Just what I Learned From My First Experience With Recording

A handful of years ago, I recorded a CD of my own songs with a friend who had built his own recording studio room. He asked me to take all the time that i required to record my songs and to gain more experience he also offered to mix the music for me.

This is actually my first official recording experience despite that fact that I’ve recorded a few demos years back using a rather vintage four track cassette recorder. Digital recording was an innovative concept, and my friend had one of the first set-ups for recording direct to PC hard drive. It was an incredible learning encounter for me. I observed in awe how my friend edited my recording by doing the vocals, adding the instrumentals, and record multiple tracks. While my friend is engrossed with the mixing and editing I observed and paid interest to what he is doing. I kept asking queries about the procedure and my friend would patiently explain the whole process to me and at the same time answer all my queries. And together, we made a record we were both very pleased of.

I do not think I realized just how much my first recording experience taught me until years later, when I was put into a couple of situations that drew upon my knowledge. The first one was as a small-time music performer, in hosting events where there was no sound engineer or sound person; if I intend to make it sound good, it was up to me. It was actually astonishing when I was able to manipulate the sound equipment and manipulate the sound mixer with ease. I learned a lot of that basic lessons from my recording experience.

The other scenario that drew on my know-how was when I became the audio engineer and wrote the music score for two short movies my son wrote and directed. By my own criteria I believed I was not competent, but with the knowledge I gained from my previous experience I was able to manipulate the sound elements in order to create ear friendly music and sound effects. In addition to that, I found a way how to remove those unwanted noise in the background from the film and this is very much helpful whenever the background noise affects the movie quality.

These projects made me realize that my initial recording played a huge role. I also realized from that encounter just how much we actually learn things by simply doing them.