Many people in their youth may have some kind of spurious dreams of becoming a professional musician, after all, popular culture in recent years has made the dream look tantalizingly easy by the way of portraying those who are underprepared for the music industry as “underdog stories” and highlighting the very rare stories of success without giving a realistic expectation of the countless failed attempts to break into the music industry that comes before them. So it’s no wonder that the demand for professional recording studio time in order to turn that long standing dream in to a tangible and realizable dream. After all you stand little chance of being noticed in any particularly meaningful way if your music is not recorded to a professional standard, otherwise your mixtape will just go straight from the CD player into the trash.
The reason that you need to book studio time and have professionally recorded tracks is a mark of a particular kind of individual in a manager, scout or executives mind, it shows that without any prompting that you are serious about making professional grade music and being more than just a musician but a manager of your own success. Basically it shows initiative. And the main reason you need to book studio time is they will, for their fee, supply you with all of the professional equipment and assistance that you could need during this process from recording to mastering your studio should have it covered, but what exactly will be provided and what does the equipment do? Well hopefully in this article we can give you a better idea of what your chosen studio will supply and what it does.
Soundboard
A vital tool for controlling and formatting the music as it is recorded. Generally all of the equipment in the studio will be hooked up to what on face value essentially looks like huge table covered in different slider, switches and dials. With this board your engineer can then go about the task of splitting and recording all of the individual elements of your songs individually and then bringing them together into a single and well composed track. Each slider controls the volume of a particular channel controlling that particular recording and each of the aforementioned dials will control a particular aspect of that channel, in order to control the specific levels of each individual element of your recording to ensure that the particular part of the tune is not overbearing or inappropriately heavy on particular levels, like mid bass.
In this respect, the soundboard can be seen as the brain of the studio, taking in all of the sounds and recordings and filtering them into a more desirable and easier to listen to track. Although much of what the soundboard is used for is actually done more by you mix engineer than the soundboard itself, so it’s important you keep on your engineer on side throughout this process for the best results. The main ways to do this are to refrain from asking them what every single switch and dial does on the soundboard. As it’s not really important to you making the music that he is recording, so unless you want him to ask you to teach him guitar, don’t ask.
Your engineer
The engineer that the studio supplies you to operate the recording equipment and to mix the levels together to ensure the highest quality of recording possible, he is also there to provide recommendations on the music itself in relation to the music, for example, omitting a section because it doesn’t sound right over a microphone. However, depending on how you deal wth your engineer, they can offer so much more than merely operating the soundboard and software that you need for the song, but they can offer valuable insights.
These people generally are not only qualified in music technology but also experience working with countless artists of all sizes and at varying levels of fame, so chances are that they understand a good deal about the industry, and about individual artists endeavors as well as his own experiences in the scene. So if you keep on his good side then there is a good chance that he will share some of these insights and you never know what kinds of advice will come up gold later in life. Thank you for taking the time to read this article, please click the following link for more information on how to choose a mix engineer.
