Something that you may need to do if you’re part of the music business is recording and mixing audio. There are many different components in the process – the skills, the hardware and the software all need to work together in order to gain a decent end result. In this article, I’m going to talk about a few different things that you should be considering if you want to make sure that the music and sound that you develop is the best it can be. Do bare in mind that some investment is required if you want to create something truly professional.
The first thing you’re going to need is decent hardware. This is an area where you really can’t get away from spending money. If you buy cheap products, you’ll get a cheap result back. The most important thing you’ll need is a good quality microphone to record the sound. We always suggest that you record each instrument individually so that when it comes to the mixing stage, you’ll be able to make sure each one is heard at the volume you want – there really is no room for flexibility when all of your music is on the same track. It isn’t for us to say how much you should spend investing in a mic, but you really do need to search around and do a bit of testing, maybe even look up some reviews, so that you won’t be left disappointed. Professional labels spend thousands on their equipment and whilst you might not be able to do that, you can still produce something decent by shopping around.
When you’ve got the hardware sorted, the next thing you should be thinking about is the software. There are many different applications that you can use to do this job, the vast majority of them being paid apps which can cost huge amounts of money in licensing fees. For this reason, if you’re just a freelancer or a small company then you may want to think about a program called Audacity (click the link to find the download). This is completely free of charge to use unlike the rest of the industry and it still offers all of the features that you’d expect and need. In fact, because of this it has made it one of the most popular of its kind and is also open source, which means the programming behind it is freely available to anyone who wants it. This allows external developers to get involved with the project and to continue adding new features and plugins, something which we should all be grateful for.
You’re of course going to need a lot of skills on your team, in the form of the musicians who perform as well as the people in the backend who mix it all afterwards. This isn’t something I can help you with, but if you concentrate on the hardware and the software initially you should make things easier for yourself in the long run. This is a very tough industry which requires a lot of work for potentially very little returns, so you have to make sure everything you produce is of the highest quality so that you don’t lose any opportunities that may arise.
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