Audio Recording Tutorial #01 - Basic Recording with a HD Camera and a Wave Recorder

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:

http://cd-burning-software-review.toptenreviews.com/audio-file-types.html

http://www.edb.utexas.edu/minliu/multimedia/PDFfolder/CompareMusic.pdf

http://www.planetoftunes.com/digiaudio/daudiofiles.html

Software Used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audacity_(audio_editor)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLC_media_player

Recording Devices:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/audio/recording.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_recording_and_reproduction

http://multimedia.journalism.berkeley.edu/tutorials/audio-recorders/choosing/

Extracting Audio from Video using VLC:

http://www.ghacks.net/2011/07/15/how-to-extract-audio-from-video-files-using-vlc-media-player/

Audio Frequency Spectrum:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_frequency

http://www.teachmeaudio.com/production/mixing/4-techniques/10-audio-spectrum

http://audio.tutsplus.com/tutorials/production/how-to-recognize-frequencies/

Plosives:

http://djbolivia.blogspot.ca/2013/02/plosives-background-for-singers-audio.html

Sibilance:

http://djbolivia.blogspot.ca/2013/02/sibilance-how-singers-and-audio.html

Pop Filters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_filter

http://www.deansabatino.com/2005/08/21/67/

Equalization:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1995_articles/mar95/eq.html

http://www.ethanwiner.com/equalizers.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_(audio)

Reverb(eration):

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/effects_reverb.html

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may00/articles/reverb.htm

http://www.sweetwater.com/feature/technotes/issue28-reverb/

Normalizing Audio:

http://www.hometracked.com/2008/04/20/10-myths-about-normalization/

https://auphonic.com/blog/2011/07/25/loudness-normalization-and-compression-podcasts-and-speech-audio/

http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Normalize

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:

http://www.djbolivia.ca/tutorials/audiorecording01.rar

To see the rest of the tutorials in this Audio Recording series, visit:

djbolivia.ca/audiorecording

Thanks so much for visit, and for your support!  I really appreciate the fan base that I've been able to build up over the years.

Also, if you want to visit any of my other sites, here are a few links:

    YouTube:  youtube.com/djbolivia

    SoundCloud:  soundcloud.com/djbolivia

    Blogger:  djbolivia.blogspot.com

    Main Site:  www.djbolivia.ca