How to Prepare a Recording Session

When preparing for a recording session, be it at home or in a recording studio, the single most important thing to remember is that preparation is paramount.

It's the simple things like staying within your comfortable playing limits and not being tempted play things that are on the limit of you playing ability or beyond. In doing so, your accuracy and consistency of peformance will be seriously compromised. Playing within your limits will make you sound much more professional and slick.

Always make sure that you know the song lyrics and chords. You might think this is really obvious but you'd be surprised how many people turn up not knowing them.

An equally obvious precaution is to make sure that you have the arrangements finalised, come the day of the session along with the tempos and the keys.

Ensure your that all your instruments are in good working condition. A badly set up instrument will hamper your playing and knock your confidence.

Make a decision as to whether you want to work to click tracks before the session. This will save time and potential problems in the studio. Whether you decide to use click tracks or not it's a good idea to practice using them.

One easy way to highlight any of the above problems is to have a bit of "dry run" by recording one of your rehearsals. 

There are plenty of rehearsal rooms with basic recording set ups. Record a practice session with the band playing to a click. This will real help you to decide whether to use them or not.

You must all get a good night's sleep the night before a session. Giving it your all is very difficult if you are tired, especially if you're the singer.

Set up time is really important to make sure that the sounds being recorded sound good. A poor sound for the want of an extra hour setup time, can result in hours of hard work trying to fix it in the mix!

Make sure that you are happy with your headphone mix. This is so important so don't afraid to tell the engineer if it's not quite right. When reviewing your mixes in the control room don't monitor too loud, this will blur your judgement, making it difficult to hear any pitching problems or judge instrument level balances.

Check your instrument tuning at every opportunity. There is nothing more infuriating than recording a great take only to find that an instrument has drifted out of tune, especially if you are doing drop-ins, where any tuning variations will be really obvious at the edit points.

In the event that everything goes well and you get the tracks down quicker than anticipated, you may in fact be able to record a few extra tracks, so it's a good idea to have more tracks prepared than you think you are likely to record. This will give you the option of ditching a track that may not have turned out quite as good as you'd hoped.

Bring plenty of extra sets of strings, drum sticks and skins, fuses, batteries, amplifier valves, as well as any files that may want imported into the studio DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). As a precaution it's wise to bring lyric sheets, these are really useful for the engineer to have when laying down vocals, and quite often to the singer who in the heat of the moment, forgets his lines.

Give some consideration to how you want to back up your recordings. Whilst DVD backup has been the norm for the last 10 years or so, nowadays it's probably cheaper to just go and buy an external drive for your studio back up. Make sure however that it is formatted for Mac and PC so that it is that is compatible for any computer platform. With this in mind I would always advise recording to the Broadcast Wav format (.WAV or .BWAV) which has become the cross-platform de facto file format. 

Be sure that you know exactly where you are going to park your vehicles and any costs that may be involved. You don't want to be spending your day running to and from parking metres or having to move your car every 2 hours. Allow for the cost of food and drink, and any accommodation that may be needed in the event of an overrun. Don't leave changing strings or drum skins to the day of the session, do it the night before and stretch them in properly. Doing this on the day can waste a lot of time.

Good luck with your session and enjoy it, music should be fun.