When Guitar World first asked me to do a column I thought, “Sure, as long as it’s about something practical instead of all that minor-flatted-third-aolean-fifth-position scale crapola that I slept through in music theory class. How about if I share what I know (and believe me, everything I know I learned the hard way) about how to form a band? I figured it’d be hard to fill more than four or five columns, let alone 18!
We’ve talked about your van, your T-shirts, your lawyer, your publishing deal, your guitar tech, the Internet, spare batteries, MTV and your set list. There are a lot of details to worry about and a lot of business to get bogged down in, but try to remember that in the end it all comes back to the music – always. The only topic I can think of that we haven’t touched on is recording your first album. What happens in the studio? What does an engineer actually do?
It used to be that unless you were recording your band in your basement on a boom-box, you had to go into a recording studio. There were “demo studios,” which were little rooms with 4- or 8-track tape machines that were used to record demos and local radio commercials. You’d set up your gear in some guy’s basement and, for the $8 an hour he’d charge you, you’d hope you would come out with something you could play for people. Then there were the middle range studios-16-track facilities that, while probably still in somebody’s garage, were a step removed from the “hobby” stage. If you were lucky, you’d have an engineer to work with who knew what he/she was doing, the ability to isolate the instruments from each other and some decent microphones. This is where you might’ve recorded your first single or album if you were doing everything yourself.
Finally, you had the pro studios which were pretty much off-limits unless you had a major label behind you. These were the fully-staffed 24- or 48-track facilities where, at $1,000 a day or more (plus producer’s fees, tape costs, gear rental, and, keeping in mind that I’m talking about the Seventies and Eighties, whatever other high-dollar items were deemed necessary to the creative process), you would work at a frenzied pace to turn out an album as quickly as possible.
The science of recording has changed drastically since the dawn of the rock and roll era. Once upon a time, a record was a document of a live performance-a monophonic analog wave, cut directly onto a master disk on a hand-cranked or spring-driven machine. Later, disks were cut electrically, and eventually recorded to tape. In the 1940’s, people started to experiment with hooking two tape machines together for a stereo image. In the Fifties came the idea of recording two, three or four simultaneous tracks on one piece of tape (Les Paul is more than the name on a guitar; if you’re interested in recording, do some research on this guy and his ideas), and it wasn’t long before there were 8-, 16-, 24-, 48- and 72-track recordings.
At the same time, with all of this new freedom to fix parts of a recording and add things to it, the idea of what a recording was went from being a “picture” of a live situation to being its own thing-a carefully crafted piece of music that would then have to be recreated in a live performance.
In the preceding section, I said “used to be” because the process of recording has changed so much, especially in the past ten years but has it? When you hear a hip-hop or techno record, chances are that at least part of it was recorded in somebody’s home studio, maybe even in their bedroom on their computer! With digital recording (encoded numbers on tape or in a computer’s memory that represent sound, as opposed to an analog-wave model of it) and the proliferation of low-cost, high-quality gear, almost anybody can make a good sounding, low-noise recording.
Buy an 8-track digital recorder, a mixer and some microphones and you can record your own demos-and your own records, if you get good enough. So why would anyone still spend thousands of dollars in a “real studio” and get nothing in return but a tape when they could use their recording advance to buy their own studio set-up?
Here’s another question: If you could use a transistor amplifier, why would you play guitar through a tube amp? Tubes give off heat, burn out, sound different every day and are an obsolete technology-apart from guitar amps, no other appliance has been tube-powered since the 1960s. In fact, tubes are no longer even made in the U.S.! Answer: The sound. Nothing sounds like a tube amp and, as it happens, nothing sounds like an analog recording. Sure, 4- and 8-track analog cassette recorders are affordable, but the stuff that your favorite albums were recorded through isn’t-what you’re paying $700 to $2,000/day to record in a pro studio for is millions of dollars worth of gear and a staff that knows how to use it. For electronic music, where the sound source is synthetic or digital, I would recommend keeping it in that medium and build and learn how to use a home digital studio. For guitars, drums, and microphones, your best bet for making the best recording possible is still old fashioned analog tape.
More on recording, what you actually hear on an album and what a producer does next time. If you have any questions-about anything-you can write me at [redacted], or you can email me at [redacted]@aol.com. I’ll keep the column going by answering your letters.
Here are the next eight bars of the “I Am Legend” (La Sexorcisto) intro (Figure1).We’re almost done!
