Audio editing Music workstation...........
John Knight shows garage musicians how to enter the world of multi-track recording without inducing stress-based migraines.
John Knight shows garage musicians how to enter the world of multi-track recording.
This is an introduction to the world of sound-on-sound and multi-track recording using the open source program, Audacity. More advanced users are going to read this, think of big production suites (especially Ardour), and cough. Audacity? Something simple and easy to use? You’re not allowed to do that! Let them. This article isn’t aimed at them trying to improve their 1337 skills—this article is for introducing musicians to an easy way of producing polished demos using the layered technique of multi-track recording. Before we start arguing, let’s first look at what
Audacity actually is. According to Audacity’s overly modest website: “Audacity is free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds”. This simply doesn’t cover it. Audacity is a simple and highly intuitive recording and editing program that enables you to work individually with multiple layers—and that is key to this article.
Although this is simple bread-and-butter stuff for your average sound engineer, exactly what layered-recording is – and what it allows you to do – may not have occurred to many lay-musicians and for the uninitiated, its approach may be a revelation!
Multi-track recording allows you to build up and edit a song one layer at a time. This means you can record musicians individually (instead of having to capture a band all at once); make edits to individual voices and instruments within the whole and ultimately build a wall of sound that can range from a modest indie three-piece to an army of a thousand voices. Crucially, Audacity is the easiest introduction to this world.
The easiest way to demonstrate layered recording is to jump right in with a simple experiment. If you have an instrument ready to go with a line-in—brilliant. But I’m guessing not. Otherwise, just plug in your internet microphone and make sure that your sound levels are high enough to be heard. Now, press the pink ‘Record’ button. Play some piano, sing, shout at your siblings, read some Orwell, invade a country… anything—just go mental and make some noise. You should see a blue waveform being made on the fly, recording whatever noise you’re making. (If not, check your levels and inputs—you may have to switch between line-in, mic-in or perhaps click ‘Capture’ in your mixer.) Now press ‘Stop’, and click ‘Play’ to hear your recording. This is your first track; your first ‘layer’.
So far, so normal, but this is where it gets interesting (and we recommend you switch to headphones from here on if possible). Press ‘Record’ again and make some more noise, but be prepared for something different: your first track will be playing through your headphones while you are recording
your second track. This may startle you at first, but persevere and keep making noise, and click ‘Stop’ when you’re done. You now have two audio tracks, and provided you have a default program configuration and have used headphones instead of speakers, these two tracks should be independent of each other. Press ‘Play’ to hear the effect of you making noise over yourself. OK, good so far, and I’m sure you’ve got the idea, but for the full effect of this experiment (and maximum trippiness), we suggest making at least four tracks of noise!
So, you have a bunch of tracks layered on top of each other – sound-on-sound recording – but this is where you really get to have fun. Look to the left of each track, where you’ll see a grey box with a group of controls. These control muting, volume, visually collapsing less important tracks, deleting the track altogether, or the fun part—the stereo slider. Grab the stereo slider on each track (it’s the one sneakily labelled ‘L’ and ‘R’ if you haven’t already guessed) and move it somewhere random and different for each layer. Now press ‘Play’. Cool, isn’t it? You’ve now created your own virtual space in the stereo spectrum and the change from mono to stereo is like switching from black and white to colour. The cool thing is that you can move these sliders around even while Audacity is playing, so play with it on the fly and have fun. Experiment with the volume slider, mute, and solo controls while you’re there and there you have it: you now have the essential principles of multi-track recording. Now let’s do something useful.
Making music
To make your first demo in Audacity, you have to start somewhere, and generally the best place is the drums. The drums are an enormous process in themselves (drum work can be almost as extensive as an entire song), so for the sake of flow see the box ( What to do with Drums ) if you want to know more. Either way, record your drums first – or import them from another program – or if you want to record the other layers first, use a click track. You can generate a clicktrack in Audacity by clicking Generate > Click Track and tweaking the options to suit.
Next up, it’s best to tackle either the bass or the rhythm guitar. For the newcomer to recording, you may be wondering how you actually record guitars. Believe it or not, the traditional method really does involve plonking a microphone in front of an amp! Although tried and true, this method has the usual drawback of environmental noise with takes being ruined by tractors driving past, or your dad bursting into to the room to tell you that your black metal sucks and you should learn some Pink Floyd. (He has a point).
The alternative is to use a DI, or Direct Input method. This converts the signal from your guitar or bass into something that you can plug straight into a soundcard or mixer desk, that shouldn’t nuke your headphones or speakers (we’ve had some equipment setups break good pairs of Sennheisers, but hopefully you’ll fare better).
Use of a DI is a highly contentious issue and will be frowned upon by traditionalists, but it does have its advantages. First, environmental noise is entirely sidestepped, so even the noisiest of recording environments aren’t an issue. Second, you have a clean, solid signal that is as close to hiss-free as you can hope to get. What are the disadvantages? Well, pretty much no character for one. Straight DI is common enough for cleanly recorded bass, but sounds rubbish with electric guitar.
This has been largely addressed in the last decade with guitar pods/virtual amps/amp modellers (I’ll just use the term virtual amp). These are neat boxes that are designed to give you a choice of numerous amplifier sounds, all in the privacy of your headphones or straight into a mixer desk or soundcard. Virtual amps are now plentiful in variety and quality – for both guitar and bass – and are well worth the experiment. However, their sound won’t please everyone. We love their convenience, and they’re very popular among the Meshuggah ‘Djent’ crowd, but we wouldn’t use one for recording a new Metallica album…
Recording keyboards is a no-brainer that goes straight to line-in, but acoustic pianos are much trickier. We’ve never recorded one with any attempt at genuine quality, so we can’t pass on any tips. However, there are plenty of tips online. But if you’re not too fussy in your demos, you might be able to get away with some of the mics used for your drum recording (chiefly the overhead mics), heavily re-configured.
