Working on recording songs on my home studio

[Ezequiel Romanko]

Hi guys im trying to get down some songs to make an EP, i got 4 songs totally written for recording them and mixing them, how i should start? i didn't went to a studio or make a serious recording of my songs, should i practice a lot the songs with metronome before recording? what i should record first?

 

[Ed Seith]

Well, this is a can of worms. Okay, so I will assume you've already GOT a "home studio setup" since you're referring to one in the possessive. Good start.

If there are drums, that's what you start with, whether they're real or (more likely in a home studio) software-based. Work out your drum parts, choose your tempo (BPM) and get them drummies into the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) first.

After that, in a typical studio, the bass guitar might be next, but when we guitarists record, we tend to not have bass parts all written out yet, so record your rhythm guitars. Assuming we're talking about a rock song, typical approach is two separate rhythm guitar tracks, and you pan them left and right, usually really hard left and right or even 100 left and 100 right.

Then you can do either the bass or the melodic parts/instruments - guitar melodies, keys, vocals, etc.

Let's start there, because for 4 songs, that's probably anywhere from a week to several months' work, depending on your priorities, how good you are in a studio setting, and how picky you are.

 

[Ezequiel Romanko]

Thanks a lot Ed that helps me a lot. About the drums im using Ezdrummer 2, but it dont sound too real for me what other software would you recommend me? Cuz its really hard for me to actually use real drums, and should i separate every instrument of the drums on different chanels?

 

[Ed Seith]

I use EZDrummer 2, as well. There are a number of different drum kits mic'd up that you can choose from. I would suggest NOT separating them until you're better understanding the process and have an interest in really manually manipulating the different drums dynamically during the mix. There are settings for it to "humanize" the playing. I typically set this to FULL HUMAN for maximum humanness.

 

[Filip Tomiša]

The way to humanize drums is all about velocity (loudness of a note). If you keep the same velocity of each note your drums will sound robotic but if you change the velocity of each note it will sound more human. Also what you can do is instead having one kick play everytime you can use two different kicks to make it more interesting (drum vsts always have multiple one-shots of each element so you don't have to use only one kick. But if you use samples and you choose two random samples that are not in the same key it will probably sound bad.) Same thing for snare or anything else really.
You want your kick to be about the same velocity everytime because it needs to sound tight. Let's say the first kick hit is super loud and the second one is very quiet. That won't sound very consistent. So that's why the kick should have the same velocity with slight changes to make it more human but nothing too drastic. Also what you can do is move your snare a bit to the left from the grid because drummers don't hit the snare always on time but you gotta be careful with that because if you move it too much it will sound out of place.

Here are two pictures that will help you visualise what I just said and here are the links to the mp3 files so you can hear what it actually sounds like: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PnH18J6zWLo6RgtAyj3kndW0L8svCwNi (DRUMS)
https://drive.google.com/open?id=12SwdsUtFy1ZFyNIwXgt87wS8m4T2sT4P (HI HAT)

 

[Rute Rodrigues]

This is good for me too, I don't understand nothing about home recording x)