I’ve generally been using my DJ Bolivia YouTube channel
for educational purposes. My goal has
always been to feature videos teaching about a number of music-related
topics: DJ’ing, using audio editors such
as Ableton and Cubase and ProTools and other DAW’s, production of dance music
from scratch, and the occasional music video.
But one additional group of videos that I’ve wanted to put together has
been a series on basic audio recording techniques.
I just put together the first video in that series. This one deals with very simple audio
recording using the microphone on a HD video camera, and using a portable audio
recording device. It talks about some of
the basic types of processing that a studio engineer would put on an audio
track (particularly on vocals), which includes reverb, delay, chorus, and
EQ’ing, although it only goes into any detail on the last of those four
topics. I predominantly use Audacity to
illustrate some basic concepts, with just a bit of use of Audition and VLC to
help out with some other tasks.
Essentially, I’ve recorded a song (acoustic guitar and singing) and then
extracted the audio from the recording devices, then I did some very simple
processing in order to come up with a better quality audio file.
Here’s the video:
The video touches on quite a few different topics that a
musician should become familiar with if you want to do any recording. Here is a list of some suggested additional
reference sites that you might want to check out, in order to learn more about
topics that I mentioned:
Audio File
Formats:
Software Used:
Recording Devices:
Extracting Audio
from Video using VLC:
Audio Frequency
Spectrum:
Plosives:
Sibilance:
Pop Filters:
Equalization:
Reverb(eration):
Normalizing Audio:
If you want to download the audio files that I was using
in this video, to better hear the audio in your own home studio setup, here’s a
link to a zipped folder containing the relevant files and a _readme.txt file
which describes the contents:
The next couple of videos, which I hope to have online by
the end of February 2013, will discuss different types of microphones, the use
of external sound cards to help get audio into a computer, and multi-track
recording either though several simultaneous inputs coming into the computer
simultaneously, or through doing multiple tracks in layers. I’ll also try to get some of my friends who
are better guitar players or vocalists to help me out!
More advanced videos in this series (which could take me
a couple years, because I can think of about thirty or forty topics that I’d
like to go into eventually) will cover things such as recording full bands
live, microphone placement for drum kits, and detailed explanation of effects
such as delay, chorus, reverb, flanging, phasing, and many more. I’ll eventually cover EQ’ing in far more
depth, so you’ll have a better understanding of how to combine EQ’ing with
proper placement of various instruments within a stereo field to add clarity to
your mixes. I’ll cover compression and
basic mastering. I’ll cover various
pieces of studio equipment, such as studio monitors and DI boxes. In short, there’s a lot of stuff that I can
talk about, and eventually I’ll be doing videos where an entire band records a
full multi-track song from scratch.
Anyway, this is an overwhelming amount of
information. If you just watch this
first video and then try to learn everything at all the links that I’ve
provided above, that should keep you busy round-the-clock for a week or
so. And as always, if you have friends
that might be interested in learning about stuff that I’ve covered in this
video, I appreciate if you can email them or share a link to this blog post.
Links to Jonathan Clark’s various web sites:
Main Site: www.djbolivia.ca
Facebook: www.facebook.com/djbolivia
YouTube: www.youtube.com/djbolivia
Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/djbolivia
Twitter: www.twitter.com/djbolivia
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If you appreciate the content that I've shared in my blog posts and youtube videos, I'd really appreciate in kind if you could show some support by donating a few dollars to help sponsor tree planting, in order to help fight climate change. I'm very involved in this type of work at my own reforestation company, which builds community forests and forest reserve areas to help the environment. Find out more at this link:
replant.ca/environmental
