it’s review time again :-)

quite some time ago i mentioned a book i was going to read and i wrote this entry about the question if high end gear makes any sense for the non-studio-pro-guy. anyway, the book i’m talking about is called Guerrilla Home Recording by Karl Coryat. the subtitle goes as follows: how to get great sound from any studio, no matter how weird or cheap your gear is. and that’s about it. thanx for reading, good night.

hehehe, just pulling your leg. since i wrote that last entry about this subject, i read this book twice and i still like it a lot. the author is – like me – convinced that someone with the right know-how is able to make a decent and professional sounding recording even if he/she has to make do with obsolete or amateurish equipment. i’m going to quote a brief passage of the introduction which makes the attitude quite clear:

…it’s all a huge lie, fabricated to get you to spend your money. look at it this way: the best-stocked kitchen with the most professional pots and pans won’t magically turn you into a brilliant chef. you need to learn the basics of the craft first. and even though i’m not much of a cook, i’d swear that if i knew what i was doing, i could whip up one hell of a soufflé with 20 bucks’ worth of thrift store pots and pans and run-of-the-mill ingredients from a discount supermarket.

so that’s where he begins, by first telling what guerrilla home recording is about – basically it’s about improvising, about specifying your goal and reaching it with the tools available. he then gets into the nuts and bolts of sound and recording, but only the things one needs to know – nothing more and that’s fine with me. there’s basics about soundwaves, dynamic range, frequency spectrum etc. about equalizers, compressors and so forth. he gets into the different cables and plugs one will encounter, explains the signal-to-noise ratio, midi, ground loops and gives a complete tour of the signal chain – in my opinion a very important chapter that every musician should read before getting the hands on the first instrument. experience taught me that there are some areas on a mixer a lot of musicians never understood, like the insert for instance or what exactly the ‘q’ at he knob in the eq-section means. you can find some examples for efficient board setups as well as lots and lots of workarounds for common problems, like channel-shortage for example….

there is a chapter about effects and one that’s called ‘how to record almost anything’, in which the author talks about miking amps, recording bass, various guitar sounds, synths, lead and backing vocals etc. followed by a chapter about drums only. i was a bit disappointed about his opinion to use sampled drums. i love playing drums and recently got into the recording side of that great instrument. on the other hand though, he’s absolutely right because recording drums on your own is a very difficult task. it’s not only about good microphones, phase-parties, correct pan-positions but also about the right room to record in. and hands down, the options of someone without a pro-location are very limited. i came up with a cool sound i still like a lot, with four mics and a lot of patience during the mic-placement-trial-and-error-phase. the problem is, that is the sound. i won’t get another sound out of it because of the room – meaning if i find a song that embraces this sound, fine. but for anything else it just won’t be right. so sampled drums might be the only option for a professional sounding production. i’m not perfectly sure about it yet… by the way, the author is against quantization and such, instead he recommends playing the drums through a midi interface to keep them human. i agree.

the last chapter is about mixing and mastering and there’s an exercise as well that i didn’t try yet, but i’m convinced it will teach you/me a lot…

just to be clear about this, he does not by any means say that you could drive a pro studio out of business with just know-how and an old 4-track-cassette-recorder. it’s just about getting the best out of your gear, whatever your gear is. and to be honest, i was waiting for something like this…

all in all i strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in making his/her own recordings. there are a lot of things in this book that will help you create a better product than most of the others. i don’t think it’s the only source of information one should consult when getting into this interesting topic but it sure is a great way to start…

go to backbeat books to check it out. they have other nice books as well, maybe i’ll post a review of another one soon…