Getting great results from recording studio equipment needs highly skilled craftsmanship that combines the art of music with the science of audio production technology.

This requires knowledge, understanding how to apply it, and a well-honed ability to listen critically to the sounds as they are recorded.

Developing your technical skills along with your creativity will enable you to achieve better recordings through a solid understanding of recording techniques and studio equipment.

This short guide will lead you through some of the techno-maze that is the studio equipment world. You'll gain the basic knowledge and understanding you'll need to build on as you select gear for your music studio. The information in this article will open the door to knowledge and understanding as well as the technical ‘savvy' essential for you to achieve great results in the recording studio…

It is important to continually learn by reading articles, books, subscribing to industry magazines that inspire and educate you. This knowledge will empower you to use your studio equipment to its full potential and work successfully in every situation including home recording, in professional studios, in the live situation, for on-location recording and radio, film and TV work.

The Basics

First, let's take a look at a simple overview of the recording process. Let's look at the recording process in three main stages, Input, Processing and Output. Then we'll give examples of the equipment required to fulfill each of these stages.

Input Stage

The Input stage is a very important stage to get right; you have to make sure you capture the moment of the great performance.

• This stage starts with the musician and their instrument, get this right and you're off to a great start.
• The next consideration is the room acoustics, this is how the sound is bouncing off the walls, floor and ceiling of the room.
• Then you must consider the microphones, how you place them and the microphone [tag]pre amp[/tag] that is used to do the amplification.

Processing Stage

The Processing stage is usually considered as made up by

• sound card
• music computer
• music software
  • examples of music software: Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, or Cakewalk
• mixing desk
• outboard gear
  • for example, compressors, limiters, noise gates, equalizers, multi effects units, reverbs and delays.

The choice of music software is critical as this affects the sound.

Each music software program available processes the sound in a slightly different way and therefore makes it sound slightly different.

During the processing stage you must also take into consideration the plug ins available with certain music software packages and the support for third party plug ins.

Output Stage

There are two different aspects of the Output stage of recording:

• monitoring – listening to the sound via your amplifier through the monitor speakers and headphones
• reproducing or mix down - onto CD, DVD, for on-line or other medium

Monitoring is very important as it is impossible to listen critically without very careful choice and placement of monitors. Equally, CD writing is important as you can cause problems to the mastering engineer by not writing properly with your CD recorder.

Recording is a service without which millions of people wouldn't be exposed to great music by masters of song writing and composition. You are capturing a great composer, a great performance and a great instrument all at once and then using the studio equipment to enhance this even further.

You can truly immortalize the music you record!

Tags: Recording Studio, Home Recording Studio, How to Record, Music Recording