Hi guys.
I could really use some good advice now from people who has experience in recording commercial, full lenght cd’s.
The thing is that I’m coming up towards my graduation project (don’t really know what to call it) in school. You are supposed to work in groups, during this whole year to complete a project, music related, which will have a major impact on the final grades. I tought I’d do a cd with my band. I need to produce the whole product by myself mainly, but I’m allowed to take as much help from others as I want to. You don’t really get funding except in special cases tough so costs must be kept at a minimum. We have top of the line recording studios in school and I’ll be free to use them during the entire year.
I’m a bit terrified by the sheer size of this project. Recording a cd is very hard work in itself, I know from recording several demos. This is a full lenght cd and the quality of the whole recording needs to be top class. On top of that, I’ll need to get the cover and all things related fixed (even if I won’t do it myself, I’ll still have to be in charge of all the work and organize). Do you think I’ve taken water above my head so to speak? Is this doable in less than year? It’s not like I won’t have other things to think about during this time eighter.
Any advice on how I should go about, shared experiences and hints will be much appreciated. And of course, buy my cd when it’s done 
Best thing to do is relax.
Take a deep breath, and try to have as much fun with it as you can. Don’t sweat the small details right off the mark. Much of the trouble of making a CD seems to come from frayed nerves, and short tempers. Enjoy what you’re doing, and take it a day (and a tune) at a time. You’ll have good days and bad, so just be aware that not everything will work out all the time…but sometimes it may work out better than you’d hoped.
Best of luck!
You’d need to tell us a bit more I think. Will you have the use of an experienced sound engineer? Will you have to do the final mix?
A CD is very doable in a year if you approach it the right way. Many very fine CDs have been recorded in a day or two. If you can record your band more or less live then time won’t be a problem I think.
If you have to engineer it yourself and you won’t have the help of experienced people to advise and help you as you proceed, you will have a lot of learning to do. Do you know much about microphone selection and placement, about isolation of instruments (if you are recording live), about mixing, and so on? If you have more or less unlimited studio time and your band will be available regularly you should be able to get tracks down but you really will want to be able to ask experienced engineers and producers for advice as you go along. If your are expected to produce pop polish, that won’t be easy—some techniques take years to learn. That said, I can’t imagine that your teachers aren’t aware of that and I’d assume that they won’t expect you to become a top producer from a standing start in a year.
While it can be a daunting prospect I think if you have your tunes down and a good idea of what you are going to record you can get such a project done fairly quickly. I have seen a good few top Irish CDs been recorded and finalised in a matter of weeks.
I made a CD with my friend Martin Cole who played all the accompaniment, added vocals and did all the mixing and engineering. The review and clips are below (cheers, Gary). I should like to tell you how I’d do it differently next time, if I could.
First, I’d want someone else, not the performers, to do all the worrying about the recording process. Second, I’d want to have nailed down to a tee all the arrangements we were going to use. The recording studio is not the place to be having long-winded discussions about who plays first time through, whether that Am chord should be an F, who comes in for the second tune and so on. I’m not saying that someone can’t have a brilliant sudden flash of inspiration in the studio, but on the whole you save a lot of studio time if you work these things out in advance. You may not be paying for studio time this time round on an hour-to-hour basis, but paying for time that way is the norm! Third, practise everything thoroughly, your own parts and in the ensemble, a lot before you go in. It’s much better if you record stuff you’ve actually played in sessions or gigs together. I think this applies even if you’re going to do a lot of over-dubbing. You need to work out all the little nuances of the tunes so that no-one is playing clashing notes or ornamentation. Fourth, grit your teeth and prepare for stressful moments: someone isn’t playing the way you agreed all along; undiplomatic remarks are made; you make a fatal glitch at the end of an otherwise perfect three-minute take (everybody does that!). On several occasions we got nothing useful down after several hours hard work and frayed nerves, yet the next day we positively flew! Standing up alone with phones on in front of a vocal mic does not result in the same frisson that playing to an audience does!
I burned my CDs on my computer, made the labels and typed and printed the inserts. They are OK, the music is the important thing and all that stuff, but I regret not getting my CDs made professionally now. It would have saved me a huge amount of time and wouldn’t have cost me much more than doing it myself. It would have looked much better too.
Steve
Ps. I still have plenty and they’re cheap… 
Steve
Producing the cut(s) is the hardest job of any recording.
We recorded all our stuff ourselves, to spare ourselves the stress of studio recording time and money considerations available to do it.
My son used a sound blaster live audio card and a Peavy 8 channel mixer and (mostly) condenser mics, using Cakewalk Express to record/edit the tracks.
I have just installed an M-Audio Delta 1010 sound card and I am trying to learn how it works, both in Windows and Linux (so few brain cells left…) I got a bad CD with it, so I am missing some programs (in Windows) that come with the card.
if you look on our website (in my sig), you’ll find our CD, along with some cuts from it.
We did the entire thing at home, ourselves. The recording, mixing, processing, etc. For the technical aspects, you’ll have to ask Tom (there’s a contact page on the website).
From my perspective:
*it’s VITAL to have good mikes. No matter what else you do, if you don’t have good mikes, you’ll get bad sound.
*know going in that you will NOT have an absolute, note for note, perfect recording ever.
*be willing to say “enough is enough” as far as the mixing, cleaning up, etc. is concerned. You can master something to death, and you will always hear one more thing that “should” be changed each time you listen.
*record more songs than you think you’ll need. That way, you can choose the best, and not have to do with a “not so great” one just to fill in.
When you think you have the “finished” product, play it on a number of stereos. Car stereos. Little boom box. Large home model. Walkman. It will sound different on each, and you want to know if what you’ve done is what you want to present every time.
