There are four major, big picture, considerations that you should always consider long before you immortalize the first note of your next project. These include the space in which you will produce, the surrounding environment of that particular space, the readiness of the tools necessary to produce your vision and the requirements for each of those tools, and the essential education and understanding that you will need in order to be successful in faithfully producing your vision.
The Workspace
I think that all new producers find ourselves so transfixed with the idea of the final product that we completely disregard the fact that nothing is more important to the quality of your finished product than the preproduction phase. In order to produce quality tracks, you are going to have to start with quality recordings and in order to produce quality recordings you are going to need a space that is appropriately laid out for the task. Just like any other craftsperson, your work requires a space that is appropriate to the task. However, this can be difficult to ensure as audio can be sensitive medium. In most cases you are going to want a space that is as free as possible from unnecessary internal noises, such as unwanted reverberations and electronic noises, as well as external noises such as planes, trains, and general human noise. This can be tricky given that most of us do not live in a sound proof studio. Therefore, you are going to have to be creative, especially if you are on tight budget, in order to create the best possible environment for your recordings.
Allow me to offer you some free advice on how to get the best recording in your own home without spending a dime. Firstly, any kind of walk-in closet is going to be your best friend. If you have a closet that you can walk into, even if it is just one step, you are going to have a decent isolation booth for vocals and amplifiers. Use this space to your advantage. In most cases, it will be covered in clothes and soft surfaces of all kinds that will stop reverberations and create a fairly dry sound. This is perfect as it will allow you to manipulate the sound to your liking during the mixing phase. Nothing is as annoying as trying to get rid of acoustic anomalies that you do not want in a recording after the fact. Whenever possible avoid these effects from even ending up on your recording in the first place. Early in my audio production journey I was painfully unaware of how different materials and surfaces affect the way in which sound behaves in a room. As such I ended up with recordings like the one that you can hear below. You can clearly hear how the natural reverberation of the room significantly impacts the clarity of the recording.
Closets are great but we often need more space than that to record certain instruments or musical segments. My advice to you is to endeavor to always use the smallest space possible for your needs. Unless you are actively looking to infuse your recording with natural reverb, it is best to avoid reverberations altogether until you are in the mixing phase. A small room will ensure that you have minimal natural reverb and it will also allow you to control the reverb in the room much more easily. The more space you have to work with the harder it will be to control reverberation in a budget friendly manner. I once had the opportunity to record in a small unfurnished guest bedroom that was filled with mattresses for beds that had not yet been set up. This created a fairly reverb-free environment that complimented the recordings. You can hear an example of the effect that had on the recording below. The lack of reverberation in the room allowed me to add reverb to taste in the mixing phase. I think that you can agree that the reverb in this recording is much more pleasing to the ear than the reverb in the previous example.
Consider the surrounding environment
Controlling an indoor space is one thing but these spaces are not isolated from the outside world. It is crucial that we also consider the surrounding environment in which our workspace exists. Some of us have to work within local environments that are highly susceptible to noise. It is crucial that we take that reality into consideration before every project. Early in my journey in audio production, I lived near a small municipal airport and unfortunately directly below one of the flightpaths. This caused me to often have to scrap takes and start over once the noisy vehicle had moved far enough away that it would no longer be captured in my recordings. Similarly, on several occasions I was invited to work at a carefully thought-out home studio that had been built in a two-car garage. The owners of the studio had done a fantastic job of ensuring that all the basic needs were met given their limited resources. However, they could do nothing about the fact that their studio was just yards away from actively used train tracks. This caused us to have to anticipate the passage of trains and record around their schedule. Luckily, the owners of the studio were keenly aware of the general schedule of the trains and they used that information help guide our sessions. We were able to transition between recording blocks and planning blocks with a high level of efficiency which ultimately benefitted the sessions nicely.
These are not all of the spatial and environmental considerations that you may encounter (your mileage will definitely vary) but it is a brief illustration that will hopefully serve to help you reflect on your workspace and the surrounding environment so that you can anticipate and proactively address potential issues that may hinder the success of your productions.
inspect and prepare your tools
I like to think of producing audio in the same way that I think about taking portraits. The aim, in most cases, is to capture the best possible representation of a moment. As with portraits, in general, you want to make sure that you look your best regardless of the particular aesthetic that you are aiming to produce. As such, here are some key considerations to keep in mind every time that you record. When it comes to stringed instruments, make sure that you always change your strings and ensure that your instrument is properly setup before you begin recording anything. Old strings will produce dull lifeless sounding recordings that may be consistently out of tune or going out of tune and bad setups will only exacerbate these issues. This will not only cause you headaches in the recording phase but it will also come back to cause your further headaches during the mixing phase. Keep in mind that you should avoid changing strings and immediately recording as this will also cause tunning issues. Make sure to change your strings and break them in for a reasonable period before starting your first take. Acoustic drums require similar considerations. Make sure to change your heads and strategically place the pieces of your kit in order to minimize bleed in your recordings. Just like with old strings, old heads will sound dull and lifeless and may even lead to odd overtones in your drum recordings that can be a nightmare to try to deal with in the mixing phase. Unsurprisingly, recording voices also requires similar considerations. My best piece of advice is to ensure that vocalists lightly warmup before recording (some vocalists overdo it during their warmup and ultimately strain their voices, it is best to have a vocalist come to the microphone still getting loose than being overly strained). Additionally, get in the habit of having vocalists run one or two scratch takes. The first couple of takes are rarely gold and allowing a vocalist a couple takes to finish warming up or work out their anxieties will ultimately pay dividends down the road.
Education is the key to Success
I realize none of these considerations are particularly thrilling, and of the four this may be the least thrilling, but if you are going to be an effective audio engineer you are going to need to educate yourself. There is no point in getting involved with something if you are going to spend your time doing it cluelessly. Audio production education can be at once frustratingly out of reach and ubiquitously available and quality audio production education can often be mired within the tons of less reputable resources. There are plenty of voices in the free audio production education space, myself included, and not all those voices carry with them the same weight. Personally, I do not consider myself and expert, but I do consider that I have made enough mistakes and have spent enough time making mistakes to be able to provide guidance to those that might potentially make the same mistakes if not otherwise advised. As such, I highly recommend that you stay open to any an all education that you may receive in this space, but that you ultimately defer to the experts whenever possible. Luckily many experts are willing to share plenty of invaluable information for free. I highly recommend that you take a look at the various articles that companies like Sweetwater and iZotope regularly put out. They are an invaluable source of quality information that will setup you up for success every time. The articles produced by iZotope are especially useful as they often include pictures, audio samples, and videos to ensure that you that you get the most out of the education that they provide. Beyond that, I also highly recommend The Art of Digital Audio Recording as well as Mixing and Mastering in the Box, both by Steve Savage. Unfortunately, these books are not free but they are definitely worth the investment given that they are about as comprehensive a guide to learning how to produce audio in line with professional standards that you are going to find.
Until next time
There you have an exploration of some basic but absolutely essential preproduction considerations that will be key to the success of your projects. None of this is particularly exciting but developing a habit of giving these aspects their proper consideration will positively impact the quality of your productions and save you massive headaches every time. This, of course, is only the beginning when it comes to audio production. I will endeavor to continue to write articles that further explore the key considerations necessary to be an effective home audio engineer in future articles. However, should you have questions or concerns please feel free to reach out and I will do my best answer your questions or guide you to the proper resources.
Add comment
Comments