The Recording Process

Producer/Engineer : Kovi Mongelli

The Recording Process

Just about every emerging artist thinks about making a recording. When they actually try to get started, they realize that there is more to it than just showing up at a recording studio and singing a bunch of their songs. More and more artists are becoming quite knowledgeable about recording, as many have assembled small studios in their homes to do rough demos, but when it comes time to record a project for release, they are not sure where to start.

Let’s consider the case of an artist who is ready to make his or her first CD. In this series of articles, we’d like to touch upon the basic steps an artist needs to take in producing a professional recording.

As with any creative process, there is no absolute hard and fast procedure that must be followed stringently, but there is a logical development that all recordings must go through, which includes:
Recording, Editing,  Mixing and  Mastering .
That being said, this is an explanation of that general process and what takes place during each of these steps.

Recording
Now we start to get a little more technical.

The term Recording is often used to refer to this and the following three steps as a whole, but for simplicity’s sake, the term Recording is used here to mean “putting performances to tape” (or as is the case now, a digital format). This is also referred to as Tracking etc.

Recording Studios have long been somewhat of a mystery to industry outsiders, but basically what takes place during Recording is microphones and various high-end sound altering equipment are used to capture a sound being produced in an acoustically tuned room or environment and storing that sound information onto some sort of media (be it magnetic tape, a computer hard drive, or, in the old days, acetate discs).

Generally, a process called Multi-Tracking is used for commercial recordings in which each microphone (and hence, each sound, be it vocals, guitar, or cello) is printed separately to the storage media to be manipulated at a later time.

To simplify it a bit, the ‘normal’ stereo recording that a consumer would hear is comprised of two tracks or channels, the Right and the Left. During the Recording or Multi-Tracking stage, there are virtually innumerable quantities of tracks or channels that can each be controlled separately from the other tracks. For instance if you have recorded a vocal part on one track and a guitar part on another, because they were recorded separately in a Multi-Track setting, the volume of the vocals can be increased or decreased without affecting the sound or volume of the guitar track whatsoever.

Also, these instruments do not need be recorded at the same time. The bass guitar player could record his/her part on Thursday, and the vocalist might lay down tracks a week later. Basically, because they are on separate tracks, the musicians do not have to be playing at the same time or even in the same place to create a finished product that sounds like they were looking right at each other. This also enables a multi-instrumentalist to record all the instruments themselves and create their own ‘virtual’ band where they are the only member.

Editing

Editing has become a much more important and functional stage in the creation of a musical work. Simply put, Editing consists of changing the original recording by way of altering the timing, pitch, or speed of an individual track, or tracks to change the performance. One such common practice is referred to as “comping.” Comping is the idea of recording multiple takes of one instrument with the intent of compiling all of the takes into one cohesive take for the purpose of eliminating errors or creating a ‘perfect’ take. Digitally, this process can be simple and completed with just a couple of mouse clicks.

Mixing

If you recall, when we finished the Recording stage, we were left with many different tracks, each with it’s own instrument. Each of these tracks by now has been edited to contain the best possible performance during the Editing stage, but they are still individual tracks and not one cohesive song that a consumer can pop in the CD player. Mixing is the process of taking all of these individual tracks and by way of using sound altering effects, changing volumes, and manipulating perceived position Left and Right (panning), creating a stereo (two track) recording. Think of it in terms of a funnel. The individual tracks are the wide end, and they must be brought together to form two tracks (the narrow end).

Once this is accomplished, we are left with a stereo (two track) recording with all the instruments sounding great together and the song is nearly finished.

Mastering

This is the final and most often overlooked step in the song creation process. In fact, if you were to ask a group of musicians what mastering is, chances are a good portion would not be able to tell you what it is and why it is so important.

Essentially, Mastering is preparing the final stereo recording for commercial consumption by pumping it up to a usable volume and making sure that the song will sound good on any sound system it plays on, from a home theater system that costs thousands of dollars, to your little tiny, terrible laptop speakers.

Mastering is important because when the Mixing stage is complete, the stereo recordings you are left with were mixed to sound good on the speakers that they were mixed on regardless of how that sound translates to other spaces and speakers. Also, in the case of making an album, you don’t want Song #1 to be a whole lot louder than Song #2 or even Song #15. Have you ever listened to a CD where you were constantly adjusting the volume just to maintain a consistent pleasant playback level? This is a CD that has not been mastered (or was mastered poorly). The same applies for making the songs sound like they belong together in that you don’t want one song to sound ‘tinny’ (a.k.a. too much high end equalization) and another ‘boomy’ (a.k.a. too much low end).

So that explains why Mastering is important for album, but what about commercial releases? Imagine if your un-mastered song were played to a record executive or on the radio between two wonderfully mastered songs. You would get swallowed up. Your song may be too quiet, or have too much low end and basically just sound unprofessional by comparison.

Knowing what to do is the easy part though which is why audio professionals spend years learning what to listen for and how to make things sound ‘right.’ So contact a recommended audio professional to get your project started, but at least now, you’ll know where to start.