What I Discovered From My Initial Experience With Recording

I recorded my first CD containing my orginal songs with the help of a friend who happens to own his own recording studio. As a way of gaining experience and "seat time", he had asked me to take all the studio time I required for free, and he would record and mix the music for me.

I had recorded simple demos before using an older four-track cassette recorder, but this was my first official recording encounter. Digital recording was an revolutionary concept, and my friend had one of the first set-ups for recording direct to computer hard drive. It was an amazing learning encounter for me. I observed how my friend did microphone placement for vocals, guitar amplifiers and drums; how he placed instrumentalists in different rooms so they could play live "together" and he could record multiple tracks without audio bleed-over; how he managed problems on the fly when things didn't go as he'd planned. I paid close attention during the mixing process, as my friend would make the smallest changes to the track volumes or equalization to improve the sound. I kept asking questions about the process and my friend would patiently explain the whole process to me and at the same time answer all my questions. And collectively, we made a record we were both proud of.

I do not think I realized just how much my first recording experience taught me until years later, when I was put into a couple of circumstances that drew upon my knowledge. The first one was as a small-time music performer, in hosting events where there was no audio engineer or sound person; if I intend to make it sound good, it was up to me. It was actually surprising when I was able to handle the sound equipment and manipulate the sound mixer with ease. I learned a lot of that fundamental knowledge from my recording experience. The other scenario that drew on my know-how was when I became the sound engineer and wrote the music score for two short films my son wrote and directed. Not really being qualified (I thought), I felt overwhelmed and quite out of my forte; but I'd learned enough from that time in the studio to detect when an audio signal was too loud or too soft, and how to compensate; and in post-production, I was able to write and record multiple songs on a Mac computer, and I knew how to make the adjustments to balance the sound levels. I even discovered out how to remove unnecessary noise from the audio of the film itself, when background noise influenced the quality.

These projects made me realize that my first recording played a big role. I also realized from that encounter just how much we actually learn things by simply doing them.