It has become a common practice for musicians to set up a recording studio at their homes. Earlier it was to evade the process of booking and paying for a studio and working in that fixed time. Now, with the outbreak of COVID, it has become crucial for artists to have a setup at home to stay active and keep making music. However, with the lack of professional help, artists end up making a few mistakes while recording at home:
Choosing the wrong room
The room that an instrument is recorded in always changes the tone and this is especially true for vocals. In a home setting, there are always limitations to finding a room because most people don’t have a custom-built home studio. You have to work with what you’ve got which is not at all difficult if you make the right choice.
Some of the things you should keep in mind while choosing a room for recording:
- Fewer windows to avoid external sound
- Some sound absorbents like beds, couches, pillows to make the vocals less reverberant
- But not too many absorbents otherwise your vocals will sound dull
- Avoid a room with a lot of hard surfaces
You can work around things in a room to get the desired result. For example, you can put up a mattress or hang quilts in between instruments to avoid harsh spill or use duvets, heavy curtains, or mattresses as acoustic panels to create a makeshift booth around the vocalist.
Using Cheap Cables while Recording at Home
The cables you use for your microphones, instruments, and to connect your equipment plays a very important role. No matter how good and expensive your instruments are, they are only as good as the cables you use. There is a vast difference between a quality cable and an inexpensive, discounted one. Each cable used is carrying the signal of your recording and cheap cables in the mix can add unwanted distortion.
Using too many effects
Artists tend to rely on effects to compensate for the lack of clarity and overall quality in a home-recorded song. The most commonly used effect is reverb which is used to make recordings sound less flat. But when artists drown their recordings with reverb, the notes become slurred together and indistinguishable.
Another mistake artists make while mixing at home is not leaving enough headroom. This leaves less room for improvement during mastering. Leaving headroom helps you prevent your mix from clipping and distorting, and leaves mastering the space to work its magic.
Deliver My Tune (DMT) offers music mastering services along with distributing your songs to over 60 music streaming platforms. It’s a cloud-based, automated music mastering service that allows you to upload your audio tracks in various formats, and then it is digitally mastered using AI algorithms. The music can then be distributed on digital streaming services sites, like iTunes, Spotify, Shazam, etc.