A few days ago we were recording some stuff. It's not like it's sometimes portrayed on film/TV with the whole band playing at all at once. It's technically possible to do it that way if you have an enormous budget and an army of technicians but for the most part it's much easier to concentrate on one part at a time. First one records the drums, then the bass, then the rhythm guitars. This then give a nice firm foundation for lead guitars, violins, synths and whatever complicated stuff to be recorded on, and then we put the vocals in.
High budget set-ups have a separate recording booths and control rooms. Our cheapo set-up relies on double glazed French windows on both sides of the extension, the near-silent nature of the salvaged Dell powering the studio, remembering to turn the monitors off during recording, minimising the number of people in the recording room and a lot of patience.
We made the following observations:
- It's very easy to forget to arm some part of the recording chain.
- Your lead guitarist will always be busy playing Diablo II when he's needed.
- Deprived of a musical instrument to hold, comic actions are required when doing backing vocals.
- a large number of takes (usually of main vocal parts) will feature someone wandering in and knocking something over, usually during the silent parts of the best takes
- almost every take ends in a declaration of the number of screwups the performer made, followed by quick agreement or a raise by anyone else within earshot.
- we really should keep a (video) camera handy to capture the scenes that have to be seen to be believed.
