Chris Reitz dot Com

And one more. How to record on a tight budget. I had another one about mastering, but it didn’t really have anything good in there. I might eventually write something up about it.

Your band wants to record a hit, but how? You’ve tried your parents’ tape deck and it didn’t work. How do the pros do it? Bad news. The pros do it with a lot of money. But there is a way to do it without having a multi-million dollar budget.

These days, most recording is done digitally, or on a computer. So, if you have a desktop computer, or a laptop with a bit of space on the hard drive, you are in luck. Otherwise, you can build a computer for a very reasonable price. My band built one for $385. It had a 40GB hard drive, 1.56GHz AMD Athlon XP processor, and 512MB of RAM. We found a monitor that was being thrown out, and used that. You don’t need a fancy computer to record audio. The only thing I’d change if I were building a new computer is I’d get a much bigger hard drive. But if you’re willing to store most of what you do as CD backups, a 40GB drive is just fine. [It's hard to find a 40GB drive anymore...just shows you when I wrote this!! HA!]

if you have a laptop, you’ll probably want to look into getting a PCMCIA sound card like the DigiMark Pocket VX 220. Most laptop sound cards aren’t good enough to record with, so you need either a USB card (ok) or a PCMCIA card (better). [Firewire is even better, but Firewire cards can get very expensive.]

Next, you will need a small mixer. It only needs enough inputs for one person’s instrument and one microphone. My band uses a Behringer Eurorack UB1002FX. It has two mono inputs (one mic and one guitar), and four stereo imputs for things like keyboards. We got it for about $75.

Get a good microphone. Usually, the more expensive you can afford, the more expensive you should buy. My band uses a Shure Beta58 that we got for about $150, but if you can afford a $600 multi-pattern large-diaphragm condenser, get one. It will help your sound. [I also recently bought an Audio-Technica AT2020 for about $80. I HIGHLY recommend it if you're looking for a cheap, nice-sounding condenser.]

Buy a set of good speakers. Decent studio monitors cost about a thousand dollars but I have gotten away with using a Phillips minisystem ($150) and some $20 Sony headphones [which later broke and now I'm using $40 Sennheiser EH150s].

Recording software can be the most expensive item on your list, if you let it be. Or you can let it be the cheapest. My band uses a package called Audacity which is free. We got it from Stanford’s PlanetCCRMA website, which offers a comprehensive group of Linux audio packages for recording. We also got a bunch of free effects plugins from PlanetCCRMA. Audacity also runs on Windows for those who prefer. Otherwise, you are looking at $500 to thousands of dollars for multi track recording software [Adobe Audition is a great broadcast editing suite, and runs about $350].

Set up your studio where you can (where you won’t get too much noise or complaints of noise) and record one track at a time. My band usually does drums first, then main [rhythm] instrument, then other instruments, then vocals. Make sure your ‘vocal booth’ is reasonably quiet. We use my (small) room with some winter blankets over the doors to the outside and to the bathroom [this will be changing soon---we're building a real studio!!]. Try to get rid of any reverb in it, and also try to get rid of any resonant frequencies (notes that sound louder than others when sung for more than a couple seconds). You can usually do this with blankets and pillows, but if you can afford it, you might be interested in special acoustical foam and bass traps. [I got some for free when a broadcast school got gutted for a new tenant to move in.]

When you’re in the studio, take time to listen to tracks and see if you really want to keep them. You are not a pro, so it will take you some time to produce professional sounding audio. It took my band several years of studio experience to be able to throw a track together in a couple hours. Our first recording took a day for a 5-minute song. At the end, we didn’t like it and we re-recorded it. Several times. I’d estimate that it took close to 40 hours of studio time to record our first 5-minute song.

ok…that about covers it for my re-posts. I’ve got a couple other things that I might eventually post up, and yes, I know, I still need to finish my relay rack. I’m procrastinating, which those of you who know me know I can be very good at.