A few of my own home recording tips:<p>- Use a condenser microphone with a pop filter for vocals<p>- Use 2 matched condenser mics for acoustic instruments, separated by twice the distance to the instrument, pan them left and right<p>- Use a dozen cheap foam panels to reduce unwanted room sound (placed closer to the vocals/instrument depending on situation). I tacked mine to a sheet of plywood so that it could be moved around.<p>- Eat a banana before singing to help improve vocal quality<p>- It will never sound as good as you want, but the most important thing is the performance. People will put up with imperfect recordings if the performance is good.
1) Since record labels generally haven't given an advance to a new artist for a decade, almost all albums and Youtubes are now done "in your room."<p>2) The Yamaha AG03 is a mixing console more intended for live gigs. If you're mainly doing home studio recoding, then most people get a Focusrite 2i2 or Yamaha/Steinberg UR22 and do mixing in the DAW (computer program.) The UR22 has MIDI-in and out.<p>Synths often have a built-in audio interface for microphones or guitars, though sometimes without phantom power.<p>Otherwise, the how-to is pretty typical of how it's done. Note that the author was already quite a musician, having been in a band. YMMV!
On a similar note, here's a two-minute video by Calvin Harris on how he made "Slide": <a href="https://twitter.com/CalvinHarris/status/843563157280903168" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/CalvinHarris/status/843563157280903168</a><p>It's kind of crazy to see that while he has some slightly nicer instruments than me, he mostly does the same thing I do, only with a couple orders of magnitude more talent and a Dropbox with Frank Ocean and Migos vox in it.
This is a great writeup. I did something similar to this. 80 songs. Everything this author says about the process is pretty much the same that i experienced, but it took me a year to figure it out and another year and a half to write and record all the music. about one song a week. Oh except I did drums differently, I found somthinig called Fat Drums (or something), a midi-based drum machine, and basically i finger drummed on my usb keyboard into a track on my DAW. it was fantastic, absolutely indistinguishable from a human drummer. oh also i used ableton as a daw, it is really good, but really anything could work. and like this author discovered, you can spend way too much time redoing takes, so i took a lot of pride on doing one or two takes and moving on. kept the creative process flowing. in fact after 80 songs, maybe 12 i thought were actually pretty good, so we formed a band, learned those songs, and played live locally for a year or so. it was fun. great job romes!!!
I tried to post a correction on Medium, but they wanted me to create an account. So I created an account to post the correction and they still wouldn't let me post, something about either my profile wasn't complete or I hadn't done enough to allow posting.<p>Great business model. Outsource the content creation to the peons but then implement draconian restrictions so you have to jump through hoops to make a positive contribution.<p>Anyway, the correction is, the book "Set Your Voice Free" is by Roger Love, not Robert Love as stated in the article. Helpful for anyone looking for it because Robert Love writes Linux books that contain very little information about improving your singing voice.<p>I don't understand why anyone would be suckered into creating value for a place like Medium when they are so obviously exploitative.
I do some mixing for live events on occasion, and I had a guy tell me once that no mix is ever done, but every mix is eventually abandoned.<p>Honestly, it's true. You can sink an incredible amount of time into mixing and still not be happy with it.
This is exactly the reason why I switched careers from audio tech to development. Funny seeing this posted here.<p>I believe there was a post last night on mass amateurization - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_amateurization" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_amateurization</a><p>But yeah, you do not need a lot of professional equipment or specialized knowledge now to create great records. I am not at all bemoaning this fact, I love that creating music is more and more open for all, music is a very human quality we should all have access to.
Great write-up. People don't realise, this was instrumental to the success of Billie Eilish. She and her brother make their music in a tiny bedroom studio and you can't argue with the results. The trove of available VST plugins for mastering, mixing and instruments are vast and most of them are affordable for those who are serious about pursuing bedroom recording.
Finishing an entire album is a great achievement. Even with the tremendous improvements and price reductions in modern home-recording equipment there is still numerous hours of effort required. It is a marathon like effort and anyone who completes it should feel proud.
This is great, exactly what I've been trying to do but there's never enough time and now the second kid is on the way... I guess I'll have to just find that extra time somehow because you got me excited again.<p>One question:
What did you use for the guitar amp? I personally use Guitar rig and I keep getting lost in all those infinite guitar sounds. I'm worried my songs won't sound cohesive if I experiment too much and have a different setup (or several) for each song. Do you just pick a few sets like a clean sounding one, dirty sounding one and stick with them through the whole record (maybe add some unique effects here and there) or does it not matter?
Great article (and nice music). Wish I had read this pointers years ago, when I still had a lot of free time.
Maybe a nice hobby for corona quarantine time :-)
There's some fantastic artists on youtube who produce in similar circumstances. Here's one of my favorite examples (the video was also made in the artist's room) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYv6-5VmNEM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYv6-5VmNEM</a>
I cannot help but mention Jacob Collier, who self-produced an album (called "In My Room") and won 2 Grammys with it. <a href="https://youtu.be/4v3zyPEy-Po?list=PLHX_dBxnc8z-EeR431dUujzqeFdMaeoGq" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/4v3zyPEy-Po?list=PLHX_dBxnc8z-EeR431dUujzqe...</a>
Really neat article. The part about promoting your music seems really hard. I have 0 knowledge about music industry but I've heard there are some sites like Submithub that promote your music to blogs for a small fee. Maybe you can try that. A few reviews from music blogger can help you get more fans.
One thing I believe is not mentioned in the article is your monitoring and mixing set up. I didn't see any reference to headphones, speakers Etc<p>This makes a pretty big difference in the mixing and mastering phases.
A four year old teaches a couple of lessons on how to use Garage Band<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK1PjOx9XoI&list=PLkx9TVrdk-e5AiYUz9K_Tcvmq4mrr1BmU&index=2" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK1PjOx9XoI&list=PLkx9TVrdk-...</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhDbrdwjj7c&list=PLkx9TVrdk-e5AiYUz9K_Tcvmq4mrr1BmU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhDbrdwjj7c&list=PLkx9TVrdk-...</a>
Reminders me than one of my favourite albums ever, Sheena Ringo's Kalk Samen Kuri no Hana was recorded entirely by her in her apartment with Mac and some cheap hardware.
Good article and I like the music. BTW "Reverse Glimpse" gets stuck for me. Just a black screen and it will not play. It stops the playlist there too.
Wonderful to see such a detailed run down!<p>I scrolled straight to the singing part to see if there were any nuggets of wisdom. I've been singing with a teacher for 6 months and it still seems impossible. Everything is so indirect and there is no obvious path to getting better.<p>Are there any people here who have improved their singing skills significantly? What did you do?
Assuming I already have a guitar, bass and electric piano (with midi) how much would I have to spend on bits and pieces to do something similar. I have a couple of low spec windows laptops so might well need a new machine as well?<p>Guess the main costs would be the digital interface and software plus a new computer maybe (does it really gave to be a mac!!)