Preparing
for Tracking
Recording in a home studio or practice room can be a great way to capture the ideal performance without the financial pressure of a recording studio. However, you need to use special care to avoid common problems associated with recording yourself. A producer or great tracking engineer pays attention to these things in the studio, but now you're taking this role. A little preparation goes a long way.
Guitar/ Bass Tuning and Intonation
This is the simplest problem to avoid and has the biggest negative effect on your recording. Get a good tuner and use it religiously. When I am tracking a band, I have them tune every time I press stop on the recorder. Some tuning tips:
Intonation – Either have your guitar or bass intonated professionally or do it yourself if you have a good strobe tuner and some time to learn the process. If you think your guitar is intonated well, check the following two things. Play an open G chord and an open A chord. Are both chords tuned perfectly? Often these two chords can not be in tune at the same time with guitars that are out of intonation.
Tuners – The Boss pedal tuner is an excellent tuner and reasonably priced. The Peterson strobe tuners are the state of the art and go from $200 into the thousands. If you have an iPhone you can buy the Peterson iPhone app for $10, which may be the best 10 dollars you could spend in recording.
Put on new strings – Just put them on. They sound better, tune better and are cheap. Everyone has an opinion, but I just buy the cheapest ones. Cheap new strings still sound way better than expensive old ones. Put them on the night before and stretch them out so they don't stretch while you're tracking.
Put on new drum heads – Nothing can kill your drum sound more than beat up heads. Put new ones on the top snare head and the toms. If there are dents in the heads of any drum on your kit, you are handicapping yourself. Also, read up on the difference in tone between clear vs coated and single vs multiply heads. Often heads are based on how they look, which can be fine for live, but you can really match the attack and sustain characteristics here to the basic elements of your song (tempo, smooth vs aggressive, etc).
Drum Tuning 101
There are several schools of thought on drum tuning. For me it's simple - you get the Drum Dial and tune it (http://www.drumdial.com/). It's relatively cheap and makes a huge difference. The theory behind the device is to get the same note or pitch at each lug of the drum. The problem with tuning by tension is that tension doesn't equal pitch. If there is a little speck of dirt or, far more likely, a little rust or corrosion on the lug, a higher tension will exist on that lug. However, the head itself won't be quite as tight and will be a lower pitch at that spot. Of course, if you're playing be-bop jazz, all bets are off, as the wobbly, overtone rich sound of a head tuned unequally is part of the sound..
Room Acoustics
A common problem with home recording is over-deadening the space. Even if you have a less than ideal recording space, you do not want to make a completely dead room. There are several reasons for this. Primarily, the sound proofing materials that most people have access to do not absorb equally across all frequencies. Materials like heavy blankets, mattresses, egg crates, 1" or 2" acoustic foam absorb high and high mid frequencies well and make a room sound somewhat dead or quieter, but only in the high frequency range. The bass and low mid frequency range is largely unaffected by these materials.
Have you noticed that these frequencies are still audible outside your practice room? If the solid walls of your practice space aren't stopping these frequencies, this should show you that your 'sound proofing' materials you are using for your recording space aren't going to either. This is a big problem because those frequencies are the ones that create a muddy sound in drum and bass recordings. These are the last frequencies that you want over represented in your drum and bass recordings.
Solution – do the exact opposite of high frequency absorption. Reflect and scatter those high frequencies so that they can balance the low frequencies. The major problem with most amateur recording spaces is the parallel walls. To avoid this, use reflective surfaces in the corners of the room or in front of or behind the drum kit to create non-parallel surfaces for reflection. Parallel surfaces sound small and non parallel surfaces sound larger. Experiment with reflective surfaces like small tables, doors, anything with glass on it (but be careful).
