Recording at Home - Blessing or Burden?

Ah yes... Every musician dreams of having the capability to record themselves at home. For a relatively small investment of money, and a healthy investment of time, one can acquire all the equipment and know-how needed to turn out a decent quality recording. This can be both a blessing and a burden.

When one has the resources to record themselves at any given moment, possibilities arise that otherwise would not present themselves - got an idea for an amazing guitar riff at 3am? Lay it down! Able to only work in small time chunks? No problem! Want to have complete control over the entire creative process? You bet!

All of these things (and many more) are brilliant reasons to record at home, but there are pitfalls that go along with this luxury. The endless tweaking of sounds, the scrutinizing of every last detail, the 3 dozen attempts to get the "perfect" vibraslap take, etc., etc. All of these things are challenges for the home studio owner.

I've recently been down the road of endless takes and painful micro-tweaking. Did I intend to travel that road? No. But it's incredibly easy to get sucked in when there are no budgetary or time constraints as there would be if you were renting out a studio. So here are a few tips that will help you smooth out your journey of home recording mayhem!

1. Have a clear (or at least a reasonably clear) vision for your song. Make sure your arrangement is solid - there's nothing worse that realizing that the bridge is 16 bars too long and there's no way a simple cut and paste edit will work and you end up rerecording parts. Try and narrow down the stylistic elements of your song before you commit anything to "tape". Recording distorted guitars, drums, bass, and chainsaws only to realize half way through that the vibe you were going for called for piano, strings, and a vibraphone is a real bummer. Get your song in order before anything gets recorded and you'll find the process a lot smoother.

2. Obviously you want to get as close to that elusive perfect take as you can, but be aware of the law of diminishing returns. There is a point that you will reach when every take that you do gets no closer, or worse, gets farther from that perfect take. Know when to accept what you have and move on. Another option is to take some time away from that part or from recording altogether. Some downtime may give you a chance to reflect on what the previous takes were missing, and when you step back to it you'll have a clearer idea of what the track needs. Time away from the track will also allow you to approach it with fresh ears and you may realize that the 3rd take was actually pretty great - you were just too involved at the time to realize that you had some magic brewing there.

3. Resist the urge to spend a lot of time mixing while you're still tracking. Of course some preliminary mixing will need to be done in order to get the track prepped for overdubbing the various instruments, but try and avoid spending hours on tweaking that scratch vocal reverb tail. I can guarantee that you'll want to change it in the final mix, so leave the excessive tweaking well enough alone.

4. Resist the temptation to fill every last split second with dozens of sounds. Let your song breathe a bit - there's really no need for 7 contrapuntal trombone lines floating through your folk rock song. Try and develop that ability to sense when you've got too much going on. If there are 6 different rhythmic motifs happening at the same time as the lead vocal, you've gone to far and you need to reel it back in. Less in not always necessarily more, but it's a good idea to start with.

By following these tips you will save yourself a lot of time and frustration. By no means am I advocating doing a half-assed job, I just don't want you spending hours and hours of time on wasteful, needless things - I have, and it sucks.

Good luck!