The following is a post that was originally published on 6/2/08. Due to a data loss issue producer notes suffered on 6/2/08, I am republishing it today. It is the last of four posts that will be republished in an attempt to retain the integrity of producer notes.

I’m back from a two week leave from Producer Notes. My time away from here allowed me to relive a bit of pressure that built up as a result of my ongoing balancing act between my freelance production/engineering career, and the operations of my startup. I was able to do quite a bit of Radical Notion business planning, and pickup several recording sessions as well. I got a whole lot of work done, but it’s definitely not complete. I will likely have to take another leave before the summer is out. Thanks for your loyal readership, and for staying subscribed throughout this process. Now on to today’s post…

Recording should be a creative process. The technical aspect of it should be pretty much invisible. In order for that to happen, you need everything to run as smooth as possible. Nothing derails your creativity quicker than constant technical hiccups. This week I put together 5 tips that will help things feel smoother and more creative when recording your own band, or recording for someone else. This list is meant to be 5 individual tips, not a step-by-step process.

1) Plan your setup beforehand
Planning out your setup should be done at least the day before you intend to record. Determine whether you will record everyone at once, or if you will be building the recording part by part. Figure out the best use of the recording space, and the best place for each instrument within that space. After you know where you want to put the instruments you need to decide what mics and gear to use. Then patch it all up and get it ready.

2) Test your setup beforehand
Once all the equipment is setup, go through and test each input to make sure you are getting a clean signal from the mic, through any gear, to the DAW and to the headphones. An easy way to do this is simply to have a band-mate go around and talk into each mic while wearing headphones. The last thing you want is to sit down the day you are supposed to record, and realize that you are not getting any signal into your DAW. Save yourself from a massive panic attack. Test your setup the day before you record.

3) Record to an external hard drive.
Your internal system hard drive is not meant for recording! It is meant to run the operating system and other various applications that you use on a day-to-day basis, such as your DAW software. Do yourself a huge favor and buy an external hard drive. Keep your session document and audio files in a folder on this external drive. Name the folder the same name as the song. Most DAW software will take care of this folder creation/naming for you. But allocate your recordings to this new drive! Having an external hard drive also makes things more convenient when recording at several different locations. If you are taking the project to a place that has the same DAW software as you, you can bring your drive and everything should open up perfectly on the other system (this is not always true, unfortunately).

4) Simplify
You want to always keep the shortest path to the DAW. Don’t put every compressor, EQ, reverb, delay, time displacement discombobulating logarithmic refracting unit known to man in your signal chain. Refrain from over calculating things. Having more gear in the signal chain means having more things to worry about (and more noise). Leave the EQ’ing, compressing and audio time travel for the mixing stage.

5) Keep things consistent
There is no use in changing something just because. Find your basic setup, and keep it the same through the recording process. This way you eliminate the possibility of confusing anyone (or yourself) and causing a technical mess. If your setup is working fine the way it is, then there is no sense in changing what’s working.

I hope you can find a few of these tips useful. Perhaps you already knew some of them. When writing this post I thought of well over 5 tips, so I plan on making this a recurring post. If you didn’t find anything useful this time, maybe you will next time. In the meantime feel free to leave comments with your own tips. Or you could send me your tips via email at stinson[AT]producernotes[DOT]com. I might include them in a future post. Hope your recordings are full of creativity…