Sessions

Finally, we can talk about the actual act of recording. In detail, with practical tips and tricks. This chapter is about each session. What should you do before and after a session? How do you start and end it well?

For this chapter, a session simply means one sustained period of sitting in your recording booth and doing recordings. A session starts when you enter the room and turn on the equipment. The session ends when you turn off the lights and leave the room, to do something else the rest of the day.

Before each session

This has three parts:

• Prepare material
• Prepare yourself
• Checks

Other vital elements (microphone placement, gain staging, …) have been discussed before and won’t be again.

Prepare material

Remove or turn off all devices you don’t need. They make (unexpected) noise. They interrupt your flow. Leave your smartphone out of the room. If you really need it, put it into airplane mode.

Prepare your clothes. Don’t wear clothes that make noise, are too tight (to work in), or have lots of bells and whistles. Opt for soft, warm, comfortable clothes. This is easiest during the summer: that time of year, you barely wear clothes, and they’ll be thin and loose. During the winter, find some thick bland sweaters to put on.

Prepare your pockets. Remove any items from them. These, again, make noise when you don’t want to. Additionally, they make it less comfortable to sit or hold an instrument.

Prepare your arrangement. Don’t just create a song and hope you’ll remember it. Have an arrangement printed (or written down, if that’s your style). Maybe multiple times, in case you lose one, or you make edits along the way. This is especially useful when recording with multiple people or across multiple days. Having a few papers that tell you exactly what to record ensures you’re consistent and never loose your flow.

Tune your instruments. Doesn’t matter that it “sounds fine” to you. Or that you just recorded something with the guitar last night. Tune them. At least before each session, but preferably between takes as well. Like a recording that is slightly off the beat, multiple overlapping recordings of instruments that are slightly out of tune will sound horrible. And it’s another thing you can’t fix later without adding nasty audio artefacts.

Prepare any tools you might need. Keep a bowl of guitar plectrums nearby, as well as a capo. Keep the other instruments you’ll need on hand, tuned and ready. Keep some pen and paper for quick notes or reminders. You don’t want to interrupt your flow or get out of that “creative, emotional state”.

Finally, I like preparing all my tracks. Because I have an arrangement, I know exactly which tracks I’ll need! So I create them quickly in bulk, then name them accordingly. This often means starting with 6-10 tracks. I like keeping my tracks mono, but that’s partially because of some bugs with stereo tracks in older versions of my DAW. So even if I double a recording, I still use two tracks named “ChordsL” and “ChordsR”. But you can also use a single stereo track for those situations.

Prepare yourself

This means warming up! Both your voice, your body and your musical muscle.

Throughout this guide, I’ve said many things about “being in the zone” or “not interrupting your flow”. I really think the most crucial skill is to learn how to “perform optimally”. How to prime your brain for success and creativity.

Warming up is one of the key ways to do so, of course. By warming up, you set yourself up for success. You’ll play your instrument better, your voice will sound better, and our brains get sharper with exercise.

• You can read my guide on Singing & Speaking for vocal exercises.
• Or read my guide on Fitness & Health for general health tips.

But there’s no reason to overthink this. Some small things are already fine.

• Light stretching, jogging, walking around
• Some simple scales or random sounds to get your voice up and running
• Improvise for five minutes on your instrument

Don’t put too much pressure on this. It’s one of the major pitfalls: you want each session / take to be perfect, which leads to insecurity and self-doubt, which leads to all your recordings actually being worse.

So shake our body loose. Improvise and make random rounds for five minutes. Run around, lift some heavy things, and when you feel energized—record that performance!

I know some people who swear by recording vocals in the evening, never in the morning. I sympathize with this, to some extent. Yes, you can prepare and warmup your voice to perform right out of bed. But you’ll fight a battle, and even if your voice is ready, the rest of your body might not be. Later in the day, both body and voice are more easily capable of delivering a strong performance.

There are two reasons why I don’t completely sympathize. First, for many it’s not possible to make a lot of noise late in the day. They have housemates, neighbors, whatever. Secondly, I often record straight out of bed, because I’d otherwise lose inspiration or motivation … leading to not recording at all. In general, I’d always recommend the workflow that allows you in your situation to do the most work every day.

