Personal Studio Equipment

Personal studio equipment is not meant as a means to record your demo, but rather to be used more like a notepad. You should really tune your sound before going into a studio and paying by the hour to make your demo. A great way to do this is to record and re-record over and over again until you know exactly the way you want it. It will save you big bucks in the studio. Personal studio equipment is sometimes even used to lay down a few tracks before you get into the studio. You will lose a generation, and the sound isn't going to be as great, but for things like drums and bass that are laid into the background, it's sufficient. You can also keep track of your changing sound, and let's face it, we all love to hear ourselves. In addition, it's great practice if you have ideas of owning your own studio someday. Every not-so- rich-and-famous music maker should have a personal studio.

Four-tracks are the most common piece of personal studio equipment on the market today. If you are not familiar with them, they are called four-tracks because they record on just that, four tracks. A regular cassette tape contains four tracks all together, two for each "side", a four-track recorder utilizes all four for recording songs. A four-track is like a cassette recorder than can play and record at the same time (multi-tracking). A recording studio usually has between 16 and 48 tracks, so you have less to play with, but if you utilize your space wisely, you can get a terrific sound. There is a common practice called sub-mixing, also referred to as "bouncing," that can free up some space for extra instruments or vocals. For instance, you could record the drums on track one, bass on track two, and guitar on track three, then transfer all three to track four, leaving three empty tracks. Again, you get into the generation loss, but since this isn't your actual demo, you should be fine. Just make sure you have your drums, bass and guitar exactly the way you want them because they cannot be changed once they are mixed together.