Recording: BPM, Levels

Your main goal while recording is to maintain focus and eyes on the final outcome. Believe me, it’s really easy to spend hours and hours in tweaking knobs an playing around with amp simulators and different plug-ins.

DAW manuals have thousands of pages: you don’t need to read them all, just master the few important steps that make 99% of the right sound you need.

BPM (Beats Per Min)

One of the thing I found really important (after several painful mistakes) is to set up the correct tempo of the track BEFORE starting to record anything on it. Doing it in a later stage is surely more complicated and tricky.

A very easy way in Logic is to use the BPM counter, and let him calculate the tempo of your track.

For example, you enable the recording of a guitar track, you activate the BPM counter, strum the chords of the song (without actually recording anything), and a BPM number will appear. Just input that number in the BPM field of the song, and hit play with the metronome switched on. Try to play your guitar along the metronome, and if some adjustments are needed (slower, faster), just increase the BPM number until you reach the desire speed.

Setting the correct BPM at the beginning will make the recording of synth drums and other instrument very easy.

Recording levels

Another important thing to get right in the first place is the recording levels of your instruments and sub-tracks of your song. You need to ensure that the input recording meter never gets into the red area, even in the loudest part of your playing (when you are strumming harder, singing louder etc.). 

You should aim for a half-way / three-quarters meter peak in every audio file you are going to record (see screenshot below).

See the next post for an introduction on effects, equalisation and audio editing.