Third Take

I did something last night I never thought I’d do - I copied the lead vocal from the first chorus to the second chorus. In some genres, this is the normal, expected practice and a mandatory skill for the engineer. Other circles put emphasis on vague notions of authenticity and integrity, and duplicating a performance is seen as fakery. I usually relate to this more idealistic school of thought, but last night I broke my own rules. Read more

After you’ve set yourself up for a successful recording, it’s time to press record and capture the (hopefully) great performance. Unfortunately, even the best performance can be marred by sloppy recording technique. Here are three tips to help you get a cleaner track. Read more

I recently purchased a pair of sound isolating earbuds for live use. At one of my guitar gigs, we have an in-ear monitor system and I wanted a nice pair of earbuds that would block out stage noise and let me hear the monitor system clearly. Then I had a brainstorm: why not use them when recording vocals in my home studio? Read more

Most of us get into home recording because we want to record ourselves or our band. We soon realize that there is a steep learning curve, and making a recording that sounds “professional” is hard. If you are just starting out, your biggest obstacle is not lack of gear, software, or plugins, but lack of knowledge. You can make a good recording on minimal equipment, but if you don’t know how to work effectively, it can be very frustrating. There is nothing worse than getting several hours into a project and realizing that a mistake you made at the beginning has doomed your recording. Here are a few techniques to help you get off to a solid start. Read more

Electric guitar is one of the easiest instruments to record. Maybe it’s because I’m a guitar player and I know what I want a guitar to sound like, but I’ve never had a lot of trouble getting good electric guitar sounds recorded. Even so, there is a difference between good and great - here are five tips that have improved my recordings. Read more

Acoustic guitar is one of the most difficult instruments to record. I haven’t come close to mastering the art, but I have figured some things out along the way that I think are worth passing on to other home recorders. Some of these are sure to be controversial, and other people may have had great results with other techniques. However, after reading everything I could find and applying it in my own home studio, this is what has worked for me. Read more

I found a great article on parallel compression at a blog called Hometracked. It looks like a great blog and I plan on keeping up with it.

Parallel compression is the process of mixing an uncompressed signal with a compressed copy of it. The article at Hometracked shows how to do this in Sonar and includes audio examples.

I’m still experimenting with this technique, but getting good results.