A lot of artists think they have to choose between recording everything at home and booking a studio for everything. Often the answer is somewhere in between. Some parts of a song lose almost nothing when you record them at home. Others are worth every minute of studio time. Knowing which is which lets you put your budget where it counts.
WHAT HOME RECORDING DOES WELL
Home is the best place to write. There's no clock running, so you can try ten versions of a chorus and keep the one that works. It's the right place for demos, scratch vocals and working out arrangements before anyone spends money on them.
Some parts can hold up for a release when they're recorded at home. Synths, programmed drums, and guitar or bass recorded direct can all sound professional if they're captured cleanly.
THE THING NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
If you've never spent time in a studio, you don't know what a raw recording is supposed to sound like. Everything you've ever heard is a finished record, already mixed and mastered. So when your recording sounds off, it's hard to tell if that's normal for a raw track or a real problem that can't be fixed later. Room echo, bad levels and poor mic placement are easy to miss when you don't know what to listen for.
A STORY FROM A FEW YEARS BACK
A band from Ontario decided to buy some gear and record their whole record themselves. When it came time to mix, they reached out to me, because they had gotten in over their heads.
The recordings were pretty much unusable. The room had a lot of unwanted reverb, the mics weren't placed at the correct distance, and the gain staging was off, so the levels were wrong going in. None of that can be fixed in the mix. They were set on doing it themselves, so I tried coaching them through it, but in the end they had to book a local studio and record the songs again.
They lost a lot of time, and so did I. Recording is a real skill. Mic placement, gain staging and the room all matter before anyone hits record. With the drums and vocals done in a studio, they could have gotten away with some parts at home, but only with the proper setup and some guidance going in. Without professional advice on how to set up and where to record, you're going to have a hard time recording anything at home.
WHAT TO RECORD WHERE
Usually fine at home, with the right setup:
— Songwriting, demos and arrangement ideas
— Synths, keys and programmed drums
— Guitar and bass recorded direct
— Scratch and guide vocals
Worth bringing to the studio:
— Drums
— Lead vocals for a release
— Full bands tracking together
— Acoustic instruments like acoustic guitar, piano and strings
Anything that depends on a microphone and a good room gains the most from the studio. Anything recorded direct or inside the computer gains the least.
IF YOU'RE RECORDING AT HOME, GET THESE RIGHT
— Pick the quietest, least echoey room you have. A closet full of clothes is often the best vocal booth in the house.
— Keep the mic away from bare walls and corners.
— Turn off fans, fridges and the furnace while you record.
— Get your gain staging right. There's no magic number, it depends on the source. I've recorded plenty of things around minus 18, and healthy headroom is better than pushing levels too hot. Never let anything clip. The catch at home is noise: your level has to be high enough to rise above the hum and room sound around you. In a quiet studio with clean gear, you can record at lower levels because there's far less noise to fight.
— Record dry. Save the reverb and effects for the mix.
— Record at 24 bit, 48 kHz or higher.
SENDING ME YOUR HOME RECORDINGS
Two problems show up in almost every set of files I get, and neither one is the audio.
The first is sending too many files. If you send me a file, I assume it's meant to be used. I shouldn't be picking between five vocal takes or ten snare samples, unless they're all designed to work together. Choosing the best take is a production decision, and those should be made before anything is sent for mixing. If you want help making those calls, that's production, and I'm happy to do it. Just let me know up front, so we're on the same page.
The second is file names. Audio 1, Audio 2 and a track called final new vocal take 3 USE THIS ONE slow everything down, because I have to open every file just to figure out what it is.
Keep file names short and descriptive, using the same shorthand studios use, with a space between each part. Use all caps too. I read track names from across the console, and caps are much easier to read at a distance. The name should tell me what the file is at a glance:
— KICK IN and KICK OUT for the kick drum mics inside and outside the drum
— SN TOP and SN BTM for snare top and snare bottom
— OH L and OH R for overheads left and right
— BASS DI for bass recorded direct
— VOX MAIN for the main vocal
And so on for everything else. You don't need to match my labels exactly, just keep them short and clear.
Bounce everything in mono, with all panning turned off. If something was recorded with two mics in stereo, like overheads, send two mono files labelled left and right (OH L, OH R). I'll handle the panning in the mix. The one exception is a stereo source that was recorded as a single stereo track, like a synth or a printed stereo effect. Send that as one stereo file.
Watch your export settings. Some recording programs bounce every track as a stereo file by default, even a mono vocal or a single kick mic. When that happens I can't tell a true stereo file from a mono track that's just been doubled, and I have to sort through them one by one. Before you export, look for a setting usually called something like Follow Source, which keeps each track in its original mono or stereo format.
The rest of the checklist:
— Send only the tracks that belong in the final mix.
— Export every track as its own WAV file.
— Start every file at the very beginning of the song, so they all line up.
— Keep your session's original sample rate and bit depth.
— Turn off any effects on your master channel before exporting.
— Include your rough mix as a reference, along with the song's tempo.
NOT SURE WHAT TO RECORD WHERE?
A consultation before you record anything important can save you months. Whether it's your first song or a full length album, we'll go over your goals, your songs, your setup, your timeline and your budget, and answer any questions you have about the process. You'll leave with a clear plan for what to record at home, what to bring into the studio and the best path forward for your project.
If you want to know why the studio stages matter in the first place, I covered that in Why Professional Recording Services Matter.
Questions first? Send us a message.