How to record an album

Hey everyone! So today I’m going to lay down some truths to you guys about recorded albums. Some of you might be shocked to hear that some of your favorite artists out there aren’t really all that great. Some of you might be shocked to hear that it takes more work than expected to actually write, produce, mix, and master a full length studio album or EP. 

Anyways, Before we get into it, let’s take a moment of silence and pray for all of the things that are in our lives. 

At this time, I would like all of us to take a moment of silence and pray for all of the things in our lives. Pray to God to help you to become the best possible person that you are destined to become. Take a minimum of 5 minutes and pray for all of these things. 

Now back to the show

Recording an album

So, it actually takes a bit of a process in order to record an album. You need to do a few things in order to actually record anything good. 

The first step is to actually write the song. 

99.9% of all songwriters out there (in Pop, Rap, Rock, Hip-hop, Country, Christian, Jazz, Blues) write out their songs beforehand. 

They don’t just randomly spit out whatever is on their mind while they are in the studio, even though it can be beneficial to have fresh ideas in your head while in the studio. 

I mean I have heard of cases where 2 rappers freestyled absolutely all of their albums, Biggie and Snoop Dogg, However, that’s rare and there’s something that you don’t know about freestyling if you’ve never freestyled. 

In order to freestyle well, you need to have practiced rehearsed lines over and over again many times in different ways. 

So like, in order to have freestyled about a topic on the microphone, it’s actually just re-written or re-said things. That’s how come rappers can freestyle in rhythm and rhyme, they’re not really “making stuff up on the spot” but they are rather just resaying things that they already rehearsed. 

This is coming from a dude who raps, trust me! 

So, first step is to write out the song.

The next step is to rehearse the song.

HAHAHA, I can already hear some of you NON MUSICIANS say, Why would you need to rehearse your own songs if you’ve already wrote them? 

Well that’s simple, just because you wrote a song, doesn’t mean that you remember them. And it’s absolutely essential that you know how to sing your song in different keys, tempos, rhythms, etc. etc. because it will come in handy when you’re in the recording studio and the sound engineer says, “Sing the harmonies to the background vocals.” 

Or you might not like the song that you just recorded in a certain key and think it’s too high or low and you’ll want to adjust it to your voice. 

The next step is to Demo the song. 

What is a demo? 

A demo is a sample of your music. 

Now it doesn’t have to be a fully produced song that is completely mixed and mastered. 

However, major record labels and people who are really established will want to sometimes hear what was your TOTAL idea for the song.

When you’re making a demo you will oftentimes have to redo the song and different parts of the song because you might like the way that other parts of that recording sounded better. 

Me personally, whenever I go into the recording studio, I ask for my demos live takes and we do the live takes 3 to 4 times. And then after that we re-record the guitars separately and the voices separately. It’s really cool.  

A demo can be as simple as my voice and a guitar playing to as complete as a fully produced song. 

Now, here some people choose different paths with their songs. Some people choose to go  and fully produce the song. Others choose to just stick with the guitar and voice sample. 

Why? 

Different goals. 

Sometimes it’s actually needed to have just the voice and the guitar in your demo. Other times it’s needed for a fully produced song. 

And depending on whether or not you’re going to hire a producer for your album, then you’ll want to sometimes fully produce the song to give the producer a viewpoint as to what you want the song to sound like. 

Sometimes you won’t want to fully produce a song when you have a producer. At this point the producer becomes a part of the artist’s view. The producer could add artistic elements to your song that would put a different brain on your song. 

But it just depends on how you think the song is coming along and what you think of the song. 

Next step

Produce the song.

If you know how to produce, lucky you! Because you might be doing that for your own first 5 independent albums. Why? Because producers are EXPENSIVE. HAHAHA! I know that sucks but it’s the cold hard truth. 

A good producer will be expensive. 

I was doing some research as to how much a producer will cost to produce your song and I was looking that the “Fair price” for a good producer was like between 5,000 to 10,000 dollars for a 10 song album. 

HOWEVER, DON”T LET THAT STOP YOU!!!!!

Hahaha! There are about a million ways that you could self produce or get beats and instrumentals for cheap! I know of 2 websites off the top of my head that you can get FREE or CHEAP beats and instrumentals: Beatstars.com and Airbit.com. My personal favorite is Beatstars. 

They have terms as to how you can use the beats, like you can’t sell more than 5000 albums or something like that or else you would have to buy the beat lease again. 

However, when you first start out being a musician, You’re not even going to sell that amount of albums!!!! And guess what? Those dudes will give you their beats for about 30 bucks and it’s ALL YOU NEED. 

If you do some looking around you could probably get around 10 songs for about 100 bucks! It’s really not that bad of a deal. 

Some producers give away their beats because influence is more important to them than money is. So, they trade up their money for influence and sure enough they will get money one day. 

Either way, if the producer decides to give away his beats for free or sell them, he will get a cut of the publishing royalties because they will almost ALWAYS put in the fine print that they are entitled to 50% of publishing. 

Last step

Mixing and mastering

At this point, we’ve reached post-production. There are some things that everyone says in the music industry about mixing and mastering, “You only mix and master a song professionally if you’ve been doing it for 20 or 30 years.” 

I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy to do those two things. 

However, there are some cheats that you could do.

For mastering, there are programs that you can buy for your DAW and it will master your song for you. 

However for mixing it’s a little different because mixing is an art and it can’t be done by a computer. 

There are different ways that a professional mixing engineer could mix a song and all of them could sound AWESOME. It’s just it’s a lot of decision making between the mixing engineer and the artist. 

If you don’t know anything about mixing, I highly recommend that you start learning because it will come in handy when deciding which effects you want on your song. 

Mixing is expensive too. I went to a local mixing engineer and he said that to mix one song, it would cost me 300 dollars! And guess what? IT WAS ONLY FOR A GUITAR AND VOICE SONG!!!!! 

I was dead on the inside. 

But anyways, we’re at the end of our blog post. I hope that I have shared some insight in the real recording process and how much work it actually takes to record a song. 

Broadcast

I sure hope that I have been an inspiration and a hope to you all. Please pray, read your bible, go to church, and love God above all else. Like, comment, share, subscribe, and I will see you all next time. 

Remember if you want to go to heaven, then believe in Jesus and you will go to heaven. 

Thank you all for listening in on this blog post. 

German Gonzalez, signing out!