As for liners - while I understand the need to put your life history on them, DON’T. I’m getting old. I can’t read anything in size 8 type without longer arms! Don’t put white print on dark background for the same reason. And do put up a webpage for the CD, it’s so much easier to read about it on a big screen than a little sheet of paper!
Most professional services provide good extras, in a lot of cases printing the cover and booklet are included in the deal, you just send off the master CD and a CD with the graphic design and a week later you have your CDs boxed at home. Depending on the number of copies cost stays well under a fiver each (excluding your studio cost, graphic design etc).
A few thoughts:
- If you give yourself too much time for recording, you can end up with something that’s technically perfect but emotionally sterile. When the Scottish singer Dick Gaughan recorded his most recent album “Outlaws and Dreamers,” he decided to make it feel more like a live recording by setting himself a tight time limit in the studio. The result captures much of the energy and feeling of a live performance and it’s one of his best albums even though there are a few rough spots here and there. You can read about his approach here (scroll down below the list of songs):
http://www.dickalba.demon.co.uk/discog/dsc_outl.html
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In the same vein as #1, you might try recording with the band all together in one room rather than separated in different rooms (which is customary) to capture more of that “live” sound. The disadvantages to the one-room approach are that it’s less easy to adjust the mix afterwards, since each instrument track may bleed a bit onto the others, and (for the same reason) if one person messes up everyone has to go back and re-record the whole cut together. But when you’re playing in separate rooms it can be harder to get the same level of energy in your playing as when you’re all together. And I’d rather have a live-sounding recording with a few mistakes than something slick and perfect.
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If you can afford it, don’t skimp on mastering and final production. In several of the CDs I’ve played on, listening to the final CD after listening to the studio tapes was a disappointment; quite a bit of sound quality was lost because the artists chose to go with a cheap service.
Thanks for all the inputs guys. I’ve seen many great advices so far. Stuff to think about for sure. I’ll keep you updated on the process if anyone’s interested. And keep 'em coming. Can’t get too many advices.
I meant to post these links before.
Producing A Demo / Early Album
There are lots of good pointers to other facets of “bandmanship” as well as recording.
Steve, you nailed it. I’ve worked in a few recording studios, and your advice is dead-on. The difference between a successful session an an unsuccessful session is that the groups who get good results come in well-rehearsed, thinking about their music and performance, and the groups who leave disappointed come in thinking about how they’re going to mic stuff and how many takes they’ll need.
Cheers Craig. I was on a steep learning-curve as they say, and after we did the CD (wrong way round!) I got more advice from experienced folks on one of the harmonica forums. I just wanted to pass on my overall feelings about how it went and what I’d change if I could do it again. I think you summed things up very well in your post.
I will get back to you Henke, tomorrow I hope!
Steve
Henke,
I was going to post this yesterday and forgot…sorry.
Whenever I do recording for my band (I play the piano/synth for a Journey-esq band) I just use my digital 32 track recorder. It has in-device mastering capability that simplify the process very easily without having to transfer media and thus lose sound quality…I then transfer the tracks to my laptop to clean up anomolies and noise if any, and record them to disk. There are a few publishing houses locally that do CDs here, but I have no clue about where you’re at. Usually, if you provide them with a digital copy of your tracks, they can do the recording and disk printing for you.
My recording unit was rather pricy, but a nice 16 track recorder can be had for about US$300 used.
If your school has all the recording and mastering gear, have someone do most of the busy work for you like pressing and printing the CDs. The cost to time value works out to be about the same.
OHMYGAWSH - you’re kidding??!! Journey is my absolute FAVORITE rock band! They were here last year, but I refuse to see them without Steve.
Yeah, I’m too husky to be a Jon Caine lookalike, but I try,…
Just saw them myself, last week in Vegas…they were handing out copies of their new album.
My advice to you is to approach the project from a producer’s standpoint first, then as an engineer, then as a musician. The actual nuts and bolts of recording are simple enough and you have certainly received some good advice from others regarding everything from mic selection to mindset coming into the recording session.
I finished my undergrad degree doing just what you are here and I can tell you that the most successful projects were the ones that didn’t wait until the last 4-6 weeks before the due date to begin the production. (Everyone else did that and they were all fighting for studio space at the last minute. Some folks were made to schedule their sessions to begin at 2am! Not good during finals week.)
The hardest thing you will face is the part you have never done. Organizing a recording project sounds like the hardest thing from your post. Make a schedule of what you want to accomplish. WRITE IT DOWN. Start with the due date and work backwards. Try to figure details like…
In order to have the CD done on ZZ date I will have to finish the duplication (if making multiple copies) by YY date because delivery of the final product will take (##) days.
In order to have the duplication finished on YY date I will have to have the master finished by XX date because duplication will take (##) Days.
In order to have the master finished by XX date, I will have to have the mixdown finished by WW date because creating a master will take (##) Days.
In order to have the mixdown finished by WW date I will have to have all cuts tracked by VV date because mixdown will take (##) weeks.
You get the picture…
At this point you should have a tracking completion date that is a few months or so before your due date. From that date backwards to today, divide your time evenly for the number of cuts you plan for the album.
Make sub schedules for each song’s due date. Keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller parts until you know what you have to do on a daily and even hourly basis to get the project done and in an excellent fashion.
Try to plan on doing more of the project earlier. As you go you will find that your skills will increase, in the control room, the isolation booth, on your instruments, and your planning. This will allow you more time to fix things you don’t like when you go to mixdown.
Don’t mixdown each cut individually. Do it all as an album to maintain the continuity/integrity of the overall sound and get consistent levels.
A Year is plenty of time to do an entire album if you schedule your time right and you will have the same ease of approach that BrianLee suggested if you know exactly how you are going to go about it. 
Good Luck!
Scott