FEATURE
WhatYou Really Need
to Record
(in the Digital Age)
BY GLENN FEIT
The last twenty years or so have really seen a
revolution in recording, playing, and learning
music. Computers have changed everything
from what we use to record, to what we play,
to where we get our music lessons. But when
it comes to recording acoustic instruments,
the song remains the same: we still need
microphones, cables, speakers, and more.
The good news is there’s more good gear
available now than ever before. The bad news
is, there is more good gear available than ever
before. Unless you have unlimited resources,
it can be hard to choose what you really need
to get professional-sounding results. We’ve all
heard of “GIGO”—Garbage In, Garbage Out.
If you’re looking to record yourself, or just a
few musicians at a time, what gear is essential? Hopefully, this can help you choose what
you really need to get going and avoid some
problems along the way.
Power
Just about every current recording program
gives the user more than enough computing
power to rock the audio world, with results
surpassing what was available in million-dollar
studios only a generation ago (in terms of
distortion and noise). Once you’ve picked
your software and digital interface or standalone recorder, the most important thing is
electrical power.
Nothing ruins a recording session more than
having a take disappear because the power
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voltage level dropped, or went off completely
before the take could be completed—or in
the case of recording to a computer, saved.
Buy an uninterruptible power supply (UPS)
with enough battery backup to power your
recorder or computer, external hard drives
and computer monitor long enough to save
and shut down safely. Even if you record
with a laptop computer, which has a battery,
you still need the UPS for the external hard
drives you’re recording to. You’re not going to
record to the system drive where you store all
your programs, are you?
Storage
Storage is your next big issue. Audio eats
up disk space fast—faster if you use higher
sampling and bit rates. Backing up is crucial in the digital recording age. Analog
tape stores signals semi-permanently and
resists erasure. Digital data can disappear
in a click of a mouse. Rule of thumb: if
digital data doesn’t exist in at least three
places, it doesn’t really exist. You should
have a fast hard drive (at least 7600 RPM)
to record your sessions to, and another
drive of some type to back up to at the
end of each and every session. Later you
can also back up to other recordable
media, including CDs (CDRs), DVDs or
flash drives. Most current recording programs have a feature to simplify back-ups.
If yours doesn’t, it’s a simple matter to
copy the necessary files to another drive.
