Mass Hysteria Band

A couple of years ago, I had a great conversation with Tom Booth. I just called him one day out of the blue, left a message on his answering machine, and amazingly enough, he called me back a couple of days later! For those of you who have never had the chance to meet him, Tom’s not only an incredibly talented and gifted artist, he’s just an all-around nice guy, and he had a lot of advice to offer me.  I originally called him to ask him about how he went about putting his first album together, and how much did he spend in studio time. His answer actually surprised me.

“Well,” he said, “My latest album actually cost quite a bit, but if you’re just starting out with your first album, don’t spend the money on studio time. Spend your money on the best equipment you can get, then only go into the studio when you’ve got your songs completely down.” The conversation when on for awhile touching other subject not related to this article, but I got a lot valuable insight from Tom, and for that, I thank him.

Based on that conversation, I went out and spent roughly $10,000 on recording equipment and new guitar gear, then went about the arduous task of learning DigiDesign’s ProTools LE. That was a lesson in frustration. Without a doubt, ProTools is pretty much the standard when  it comes to recording. But for home recording, it was an absolutely daunting task trying to learn the ins and outs of the software. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult to use. There’s just so much to it, that I found that I was spend more time on learning the software, than getting my songs onto disc! So I actually gave up recording for about a year. I just kept writing songs. As time went by, close friends kept on urging me to get my songs out, but I explained my frustration, and said that I was waiting for God to present me with a solution.

A couple of months went by, and I found myself out of a job again as the start-up I joined completely imploded. In spite of that, I had the feeling that this was going to set me up with a new, even better opportunity, and more importantly, help me find a solution to getting my songs recorded. As a result of my company folding, I was able to purchase a couple of G5 iMacs that I would set up and give to my kids. Little did I know that that purchase of $600 for the both of them would completely change my life!

I brought the computers home and set them up. By chance, one of the computers had iLife installed on it, and I just happened to discover a little unassuming program called GarageBand. I ended up playing with it for over 6 hours! I discovered that my DAW (an MBox2) could be used with GarageBand, so I hooked it up and started recording tracks. I was amazed to be able to record You Stir My Soul, the title track to my demo in less than an hour! Granted, it’s only two guitar parts and three vocal parts, but it would’ve taken me days to do it ProTools! I spent the next week recording a few more songs like Great God, I Will Sing of Your Salvation, and We Sing with Joy! whose project files I unfortunately lost due to a hard drive failure, but I now had the recording bug back!

Going back to what Tom had advised, I still totally agree that you should buy gear. But I’ll qualify it… Buy gear that you will use for recording; that is, good-quality instruments - in case you’re in need to fill up gaps in things you’re missing instrument-wise. For recording gear, get a good DAW like an MBox or Presonus DAW. Then make sure you have a program that can interface with your DAW. Keep in mind that you’re putting together a demo, not a fully mastered production-quality collection of music. The idea is to get it good enough to turn heads, but with the understanding that you’ll do the real recording in a studio where you have a sound engineer.

Here’s the amazing thing I’ve found about using GarageBand for the past year. It has got some great mastering tools in it, so you can get your songs very close to a finished state. But even more amazing is that it’s so easy to use, you can concentrate more on getting your music recorded than futzing about with the software. Does it have it’s shortcomings? Sure it does. For instance, you only have a 1 meaure count-in for re-recording a region. That can be a real pain, especially if the song has a fast tempo. You barely have time to click the recording button then start singing or playing. But in spite of its shortcomings, the general ease getting your songs down far outweighs the negatives.