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Everything is quiet and the only sound is you strumming your guitar and singing a song you’ve just written that morning. It sounds so good that you’d like to capture the moment. “It’s not going to get any better than this” you think. That’s great. You’re ready to record. You get up, move over to your four-track in its little corner of the room with its attached effects unit and microphone (you’ve been fooling around with it so you at least understand how it works) and then you freeze.
Nervous? That’s good. It will add energy to your performance. But don’t be too nervous. Remember, you can redo the performance as many times as you want to. You can save the pieces that and discard those that don’t. You’re the creator here, you make the decisions. Your four-track gives you the power to either play your song “live” in one take, or to construct it layer by layer until you’re satisfied with it. We’ll get into things like microphone placement for various instruments later; right now it’s just you, your voice, and your acoustic guitar. Simple enough. You have two choices on how to proceed. As mentioned above, you can either... 1.) Just do it. Capture the performance in one easy take. 2.) Record first your guitar and then your vocals. The first one is the easiest. With one microphone you can simply set it up to record on Track 1 and go for it. If you make a mistake along the way then just start over. If you have two microphones then you can set one up to record your vocals on Track 1, and the other to capture your guitar on Track 2. Listen through the headphones to make sure the levels are where you want them before recording. The second way to do this is to first record your guitar on Track 1 and to then add your vocals to Track 2 afterwards. A perfectionist will always take this route. You can redo your vocals as many times as you want without having to also redo your guitar part. After recording your song using one of the two above approaches you have so many options still available to you it can drive you nuts if you sit back and think about it long enough. Do you want to add back-up vocals, another guitar part, a solo? Maybe throw in some harmonica ala Neil Young? Depending on your approach you still have either two or three tracks still available to you. As we go further you’ll discover you have even more, but that’s for another day. Right now we’ll settle for four. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Step One: Recording One or Two Tracks in Home Recording is owned by Rick DeCost. Permission to republish Step One: Recording One or Two Tracks in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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