of his part of the song, they are well rehearsed and have co-ordination with each other. Planning ahead for the recording makes the recording smooth and enables you to think creative.
Doing a small MIDI mockup arrangement for the entire band to listen to the song is another great way to do the pre-production. MIDI is done using specific software instruments in the DAW of choice.
- Plan your recording:
Planning on how to record is the important thing to do. You must make a list of instruments you are going to record and accordingly make the floor recording plan. If you have a compact room, using overdubbing method is useful for you. In overdubbing, one instrument is recorded at a time and the next instrument is dubbed over it. Overdubbing offers you a great benefit, i.e. it eliminates any microphone bleed that is often reported while dubbing all the instruments at once. For best overdubbing results, you must ensure that you have the right audio interface depending upon the channels you wish to record.
- The Recording Session:
For best recording results, mic selection and monitoring play an important role.
Mic selection:
When you will scorch the market, you will find endless options for microphones. You can choose a drum kit mic set if you are buying for a band recording. The kit you choose must have a good diaphragm condenser mic to record the instruments as well as the vocals. If you wish to stay economical, buy a mic that can record everything from guitars to drums to bass, to vocals and even horns & orchestra.
Monitoring:
Monitoring is an important part of the recording, basically, it is a process where all your band members listen to the recorded pieces and find the scope of improvement. It is done on a DAW of your choice, where you send a song to play through the audio interface to let the others listen.
For example, if you are recording drums, you can let the drummer listen to MIDI Rhodes, bass, and piano parts.teh drummer thus feels as if he is playing with rest of the band and produces great music. To know about mixing and monitoring tools you can read our previous article; Essential tools required for mixing & mastering.
Hope this helps you in recording a great song at your home studio. Do try it out and let the world listen to your amazing recording.