My Current Process for Recording Music | Before and After
Step One
Recording
Ok, so it's 6 o'clock in the evening, there's nobody in the house, I'm all alone, I think it's time to record some music. My guitar is already lying on my bed, as usual, but where is my iPod? I know it's around here somewhere. Is it under the pillows? Nope. It's not under the covers either. Maybe it's under the plate that's still hanging around after dinner... nope, nothing. Ok, dig around that pile of books and papers that I've been too lazy to clean off the bed the last few days. Aha! There you are you cheeky little fecker, thought you could hide on me, didn't you? Well, you're out of luck today kid, 'cause I found you. Now, I know I saw my headphones recently... scanning... scanning... ah, the windowsill, excellent, let me just grab them and I should be good to go.
Alright, I think that's everything I need, let me just run down the checklist.
- iPod Classic 160GB, Black --- Check
- Skullcandy Hesh 2.0 Headphones, Carbon/Mint, wired --- Check
- Cort AD810 Guitar, Natural Satin --- Check
- Human Brain, Pink/Grey, w/Fitted Carry Case --- Check...?
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure about that last one. I mean, I think it's still in there, but the carry case has been knocked around in the past so who knows how it's holding up? But anyway, there's no point worrying about previous potential brain trauma, that's all in the past now.
Right, so I've got everything set up, I guess it's time to pick a song to record. I recorded one of my newer songs last time, maybe I could try do an older one... hmmm... actually, no, I think I might do that song I wrote on the ukulele a few months ago, I'd like to have a half decent recording of it and hear how it sounds on the guitar for a change. And since I'm going to be sharing it with people, I guess I'll finally have to give it a name too.
And now, with the choice of song settled, it's time to start recording. All I have to do is... wait, my iPod isn- oh, I left the lock on silly me, haha. Ok, scroll down to Voice Memos, click, make sure the recording is set to high quality, and... click... give it a second, make sure it's recording... ok good, start playing. Oh, shit, how does this song go again? What's the first line? Oh, never mind, I remember now, just in time too. Right start singing, and just hope you don't fuck this up, do it first time... Ok, this is going well I think I might make i- Oh god, what the hell did my voice just do? Fuck, well I guess I fucked that one up. Go again...
And it continues on like that until eventually I have something that sounds like this:
It only took me two tries to get that one too. It's just a shame the quality and (more importantly) the volume are so damn low. Well. I guess it's time for the next stage.
Step Two
Fixing
{Feel free to skip this part and just scroll down to the finished song if you're not interested in all this shite}
Ok, full disclosure, I'm writing this the day after I wrote Step One above, and I'm probably not going to keep up the little routine. I want to try and get this over and done with. I'm going to be super basic here and just give a brief overview of what I did to this track to make it a bit easier, for me, to listen to. I've added a few screenshots, I thought it might make things easier to explain (it didn't).
So, after transferring the recording from the iPod to my laptop, I open it up in Reaper and have a quick listen to it before doing anything else, just to make sure it's still there. Don't mind the track title, that's just how the iPod names recordings and I wasn't bothered changing it yet.
I then set up a blank track to send the audio to, mostly just for effects like reverb, delay, or whatever. Doing this already affects the loudness of the audio, you know, because it's now coming out of two tracks instead of one.
I don't know if you can hear it in that unprocessed demo above but every recording I make on my iPod has this really annoying high pitch noise that becomes more obvious with increased volume (obviously). So my next step is to use EQ on the main audio track to get rid of that awful noise. Through trial and error I've found that the noise is roughly around 8.5khz. I use Reaper's ReaEQ plugin to do this because it's pretty decent and easy to use for my purposes, I haven't really downloaded any other EQ plugins yet. Since it's a multiband EQ I change the "type" of one of the bands to notch and stick it somewhere around that 8.5khz mark. It looks something like this:
And, oh my god, that is so much better! You guys really don't know how good it feels to get rid of that awful, awful noise. Text and pictures are not a great way to explain and compare differences in audio, so I think I might make a post using Dtube in the future to let you guys hear how the audio changes after each change. But for now, I'm just going through the steps I took with this track.
Now I decide to use a stereo widener to turn the mono recording into something a little less flat. On the main track I used a plugin I haven't tried before and, even though I really didn't know what I was doing, I was fairly happy with the results. After this I use a reverb plugin on the effects track, and again, for this song I used a reverb plugin I hadn't tried before and I think it might sound a little better than the ones I've used previously. I like to try and keep the reverb to a minimum by turning down the volume of the effects track on the mixer.
And it's starting to sound better already. It still sounds a little too quiet though, if I was listening to my iPod on shuffle and this song came on I'd have to crank the volume to max to hear it properly, then quickly turn it down again once the song is over. I don't like that, and I'm sure other people wouldn't like it either.
