Articles on audio recording: your guide to quality recordings

This week I invite you to discuss the importance of tuning in a recording situation.

This week we'll tackle a somewhat peculiar case: hardware synthesizers.

I'll dedicate the first article of the year in this series to tidiness in your home studio. I know it seems a bit off-topic, but trust me it is much more important than it appears at first sight.

In this episode I invite you to discover a trick that every beginner ought to know, the so-called 3:1 rule.

After having recorded a bowed upright bass last week, today we'll see how to track a double bass played with the fingers, a technique called pizzicato.

In this article we'll see how to record an upright bass played with a bow. But don't worry, we'll also see how to record a pizzicato double bass in our next article.

This week we'll see how to make life easier to your "future you."

Having a soundproof home studio is very nice. But that's far from enough to make a room ideal to record and mix music. Enter acoustic treatment.

As we saw in the previous article, the comfort of the musician is crucial to getting a good performance, and hence a precondition for every good recording. And this comfort depends largely on the sub…

In this week's episode we will discuss something that ought to precede any attempt to record your music. Considered optional by some, pre-production is often ignored by beginners. And yet they are th…

Having the best gear in the world and being an audio engineer without equal is very nice, but unfortunately that doesn't mean you'll be able to make the best records.

This week we'll start with the first practical case: tracking a trombone.

You'll fix it in the mix... right? Wrong! That's why I'll try to make sure that this phrase never makes into your home studio.

This week we'll take a moment to discuss the delicate issue of levels during tracking.

Today we'll discuss a topic that's very important in the all-digital age, namely which format you should use to record your takes.

Hopefully, one day you’ll go to Abbey Road to record your music, just like the Beatles. But since recording in such a studio is prohibitively expensive for most musicians, you might want to consider …

Andrew Wade (aka “The Big Boss”) knows a little something about guitar recording. Wade is a producer/engineer/songwriter who has focused heavily on the pop-punk/Emo genres and has produced music (inc…

Although he spent most of his childhood playing and studying music, it wasn’t until Greg Wells was 18 that he got bitten by the recording bug. “I got my parents to co-sign a loan, and I bought a Mac …

When recording an ensemble or just overdubbing one instrument, there's one part of the song that gets very little attention: right after the very last chord or note has been struck. Especially if the…

In the early 1960s, at the beginning of the British Invasion, the studio scene in England was thriving, but the British studios used different gear and got a very different sound than their U.S. coun…

Did you know that John Lennon’s first guitar was a Gallotone Champion acoustic that he ordered from a catalog, or that George Harrison played a Framus Hootenanny 12-string on “Help," or that Ringo st…

Joe West has never been afraid to take on a project, even early in his career when he didn’t always have the requisite experience. “If you turn a gig down,” he says, “you end up in a situation where …

Let’s face it: Albums are not what they used to be. I’m not talking about the music (although there are some who would make that argument), and I’m not talking about the production. I’m referring to …

A cohesive sonic signature helps make an album, EP or other multi-song project more appealing to listeners. If you listen to a classic album, whether it's Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” The Be…

You have a number of options when it comes to the bit-depth of your DAW or other digital audio recording session including 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit floating point. But do you know why you’d choose o…