Generally just looking for the highest fidelity recording imaginable, studio quality in a bedroom. Looking for general advice, gear, do’s and dont’s, just the most comprehensive collection of knowledge this forum has to offer, I know every single one of you have your own thing to add to this so do!
Personally, I record both my band and my electronic stuff straight into Ableton through a Behringer UMC404HD. For years the thing that has been holding my music back is the music itself, though now I find the biggest drawback about my music is an exceptionally obvious amount of noise, or its at least incredibly obvious to me. Considering a lot of my music is a blend of stuff created in the daw and multiple tracks through the interface, sometimes it can be EQ’d out somewhat. Though mainly I just record it to tape then back into the DAW to mask it.
ever thought about actually recording nothing, literally just the noise to keep it as reference. Then going step by step thru any signal chain to find whats the most problematic stuff, do i have noise gates i could use, do they make sense… do i keep the sample rate consistent, whats making that noise exactly, can i mute it… is it the cable, the connector, some strange low quality power plug, is my phone charged somewhere else, do i really need USB in between, and on and on, simple things even expensive gear will not fix.
I’ll also add checking your gain staging to that list, so you’re getting the optimal signal to noise throughout. You may be doing all of these things already of course but we’d be remiss to not mention it.
I don’t know what the ADC/DAC performance is on the UMC404HD but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t have the best S/N stats. But then again I also wouldn’t be surprised if there would be negligible difference between it and a much more premium interface, as the audio quality I hear in most modern gear seems to be pretty excellent.
I would recommend you try the above suggestions if you haven’t already so you know that you’ve optimised the rest of the setup to a decent degree and identified any problem pieces of gear, then if you’re still not satisfied you might want to research another interface.
Check if there’s no ground loop. Also, some power adapters are noisy, sometimes even with these ferrite cylinders. Oh and pedals are notoriously noisy. And some cheap synths too. You can make perfectly fine music with cheap interfaces. Usually the culprit lies elsewhere.
In general my best practice advice would be as following:
make sure that you use instruments that sound great (to you). As with recording it always comes down to: shit quality going into the signal chain will also give shit results.
keep the signal chain as short as possible, make sure the components of the signal chain are good quality and also prevent any unnecessary ad/da conversion.
make sure you have access over quality monitoring when recording. You should be able to hear exactly what you are recording in order to make the right (best sounding) decisions in the process. On top, the musician will play the best sounding music if he or she will hear his playing exactly as it is recorded.
when recording mic signals make sure you are recording in a great sounding room.
get an audio engineer with a great pair of ears. Without great ears to judge what you are recording, you will still not get great results. I even dare to say that you will get a better recording with a great pair of ears and mediocre quality equipment than with top notch equipment and a mediocre pair of ears.
make sure that you have great arrangements for your music as most recording issues are cause by arrangement issues and not by equipment issues. For instance, if your arrangement is done well then you will not have clashing notes or frequencies as your arrangement already takes care of separating the different instruments
make sure that you have practiced what you want to record very well. This sounds very obvious. Surprisingly though I have seen many artists fail at this exact point.
Lastly, the million dollar question is, what is good quality gear? In my experience that really depends on how you purpose the gear. For instance, a cheap audio interface will generally give good results for line level audio recording. However, when you start recording mic signal, usually the cheap interfaces generate (too much) noise and result in thin and harsh recordings.
And after dispensing this advice I now boldly hijack the thread for a short moment to share something that personally makes me very proud: after playing in bands for 20 years tomorrow our band will play the most famous venue venue in the Netherlands. For the Dutchies, that will be Paradiso. Please take my advice above as a 20 yr long learning curve leading up to playing the big venues.
If you make music in your bedroom, then you already have “a studio”., so anything you make is already “studio quality”.
Are you trying to get recordings which sound like Beyonce & Hans Zimmer hanging out with Brian Eno & Rick Ruben in Abbey Road? Maybe you want to sound like 80s industrial or goth tracks. You don’t “need” Abbey Road for that.
Personally, I think it’s better to focus on what you have available, can afford to change, and what your music needs to do. Don’t wear yourself out fretting about expensive production techniques that don’t apply to your sound… unless they do actually apply.
Pick two or three directions your music will go, and build a signal path and personal habits which support those aims. Consider renting spaces for things you can’t do. Maybe recording all your band playing together would yield better stems than tracking one by one at home… but mix at home). Etc
Yes, it’s very long, but it covers a lot of ground—it’s basically a recording engineer laying out everything they know about capturing decent sound with whatever gear you have in front of you, from how to treat your recording environment on the cheap, to making sure your bass “hits,” to little things like making sure your cables and connectors are all in good shape and good order.
Often when I hit a sound quality problem, I return to that thread and see what I might’ve forgotten about.
To give you a taste, this is from the beginning of that thread, which I always try to keep in mind as I mix:
There is this notion of “golden ears,” of people with a super-magical ability to hear the difference between good and bad sound. The idea is that this this supernatural hearing is what makes their recordings so good. That is nonsense. If their hearing were so much better, then none of us would be able to detect how much better their recordings were. They make “golden recordings” that are still “golden” even to those of us with regular ears. If you cannot distinguish between good-sounding recordings and bad ones, then yes, you should give up, but that’s not the case, because otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this thread. You’d be perfectly happy with bad recordings.
The fact that you can tell the difference between good-sounding recordings and bad-sounding ones means that you have the necessary physiological attributes to get from A to B. Skills, experience, and learned techniques will speed up the process, but the slow slog through blind trial-and-error can still get you there if you keep your eyes on the prize of getting the sound from the speakers to match the sound in your mind’s eye (or mind’s ear, so to speak).
If you have more or less functional hearing, then you have everything you need to make the same evaluations that million-dollar producers do (in fact many of them have less functional hearing than you do, probably).
