Should Artist Record Their Own Music?

Studio time can cost a large amount of money unless you have good connection with engineers. The price can range from $0 to a few hundred dollars depending if they change by the hour or day. As time changed from the 80’s with analog recording to digital recording, you can actually record your own music with a few hundred dollars at home. With analog, you would have to spend millions of dollars in order to run a recording studio, and it was time consuming.

When music recording began, there was a big different of how they record today. If you listen to the Beatles that started in 1957, they would record a drum set in mono because at that time they never experienced stereo. Today, you can record a large drum set, and locate each piece while using headphones.

If Recording is now easy and affordable, isn’t it good for an artist to do so to save money? Becoming an audio engineer can take years to make a song sound to its best. Recording a good vocal track isn’t as easy as setting up a microphone and pressing record. Without having good acoustic treatment such as brick walls, you can have ambiance noise coming from different ways such a cars, the wind, planes, and so on. In the humans voice, they can sing from 150 hertz all the way to 4000 hertz. Not knowing a good microphone angle or having a flat frequency of the vocalist voice, it can make it more difficult during the mix.

Without having a good mix, it makes it harder for it to get master and if the master does not sound good to its fullest, people would not have interest in buying it. If you watch a trailer of a movie with bad video and audio quality, you would probably lose interest in purchasing the movie. One good example of  good song  that was engineered by the best audio engineers in America is Michael Jackson. Listening to his song “Billie Jean”, none of the tracks are blocking another track (or masking) and they all can be understood. If I put it in better terms, imagine you are a professional instrumental and you play the saxophone. If it is difficult to understand the saxophone in certain notes of a song, it makes it harder to build attraction of it all.

The music industry has changed dramatically and is a struggle today in getting signed by a record label. It does not matter if the record label likes your music, if people do not have interest in buying it, you would not make money and that is what a record label wants. Record labels look for artist who have a large fan base and people who would be willing  to go see your music. The best way to do so is by making good music that sounds good and to make it sound good, you will need an audio engineer. Audio engineers spend hundreds of hours to understand the true meaning of recording/mixing and artist do not have time for that and should focus more on their music.