With the tide of technological advancement, it is clear that musicians of today are far luckier than those of yesterday.
In the old days, most musicians would create a demo of their compositions by playing on a piano or guitar and recording on a simple desk cassette recorder. I remember my uncle used to have one were they record over a small mic and huddle close and sing.
If you were a band, it would be a lot more difficult. You need to have a band set up by renting a studio. Hooking up everything on a mixer and relaying on the ears of a sound engineer to get a good mix and record a song live direct to a cassette. Others would wait for a big gig and politely ask the technician to record your set.
If you are a solo composer and you know how to work with midi, then you can get an MC-50 and create a sequenced minus one for your song. Or you may get one of those expensive cassette based track recorder to record each instrument one by one. But you are limited to 4-track (as most cassette based are) and your only option to go beyond its limitations is to do ping pong recording. This means recording 3 instruments of seperate tracks, mixing them into one track to get three more available tracks.
And then you have to convince a producer or anyone who has the cash to spend for a production quality recording in a studio. Then you will record your song to reel. Production cost is ultimately high which means, producers will only spend if they know that they will profit from it.
But things changed. You dont have to spend so much not just to make a demo but to actually make a production quality album. This is the reason why most bands of today produces their own albums in what they call EP. Or other profit minded people goes into the indie market.
In the recent years, setting up a recording studio was not too expensive anymore. Anyone who have a good international credit card can order some digital recording equiptment such as ADATs or any other quality multitracker. Gone are those big reels which are so expensive (not just the recorder but even the reel itself are so expensive . . not to mention heavy). Other people who have relatives abroad can ask them to bring home the goodies. Digital multitrackers which are stand alone came out and those who can afford are now getting them.
At this point, there became evident who where the bands who have cash and those “other bands” who would frown on the “rich kids” bands out of envy since they dont have access to produce their own album. Now these “other bands” will have to rely on the good old “discovery by an A&R” method to get an album.
Today things are changing and changing fast. Everything can now be done with a PC. Even professional recording studios have PCs and people at home can equal the specs of those PCs. Most professional studios run on mac, primarily because of their power and reliabilty. But PCs are trying to catch up. Now you can record a production quality album from your own bedroom. The recording equiptment are now available in the local stores. JB music has a wide array of m-audio equiptment at sale price being the local distributor. Yupangco distributes a lot of line6 recording products and roland. Audiophile distributes Tascams and Alesis. No need to look over the internet and order as the prices comes out cheaper since you dont pay for shipping expenses. Softwares are readily available. . . although I hate to promote this but they are being sold at the sidewalks for less than a dollar (figure of speech here). You can even get Sonar, Cubase, Reason, Protools LE, Abelton, Audition, Cooledit, Wavelab, and all those other cool stuff in one DVD for about P250.
Now bands can call the shots and create an album to whatever they desire to integrate in it since they can now do it in their own home. They can even record each instrument on each house of each band member. There was even a band I saw on Ellen show where the member have not meet each other before, only through the internet via youtube and was able to come up with an album simply by sending thru email elements of the songs.
So what do you need to make a good recording? First you need a good PC. It would be better if you have a dualcore. A quad core is excellent. Get lots of memory. Memories comes cheap nowadays. I got a 1GB DDR for only P800 (that is a kingston lifetime warranty). So 2GB is P1600. Memory is important especially when you mixdown a song especially with all those effects you put in on each element.
One primary equiptment you will need is a good soundcard. A soundcard for recording is like a videocard for gaming. It is an acceleration hardware. This means sound is processed on a soundcard thus minimizing the workload on the main processor. A good soundcard should accept at least 24bit and 48khz audio resolution. If you have the budget get the highest you can afford. Another thing to consider is the inputs and outputs. If you are recording live drums then you would definitely need one with at least 8 inputs in order to record the drums on to separate tracks. Also think of the versitality pre-amp you could get out of it. Something that accepts line level, unbalanced and balanced inputs plus phantom power. This way you can plug in your guitar directly thus eliminating noise from any external devices you need to pass thru. You can actually record your guitar without effects and use the virtual effects softwares. Just make sure you are monitoring the sound you want so as you can play accordingly. Next issue to consider is the latency. Most people who first time record on a pc would complain that there is a delay in the way the audio is input. Thus the guitar misses the beat of the drums. A good soundcard should eliminate this problem.
My advise now is to invest on a good audio monitor. Get a good near field monitors – or make one if you know how. Get a good headphone. I am using a Philips SHP1900 headphone I bought from Astrovision for only P650. Use reliable cables to avoid noise. And dont hesitate to experiment to get the sound you want.
This will go longer if I dont stop now. I am sure a lot of you will comment or ask questions about a lot of recording stuff. Please feel free and I will try to answer in the best way I could.
Enjoy!
