Easy Digital Home Studio Recording

By Grant Derigo, Sarah Johnson and Jackie Rapp

Since digital recording technology allows a user to access all or the available tools of a professional studio directly from a desktop or laptop computer, many amateur and small time professional musicians have taken to recording most of their work straight from home.  The computer takes the place of mixing boards that previously took up an entire desk space.  Massive sound rooms engineered for perfect acoustics have been become almost obsolete thanks to digital compressors and the ability to directly adjust even the most minute details in an instruments frequency and wavelength.

Austin resident, Jack Swoboda is a part time musician and full time employee for Apple.  He spends his days providing technical support for Apple’s iPhone and in his free time he produces and composes completely original music from his computer right in his own bedroom.  While Jack feels that live it is usually nicer to have a live musician playing each instrument in a song, for the purposes or composing and recording it is often easier to use digital instruments for everything other than guitar, bass and vocals.

Mr. Swoboda’s typical songwriting process, form start to finish, involves the following:  First, he sarts by making a drum loop.  He uses a MIDI piano to play the parts or each drum.  Since there are so many drums in a kit, the easiest way to record drums is to make two or three separate tracks with different drums on each.  For instance one track might contain the kick and snare drums, another might contain the hi-hat and tom-toms while the third track contains any cymbal crashes Jack wishes to add.  Once the drum track is made it can be looped, or repeated continuously while other parts are added.  Usually the next step is to add a bass line, the backbone of the song.  Jack accomplishes this with an electric bass plugged into a bass amplifier with a digital interface.  Keyboards or synthesizers are then added if necessary with the MIDI piano.  Guitar is recorded by plugging in an amplifiable guitar to a digital input/ output source.  In this case, Jack is using a Line 6 amplifier with a built in XLR out.  Since most amplifiers do not have this function, others are more prone to either plug the guitar directly into the computer and use a digital processor.  The other option is to mic the amplifier the old fashioned way.  The last thing to be added are the vocals of each song.  It is important to note on the computer screen the visual difference between recorded MIDI and recorded audio.  The audio is shown as a sampled wave, while the MIDI is displayed as a series of boxes, each representing a note, drum beat or some other event on the audio timeline.

Once all of the different instruments have been recorded, Jack begins to arrange them using the editing screen.  He takes a small looped section of each part and arranges them visually on the screen.  Before computer based recording studios, all of the arranging was done with a pen and paper and the entire song was recorded in a continuous take.  With the computer Jack is able to make a song from multiple bits of recorded music, each about 10 to 20 seconds, by pasting or “painting” them onto the screen.

He also works with Clarice “Clarieta” Wright and The Secret Armadillo Society