Checks

Check if your instruments or material are in good shape. Maybe your guitar (or other string instrument) needs new strings. Maybe one of the cables you use is twisted in a weird way and near breaking. Maybe your audio interface took much longer to start than last time—see if it still works well or if something broke.

Check the tempo. As mentioned before, your subjective brain can pick the wrong tempo for the song for all sorts of reasons. Once you’ve recorded everything in that tempo, you’re pretty much screwed if you want to change it. So check the tempo a few times, play with the metronome turned on, and make sure it fits.

Check the noise (from the environment). Sometimes you’re just unlucky and your neighbor just decided to use their leaf blower. Or you hear an ambulance coming, and it’ll take half a minute before it passes and the sound dies down again.

This doesn’t always have to be a problem. That’s why it’s under checks. Listen to your recordings; check if your microphone actually picks up on the noise you hear so clearly. Chances are that it doesn’t hear that at all. Because our ears are different from microphones.

Check the state of the session file. Sometimes, you left some tracks on/off from before. Or you accidentally kept another track “record enabled”. You might have significantly turned up the volume of a recording (to listen for a specific thing) or put all the sounds into your left ear only (for singing with headphones).

Forget to check this, and you might record for 30 minutes before realizing you have to throw it all away. (Or just, generally, being confused why things sound weird to you.)

And most importantly, check if everything is turned on. It’s stupid how easy it is to forget this. You press space bar to start recording … but your microphone isn’t even plugged in. You put on the headphones, but forget to plug those into the audio interface, which means you don’t hear a thing.

Do a few test recordings. Clap your hands, or snap your fingers, to see the microphone response. Listen back with your headphones.

Once a handful of 10 second test recordings went without mistake, you’re ready.

After each session

Well, this can be summarized with: clean up after yourself.

Many issues above stem from not properly ending your session last time: tracks left open, equipment left in a weird state, a session file that’s a mess. So take those 5 minutes after each session to clean up and prevent future problems.

Software

First of all: save that file and make a backup! Audio files are huge. It’s a pain, I know. But losing two weeks of hard work because of laziness is even more of a pain :p Get a dedicated, large SSD onto which you can backup all recordings.

• Make sure all tracks have a name
• Make sure the name is correct. (Maybe you have a track Piano and one Guitar. And you accidentally switched them, recording Piano to the Guitar track. Catch that early, or you’ll catch it at a more unfortunate moment.)
• Turn off any special state on tracks (mute, solo, record enabled, etc.) It should just be a standard session that records or mutes nothing, and will play all its layers. (That’s why I recommend creating one track that holds your cue mix for recording. All you need to do is turn that on at the start of each session and off at the end.)

Optionally, you can listen to all your recordings in a state that’s as “finished” as possible. (All relevant layers on, in stereo, start to finish.) Note anything you want to change. Any recording that sounds weird or bad to you. These notes will be your guide for the next session.

Hardware

Turn off all your hardware. I know many people just keep things on “for convenience”. Well, I care more about saving money and the climate than my convenience. I always turn everything off and unplug it. This is a fast process if

• You don’t have miles of equipment
• It all connects to only one or two outlets, through splitters

But there is an order in which to turn it off!

Reduce all volume levels to zero before changing anything about your audio chain.

Your monitors/speakers are LAST IN, FIRST OUT

They’re the last thing you turn on, and the first thing your turn off. If you don’t, you’ll get a nasty pop or blast of sound the audio interface loses power. (As such, also never connect or disconnect your speakers while the interface is already turned on.)

After that, you can turn off the interface. (Its knobs should be at zero by now.) Then you can turn off your computer.

With everything safely off, you can change your setup if you want. Plug microphones in. Change your headphone. Whatever.

Conclusion

This is a short but practical guide to follow before and after each session.

But as always, you learn all these things through experience. You will make some mistakes. Maybe break one piece of equipment or produce a nasty sound. And you’ll learn from that to never do the bad thing again.

I learnt most principles about dealing with audio safely at my high school. They had a program (called AugPop) that allowed you to rehearse with a band after school. For roughly an hour, you were completely free to use the instruments there and make any music you wanted. The leader of the project was keen on giving us as much freedom and independence possible.

Well … only one person needed to crank the volume to max once … or pull a cable out of an active amplifier … and everybody immediately learned not to do that :p