Hi Roberto, nice to meet you. Below we leave you a short guide written by us:
One of the fundamental steps to take when you want to record your album, or when you want to prepare a repertoire with your band, is Pre-production. In this article we will delve specifically into the case where you want to make a CD of your own songs; in this context, pre-producing your album is a must. In this phase the song is effectively created, its performance in an ensemble is tested, the arrangement and the parts of each musician are optimized, the sounds and the most suitable instruments for the song are chosen, and much, much more.
A few years ago, pre-production was done in the rehearsal room, generally with a single microphone capturing the room, useful for listening back to what was practiced together with the band. This technique is still widely used, and is increasingly carried out using our mobile phones’ microphones.
This is certainly one of the simplest and most functional ways, but nevertheless, thanks to the spread of PCs and low-cost audio peripherals, more accurate work can be achieved. In fact, it is increasingly easy to buy a PC, an audio interface with multiple inputs, management software (DAW) and microphones. With these tools, you can then create an amateur multitrack recording that will allow you to build the song.
Let’s take a practical example, let’s take a band composed of 4 members:
-DRUMS
-BASS
-GUITAR
-VOCALS
Let’s assume that our singer has written the lyrics and created the harmonic structure of the song, what exactly should we do?
We first recommend trying out possible ensemble solutions together, simply improvising over them and putting down extemporaneous ideas dictated by the band’s instinct. At this point we use the phone to record what happens, so that we can listen back and catch the most interesting ideas.
After an initial phase of reflection and listening back, our multitrack pre-production session comes into play.
It is good practice to record the GUIDE, perhaps composed of a guitar and vocals; small rhythmic elements and anything else you deem useful are also very useful. We generally connect a guitar directly to the audio interface, provide headphones to our guitarist and our singer, and start recording just the guitar.
It is advisable to let the singer give only the general guide of the song to the guitarist, who will have to strictly follow the metronome. After finishing the guitar session and checking that it respects the parts of the song and the metronome, we proceed to acquire the guide VOCAL track.
Once our backing track is made, it is advisable to do some editing to align with the metronome. As an alternative to the guide guitar, you could also record a midi keyboard backing track in order to obtain a more precise and simple quantization.
We will then move on to recording the rhythm section; for example, we can record a drum session, it is particularly convenient to write the part in midi and assign an instrument like Battery or similar, nobody forbids recording the acoustic drums with a basic set of microphones, we don’t need quality at this stage.
Once the rhythm sections are done, we can proceed to recording the bass. In this case too, for practicality it will be sufficient to use the Hi-Z input of our audio interface. For the sake of brevity we are leaving out many considerations, but ultimately once the bass is done, we can proceed with the same general philosophy to the recording of guitars and vocals.
All this process serves us to be able to shape the song to our liking, to change our parts, to test our sounds and much more.
Having pre-recorded our song will also help us definitively define our arrangement, and each musician will be more aware of their own performance.
Let’s premise that it is good to make a rough mix to define a pleasant listening experience, all this effort package will help us in the subsequent phase, the creation of the album in a professional studio.
We realize that we have overlooked numerous details, but the goal of the article is exclusively to provide a first path to follow, postponing in-depth analyses to subsequent articles. For any further doubts do not hesitate to contact us.
Good music!