So that means I have to try make it sound a little more like some of the music I listen to, regarding volume at least. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do this proper and most of my attempts end up sounding crap. I see a lot of people talking about compressors, and limiters, and EQ, and all sorts of things I just don't understand as tools for making audio louder, but I'm still trying to figure out what to use where and how to use them effectively. If anyone has any tips and/or tricks to help me understand this a bit better please let me know in the comments, I really would like to be able to make my songs a bit louder without having them sound like garbage.
On my last track, The Slip, I used a limiter plugin called Limiter No.6 on the master track and it sounded fairly ok so I decided to do the same again this time. Although, due to differences in the recording and/or effects, etc... I ended up using a different preset to achieve a similar level of volume, and listening back to it now I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with the sound, but hey, I'll fix that for the next version this song. Another issue I've noticed with this recording is the amount of background white noise through the whole song, the limiter really made that hiss more prominent, but, whatever, sometimes when I listen to the track it reminds me of the sound of rain, so it's really not too bad.
Right, the last thing I do is play around with the EQ and other effects a bit now that I've got a foundation to work from. I was fairly happy with the reverb and the limiter at the time, but after checking out a few different presets on the EQ I found one that made an improvement on the track without me having to tweak it too much. It's interesting too because it's a preset I check every time I'm processing a track in Reaper and have never like the results too much, but hey, this time it was pretty much just what I needed. At this point I put a short fade in on the track just so the background hiss didn't hit my ears so hard when I pressed play, I also put a shot fade out on the track too, but I'm not sure it served any sort of purpose. Anyway, here's what the finished track looks like:
Step Three
Finishing
Ok, I'm sure you don't care what the song looks like, you want to know what it sounds like, right? Well, we'll get to that in a minute, because now that the easy part is done, we have to move on to the hard part: Naming the song.
Seriously, trying to decide on a final title for a song can be difficult for me. And it's not that I can't come up with a title, it's about coming up with the right title. I mean, sometimes (especially on my more experimental/instrumental tracks/projects) any old name will do, which you'll see on my DSound profile for @the-dagda. I have tracks up there titled things like "sillydrumz001" and "000drumfun001_0barebonesdemo" (which I'm not going to link to because apparently DSound is a load of shite that won't let you listen to tracks after they've been uploaded for a few months), but I don't think that is a good way to name songs that I consider to be quite personal. Another thing about song titles is sometimes one of them just pops into your head and and you end up having to write a song around the title, other times you have an idea for a song and as it starts coming together you just find a title that fits.
This song wasn't like any of those though. It took me a good few hours of solid thought before I finally decided on a title that meant as much to me as the song itself. Do good musicians have these kind of problems, or am I just an idiot? I don't know. I won't go through my whole process for finally finding a title, or what that title fully means to me, but I will say that I had certain things in mind once I knew it was time to come up with something. One of the main things that was important to me coming up with the title was trying to relate it to Ireland in some way, gotta represent your home every now and then, right? Eventually I settled on something related to one of my favourite stories from Irish Mythology, but even narrowing it down as far as that I still had some options to choose from. Technically three of those options were variations of each other, in fact, one of the options was just an English translation of one of the other options, the other was an allusion to the other two. And even though those three had a deeper meaning that sort of fit the theme of the song I decided to keep it simple and go with one of my earlier choices, it's just one word, a noun, a person's name, easy.
Ok, I know I'm probably annoying you right now because I still haven't told you the title of the song, but I wanted you to have just a little taste of what I had to go through when coming up with the title. I mean, you just had to read a little bit of text. I had to think of something that fit all of my criteria, every time a title came to mind I had to check to see if it had some sort of general meaning that anybody could pick up on that was somehow related to what it meant to me personally. And I had to make sure it sort of fit the theme of the song.
In contrast, the title of the last song I shared with you guys, The Slip, is entirely personal, has very little meaning to anyone else, and has almost nothing to do with the song, and only took one random thought popping into existence at just the right time, so, yeah, make of that what you will.
But, anyway, I think it's time to put you out of your misery (although if you were following me on soundcloud you would've seen the title by now), here it comes...
Alright guys. Let me now what you think of the song, the recording set up, and the post-production.Please do be as critical, harsh, and/or mean as you want, just be sure to give me some ideas on how to improve while you're at it. Also, let me know what you think of this format, while it's not something I'm going to do too often I think it would be nice to do something like this whenever I upgrade my equipment. I'll be posting the finished track to DSound tomorrow, maybe, where I'll give a bit more info about the song itself, so keep an eye out for that if you're interested.
Anyway, thanks for your time. And double thanks in advance to anyone and everyone who takes the effort to give me some feedback and/or advice.
See ya after.