Editors' Blogs

Maybe this should go on our Q&A page, but it's got a fair bit of "my personal opinion" in it, so what the heck.

I was recently approached by a young man who was creating a 20-minute audio documentary on the rise of home recording. It was for a journalism class, and no prior knowledge of recording technology was being assumed on the part of the audience. He was looking for some insights on the history and key issues of the topic. I responded that my whole dang magazine was on that topic and he'd have to be a bit more specific, and obligingly he sent me the following three questions:

1. "What would you classify as the most important innovations to aid home recording, the equipment needed when recording at home and why?"

2. "What would you class as the main issues with recoding at home as opposed to the studio?"

3. "What advice would you give to someone starting out and/or looking into recording at home?"

Fair enough. Here's what I wrote back to him.

"In my opinion, the single most important innovation that has aided the democratization of home recording has been the advent of the affordable personal computer. A great deal of what we do when we record music -- capturing and storing audio, editing it after the fact, mixing it together, and turning it into a product that can easily be listened to -- requires either a physical medium to store the audio or a way to turn it into digital data that can be manipulated.

For decades, we have used analog tape recorders to capture and store audio, razor blades to edit it, and have mixed it down to other tapes. With the introduction of digital technology came the design of purpose-built music workstations. In the beginning they were fabulously expensive and only did a few rudimentary things, but as time went on and computers got cheaper and faster (you know Moore's Law, I assume), it got to the point where even an ordinary personal computer costing a few hundred dollars could do everything an audio producer needed. All one has to do is attach the right interface hardware to get audio into the computer, and everything else is just a matter of having the right software... and said software can be very affordable, or even free.

That having been said, the single most important issue a home recordist will run into is one that no one ever thinks about yet does the most damage to people's early efforts in recording. The problem is not with the computer, or even with the gizmos that you hook up to it. It's the space in which you record. How music sounds when coming through a microphone is directly influenced -- strongly influenced -- by the room in which the music is played... whether it's large or small, with coverings on the walls or just bare drywall, what shape it is, what sort of furniture is in it, how many people are there, etc. We never think about that, but it may be the single most important thing to influence the translation of music to recorded audio.

On the flip side, when we play back audio and hear it as music, making decisions on how to alter it, edit it, mix it... we do so through speaker or headphone systems that may be flawed in what they tell us. As a very simple example, if you record music and listen to it through a computer speaker system that has a big subwoofer for your game explosions, you will hear WAY more bass than is actually in the music. If you mix so that the bass sounds right, anyone who listens to your song on regular speakers will hear practically no bass at all... the music will sound thin and weak. The single most important thing a home recordist can do is to understand and try to account for the shape of his room, and to listen on speakers he knows and trusts. Everything else follows from that.

Those two things really answer your third question, what I would advise new recordists to do. Understand your room, read a bit about acoustics and how even simple and inexpensive tricks (like putting a bookshelf full of books in the right place) can improve how music sounds in the room and make your music sound better. Then find a reliable and trustworthy set of speakers, and a good set of headphones... and understand what you can never do on headphones, which is why you need speakers. Then you can think about the other stuff: what boxes to hook up to your PC, what software to run, what kind of mics you might need, and so on. To make the best music, start by understanding your room and what you hear in that room.

I hope that helps. Good luck!"

So what do you consider the important points in the art of home recording?