Home Music Recording

The book I read to research this post was Home Recording for Musicians for Dummies by Jeff Strong which is a very good book which I bought from kobo. This book assumes you are a musician who can play an instrument and now a bit about how sound is formed etc so it skips some topics. I’m not a musician but am interested in recording various friends making music so was interested in this. You have various options when it comes to recording like you can use a computer and have things like your mixers and equilizers in software form, which if you already have a computer is probably your cheapest option. Another option is buying a standalone recording studio which makes it difficult to upgrade. One thing they suggest is to start with buy the essential stuff to do your recording and you can add to it at a later date. Digital recording is the way to go whether you use a computer hard drive or a storage in a box, often called a SIAB solution. You need plenty of microphones and a lot of people use the various types of cardoid microphone for instruments & dynamic or something similiar for voice. The dynamic tends to record midranges so is no good for recording operatic vocals. You can put a pair of tights over a mike to protect it from dust. You might in some cases need a pop filter to stop crackle noises getting in the recording. The best interface for computer recording equipment is USB 3.0 which is 10 times faster than USB 2.0. Some storage devices use proprietary formats for storage when ideally you want to use a format like MP3 or AIFF that can be exported. The best MP3 encoding software which is also free is probably the iTunes software. It’s probably the easiest to use too.

Spotify

The book I read to research this post was Spotify for Dummies by Kim Gilmour which is a very good book which I got from my local library. Spotify is a music service whereby music which you can choose is streamed over the internet for you to listen to. It’s compatible with android players & ipods or iphones. There’s a premium package for £10, an unlimited package for £5 & a free package. The free version only gives 10 hours a month & contains adverts. Spotify use your computer to help distribute the music thus saving on servers & while this shouldn’t mean people have access to your data in the wrong hand It could be abused. A few groups like the beatles haven’t come on board although their solo work which is quite extensive is available. Spotify has sites in quite a lot of countries & always follows the local laws of that country. It’s a swedish company. One of the beauties of spotify is that in addition it’s also a kind of social network where you can interact & also share playlists. There’s also a lot of plug ins that work with spotify. It contains over 15 million tracks & if you get spotify premium there are often bonus tracks available.