Introduction

      If you’re like most musicians, you’ve been noodling around on your instrument for a while and you’ve finally decided to take the plunge and get serious about recording your ideas. You may just want to throw a few ideas down onto tape (or hard drive) or capture those magical moments you have with your band. Or you may want to compose, record, produce, and release the next great platinum album. Either way, you’ll find that having a home studio can give you hours of satisfaction.

      Well, you’ve chosen a great time to get involved in audio recording. Not long ago, you needed to go to a commercial recording studio and spend thousands of dollars if you wanted to make a decent-sounding recording. Now you can set up a first-class recording studio in your garage or spare bedroom and create music that can sound as good as that coming out of top-notch studios (that is, if you know how to use the gear).

      Home Recording For Dummies, 6th Edition, is a great place to start exploring the gear and techniques you need to create great recordings (if I do say so myself). This book introduces you to home recording and helps you to get your creative ideas out into the world.

About This Book

      Home Recording For Dummies not only introduces you to the technology of home recording but also presents basic multitrack recording techniques. In the pages that follow, you find out about the many types of digital recording systems available, including computer-based systems, all-in-one recorder/mixer systems (called studio-in-a-box systems), and phone and tablet recording.

      You get acquainted with the basic skills you need to make high-quality recordings. These skills can save you countless hours of experimenting and searching through owner’s manuals. In this book, you discover

      Home Recording For Dummies puts you on the fast track toward creating great-sounding recordings because it concentrates on showing you skills that you can use right away and doesn’t bother you with tons of technical jargon or useless facts.

      Throughout the book, you see sidebars (text in gray boxes) and text marked with the Technical Stuff icon. Both of these are skippable — they provide interesting information, but it’s not essential to your understanding of the subject at hand.

      Finally, within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading this book in print and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy — just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.

Foolish Assumptions

      I have to admit that when I wrote this book, I made a couple of assumptions about you, the reader. First, I assume you’re interested in recording your music (or someone else’s) in your home and not interested in reading about underwater basket-weaving (a fascinating subject, I’m sure, but not appropriate for a book entitled Home Recording For Dummies).

      I assume you’ll most likely record your music using a digital hard drive recording system because these are the most common types of systems available. I also assume you’re relatively new to the recording game and not a seasoned professional. (Although if you were, you’d find that this book is a great reference for many audio engineering fundamentals.) Oh, and I assume you play a musical instrument or are at least familiar with how instruments function and how sound is produced.

      Other than these things, I don’t assume you play a certain type of music