4 Tips for recording

Recording yourself is basically a necessity now if you’re a modern musician. With COVID so many studios are closed, and even before that studios can be incredibly expensive, so learning to record yourself is a very useful skill to have. It allows you to take remote recording gigs and opens up so many different possibilities for you.

So here are a few tips that I’ve found from having recorded myself singing, playing piano, guitar, ukulele, melodica and violin.

1. Set a timer
2. Practice before you record
3. Record full takes
4. Comp takes together

Let’s start from the top.

1. Set a timer

I’m a big fan of the pomodoro technique. The pomodoro technique means that you set a timer for 25 minutes, focus on working for those 25 minutes. After that timer is up you take a break for 5 to 10 minutes. Rinse and repeat.

Keep doing that a few times and then take a longer break after maybe 3 or 4 times through that cycle.

It’s a great way to keep yourself focused and fresh without getting burnt out and tired from trying to focus for too long of a period of time. It makes working for 2 hours straight feel really easy, and often I get much more done with this technique than if I were to just try to power through those 2 hours.

2. Practice before you record

This one is simple. Make sure you know the music and can play it well. Even if you’re sight reading a piece it can be useful to read it through a few times before you record. If you have the chance to do this while you’re recording at home it can help make the process go by faster.

After you hit that record button the stakes are high. When you’re practicing the stakes are low. You can stop and go back whenever you want. When you’re recording you can’t do that. The pressure is on when you’re recording so you might feel that each take matters more. They don’t really. If you’re recording at home (and not in a studio that you paid time for) then you can make as many takes as you want.

But practicing more can help you need fewer takes. If you can practice it enough where you can play the piece perfectly within the first 4 takes then you’ll save time while recording.

3. Record full takes

Often when recording I’m tempted to stop any time I make a mistake, no matter how small. This can be incredibly counterproductive because it prevents me from getting a full take recorded.

This might mean you have to play through small imperfections and mistakes. We’ll deal with those in the next step.

But keep playing through those things. Keep playing and record yourself playing the entire piece. Even if you make small mistakes you can fix them later. Or you can record a better full take later and use that take instead.

But having 3 takes that are pretty good will be easier to deal with than 10 takes of only the first half of the music and 0 takes of the second half of the music.

4. Comp takes together

After you’ve recorded 3 good takes you can comp them together. As long as the gain levels, microphone, and microphone position stay the same you’ll be able to put multiple takes together fairly easily. You’ll want to add crossfades any time there’s a cut between two takes but that’s about it.

What you want to think about as you’re recording is “do I have a good recording of this section already?” Maybe you’re playing a song with two sections and on the first take you play the first section perfectly, but you make a mistake on the second section. On the second take you play the second section perfectly, but you make a mistake on the first section. That’s still useable because you can comp them together and have two perfect takes.

As long as you can comp a few good takes together you’ll be able to put together a record that sounds really good.

You don’t need to play it all the way through perfectly. It doesn’t have to be one take and most professional recordings likely aren’t one take. You just need to play through each section perfectly. Then with some not so fancy audio editing you can put those few takes together and have a awesome sounding recording.

ISJ