Why choose a professional recording studio for your music? Why can’t I record and work at home even in this digital era?

 

Well, here is our take on this:

 

Imagination and creativity have no limits and as such we should feel proud for where the technology and digital music creation has gotten. Now a days, with software based samplers, you can bring in your home studio a Hollywood Orchestra, have any drum sound on a drum groove actually played and recorded by drummers at your disposal, travel in the most hidden and secret places on earth, bringing in your musical arrangements the most vast and unique array of ethnic instruments and cultures.

A word should also be said on plugins, and DAWs. If you can use a preset designed by the most demanded audio engineers in the business, why then get your track mixed/manipulated by some other engineer from the recording studio in your town? In addition, Digital Audio Workstations provide emulations of tape machines, compressors, exciters, equalisers, reverb, delays and more with ease of use, no maintenance and the possibility of loading any plugin instance you want into a channel strip, simulating what a real gear would sound like.

 

Well...all this is true and I think it’s great..however even if we do sparingly use plugins in your mixes, we never pretend to compare a sum of 1 and zeros with our real gears. We rather use it in combination. One of the very first thing you will realise when working in a professional recording studio is that once you’ve finished to track your music, it will already sound more finished than all the hours you’ve spent adding one plugin after the other to make it sound great.

Let’s aswell be so skilled and understandable of the fact that “we can do not all”. What do I mean by this? Well, if one person could “do it all”, there would probably be only one human being living on planet earth doing all jobs on his/her own!

I think one of the greatest tools for success and fantastic results is collaboration. Collaboration is, in my opinion, a sum of talent, art of listening and self-criticism, as well a sign of intelligence.

 

Collaboration is what brings it all together.

 

Have you ever asked yourself why there are still engineers and musicians that even with this whole lot of technology and ease of use, that is given to us for a few Dollars are instead spending thousands and thousands in recording studio equipment, treated, isolated and tuned rooms, high quality monitors, years of musical studies and continue to research, spending hours practicing and improving their recording skills? Ok, either we are experiencing a mass psychotic breakdown in 2017 for which these same people are throwing money and time away instead of leaving a more easy and relaxed life or...there is a clear reason for this!

Imagine if you, the instrument player or singer would one day be replaced by a software which will be playing like you with the exception that it does not need to sleep, eat, have a girlfriend, a dog and has no time off...it would be terrible, wouldn’t it? Well, the truth is that no one can be replacing you, your emotions and your playing even if technology gets near the reality day after day. And this whole thing with software instruments, if you listen carefully they pretty much sound like soul-less, like pre-recorded samples which are great for some demos. Plus,it will always sound like a misinterpretation of what the reality actually is and how an instrument really can be played. It’s the musician who makes the instrument and the great record.

 

Let me give you a perfect quote from Albert Einstein:

 

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots”.

Well, that says it all, right? That is why we are controlling all the fancy technologic inventions, own them but let expert hands operate and help us. We should always starve for more and surpass our limits, but we should never egoistically want to do it all, in my opinion.

 

To continue with the differences between professional and non-professional recording studios are rooms, gears, years of experience and people who track your music, choosing the optimum microphone and placement to track your instruments, capturing what you “have to say” at its best.

 

Recording at home is fine for the most part and I can really tell this from experience. As a matter of fact I’ve been recording lots of stuff at home on my old CDs but I’ve never forgotten to listen and I’ve always been committing my records in the hands of expert engineers in professional recording studios, where I could audition different mics and neutrally judge my recordings and see where I could improve. I can guarantee you that it is a real satisfaction to hear your recordings “speak” to you.

I actually still encourage my clients, even if this could speaks against my interests, to record at home if they feel to do so and I even tell them how. Am I drunk? No, I think that music is about collaboration and understanding.

The majority of my clients, however, decide in the end to record just a demo at home, as they consider rehearse their parts at home before the recording is taking place at 77 Sound Studio.

However, when a client feels comfortable to record at home, we create a specific plan where I tell him/her how I would set up the microphone for recording an instrument or set up the preamp, maybe the compressor as well and achieve the best S/N (signal to noise ratio) and for best possible recording.

 

Recordings are 85% of the finished record. This is why they are so important to begin with.

 

At times we would decide, in the case of a vocal line for example, to record the background vocals at home but do the main lines in the studio, since these are the most important parts of the record. This does not mean that we don’t care about the backing vocals, it simply means making a compromise, where at times it is exactly what we need to do.

 

Why contact us at 77 Sound Studio? Well, to come by at the studio for just a coffee and to make us part of your dream and if you will allow us we’ll help you achieve your musical goals. If you’re not happy...at least you will have drank a great Italian style cup of coffee!

 

For more info contact us at info@77soundstduio.com or +41 (0) 62 552 00 06.