You want to record yourself? This is actually a really good idea! Why? Let me explain…
Recording your practicing sessions
In my humble opinion you should try to record yourself as soon as possible. Start with your first practice and record yourself. When we’re practicing we concentrate on thousand different things so we can’t pay attention on everything that’s going on. How was the sound? The tone? The rhythm and timing? I don’t know! “I was completely concentrating on the right notes…”
Well, if you would have a recording of that session you’d be able to answer those questions. At the beginning of our musical journey the used recording gear and audio quality of the recording are not that important. Nowadays everybody has a smartphone so there’s your recording gear and it sounds great! Just open up your voice memo app and you’re ready to go! You can even record yourself on video so afterwards you can watch yourself playing. That way you’ll hear AND see the good and the bad stuff that happens when you’re practicing: your mistakes, bad/good technique and rhythm, maybe a nice (accidental?!) move or lick that you played and you should remember… All that is impossible to see and notice if you concentrate on other things. But the recordings, you can save and watch them anytime you want, you can see your progress much better and that should motivate you even more!
Recording your music
Sooner or later every musician wants to write some original music – it’s just the nature of the beast! Of course you can write everything down if it’s easier for you but I think the easiest way is to, again, record yourself. To keep ideas so you don’t forget them the smartphone is once again your best friend. Or your tablet. Or your computer. If it’s just a simple chord progression that you want to remember, an audio recording is the way to go, so you don’t use too much memory on your device. However, if you’re playing something complicated and you might forget how you played it – just put it on a video and it’s always there for you when you want to refresh your memory…
You want more?
Well, it happened to a lot of us. One day you just want your recordings to sound better, more “professional”. We are very fortunate that a lot of very good quality gear has become very affordable: microphones, preamps, interfaces, software… Oh, you don’t know much about this? I’m going to go into basics of recording in my next posts but for now let me say this: at the beginning always use what you already have! Nowadays almost everybody has some sort of computer at home so there’s your recording machine! There is free software online (DAW – digital audio workstation) that’s perfectly fine to start basic recording. Maybe there are already some speakers connected to your computer or some headphones lying around. If so, you only need an audio interface (the device that converts analog signals into digital ones and vice versa) and a microphone. That’s it! You can do amazing stuff with this basic setup…
But as I said: we will talk about this in future posts so stay tuned…
