Just what I Learned From My First Experience With Recording
A handful of years ago, I recorded a CD of my own songs with a friend who had built his own recording studio room. He asked me to take all the time that i required to record my songs and to gain more experience he also offered to mix the music for me.
This is actually my first official recording experience despite that fact that I’ve recorded a few demos years back using a rather vintage four track cassette recorder. Digital recording was an innovative concept, and my friend had one of the first set-ups for recording direct to PC hard drive. It was an incredible learning encounter for me. I observed how my buddy did microphone placement for vocals, guitar amplifiers and drums; how he placed instrumentalists in different rooms so they could play live “together” and he could record several tracks without audio bleed-over; how he solved problems on the fly when things didn’t go as he’d planned. I paid close attention during the mixing procedure, as my friend would make the smallest modifications to the track volumes or equalization to enhance the sound. I kept asking queries about the procedure and my friend would patiently explain the whole process to me and at the same time answer all my queries. Collectively we created a recording we can both be very pleased of.
I never thought my first recording encounter can be of great help until I was placed in a scenario where I need to use my know-how on digital recording. The first one was as a small-time music performer, in hosting events where there was no sound engineer or sound person; if I intend to make it sound good, it was up to me. It was actually astonishing when I was able to manipulate the sound equipment and manipulate the sound mixer with ease. My first recording experience provided me with all the basic knowledge that I need.
The other scenario that drew on my know-how was when I became the audio engineer and wrote the music score for two short movies my son wrote and directed. Not really being qualified (I thought), I felt overwhelmed and quite out of my element; but I had learned enough from that time in the studio to detect when an audio signal was too loud or too soft, and how to compensate; and in post-production, I was able to write and record multiple songs on a Mac computer, and I knew how to make the adjustments to balance the sound levels. In addition to that, I found a way how to remove those unwanted noise in the background from the film and this is very much helpful whenever the background noise affects the movie quality.
These projects made me realize that my initial recording played a huge role. I also realized from that encounter just how much we actually learn things by simply doing them.
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