If you’re in a band, you need a home studio. In fact, every musician needs a home studio. But if you are in a band and you’re reading this, then you my friend need to be the “recording guy/gal”.
Every band needs one. That special someone who has some equipment, some knowledge, and drive to organize recording sessions for the band. My guess is that the rest of your bandmates (like most musicians) don’t want to be bogged down with the technical stuff, so that simply leaves you.
Record Your Rehearsals
The best thing you can do is starting this week, record your band’s rehearsals. Whether you multi track it or just get a stereo mix of the band, make sure you get your practices on “tape”. These recordings can be rough of course and will mostly be utilized for arranging, writing, and demoing.
It’s amazing what you hear when you listen back to a “live” recording of yourself. You start to see where a song needs some tweaks or where the band isn’t jiving well. Plus if you happen to play to a click live (many bands do) then your demo can easily be imported into your actual recording session to serve as a guide track.
Think Like a Producer
While the rest of your band will be thinking about playing gigs, writing new music, or something else entirely (like how to pay rent being a musician), you need to start thinking like a producer. Ask yourself these types of questions: What are our best songs? Are we ready to record them? When/where can I get the drummer alone to record some drum tracks? When would we want to release an EP/album? Should we just release digital singles on our website?
Every time you get together with the band is an opportunity to bring your mobile recording rig along and try to potentially work on some recordings. You may never have any actual “sessions” booked, but instead you piece together a killer album over the course of 6 months. The idea is to be thinking about these things enough so you can capitalize on your time together.
Push The Limits
The great thing about recording yourself (if you know how) is that you have no pressure. You can be as creative as you want. You can try crazy weird recording techniques into the wee hours of the night only to realize that they sound horrible, and no money or pride is lost. Only your time.
So go ahead and get your band to try things. Be original. Be creative. Don’t feel pressure, just make music and have fun. Remember…we are living during a great recording revolution where you have access to so much powerful recording equipment and technology that happens to also be super affordable. Grab some gear, grab your band, and be the recording guy that I know you can be!
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I already am!
It’s scheduling that’s the hardest thing, i think. But if i can get the songwriter in to lay down scratch tracks, i can get the rest (i’m the drummer 
)as they have time.
Yeah, scheduling is the toughest. Can’t seem to get my band in the studio lately either…life gets in the way sometimes
Hey Grahan great posts
Do you know what is the best way to turn a whole drum kit into a loop (dual mono loop) ?
I prefer working with loops rather than five or more channels of drums when I am creating a song, so I was wondering in take a recorded drum and turn into a loop, then start work from there
Greets, Take Care
Hi Francesco! What I would do is simply set all the outputs of the drum channels to a stereo bus and then record that to a free stereo audio track with the same stereo bus set to it’s input. Then you will have a nice tidy dual mono loop to cut up and mess around with!
Thx man, do you recomend do some fade-in and fade-out (like 5 ms) before I consolidate the region in order to create the dual mono loop ?
Greets, take care.
I will do batch fades like you described only if I have been cutting up the drum tracks for editing and have a bunch of regions. Then yes, batch fade before you record down to a stereo track.
Graham, Love the site! (you being a worship leader is da bomb! Me too…) I’m in a christian band (live41band.com-check it out!). I’m not the “recording gal” of some of the band stuff. But I am of my stuff! Got extremely frustrating, wanting to put down my songs and the others were too busy! Now I have my own setup and creativity is fantastic! Instead of trying to fit into their schedules, I just walk down the hall! The E-book is dead on! Keep up the great work, I plan on learning a whole lot from the site.
Dar – Thank you for your kind words. So glad the ebook was helpful to you. Keep up the good work!
Lovin’ the Thrice pic
Found your blog today and am impressed all the way around!! I’ll be back daily.
Glad to have you Aaron! Love me some thrice!
Hey Graham,
Just discovered your site last night, worlds of info that I can’t wait to try. I currently am the recording guy for my 6 piece country band, but we have one major snag when we try to record in a studio like surrounding, we lose energy. I mean, when we play live, there’s just that connection, the drive and feeling is there, but when we try to track everything with iso rooms and stuff, the energy just goes downhill. Do you have any suggestions for helping us add some life back to our work, or should we try to record our stuff live and see if that helps?
Thanks for the info and hope to hear from you.
JP – Glad to have you my friend. If you have the ability (i.e. preamps, microphones, etc) to record all at once, then by all means give it a shot. Isolate any guitar amps and drums as best you can while maintaining visuals. A happy medium would be to record bass and drums together so you get a tight energy between them. Then track guitars together if you can. Etc.