Recording Songs

Don’t let not having any gear put you off taking part in FAWM. You don’t need a spiffy home studio setup to be a successful fawmer. Your phone contains better recording technology than anything available to the Beatles when they arrived at Abbey Road Studio in the 1960s.

And if you’re a lyricist, all you need is a pencil and paper.

Apps

When it comes to creating an audio file of your song, many fawmers just use the voice memo app on their phone. No additional technology is needed. When the song’s ready, they tap “record” and just go for it. Once the song has been saved to a file, it can be uploaded to the Internet and shared with other fawmers.

If you want something more sophisticated, Bandlab runs in your phone’s web browser and turns it into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW): the modern equivalent of a multi-track tape recorder. That means you can record voice, guitar, bass, drums, and more, one instrument at a time. Sing a duet with yourself! Form a Kazoo Orchestra!

If you’re looking for a computer app that will let you record something, edit the silences or the clomping around / dog barking / small child interrupting at the beginning or end of your song and turn it into an mp3 file for uploading, a favourite of many fawmers is the free software Audacity which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you have a Mac, it will already have GarageBand installed on it, and that’s all you need to get started.

If you’re on a PC, the original version of Cakewalk is still free. Although it’s no longer being updated, it’s a fully functional DAW that will turn your computer into a powerful recording studio with a bunch of features that some paid products still lack.

And then there's Reaper. People who use Reaper tend to be evangelists for it as much as they are users. It's a sophisticated piece of software that is just as crammed with features as commercial DAWs that cost ten times as much. It's not free, but you can download a trial version that works without any restrictions at all for sixty days: that’s more than enough time to complete the whole of FAWM with it!

Compression

When you hear someone talk about using compression in the studio, this is a different thing from file compression (see File Formats below). Audio compression is the process of reducing a recording’s dynamic range by using either a dedicated piece of hardware or a software plugin. And yes, we know that high-end audio file formats give you loads of extra dynamic range, but the thing is a compressor will make the loud bits quieter and the quiet bits louder, which can give drums more punch, make distorted guitars crunchier, and generally make your recording sound more exciting.

Number of Channels

Mono, stereo, surround sound, or immersive audio?

As far as we’re aware, every song that has ever been recorded for FAWM so far has been recorded either in mono (one channel) or stereo (two channels).

While an extension to the mp3 file format which supported multi-channel sound was introduced way back in 2008, it never caught on. Surround sound (six channels: left, center, right, rear right, and rear left speakers together with a subwoofer for the bass or 5.1) is fun for home cinema enthusiasts, and three-dimensional immersive audio (twelve channels: left, center, right, right surround, rear right, rear left, rear left surround, a subwoofer, and front and rear left and right presence speakers up in the ceiling, or 7.1.4) is beginning to catch on among the audiophile crowd, but few people are able to listen to music that way. We’re fine with stereo. We’re fine with mono, too.

There are fawmers out there who would love to be able to create mixes in Dolby Atmos, but not even @headfirstonly has the technology (or the room) for such things!

Levels

If your recording device has a VU meter or a set of level LEDs, you don’t want to bury the needle or have them lighting up red all the time. Setting the gain of your input signal too high like this can ruin a recording and cause clipping, which distorts the sound.

Tip

Keep things below 0dB (your LEDs should occasionally go yellow) but not turned down so much that you can barely hear what’s going on because you risk losing the quieter parts in the noise floor of your recording (caused by the hiss of electrical noise that all pieces of electrical equipment generate).

Gain staging is the art of making sure that you don’t find yourself turning a signal down for one part of your recording chain, then back up for the next, then back down again…

File formats

There are a lot of different file formats, but they fall into two categories: Lossy, and Lossless.

Lossy files

“Lossy” compression uses the magic of psychoacoustics to pick out a lot of the sound information that the human ear isn’t very good at picking up, and throws it away. In some cases, the compression can discard a whopping 90% of the original audio data before most listeners start to hear the quality deteriorate (this tends to affect high frequencies first. Cymbals start to take on a nasty, frying bacon quality when the audio file is heavily compressed).

The most well-known (and widely used) lossy file format is mp3.

!!! NOTE If you’re using FAWM’s file hosting, you should be uploading files in mp3 format. That shouldn’t be a problem, as most phone recording apps save files in mp3 format by default.

The lower the “bit rate” (measured in kilobytes per second) used to store the file, the more compressed it will be. Try starting out with a bit rate of 128 kb/s. That will let you post songs that are ten minutes long before you hit the FAWM hosting file size limit. Raise the bit rate to 160 kb/s and above, and most people can’t hear the difference between that and a CD.

Other lossy audio file formats include AAC, M4A (which also supports lossless compression), MP4 (which also supports video), MQA (Master Quality Authenticated), Ogg Vorbis, and OPUS.

Lossless files

You are probably familiar with .wav files. These use the same data standard that is used on compact discs (which are digital files that encoded data in 16-bit at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz). They store audio without compressing it in any way, so no audio information is lost and your final file ends up with exactly the same audio quality as it had when it was recorded. Lossless files will sound wonderful, but they will be large. 74 minutes of lossless audio will typically fill a CD, which can hold 650 Mb of data. “High end” audio releases use higher sample rates like 96 kb/s or even 192 kb/s and either 24-bit or 32-bit encoding, which massively increases the dynamic range available. And the resulting file size.

Other lossless file formats include AIFF, ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Compression). DSD (Direct Stream Digital, which is used for 5.1 audio SACDs) and FLAC (the Free Lossless Audio Codec, which also supports multi-channel audio such as 5.1 surround sound).

Tip: If the file format you’re using supports metadata (and .mp3, mp4, WAV, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC all do) we recommend adding the track name and your artist name to each file you create as a bare minimum.

Workspaces

When you’re recording, it’s better to have somewhere that is free from extraneous sounds, but we realise that not everybody is fortunate enough to have somewhere like that.

A good recording space will be acoustically dead (so sound doesn’t bounce off the walls, like it does in a tiled bathroom) and in a pinch, draping a duvet over a clothes horse will give you a workable isolation booth. Surprisingly, the inside of a car (parked, and with the engine not running) can also be a great recording space. Home recording enthusiasts also have a long history of shutting themselves in wardrobes or building mattress forts in order to get a decent recording…

If you’re lucky enough to have a space you can turn into a home recording studio (even if it’s a desk in your hallway) the trick is to treat it like a carpenter's workshop. If you have the right tools, and they're all laid out and organised so that when you need to do something, you know exactly where all the things that you're going to need are, you can work very efficiently. You can work fast.

Resources

Make sure to check out the forums for shortcuts, tips, recommendations, and links to useful bits and bobs that other fawmers use to add some awesomeness to their music.

For example, did you know you can add a complete orchestra to your DAW for nothing? Ever fancied writing classical arrangements? Spitfire Audio’s BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover and Project SAM’s free orchestra will enable you to add strings, woodwinds and brass to your songs all without leaving your bedroom (or paying for a 60 piece orchestra for the day, for that matter). They’re both entirely free!

Gear

Once you start wondering what gear you ought to buy in order to get better results, you have tumbled down the home recording rabbit hole and we can’t help you here — but if you have any questions, there are plenty of knowledgeable fawmers in the forums who will be able to help you out.