Folks have asked about what I use to record. The answer varies.<\/p>\n
At home in my “kitchen recordings” I use\u00a0a MacBook Pro with GarageBand <\/a>(GB)\u00a0and Audacity.<\/a>\u00a0 This is mostly because GB is a Mac product and plays nicely with my tools, but it’s limited in weird ways sometimes and I can usually make my changes in Audacity if it will not work in GB.<\/p>\n Garage Band has a lot of plugins that modulate your recordings in different ways. This can be good but can lead to an overproduced sound sometimes, or even a sound that’s plain weird, even if unintentional. I usually mess with the settings and make custom environments for spaces in which I record regularly.<\/p>\n Sometimes I’ll use my USB\u00a0MiC by Apogee<\/a>\u00a0which I really like. It currently retails for about $225 online. You can read all its details online, but in a nutshell, it has basic gain controls and a stand and plugs into the Mac and the iPad and had good ratings at the time I was buying.<\/p>\n I use this at the kitchen table or in the laundry room for more “professional” sound recording – i.e. when I don’t want to hear the clock in the background.<\/p>\n I also use an iPad with GarageBand for iPad. Because it’s super portable this is a great solution for SCA folks to record on the fly. I also sing frequently in a large, beautiful Catholic church with fantastic acoustics and a big pipe organ – but I don’t want to set up my laptop to record a solo piece – that feels weird. The iPad alone takes pretty great recordings in that space with the inline mic in the device itself.<\/p>\n I also have used the MiC with the iPad and GarageBand for recording and it’s been a lovely combo. I always export to the Mac to do work on the recordings as the GB for iPad functions differently than the computer version.<\/p>\n About Headphones:\u00a0<\/strong>If I’m doing fancy things, like adding tracks,\u00a0I use a set of in-ear small headphones for recording, and a pair of over the ear for listening. I got the best ones I could get at the time, so they were cheap. That being said, I like the in-ear ones best for recording as they don’t have much sound bleed.<\/p>\n I know people who have made great home studios. I’m not one of them. I can competently record and edit myself, but it’s not always what I want. I don’t want to have to be engineer – I want to be musician. So my third setup is “go to the studio.” The one I go to is Main Street Studio in Bangor, Maine<\/a>. Andrew Clifford is the recording engineer (and a percussion teacher!) Studio A is a welcome home-away-from-home and I found that my investment in the time I spent there was invaluable.<\/p>\n Andrew chose carefully the mic\/s for this project and preamps so they’d be the best things for my voice and style. I only ever had to think about music (ok, and sometimes money) but I always felt like my work was in excellent hands and I had a real professional there to give me feedback.<\/p>\n Ultimately when I decided to record and release a CD I decided to record at a studio. To me, the results are considerably better than I could have achieved at home. The mic\/preamp combo at the studio was a $10k set, add to that the sound of the studio room, quality of the engineering, and quality of the headphones for tracking – it was worth every penny to me. (And because I know you want to know,\u00a0the studio charges $50\/hour.)<\/p>\n I will detail more about the process of making the CD in later posts. But moving on…<\/p>\n I’m going to attach some pieces for you to listen to that might help illustrate why I made the choice I made to record professionally.<\/p>\n I’ve included a media player which has songs from my studio CD, “I Am of the North” which was recorded in the late winter and early spring of 2014 and released in July 2014.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n (If below this\u00a0sentence\u00a0there appears for you a large, blank space, just go to the CDBaby website here and you can listen to the clips there at\u00a0http:\/\/www.cdbaby.com\/cd\/aneledafalconbridge<\/a>)<\/p>\n <\/p>\nSetup 2 – Field Recordings<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Setup 3 – Studio<\/strong><\/h3>\n
So what’s the difference?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nStudio Recordings<\/h2>\n