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I recall telling Alex Austin, a mentor of mine and a very talented musician, that process of recording music was like going down a rabbit hole for me. My musical goal is simple. Compose a tune and record it. Despite my best efforts when I attempted to record my tunes they sounded horrible. To make matters worse I wasn’t very interested in in dealing with the complexity of recording.
Alex was a pretty intelligent guy and a good musician . Alex could not only create good music but produce it as well. Just before he passed away Alex produced and arranged a simple tune I composed and I was blown away by his effort. I most certainly could have not done what Alex did.
Conversely Alex told me that he was not a composer and that the tune I had composed for him brought tears to his eyes. I never expected that sort of response from Alex. For me it was just another tune that I had composed.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. There very few Buddy Guys or Elton Johns in the world but even those guy’s are bounded by creative limits.
My advice is to pursue what interests you and if producing and engineering is not your cup of tea pass it off to someone else who is fascinated by it.
Personally I use Ableton Lite when I record. I hardly scratch the surface on it’s potential. Like I said my goal is simple.
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Minimize everything as much as possible, keep it simple while you get a track down and then you can always retake or add complexity later. It took me years to be able to do both at the same time and I’m still not great at it. It’s just more fun to be one or the other.
In the age we live in, everyone is so isolated. Music happens when you come together with other people and I feel largely my generation is robbed of that by our own hand or otherwise. No doubt things go better when you have some good teamwork, but sometimes you can really nail it yourself too.
I think mostly just failing a lot and learning from those failures and enjoying the successes. Something I struggle with as well, but going to school for music production helped. Doing anything plugged direct in rather than mic’d up perfectly is easier. I also agree, I don’t have much interest in recording. I love to write and produce as well as mix and master, but just not the recording part. I’d rather perform it
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I kept begging Alex….Mate , just set it up so I can push one F**^ing button and play !!
He said , Hank an artist has to use all of the Pallet……and HE was an Artist.
Remember he was an intelligence analyst for the Navy…he looked at all the angles.
He learned 8 bars of music on the pedal steel guitar just to record one song with Dee because he said “it’s gotta be in the song”.
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I’ve tried to record myself, bought a bunch of toys to see what I could do, but its never been something I could handle. Someday, it would be fun to try getting into a studio and letting someone who knows what they’re doing run the show and get a better sense of how I sound –
What has kinda worked for me is a simple usb mic ( an Apogee MiC) plugged into my iphone, then use music memos to record my guitar and voice all in one. Music memos can add drums and bass at the push of a button. Sounds OK – and the files can be put in Garage Band if I want to play with it more. But I don’t –
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It is awful. I got an engineer to do it for me. Now he’s definitely a co-producer and pretty much my studio band.
If I were to start over and do a CD all by myself, I would do the following.
1) Set up the studio for one touch and/or remote operation.
2) Plan the song carefully. Know what you want on it and set up the software for each track ahead of time.
3) When you’re ready to start putting music in the machine, get someone else to push the buttons (record, rewind, playback, etc.)
The idea is to set things up so you can change your ‘hats’ instead of trying to wear two at a time. But knowing you, Matt, you’ve already thought of this.
😉
Daniel
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We have recorded 3 CDs…..Studio time in a class A studio with a master engineer is $ 30 P/Hr.
It is the mastering of the recording that take lots of time and $$$$.
The recording I made for our forum cost me $45…..what I sent to this forum was raw…no editing no mastering.
The studio put it on Soundcloud for me and I then sent it here
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Very late to the conversation…. Matt, I understand how you feel. When I first got started recording, it was primarily as an aid to my music writing. One thing led to another and I wound up with a decent DAW for multitrack.
I was enjoying everyone’s comments very much and caused me to stop and think about a lot of my writing/recording.
I steal from everyone so if you hear a riff or two that sound familiar, that’s what it is, although it’s mostly original.
This is a 6 track recording I made a while back using my Eastman E20OM -TC acoustic, Ibanez Bass, GoldTone PBR reso, plus a few overdubs. The huge learning curve for me was EQ, make no mistake, still learning… it ain’t no piece of cake! bert
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