Even on a budget!
No obligation
Friends, I'm putting the finishing touches on the Home Recording Mentorship Program as you read this. Get on the waiting list to be first in line and get the guaranteed best price. This will also put you on my newsletter, with free info about home recording, and an unsubscribe link in every email :-)
But making good sounding recordings at home ain't easy. I get it.
There are a zillion things to learn about home recording. Perhaps you've watched lots of YouTube 'How to record' videos with audio techniques and tricks, but it's hard to know what's important. And little snippets of engineering tricks don't really tell you how to record a song.
Maybe you've even bought a mixing course. But you don't relate to a big-time mixer sitting behind his or her Neve console, surrounded by expensive outboard gear, working on professionally produced tracks, recorded in top-level studio rooms with mics that probably cost thousands of dollars.
That's not where you are. You're sitting at your home, with a computer and maybe a microphone or two, wondering how to best get quality versions of your songs.
You're stuck between not knowing how to get great recordings at home, and not wanting to spend the money on a studio. And your song ideas are just sitting there, waiting. The clock is ticking.
I have a solution for you that won't break the bank.
Introducing . . .
As soon as you sign up, you'll have access to videos and written material which takes you through the birth of a song, capturing the initial idea, starting the project in a DAW, setting tempo, creating scratch bass and drum tracks, laying down and editing guitars and keyboards, cutting and comping vocals, adding effects and processing, and all the way through mixing.
Watch over my shoulder as I show you how to get started on your song, and adapt the arrangement as you go.
Want to know how to change your arrangement in minutes? How would the ending sound with a double chorus? It's easy to do. Can you drop 8 bars in the middle of your arrangement? Sure, in a few seconds.
Knowing how to get started on a song can be the most difficult part -- but not anymore!
Be 'in the room' as I set a tempo and create scratch drum tracks within a few minutes. This will help you to hit the ground running with your song ideas and get started recording quickly.
How do you set up to record vocals and guitars, and create bass, drum, and keyboard tracks?
How do you comp takes, and edit guitar? How do you punch in, overdub, select takes? How do you program with MIDI?
It's all here.
How and why do you use EQ and compression? How do you route to effects? Add reverb? Which reverb or delay should you choose?
How do you glue tracks together to get that cohesive sound?
It's laid out for you in easy-to-understand form.
I started home recording in the (gulp) late '70s, on a cassette 4-track Tascam 144 Portastudio. I worked my way into live sound and recording in a basement 8-track studio. From there, I engineered and produced recordings in some of the top-level recording studios in Seattle, and worked in conjunction with a local record company.
I've also taught audio engineering at the college level, developing and writing some of the curriculum there, and run a radio station, in Russia.
More to the point though, I am a singer/songwriter/guitar player who records in his living room with a $125 mic, a $99 audio interface, and a few pieces of software.
Each module has between 1 and 10 video lessons.
As part of the mentorship program, you can submit 5 pieces of audio or video for feedback. In the future, I may charge for this, but for you -- free.
Need help critiquing a mix, dialing in a guitar tone or EQing a vocal? Here's your chance.
Want to follow along with what I'm doing and experiment for yourself?
I'll provide the stems (audio files) from the song 'This Old Lie' for you to work with. See if you can do better!
The budget when going into a pro studio, can easily run into the thousands of dollars. And you want to keep recording your music right? You don't want to stop at one set of sessions.
The way to affordably record over and over again is to record yourself.
But you need to get your recording, arranging, and production chops up to make good recordings. The best way to do that quickly is through mentorship.
Home recording course, mentorship, stems, and bonus lessons
$
xx
One-Time Payment
No obligation
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I've got a 14-day money-back guarantee on this program -- minus $2.
This program is for independent musicians who want to make better home recordings. You should possess . . .
This course won't teach you to set up mics to record a full drum kit. I use virtual drum software, and I also talk about how to work with remote drummers to get good quality tracks for a good price. If you have a drummer and you want to record them, I recommend going into a pro studio. They can send you the tracks and you can take it from there, at home, with this course.
If you're a serial refunder of internet purchases, stay away. Each refund costs me money (the banks keep their fees). If you use this course and find it isn't a good fit for you, then fair enough -- a refund is in order. But if you buy it with the intention of refunding, you can f($#)*& all the way off. Serial refunders make things more expensive for everyone.
If you don't understand that compressing a vocal or EQing a kick drum work largely the same, no matter the genre, you should pass. I'll teach you the concepts of EQ and compression (and many more areas of recording) so you can use them in your genre, on your songs, in your way. It's not necessary to like the example song we use in order to get value from the course. But some people can't separate that out. For example, I'll show you how to find the heft in a kick drum, and also the click to make it cut through better on small speakers. If your genre requires more 'heft' or less 'click' then by all means, set the EQ accordingly by pushing those frequencies up or down.
No, of course not. Look at being a recording engineer, producing records, arranging songs, and mixing. You could spend a lifetime learning any one of those areas of audio. I can't teach you 4 lifetimes of skills in one program. And nobody knows everything about even one of these disciples. My goal is to help you to a point at which you're able to put your recordings up against professionally recorded songs.
I understand this question. You don't want to buy some course and have it be 5 minutes. It's over 10 hours of video so far, plus written and bonus material. But let me tell you why I think that's not what you should be concerned about.
What is the course were 100 hours of me trying to sing the verse and going at it over-and-over again? That wouldn't be valuable, would it? Or what if, like a lot of courses, I did stuff without explaining it? You'd get something out of it, but it would largely be a waste of time. Or what if I spend hours going over some aspect of recording you're already familiar with? Not useful.
Really, what you want to know is what the course covers and how effectively it presents the information. How long the course is is just one factor in answering those questions. So, let me tell you how the course is organized to help you use your time efficiently.
The point is that the course is well-organized. Remember, I've written college-level audio courses before :-)
Reaper is the bomb. There's not really a quality difference in DAW outputs these days (although the quality of stock plugins can vary). As I write this, a Reaper license is $60, and that will carry you through two full versions. I first bought Reaper Wed, Aug 18, 2010, at 12:24 PM. I paid another $60 in 2015. It's now 2023. In 13 years, Reaper has cost me $120. By my calculations, that's less than $1/month for a fully functional multi-track recorder that does so much more than the old 24-track tape machines and consoles could do. By contrast, Protools starts at $199 annually, and goes up to $999. Annually!
Reaper is arguably the most flexible, configurable DAW out there and has a great developer and user community to get any questions answered. Reaper doesn't have virtual instruments built-in like GarageBand does, but I'll show you how to deal with that. Reaper has a bunch of really good developers creating high-quality free plugins. And because it's so flexible, there are a lot of options in Reaper. I'll show you have to set it up and teach you which options are important.
Reaper has a 60-day free trial. That's plenty long enough to get through the course part of the mentorship. So, you don't have to buy it for the course. And frankly, once the trial version expires, no capabilities are lost. You could keep using it forever. But it's better you support the developers. They're not asking for much.
If you use Studio One, or Cubase and are into it a few years, should you grab my mentorship program? While I think there would be value for you, I'd advise you to find a program that's specific to your DAW. If you have a mentor you can easily access and your mentor uses a different DAW, go with what they use.
If you're not deeply into a DAW, or don't have a DAW or know what one is, buckle up -- let's go!
Nope. You bring the songs. I'll teach you how to make them sound as good as possible.
I understand. There's waaaaaay too much to do as an independent musician! But if you really want to make great sounding recordings, you've got to level-up your knowledge and skill.
This course will save you dozens, if not hundreds of hours in that process. I'm with you on this part of your journey.
