Top 50 Recording Tips

Before you can mix or master a piece of music, you first need to capture the raw performance in your DAW. Mark Cousins reveals some essential recording tips.

What’s the real secret behind the best-sounding commercial CDs? Is it the way the recording has been mixed, the price of the microphone used to capture the vocal, or the amount of Class-A analogue processing used to master it? Although a definitive answer is always elusive, it’s certainly true that the best records start with solid foundations – in other words, a series of instruments that have been recorded ‘to tape’ or a DAW in the most effective way possible. Indeed, with some well-tracked instrumentation laid down, the rest of the recording process often just falls into place – the mix fi ts together perfectly with clear separation between the instruments, and the master sounds polished, defined and loud (without having been pushed by a limiter to the edge of its existence).

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 74
Filed under General Features, Features

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