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How to make quality recordings In another of our occasional series of recording hints and tips, Ian Waugh looks at the process of recording and maintaining high quality audio. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear as the saying goes, although quite why you'd even try is another matter. But its modern interpretation - GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) - is never more appropriate than when applied to digital audio recording. The truth is, creating a good recording is as much art as science and it's as much - if not more - to do with what's between your ears as what's inside your computer. However, there are a number of steps you can take in order to maximise the quality of your recordings. Good recording Probably the most important thing you should do is to make the best possible recording you can each time you record. You might think that goes without saying but it's tempting to think that if a part is not front-line then the quality doesn't matter so much. Either that or you'll be tempted by that old wives' tale - you can fix it in the mix. (Although a certain amount of fixing can take place after recording, it's far, far better to have good quality material to work with in the first place.) So, when recording, record at the highest possible level but not so high that the signal clips the meters or distorts. Some software has clip indicators which show if a transient peak oversteps the mark. If you've done any tape recording you'll know that it's common practise to overdrive the input when recording. This actually produces a light form of compression creating the warm sound that die-hard tape recordists still talk about. You cannot overdrive a digital recording full stop! If you refer to an earlier tips feature, you'll recall that there are only so-many numbers for storing digital audio data. 16-bit recording, for example, has 2^16 or 65536 numbers. So what happens if the signal is already at number 65536 and the volume goes up another notch? There are no more numbers for storage so the values of any louder signals are truncated down to 65536. This causes clipping which you hear as distortion. Now you can see one of the benefits of using 24-bit and 32-bit recording - more bits, more headroom, greater accuracy and less opportunity for distortion. Getting warmer The so-called "coldness" of digital recording is simply a feature of its accuracy. Tape recording does not have digital's dynamic range so some frequencies are lost and, as mentioned, tape can be overdriven to produce a compression effect creating a perception of warmth. This "coldness" obviously worries many musicians and Cubase 5, for example, has a feature called TrueTape which "brings the warm sound of analogue tape machines to the cool world of precision digital recording". To our mind, however, it's better recording with as much accuracy as possible and then using EQ or compression to "warm up" the sound if you feel you must. Destructive behaviour Finally, when processing your tracks, try to avoid destructive editing or processing. Most sequencers apply effects on the fly in real-time so this is not usually a problem. However, some systems offer the ability to apply effects off-line which is useful if your computer doesn't have the welly to do it in real-time. If you do this, always keep a backup copy of the original recording, just in case you change your mind or discover that the effect does not fit well in the mix after all. One of the major benefits of digital recording is that you can keep copies of every take and copy them as often as you like without degrading the quality at all.
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