Audio Recording Tips

Update July 29, 2010: If are looking for tips on how to setup your recording studio in terms of acoustic placement. Refer to this tutorial: Home Studio Recording and Mixing Studio Setup Acoustic Design.

For beginners in home recording and mixing, it is of primary importance and priority that you acoustically treat your room for flattest frequency response. Flattest frequency response tells the truth, nothing more nothing less. So it means that what you really hear during mixing can translate “accurately” to a wide variety of audio reproduction systems (like iPod, CD discman, television, radio, or even hi-fidelity systems with subwoofers or not).

If the room is not acoustically treated to handle “frequency” biases, your mix might only sound good in your studio but sounds awful when reproduced in other audio monitoring systems. No matter how expensive your nearfield monitor, you still need to acoustically treat your room.

If you are successful on this, it means that what you really hear can “accurately” translate to other audio systems. So if you mix it great, it will surely sound good in other audio systems. This is how important to have a mixing studio well acoustically treated.

What are the causes of this “frequency” biases problem that makes your mix lie to you (sound good in your studio but sounds bad in other studios or audio monitoring/speaker systems)?

Consider the arrangement below (which is not correct and not optimal placement for mixing records at home):

Problems of this setup:

1.) Standing waves and reflected waves, distort the real level of the frequency being heard by the engineer. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a short guide on how to effectively use low pass filter and high pass filter in your home mixing and mastering sessions.

Let’s start with the properties of a filter. You might have read our post on What does a High Pass Filter do? – Technical Explanation and Plot , so you have a clear idea of how the high pass filter works.

A filter is a signal processing unit that “attenuates” specific range of frequencies. Based on that definition, you might consider a parametric or a graphic equalizer as a “filter” also; yes it is.

But what makes a low pass filter and high pass filter special is the ‘shelving” action on a wide limit of frequency ranges or even to infinity.

By definition>

A “low pass filter” allows frequency lower than the cutoff frequency to pass while severely attenuating above it.

So for example, if the cutoff frequency of the low pass filter is 16Khz, then it is said to pass or allow 16Khz below while attenuate severely the frequencies above 16Khz.

This is opposite to high pass filter which allows high frequencies and block lower than the cutoff.

So how are you going to use these tools in a mixing and mastering session? Read the rest of this entry »

If you are planning to create a simple home studio setup: then the computer that will be used for recording needs a decent sound card:

So how are you going to select or buy a sound card for recording purposes? Below are the characteristics of a good sound card for recording studio purposes:

1.) Can create high resolution recordings using Analog to Digital Converter. You will take note that if you are recording, the signal is analog. However if you are planning to bounce it to your hard disks, then the analog will be converted to digital based recordings using a sound card.

Make sure that the sound card can record the analog recordings at the highest recording resolutions as possible. Below is a short list of recording resolutions used by common sound cards and their remarks to quality:

a. 16 bit 44.1 Khz –> if this the maximum recording quality, this considered to be a low resolution recording. This is not recommended for high quality recording purposes. Most onboard sound cards have this maximum recording resolution.

b. 32 bit 44.1 Khz –> this is considered “OK” when it comes to recording resolution. Creative Audigy sound cards have this resolution.

c. 24 bit 96 Khz –> this is the best recording resolution recommended for home studio purposes. Audiophile 2496 has this resolution. Of course the higher resolution the better, but you will end up consuming a lot of hard disk space for this. Read the rest of this entry »