Music is probably the larger of the two media areas (sight and sound). Also music recording and live sound is my specialist area i will cover live sound in a later article.
In my eyes there are four main areas of music recording: 1st creation before you can record what ever you want to record you have to have created it. most people think that all the big artists either have people to write songs for them or they just get lucky. Now both these methods are true but theres also a lot of work going into these people claim to write a song in a day and some people can but usually it takes weeks if not months. You’ll find quite often that songs started off a poems, poems have a natural beat to them making it very easy to translate into a song.
A few tips for writing a song of your own: 1. don’t try to be fancy don’t try and write the best piece in the world sometimes simple is better, 2. think of something to write about, try and write about a story or subject that you know or like or even try changing a poem of your own, 3. don’t be a copy-cat I’ve seen songs that look a wee bit to much like big hit songs from famous artist and no it’s not cool or clever to copy people it makes you look like you lack the ability to be creative and lastly don’t be scared to go back to a old song that you have already written and edit it if you see something you don’t like change it.
with these four tips you could write your own basic song.
stage 2: Recording
although I have skipped a few minor steps recording is the most important step yet also the simplest. Although recording is simple for the band or musician or singer it can be a hassle for the recording crew.
Recording has three main steps to it 1. setup everything has to be placed miked up and tested this can take at most 2 days for a normal band. 2. Recording although this is fundamentally easy once everything has been set up and sorted out it is a lot of work to make everything sound right and professional. recording a average 3-4 minute long song can take up to around a average of 500 takes over 1-3 weeks or you may hit it first time taking maybe 5-10 takes in one day. In recording you have to be patient.
Editing follows recording:
once the piece has been recorded it will almost certainly need editing. Editing is the longest and most definitely hardest step of the four. It can take up to a year to edit a piece of music. the process can be endless but here are just a few of the more important steps: compression, EQ change, effects, mixing, panning, cutting/copying, of course these are the ones most people have heard of. Editing is what gives the song it’s soul it adds something to it almost like giving it life. Editing is a long process but once finished you feel a great sense of relief and accomplishment.
finally there is publishing:
publishing a Piece of music is when the data is taken and made into CD’s, vinyls and other formats. A few years ago all piece’s of music would of been published as a CD but now you are seeing more and more often songs released as a MP3 file on the web somewhere like i-tunes. The two reasons for this are 1 it’s cheap a CD would usually cost around 10-15 pounds (UK) and a bit more for vinyl but a MP3 to create costs well nothing the only costs are the recording and editing and those sorts of process’s. But there are also bad points to music being released as MP3’s first, fraud there are a lot of people on the web today and it is all too tempting to download music content for free. But THIS IS ILLEGAL and can get you fined a lot of money so don’t risk it if we all use places like i-tunes they will be able to lower there prices and it will be cheaper and legal to buy and download music.
