Getting The Best Recording For Your Project

Recording is by definition: To register sound in permanent form by mechanical or electrical means for reproduction. As simple as this might sound, like most things in life, there is an art form behind the process which will make some recordings better than others. From microphone selection and placement to the proper use of dynamics and equalization during mixing, our engineers have been trained and time tested to complete any project up to today’s industry standards in audio production.

Be Prepared – The best thing anybody can do for a recording session is to be well practiced and prepared. Know your songs inside and out so you have a quick answer to any question our engineer might ask. Common questions we might ask include: What is the BPM (Beats Per Minute) for this song? How long is this song? What is the pattern of the song (Intro->Verse->Chorus…)? How many instruments are in this song? Do you need different versions such as Street, Radio, and Instrumental version for your songs? If you have guest musicians performing in your tracks, make sure they know the song and their part, and will be on time. If you are bringing in a session to continue work on, please make sure it will be compatible with our system. We run Pro-tools 9 HD-3|Accell on a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard 10.6. We have the Waves Diamond Bundle and Auto-Tune plus many other various plug-ins.

Treat Your Session Like Your Job – Recording can be a fun and inspirational process, but can often be deterred from its path by many distractions. Friends, Girlfriends, Boyfriends, and Family members that aren’t part of your music or motivation should not be at a session. Thought processes and moods change with other people around and ultimately cause your session to take more time than it should. Too many people in the room at once also makes it difficult for the engineer to concentrate on the recording and can cause him/her to miss problems that otherwise would have been caught.

Become Familiar With The Recording Process – The more you know about how we work, the better we can improve your recording. If you are recording live music, we normally start with the drums and like to have them setup ahead of time. From there we will move to the bass or guitars and then all other instruments before doing vocals last. If you already have your session ready to record vocals on top of, we first import it into our Pro-Tools system from your hard drive or DVD and then change all the input/output paths to match our 48 channel Solid State Logic Recording and Mixing Console.

In the end we like to have fun while recording just like you, and the more prepared you are for your session with Digital Services, the more smoothly your project will progress.