Son of the King

I decided I would make a simple guide for all you audio amateurs, on recording, editing, masterizing and applying some simple effects to the music you plan to record. I won’t get into details of the audio recording software, but just so you know, I use Adobe Audition and the Diamond Pack VST effects bundle and Sony Sound forge VST effects. I haven’t done any midi recording as yet.

Generally when recording a song, you would want to have the beat first and then record the rest of the instruments, but as most drummers find it very hard to play their drums without something  to play it to, I record an acoustic or electric guitar (or a piano) first, to which the  drummer can then play.

Let’s start with recording an acoustic guitar. You want to place one or two mics right below or above the body, not over the center, as the bass frequency’s are overwhelming there. I used two Shure voice mic, ideally I would use condenser mics. Place the first mic at the back end of the guitar, facing to the strings behind the hole, the other one I placed on the other side of the hole, also facing towards the strings and facing slightly downwards. Your mileage may vary.

Recording the electric guitar can be slightly harder, to get a decent sound out. As plugging it directly into the mixing console doesn’t result in decent sound, the best is to place a pic directly in front of the amp (the resulting quality depends heavily on the quality of the amp),  placing the mic about half a meter or slightly farther away as to not get a saturated sound. You might try various types of mics and the distance to the amp and volume of the amp may give different results.

The Bass guitar you can record the same way, or if your amp has an output, wire it to the mixing console, where you might have to play around with the volume and frequency settings to get a good sound.

Now for the drums. As we only had 3 mics available, we placed them so as to get the best possible sound. I placed one behind the Hi-Hat, slightly lower, another one between the Bass drum and snare. Then a more powerful mic above the whole set to catch the general resulting sound. Ideally, recording every sound separately would result in a better sound, but I didn’t want to waste than much time on that and neither did the band I was recording. So one or two more well placed mics would probably result in a more “complete and filled” sound.

For the keyboard you can just plug it in to the console or use midi.

Recording the voice can be tricky, especially if your singer has just had lunch and looks like he would rather take a nap than doing some vocal recording. Best if this is done in the morning. You might have to place a filter in front of the mic if the singer tends to pronounce his P’s pretty hard, at least a small thin filter in any case. He should sing with his mouth as close as possible (but not against) the filter to get a fuller sound. You probably will have to take multiple takes.