With a blossoming of Home Studios, aspiring artists can create and record music at a lower cost, incredible convenience, and at a quality level that has been getting, on the whole, better and better. There are plenty of blogs and videos both free and paid teaching home recording techniques and best practices. But a handful of my clients prefer a more organic and seamless workflow that starts at home and moves into the studio. In these posts I will share a few optimal workflows that save money up front and take your results to amazing heights.
Vocals Over Beat
If you’re an aspiring singer or rapper, an easy low-cost way to get your songs recorded is to record over a beat or instrumental track that’s already produced and downloadable. If you’ve already written your lyrics, that’s Step 1. Step 2 is looking for the instrumental sound. If you find a track that works for you, you can usually download a compressed MP3 file that probably has repeated “buy this beat” tags. This is a great place to start in your home studio! You can load in the track as is, and lay down a basic vocal track. Simple editing tools on simplest DAW will let you do a rough arrangement of your song and work out your timing, lyrics, structure. Consider this a rough draft. By the way, you might start with the instrumental first and write your lyrics to it. Some artists I work with need to hear and feel the instrumental to get inspired on lyrics. So 1 and 2 are interchangeable.
Once you settle on a track, an arrangement, and you are confident this instrumental is the one, go right in and buy the license for this beat. Make that step 3. This is not optional. Everything you do from this point forward should be done with a licensed leased or purchased instrumental track or beat. So far you have a rough draft. Now you are about to begin tracking. When you purchase a license, consider your final intention with your song. If you are considering loading it up to the cloud on a streaming service, you’ll need at least a .WAV lease. MP3 files are not good enough for streaming. Also, you will find yourself that the .WAV is a much better track in your mix. *Important Note: When you buy your beat lease the producer will provide a license agreement. I recommend storing your downloaded track and the license in the same place. If any streaming service blocks your song because it ID’s the instrumental, you will need your license to resolve a dispute and prove you have the correct license to incorporate the track in your song. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to read your agreement. Pay attention to Scope and Territory so you understand how long and/or how many plays and duplicates your lease allows. Note where it applies (probably “The Universe”.) And finally, note how you need to credit the Beat Maker, Producer, or Composer, what their split is for writing, and whether they allow you to claim any publishing rights at all.
Does this all sound too complicated? It should. Music is property. And it is also a business. As soon as you put ink on paper or voice on a GarageBand track you have a tangible product that is worth money. If some of your song includes somebody else’s music, in the digital era it’s easy to buy, sell, or rent your content. It’s just as easy to steal it. You wouldn’t want someone stealing your compositions or lyrics, and the same applies to your song. The derivative work you make is your creation. But as long as somebody else’s content is a part of it, show respect and pay up.
Once you have your licensed track, load it into your DAW and start recording for real. This is where you need to decide how far you can take it at home, and where you want your professional studio to take over. If you’re pretty comfortable with your DAW, go ahead and replicate your track arrangement. Maybe in your rough “writing” version you already decided that the beat needs some splices, or some adjustments. Maybe you alter the tempo. Maybe you have a structure worked out with verses, choruses (hooks), or a bridge. These are pretty basic edits you can do yourself. With your arrangement in place, track your vocals.
A word on vocal tracking: Perform! It doesn’t matter how much reverb, autotune, or signal processing you end up with. Perform like you mean it. Do whatever you need to do to get your adrenaline up, channel the microphone anxiety, chill out, get into “that place”. Whatever it takes, when you record, this is a performance. For some, it’s the only one ever. Give it everything you have. While it’s possible to do some actual engineering while tracking your own, well, anything, I offer the suggestion that it will only interfere with your performance. Don’t let it. Hit record, start rolling, and belt it out. If you get it wrong, do it over, do another take or version, or add another track and do it again. This is brute force tracking because you need to be a musician now, not an engineer.
When you’re done with this, you have something to take to take to the professional studio. You have a purchased beat. You have an arrangement of the song. And you have a decent performance of the cocals or ither live instrumental you might have recorded. Bounce your tracks as WAV files or copy the whole project, if you and your studio use the same DAW, book your time, and show up when you are supposed to. If your engineer is good, and their studio is hopping, don’t waste their time and your money by being late. You’re going to pay for your whole slot anyway.
Earlier, I recommended at least purchasing a limited .WAV lease. If you really want to dig deep into your arrangement, consider leasing the track stems as well. You will pay more. While a .WAV lease might cost $60 or so, a stem lease might cost a few hundred (which is usually also Unlimited in scope, with no play limits or expiration date). You and your engineer can fully mix the whole instrumental content track by track. This lets you drop, add, arrange, edit, and fully remix and produce the entire song. You can add signal processing to individual tracks in real time, and take creative control of the entire sound. Remember though, that the recording is yours, but the track you lease is still the composer’s work, and the track stems are still their recording of it. Rearranging it and modifying their recording doesn’t make it your composition. But you and your engineer will appreciate the flexibility you get by having all the track stems to edit.
And about the killer performance you did at home? That’s the reference track your engineer will use to extract an even better performance at your pro studio where you will benefit from awesome microphones and preamps, professional signal processing and mixing, clean track punches, and precise and powerful mixing.
Once you have your professional mix, plan, with your engineer, to send your track to a mastering lab to polish up the overall sound. This is often overlooked, but shouldn’t be. A lot of pro studio engneers will assume that their clients are going to take the mix and put it straight up on SoundCloud as is. They will mix hot, and will probably take a standard short cut and put a lot of the signal processing on the stereo bus inserts instead of only on individual tracks. Make sure you tell your engineer you plan to have your track mastered (which can be done for about $100 a track from some of the best mastering labs in the world, or for $10 on gig sites like FIVERR from a decent gigworker). Either way, unless your downloaded beat has mastering-level processing already (which it shouldn’t), this is the process that will make your song sound a lot more like it was done from tracking to mastering by a professional, and will hold its own compared to full pro productions.
Be sure to check back for more tips and tricks! The next installment will focus on the home to pro workflow for a singer-songwriter tracking only instruments.
Write us at create@studio3lbny.com
Keep Creating!
Pete Buckets
Studio3 LBNY 