Understand the Effects for Recording Your Perfect Home Demo

Recording a song is an exciting thing. You've spent years playing the guitar or piano and you're writing songs that you love and would love to perform one day live for an audience. Recording the song isn't as hard or as easy as it looks. There are several tasks involved with every step of the way. However, when it comes to dressing up your songs with cool effects, that's the critical part of making your recording sound amazing versus boring and plain (although sometimes boring and plain isn't so boring and plain afterall!).

Knowing your effects and how they work will help you achieve that desired sound for your electric guitar. Even if you don't have a wah pedal or a tremolo effect pedal, mixing with effects can create the same sound. Amateur musicians also mistake some effects for others, such as reverb and echo. Flange and chorus. Echo and delay.

Reverb is the most common effect in any recording. Reverb gives that natural tone to a recording, especially in a vocal. Reverb can make the recording more bright, alive and can also add some interesting depths to the sound, especially when it comes to vocals.

One point to remember in any effect plug-in in your software is wet and dry mixing. The more dry the mix, the less of the effect is applied. Too wet of mixes may sound muddy and distorted.

Reverb is often mistaken for echo. When you stand in a room and yell, the sound reflected is actually called reverb. The decay is how long it takes before the sound is reflected back. Echo is merely that. An echo. You will hear the phrase repeated after it is sounded off. Diffusion is how many reflections are being processed. With vocals, low diffusion separates the vocal reflections more as where high diffusion sounds better with drums. Reverb is often added in the mixing process due to the nature of decaying. If you add reverb on the overall track after all the premixing is done, you won't be able to go back and change the depth of the reverb later if you recorded the take WITH reverb. Any time changing effects are not advised to be used during recording for that purpose.