After all that, we recommend tackling the vocals last over an established instrumental foundation. Vocals are usually done in a fancy recording booth that isolates you from the outside world, but our guess is that you’re looking for a ghetto alternative, right? We’ve not had a chance to try it, but during the making of Korn’s album The Path of Totality, singer Jonathan Davis would record vocal parts in hotel rooms across the world by taking a microphone into cupboards he’d lined with rugs and pillows. We’ve no idea how well this works, but we admire his ingenuity!
Archiving it
So that’s the basic recording process out of the way. Before we carry on any further, let’s quickly cover saving and exporting. File > Save Project (or Save Project As) will save things as an .aud file—a project file that only Audacity uses. This is what you want to use for adding or subtracting layers (remember that crucial ‘Undo’ button) and tweaks to the stereo image etc.
However, this will be pretty useless in the future, when you want to go through your work in later years or share your
work with other musicians. File > Export will save a snapshot of your work as a standalone sound file you can share with anyone and Export Selection will save whatever you select with your mouse into a standalone sound file. We’ve found the latter is particularly useful for grabbing snippets of audio when you’re constructing loops. The normal export function is powerful not just for making one sound file of your track, but also when you want to export most of the song except one particular layer (for instance, all the song except drums, so someone can record a new drum layer over the top). If you want to try this, just press ‘Mute’ on whichever layer you don’t want in the output file. Very cool. You will have a choice of formats—unless you’re making a compressed copy of the final track for sharing, just use WAV. It’s lossless, everybody uses it, and will be expecting it. Don’t make life hard.
Getting creative with it
We’ve covered the essentials on how to do basic multi-track recording, but the layered approach offers more to the user than simply being able to work on each track in isolation. Sound-on-sound recording gives the home musician new levels of creative possibilities and allows you to shape your own sound or even genre. What you are creating is a virtual space in stereo—a sonic landscape.
So to start you thinking creatively, in your vision what part of the band is standing where? Are the guitar and vocals coming from the same part of the room or is one front-andcentre while the others are off to the side? Are other members of the band singing harmony—and if so, do you want to use a wide stereo sound or bring them close to the centre for something more focused? We also need to consider volume and effects: where does bass sit in your music? Is it a prominent instrument or is it meant to be felt and not heard? Try turning the volume up and down on the guitars and bass, playing them off against each other—a simple volume tweak may give your band a new sound and feel. What about your equaliser (EQ)? Do your guitars have lots of mid-range (mid) and is it scooped out of your bass? Or what about reverb? Do you like a huge echoey ‘80s stadium sound or is your sound close, dry and intimate? Either way, it’s worth acquainting yourself with the Effect menu and exploring everything you find there.
But I’d like to finish off this section with my favourite use for sound-on-sound recording. Multi-tracks enable you to layer together multiple takes of the same thing. You may have noticed this effect on vocals in particular, where a singer is suddenly grouped together with more of their own voice for a strengthening of their sound. This is quite an obvious method and very common in the pop world. (For a random example, see Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman, which has numerous sections that use this approach).
What’s less obvious is what can be done with instrumentation. Metallica, in particular, has long been adherents to the sound-on-sound approach, as it allows for a much broader, meatier sound while filling in gaps and smoothing over flaws (much like a section in an orchestra, as opposed to a soloist). James Hetfield famously recorded his guitar parts three times, the third layer of which he called “the thickener”.
However, one of the most innovative uses we’ve encountered came from a track by Danish band, Mnemic. Now, quite often bass gets lost in the mix, and it’s hard to make it audible without clipping and distortion, but this track cleverly used stereo to overcome the problem.
The mix used the very simple approach of using two takes for the same part, and playing one take down the left channel, and running the other take down the right. To the untrained ear, it just sounds like one take, but the effect created is a wide stereo image, where the imperfections in each take causes the perceived central sound to randomly shift around in the stereo image. This then reveals the bass from behind other layers of sound that would otherwise obscure it. A neat trick, eh?
Where to from here?
Hopefully, the basic skills and principles you learn from Audacity can provide a foundation for moving onto larger production suites. Starting from this modest place and trying to achieve certain sounds with fewer tools might also serve you well in the long run and teach you how to adapt and think outside the box. Remember, good recording is about skill and initiative—not money and technology.
In the hands of a newbie, a song recorded with the best equipment and software in the world can still sound awful, but a talented sound engineer can take two hundred quid’s worth of mics and make it sound like £2,000. And I hate to get all ‘back in my day’ on you, but try and remember that you have free access to technology that bands you grew up listening to would have sold their mothers for!
Ultimately, Audacity isn’t going to be enough to produce the kind of commercial quality studio recordings you hear today (you want Ardour, or something like a dirty proprietary product that rhymes with ‘Row Pools’ for that). However, it’s more than enough to produce quality demos that can hopefully impress a label scout and there’s no reason that good layers produced in Audacity can’t make it into a final recording on a bigger production suite.
And you know what? We bet you any money a time will come when you’re using a big fancy mixing program, you’ll be tearing your hair out trying to do this one simple thing, and you’ll think, ‘I don’t know how this stupid thing works... stuff it, I’ll just use Audacity’.