If you need to record a track, (say a vocal take at home), you will need to use proper recording software and a recording setup to get the required quality. There are various simple recording programs like voice recorder available, but these are generally for note taking and so far, I haven’t found any that will record in a decent quality format. They all seem to put out some sort of mp3, m4a or other compressed format, which isn’t good enough.
Unfortunately, that means working with software that’s a little more “in depth”, hence why I’m writing this guide. I picked Audacity, because it’s free, simple to install, reasonably straight forward to use and you can use it straight away. There are other free/cheap and cut down versions of all the major studio software out there, including Avid’s Pro Tools, which I mainly use myself, but they usually come loaded with extra “goodies” like sample packs, plugins and the like, and so require a bit more in the way of installation, licencing and set up before use.
If you want to use Audacity, you can download it here.
Regarding recording setups, we are very lucky these days, in that the quality of even cheap interfaces is pretty good. You can buy a modern 2 channel audio interface for under £150 at the time of writing (2022) that can provide 24 bit recordings comparable in quality to what was considered high end at the turn of the century. Back then, Pro Tools and other top end studio systems, changed up from 20 bit to 24 bit interfaces and cost several thousand £££s. Note that mainstream music released from even 25 years ago certainly doesn’t lack quality in any way.
What is a compressed format?
A compressed format is when a computer will use a special alghorythm called a codec, to make a file smaller, to save space. For example, if a song from a CD is saved on your computer, at CD quality, and you make an mp3 version of that song – on average, the mp3 file, will be 10 times smaller than the CD file, and the quality will also be reduced. Here’s a visual example to show what I mean:
You can easily see both pictures above are of the same subject. A girl playing the piano. You can also tell it’s the same picture, but the quailty is different. The picture on the left has more information in it, and as a result it looks far clearer than the picture on the right. The picture on the right is the equivalent of an mp3 or other “lossy” format. For decent recordings we want to be dealing in .wav files which are NOT compressed and give much clearer quality.
Changing Recording Quality
Assuming you have downloaded and installed Audacity by now – we need to set it up to record at a high enough quality to use in the studio. Go to the edit menu at the top of Audacity’s window, and select the last item, which should be preferences, like this:
The window below will open up, and on the LEFT hand side, select Devices, and you should see a panel similar to the one below. Go to the Device: drop down list under Recording and select your device or interface.
Next go to Quality in the side bar, and you should see this panel:
Here you should select 44100 Hz or 48000 Hz as your Default Sample Rate at the top. I prefer sessions set up with a 48000 Hz (or 48k in shorthand), because it works nicely if you need to add it to video at some point in the future. Next box down, change the Default Sample Format to “32-bit floating” preferably, or if this is not available 24-bit. Change all Sample Rate Converter boxes to “Best Quality”, and all Dither boxes to “none”. This will set up Audacity for the right quality of recording for studio purposes. Click OK at the bottom to shut the panel.
Now check the bottom LEFT of the main window to make sure the default sample rate you just set, matches the project sample rate. If it doesn’t match, click the down arrow right next to it and change to the matching value.
Getting Ready to Record
Now, go to the Tracks menu at the top of the window, and create a new mono track, ready to record, like this:
You should now see something like the picture below, which should also display the correct sample rate and format selected earlier. In this instance, I have left it at 16-bit because I’m writing this, not recording.
And now you just press the record button to start the recording. Note that the control buttons correspond to those on an old tape recorder. The grey square is the STOP button, the green triangle is the PLAY button, and the RED circle is the RECORD button.
NOTE: Depending on your computer setup, sometimes Audacity will automatically open up and record onto a separate stereo track instead. Don’t worry, just use that one instead and continue as normal.
Your first recording will be used to set the gain on your interface, this should be a clearly labelled physical button on the front of your interface, or if using a USB microphone, on the mic itself. We don’t want the gain set too loud or the recording will distort, like the picture below, where you can see the waveform is squared off and the meter (top right) is in the red. We also don’t want it to be too quiet either. Try and aim to keep the recording level in the green, peaking at roughly -18 on the meter. A bit more or less doesn’t matter so long as the meter doesn’t exceed the yellow. When you are happy with the gain, you can clear the initial recording by pressing CTRL and Z on your keyboard, for “undo” just like any other program.
Now go ahead and make your recording. If it’s not perfect, don’t worry, you can make another one. Even the very best singers will record themselves a few times, then the best bits from each recording will be taken and edited together into one super take, and that will be used on the final product.
Now you need export your recording as a .WAV file, so firstly, click on Select, and the audio should be selected as you can see between the 2 highlighted orange marks.
Now go to the File menu, select Export and lick on Export as WAV
…which should open up this window below. Pick a suitable file name, and pick the relevant encoding. If you originally set the sample format (see above) to 32-bit pick “signed 32-bit PCM”, or if it was 24 bit, then “24-bit PCM”, and save it where you can find it later.
You will then see this window below. Ignore all the details and press OK.
And you’re done. 🙂 If you want to do another take simply press CTRL Z to undo, and record and export another take, but remember to give it a different name. At the studio, we routinely do 4 or 5 takes before editing to get the best overall result.
Any questions, just drop me a quick message or email me, God Bless, Matt
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