Turn Your Computer Into a Recording Studio For a Home Made Music Demo

It’s amazing what we can do with a computer nowadays, gone are the days when you were doing your home recording on a four track machine. Do not get me wrong you can produce a nice sounding demo on a four tracks machine, but now with the software sequencer selling like hot cakes and very powerful and versatile you can achieve a quality home demo.

You have now the capacity to record as much as sixty tracks or more and create a full blown band sound by playing all the instruments yourself, doing all the vocals, lead and background, playing guitar rhythm, power chords, lead guitar solos, drums, base, piano and keyboard, recording your tracks one at the time.

In order to get you going these are the items you must have.

You first need:

Make sure you evaluate this particular blog post diligently, the case and the methods have plenty of variants. -A powerful computer: Anything equivalent to a Pentium 4- 2.0 GHz and up with a minimum of one GB to two GB of DDR memory, a 160 GB hard disk or larger, a nice monitor 17”, 19” or 22” LCD if possible. A good and quiet CPU ventilator is a must to achieve a spotless recording without background noise. The more tracks you intend to create in your music projects, the more powerful your computer needs to be.

-A recording sound card:A good choice of recording card would be audiophile 2496 PCI card twenty-four bit by m-audio.

- A basic mixing board:A basic board of two channels mixing board, behringer eurorack UB502 by BehRinger connected to the sound card.

-A basic preamp: (tube if possible) connected to the two channel mixing board:A nice choice is the Tube MP studio by ART.

-A stereo receiver: (your home receiver is fine) connected to the sound card and the studio monitors connected to it.

-Studio monitors (speakers): Again this is up to you as far as the type and models, anything with a good quality sound with good woofers and tweeters.

-A music sequencer: (like cakewalk, protools or samplitude)

-Good decent low price microphones:A good choice for vocal recording at a low price of about 100.00 is the AKG perception 100, large-diaphragm condenser mic. The AKG Perception one hundred is a rugged cardioid condenser microphone. The 1″ diaphragm bring AKG-quality sound to recording, live sound and broadcasting applications.

For guitars and instruments you can use a sure SM57 dynamic microphone.

Of course you also need your instruments, if you have the basic it’s fine, I’ve a nice epiphone (Gibson AJ) acoustic guitar witch retails for less than 200.00, I use a Fender Stratocaster and Kramer electric guitars for all the heavy stuff along with a small fender amplifier, for the base and drums I use a Yamaha keyboard that I got for about 300.00 that gives me a satisfactory result.

Please bare in mind that recording sound is a skill that you can acquire with time and studies, just browse the internet and find some good articles about sound recording and mixing. There is one simple rule when you want to achieve a good sounding demo, (first it has to sound nice and right coming in to the microphones), no matter how much mixing you’ll do once you recorded all your tracks, you’ll never achieve a reasonable sounding demo if what goes in is crap like; buzzing instruments, bad positioning of your microphones, peak levels and so on.

Once the recording is done and comes the time to mix it down, bare in mind that it’s always better to remove then to add, what I mean by that’s simply use your common sense when listening to your tracks, if you notice that one of your guitar tracks a little low in volumes, do not raise that track’s volume but rather lower the volumes of the other guitar tracks and instruments, you do not want to hear distortions but you’re looking for a balance sound where you hear all the instruments and track well during the mixing. You can apply the same strategy for the EQs settings it’s also better to remove then to add.

Try to keep in mind when working on your home music demo, that the A&R people are far more interested in the song’s potential, and the artist’s appeal than they’re about the quality of the recording. Nearly every act signed to a major label will be recording their entire album over again with a professional engineer and producer. The demo is only a demo!

If you need more info on that topic and other computer related questions, you can always drop me a line or come and visit my site at http://www.bytelan.com/recordinggear.htmMy name is John Tahan a musician, webmaster and computer network engineer.Do you want to increase your income? Do you want to learn how to make money online, if you do you’ren’t the only one, please visit: http://www.becomemillionaireforfree.com/MaverickMoneyMaker.htm