Tales from Shed Studios Pt 2: voicereels and metronomes

Welcome again to another tale of home studio fun.

This time I engineered for myself, which is a lot of fun, but quite a bit more work.

The first thing about engineering recordings is to know your wiring, virtual or otherwise. I had quite a bit of experience with my two track laptop studio so I knew something about the vagaries of virtual multitrack setups this turns out to be a bonus and a hindrance since every set up is different, my little home studio (for demos and songwriting) runs a rather barebones edition of Cubase, whereas the snazzy setup in Shed Studios uses a rather more jazzy full flavoured SONAR virtual studio thingy.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a huge techie when it comes to software (hardware, yes, software, no) and all that I really care about is being able to record the sound I want as quickly as possible.

The nice thing about virtual studios is that they all follow the basic rules of a normal hardware mixer and recorder setup. That is, that all you need to do is sort out the wiring, choose your input levels, arm the track and then hit record. The only tricky parts then are in performance since you do this as many times as you need overdubs.

In the case of the latest "own song" to roll off the virtual production line, an ancient number called "Mr Indecipherable", I did about 15 tracks worth of overdubs with very very minimal changes of wiring (i.e. from instruments to microphones) and no changes at all of virtual wiring.

Things are made easier because of direct input (D.I.) which means you don't have to worry about mic'ing up an amplifier or two, because you take your lead straight from the instrument into the "interface". Oh yeah, the interface. I have NO idea what all those knobs and buttons do (and frankly, I don't really mind that much) but essentially it's an input/output box (sound goes in, sound goes out) with input and output volumes (which techies call "gain" just to make it sound more complicated) and your main issue when setting volume (or gain, if you prefer) is to make sure you have enough level coming in to work with, without having so much the sound becomes distorted and hideous.

Different things have different natural levels - a guitar (normally) has a very low output level, and an input/output box (i/o) will have the ability to boost that level while at the same time being able to turn down for, say, a powered microphone.

This latter ability is crucial to my next project, which was to work with Mrs Algo on her voicereel. Its a bit easier (since you are only working with one microphone mostly) but is considerably tricky because of the far lower level people talk than they sing.

So I should have the song up soon, and Mrs Algo's agent was happy with the work we did on her Voicereel so I reckon I'm getting quite good at it.

I'll put up the results of my work over the next couple of weeks (though not Mrs Algo, that's all copyright protected and things).

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