Frankly Audio

Before we mix we have to have something to mix. These initial posts are intended to get us all on somewhat the same page, so the next logical step is recording your performance or “tracking”. You may use different approaches to starting this process. If you are attempting a straight forward typical song arrangement without tempo changes you may want to use either the internal software metronome or a simple drum loop to preform with to maintain meter. You can program tempo changes but we’ll get into that later.

Again, if we use the paint-a-picture allegory for recording multitrack music, this is where you define your horizon and lay down the base color palette. You’ll use the instrument you are likely most comfortable with, guitar, bass, keys or just a pilot vocal, all of which you can eliminate after you build up your tracks so don’t worry so much about the quality at this point unless you are sure footed enough to record a “keeper” on your first track. One of the great things about working in the digital realm is that even if you have only four audio tracks to record with you can “bounce” them indefinitely without degradation (provided the source you record includes little or no noise). Bouncing tracks is a process that was also used decades ago with analogue tape recordings. What you are doing when you bounce tracks is combining multiple tracks together on to fewer tracks, even a single track. In the digital realm you can combine all four tracks in a four track application into one track and have three free. Something that could not be done in the analogue domain because the destination track would be wiped (recorded over) in the process. Also in the analogue domain the structure of audio tape itself along with noisy circuitry added a suffocating amount of noise and decreased dynamic range tremendously as the number of bounces increased.

In theory, as far as the actual recording parameters you have in your PC, you have the ability to record a signal technically better than almost every recording up to around the 1980’s. The magic is the music not so much the technical specs.

We’ll continue with more on tracking.

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