Tech Talk Bringing It All Back Home

Tech Talk Bringing It All Back Home

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When Fostex introduced their first fourtrack home recording unit a few years back, the ads in stereo and music magazines were enticing enough to peak the interest of any would-be do-it-yourself record producer. The unit was pictured along with a copy of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and a tagline about how the Fab Four had recorded their masterpiece on four-track, implying that anybody could create their own masterpiece with a home recording sytem.

What the ad neglected to mention was that the Beatles had producer George Martin in the studio with 'em twiddling the knobs. As any seasoned home recording vet will tell ya, it takes a bit more than just bringing equipment home and plugging it in to whip up something worthwhile. Owner's manuals are fine for telling you what your new toy can do, but devoid of any real tips on creativity or getting the most out of your equipment. Thus it's surprising that it took so long for an intelligently-written book on the subject to appear, coming to the rescue of all those borne recording enthusiasts (myself included) who were ready to toss their gear out of the window and take up something more mundane like accounting.

But The Musician's Guide Tb Home Recording is just such a book; a wonderful step-by-step manual that helps you get the most out of whatever home setup you might have, presented in straightforward, easy-to-understand language that doesn't require a chief engineer to decipher. Written by producer/engineer Peter Mclan (Men At Work) and songwriter/author Larry Wichman, The Musician's Guide was conceived nearly three years ago, stemming from Wichman's frequent badgering of Mclan for tricks of the trade.

'It really evolved around the time that Peter was doing the second Men At Work album,' Wichman recalls. 'I used to call him at all hours of the night and ask him all these questions, and I'd come into the studio and hear the takes they were doing and the mixes they were working on, and I'd see them doing all these things. I knew I wanted to try these little tricks at home, but it got down to the basic problems of just trying to get noise out of the recording. I'd go in there and see them putting tons of effects in, and I'd go in and put one effect in and it would sound like shit. No books ever told you how to use the techniques of the studio even though you had the gear.'

With chapters on everything from how to record individual instruments to how to sequence your songs on a demo tape, The Musician's Guide covers all the areas you'd expect from a book like this and more. One of the more interesting chapters that leads off the book has a rather metaphysical title: 'The Art Of Listening.'

'When I first went down to Australia, after having produced demos and then produced my own album and albums for other artists, I was confronted with a situation where I had to engineer for the first time,' Mclan says. ''I was very lucky to have been taught, after years of experimenting, by a guy by the name of Mick Guzauski, who did the Earth, Wind And Fire albums, Chuck Mangione . . . and the key thing he taught me was to listen, which is something we emphasize in the book fairly stronglylearning to really listen to the environment you're in and try to duplicate those environments. That's something that hadn't even dawned on me until I started working with him. I was doing things like twirling knobs instead of really listening. All those knobs are is an extension of what's going on between your ears, and what we tried to do with the book was to make the distance between what's going on in your ears and those knobs as short as possible.'

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''The point we've tried to make is nothing is written in stone,' Wichman adds. ''The starting points we've given for EQ for guitar are simply points that I know work in situations that I've used. Somebody could sit there and listen to them and have a starting point that they know is acceptable, then alter it to suit the needs of whatever music they're doing, but at least they know what the basis is.'

The Musician's Guide To Home Recording also has a special section on types of gear to consider buying based on your budget, from a low end of about $2,000 on up to $20,000. But the authors stress that their book is more concept-oriented than product-oriented, thus insuring to some degree that the information will remain relevant despite changes in available equipment.

'The point we've tried to make is, nothing is written in stone.'

—Wichman

''The nice thing about it is, everybody says 'How do you get away with writing a book that's not going to be out-of-date next year because of all the changes in electronic equipment?' ' Mclan says. ''What we did was we only used the concepts of, say, reverb or digital delay lines or echo or things of that nature. The technology may change somewhat, but the concept is there. That's what we try to dwell on, so that it's not going to be outdated in five years.'

'Unless they come up with some totally different form of music,' Wichman laughs. 'It would take a revolution, not just a digital revolution, to alter the usability of the book.'

If the book is successful, Wichman and Mclan plan updated editions as they deem necessary. But after three years of hard work to put together this edition, that might be awhile.

'It was Ben Hur,' Mclan says of compiling the book. 'A lot of what we considered professional effects a couple of years ago are now available for home use, and we think the timing of the book—frankly, we were frustrated with how long it took to get it on the market, but as it turns out it seems to have been a blessing in disguise, because a lot of the things we're talking about are now more and more readily available to people at home.'

From the numerous technical definitions to the nearly three dozen 'tape tips' scattered throughout the book, The Musician's Guide To Home Recording is a must own for every musician who takes his bedroom studio seriously. Whether you're working on this generation's Sgt. Pepper's or just trying to produce a decent-sounding demo, this informative volume will set you on the right track.

Steve Peters