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Home Recording... Alright, you have a computer, otherwise, you're reading this in a library somewhere, but for all intents and purposes, I'm going to assume you have a somewhat decent PC at home. Everyone can pay someone else for their experience. But in my opinion, it's better to spend your time than your money, getting that experience yourself. Having your own home studio, even if it's just on a simple Tascam 8-track or something of that nature, is going to make you 100x more of a musician & producer than shoveling out $50 an hour to some engineer you hardly know, who hardly knows your music. I've recorded shitty demos. Really shitty demos. I played in a band back in the late 90s, and we thought we were pretty good and wanted to cut a demo. We found a decent studio for about $35 an hour, about 300 miles out of town. We wound up paying a lot of studio time for the drummer to tune his drums in the studio, and for the engineer to work slowly & not hard enough. What we wound up with, was a rushed, half-assed engineered sound, poor performances from the musicians (no click track was used), and a pretty poor sound overall. It wasn't even fun. We still released the disc. I swore never again would I pay someone to fuck my sound up, when I'm perfectly capable of doing that myself :) So, in the summer of 2000, I bought my first drum machine & multi-track recording program. I released demos in 2000, 2002, & 2003. On each demo I released, I learned more about recording. How a recorded guitar is different from a miked cabinet guitar, how room acoustics mesh with digital effects, why cutting the low mids on a snare drum bring out the bottom end of the instrument, how various singers sound different with different microphones, etc. The successes & failures I experienced during this time really sculpted me as a musician and an engineer. It built my skills to the point where I was comfortable recording a full-length album by myself for the first time, and I spent 2004 recording my solo album, Screaming into the Abyss. I was very happy with the end result. The lessons I learned over those years about recording could not have been learned by paying someone else to record myself & my band. I had to do it myself, learning what works and what doesn't work... more importantly, why something does or doesn't work. So if you're serious about developing your own sound and creating the music you truly hear in your heart, I strongly encourage you to educate yourself and do it yourself. You'll be a happier musician in the long-run. |