Howdy SEA Fans, welcome to another tiptuesday blog post herein we share information that the sound engineers and music enthusiasts will find it useful on a weekly basis.

Last week we have discussed some tools that will help to improve the vocal performance and today we are going to talk about how to use rehearsal room for recording rather than spending huge amount for recording studios.

Instead of booking an expensive recording studio, some bands go the supposedly simpler way and try the recording in the rehearsal room. Of course, there is lots of difference – that’s why we’ve put together a few tips for you here, which you can consider.

Tip 1: Use the Profit of One of the Most Important Resources in Recordings: Time!
There is no studio clock on the wall, which keeps you constantly threatening, that every minute costs money: If it does not work with the song, makes extensive breaks. Or stop and try again next time. With time you can blow around as you want.

Tip 2: Do not expect too much
Even if you come with high-quality equipment in harsh quantities: The often cramped conditions and the structural differences between rehearsal room and recording studio with acoustic expansion and separation of studio and direction may be reflected in the results again. However, you should take the challenges sporty and take advantage of the benefits. After all, the rehearsal room situation is familiar to you, where you wrote or rehearsed the songs. And that’s another advantage.

Tip 3: Invest the saved money
Instead of spending huge money for the studio, do you take the interface, computers, microphones, and cables from one of you who runs home recording at home? Excellent! Usually you simply throw your equipment together. But something will be missing anyway. Maybe that’s the moment when you need to spend some of your money on a decent condenser microphone. This may come first on the drum kit and will then be used for main vocals, background vocals and acoustic guitar overdubs.

Tip 4: Import everything live?
In most cases, you will have to do without the recording of vocals and instruments together. Of course, you can also work without the vocal system, which probably lingers too much into the other microphones. Even with that, you can partially live, but then a subsequent editing and reasonable editing is often unthinkable. Can the singer record with headphones? There is still the opposite problem, that as good as the whole band will be heard on the vocal track. A proper compression or pitch/timing changes are thus impossible.

Tip 5: Keep everything nice and easy
The more effect pedals are in use, the more different memory locations the guitarist has to call, the more locks the drummer makes, the greater the chance that something will get in the way. In most cases, it makes sense to hack the songs as well as possible with as little material as possible. Take the drummer off the China splash and the second snare. And the background vocals make you even better behind, as you hang during the performance still a block on the leg.

Tip 6: Play it safe
If possible, take the dry signals from all instruments via D.I./Instument-Input. Takes the amps tend to be quieter, so you no longer have to fight against the guitar sound on the drum overhead microphone when re-amping.

Tip 7: Set up a room microphone
Must the complete miking be trimmed to maximum channel separation? No: You know the acoustics in your rehearsal room and have automatically optimized your sound during rehearsals. Then put a microphone (maybe even a stereo microphone!) To the place where you build for simple recording otherwise your cell phones or mobile recorder. You can still throw away the trail later. But you will usually be glad to have such a characterful overall sound available.

Tip 8: Provides a good listening situation for assessing the recording
If you want to know if the microphones are correct and all sounds fit, you should not listen to the rehearsal room but bring your monitor boxes with you. But here too, put it right and listen to pieces you know. Also, good headphones are helpful!

Tip 9: Everyone has to listen well
Good monitoring is the alpha and omega for good performance. If the drummer does not hear anything or needs to play quieter than usual, nobody is helped. Headphone monitoring may be useful for everyone, but much of the vibe of a rehearsal session is lost.

Tip 10: The boss is the bookkeeper
Make a note of which song was recorded in which versions when and how. Where were the weak spots? Is it possible to replace the intro of Take 2 with that of Take 8 in editing? When recording, it all seems understandable and logical to you, a few days later when mixing you have forgotten everything again. And you have to choose a person who is basically the audio engineer and the producer. Regulate who has the last word – otherwise, you will not only irritate the resource time beyond measure – there should be so many bands that have hopelessly quarreled with such undertakings!