Recording Website Forum Archive

In Reply to: Re: hehe, ya I'm trouble posted by DanS on December 22, 2000 at 08:46:01 AM:

I disagree. The advantage of owning your own gear and doing it yourself is that you have way more control and time to mess with your songs. You learn a huge amount about songwriting by doing mixing work for example. Not to mention arranging and such. A Yamaha MD is totally easy to use, or the Boss zip disk unit is also totally easy to use. You can be up and making recordings in a day.
Then, once you have learned how to mix YOUR stuff so that you like it you are way ahead of the game in terms of going into a studio for a pro recording if that's what you want to do because you have ideas about what you want the mix to do.

I just spent a week with a bunch of kids in a "real" studio laying down tracks, acting as sort of a supervisor (on the request of the parent that was footing the bill). I had worked with these kids over the summer in my "home" studio, basically just letting them play around with recording and mixing down their songs.

The mixing engineer was good with knobs and boxes, and they had a nice room and some cherry mics, but neither the engineer nor the producer have a good feel for the music he was mixing. The kids had spent a month making their own demo with a MD8 and doing several alternate mixes, rewriting their materail after learning from the mixes. So from the start, their product was more polished. They approached the studio with a very creative set of ideas about the recording process itself, which made the producer really take notice of them.

They were much better prepared to tell the engineer abnd producer, NO, we don't want it mixed like that, we want it this way.......The learning they got from recording and mixing their own stuff made them much better prepared to evaluate the pro studio product. Granted, they learned a lot but also had more control of their sound, and again, this impressed both producer and the engineer. They had enough recording experience to know what they wanted.

I suppose a really good producer could have made the difference. But finding a good producer amoung the many hacks is not an easy thing, and it takes some experience to tell a good one from a hack.

I personally endorse the stand alone digital recorder over the PC recording, although the advantage for a band of PC recording is that you will need to own a mixer and this is useful on stage as well. Much of the home gear you can use for recording, such as reverb units and such can also be added to your stage PA rig.

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