Today I was working doing some home studio recording. Its been a while since I did this and I’m reminded that 2001 – 2004 in another life I did a great deal of this. Between 2001 and 2004 I recorded, mixed and mastered a series of spoken voice CDs which sold rather well. The main one “The Adventures of well being now” sold a few thousand and some of the ambient music from that track was used for an award winning movie short that was shown on C4. See below.
Technology has moved on a fair bit since then and in the last year I upgraded the studio to use an Audient 8 channel pre amp as well as the wonderful UAD plugins which have made a massive difference to final recordings. These days I mostly play and record acoustic music and have figured out how to get some really excellent sounds. The key is to use the best instruments and recording components.
For The Small Change Diaries I still use our “go to guy” for recording and mastering as he has the skills for what we need. However I’m thinking of doing a home side project in 2017 to see what might be possible when I’m working as both artist and producer. Certainly the sound quality I can get is really excellent and of course there are no shortage of ideas waiting to be recorded. I deliberately sat in on all the mixing and mastering for the Small Change Diaries CDs to educate myself into how to get a better sonic result. One thing I have learned from home studio recording is that doing this properly takes time. I would also never want to be a sound engineer for other artists, it would drive me totally crazy!