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hey people, I'm working on an independent album. I do my recordings in a home studio but I want it mastered to where it has that sound of an album that was professionally recorded at a major studio. Will I get that high quality sound if I do a "rough mix" at home studio then take it to a major studio for mastering, or do I have to do the whole project at a major studio????
The mic used in the home studio is about $500, recording is done with pro tools on a mac G4 and the hardware is a digi 001. Including a whole bunch of other racks and knobs I don't know about. I would like to hear as many opinions as possible.
thanks,
Fred.
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This depends on what kind of music you are doing. If you are doing Electronic music (hiphop, R&B, techno, etc) it's easier to get good results at home since you're not dealing with acoustics as much as you are electronics.
Doing a Straight ahead jazz quintet at home is a lot tougher because you have to mic all the acoustic instruments and keep the noises of the everyday world out of the microphones.
I did an R&B album for someone and it was done on a 001 in his spare bedroom. There were a couple things we went to a bigger studio and recorded but 90% of the whole album was done in his spare bedroom (including all the vocals and most of the guitars). That might be the way for you to go. For example on one of the ballads we did he hired an 18-piece string section to come into a studio and record a string arrangement for the song. We then took it back to the 001 and edited it and mixed it. We also had a live rhythm section on 3 songs, which were also recorded at a real studio and then edited and mixed on the 001 at the artist's house.
The one really good thing about doing most of it at home is you can keep doing it until it's right...recording acoustic guitar and a truck drives by, "stop for a second and let's start over after the truck is gone..." The mix isn't quite right after you take it to 10 different stereo systems, no big deal just open up the session and tweak.
I will say it took us a lot longer to do it at home on the 001 than it would have if we had done everything in a commercial studio. It would have taken us about 2 months to do in a professional studio compared to the 9 months it took us to do at home. But we saved somewhere around $60,000~$80,000 by doing most of it at home.
We had it professionally mastered at one of the big mastering studios here in L.A. and that really helped too. But before we even booked the mastering we had remixed each song about 3 or 4 times to make sure each was perfect. It's tough to really hear what's happening in a mix when you're in a bedroom with no acoustic treatment and crappy monitors, but that doesn't mean you can't eventually get it right regardless.
If you're interested, I can send you an email with the link to the artist's website. He's got 20 second snippets of each song from the album.