Hello, and welcome to the ultimate recording School. My name is Darrell was and I tell you what I'm so excited to bring this course to you as I've just been bagged over the years, why don't you make the definitive guide to help harm recording enthusiasts learn the essentials kind of learn the ropes of audio engineering now what sound is made up of how to record mix and master all the stuff that I don't know. It's kind of assumed knowledge in all the manuals, the gear that you buy, people kind of already assume you know, this was what I've been actually spending about six months putting all this information together. Or probably more accurately, it's probably been over 20 plus years in my professional life. Looking over the shoulders of giants in the industry, in studios and on tour with as like Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, kind of see how it's done.

I've distilled all that stuff down to five sessions that I contained This course, this is not so much about know which button to press or what menu to go in on any particular recorder, or audio application. It's really about the unchanging principles that will serve you for the rest of your life. I don't know what we're going to be recording on in 10 years time, but I do know that we'll still be using these same principles that are contained in this five part course. We are also gonna have some fun learning along the way. I really enjoy this stuff. I hope you do too.

So anyway, anyway, let's go ahead and get started. And here's the thought of the day at the beginning, right? If you're recording suck today, a new toy ain't gonna fix it. Now I'm saying this with love with friends here. You can go out and buy up a new mic or plug in affectionate recorder, whatever, but if you don't have a good solid understanding of the principles and best practices of recording audio, then, in my opinion, it's just money down the drain. I completely understand that.

You might need some Decent gear if you're recording into saying old on our old fostex cassette recorder. But look, the way that most of us are today in the waiting is today, we can pretty much all afford some sort of portable digital recorder or software. So the missing gap is most definitely training. I've got very, very strong on this. Now, let me tell you a story that will illustrate this and probably save you thousands and thousands of dollars. I will never forget when I first moved to the States.

I was working as a salesman and little bitty Music Store in Hollywood, California. When a guy came in with a son, obviously that was very wealthy and that would come in Week after week by mooster. new stuff for this for this book, The Son or it gets over a span of about three months the police spent about $20,000 as back in 1988. Whenever they came in, I always remember the look on the salesman who he dealt with in the store. He was like jet skiing every time these guys came in. Thousand Steve was more than happy to sell the debt more and more stock that we can input.

Now as a salesman. I wasn't making probably half as much money as Steve I had the approach that if someone hadn't grasped recording levels and say, am I dealing with a noise floor that $3,000 Norman you ready seven microphone probably ain't gonna fix their problems right. Steve on the other hand, my fellow salesman didn't suffer from any of those moral dilemmas. He just sold them whatever they were willing to buy. Anyway, after the poor pilot spent probably that $20,000 unbelievable amount of money. The son strike up a conversation with me and soon found out that I knew this stuff pretty well.

It ends up that the boy really didn't know anything about recording so the dad decided to hire me to come out and teach his son how to use all of this equipment. So I'll never forget how to draw up this massive mansion in Beverly Hills with ground stop and servants My father escorted me out the back to this huge guest house where he had all this equipment ends up his son can't play it lick hands, basically doesn't know you know anything about this stuff. I'll never forget looking around the room and thinking how much wasted money was in that room. So I spent the following days filling in the gaps of the book actually used, you know, some of the stuff. And I recommended that, you know, he doesn't really need half of this stuff in here. So in retrospect, I probably wasn't a greatest salesman, because I'm not I would always question how much equipment people needed to buy.

And instead, I would always encourage them to really know how to use the equipment that they already right they already had. It don't get me wrong, I love all this gear as much as you guys do. My point is simply this the gap between where you are and where you want to go. The reason that your recordings don't sound like the ones you hear on the radio It really is simply a matter of learning the same principles that are in playing la in New York and Nashville every day of the week solid principles and best practices that give consistent, absolutely consistent results. And the great news is, we're going to learn them. All right now.

Okay, what are we actually going to be learning today? I guess the the big elephant in the room is can we realistically expect that we can learn all of this in just one course what my answer is yes. And I can say that confidently, because I've done extensive research and been at this game of teaching people and musicians how to use all the stuff gotten over 20 years. I've been through courses that teach all the minute principles of audio, and electronics and Fletcher Munson, Lammas curves, and all that stuff, and they spend months teaching this stuff. Now, that's all good stuff, but I'm pretty sure that you came here to really learn the essential The stuff that will really make a difference in your home recordings. Now, if you want to be the next Bruce within make a career out of being outside Grammy Award winning audio engineer, you'll learn a lot today.

But you're probably a year or two year long course and a major recording school in New York or LA. Most of us don't have that kind of time, and money. Now, having said that, we can learn a ton. Today we're going to grow through this course we're going to keep it simple. I'm a simple guy, I break it down to three, it's gonna just be three things, how to record how to mix and master your songs. And if I can keep the task we can really, man we can get a lot done.

You'll see that this course is broken down into five different sessions or five separate sessions. The first one, we'll look at the introduction what sound is how its recorded, then the practices of recording like punching, ultimate takes bouncing and so on in the second session, and then we'll look at effects Mixing, and finally mastering. I hope you can see how each session builds on the last verse basically understanding what sound is, then how to record it, then what effects out once we've recorded tracks and know how to use effects, then we can mix that down. And then finally we can master a track to give it that polished sound that we hear on the radio. So I guess it would be it would be fair to ask, Who am I and what the heck do I know about this subject? Well, like maybe many of you I've been playing with this stuff.

I've been playing with these toys since I was a kid. I bought my first multitrack test Chem 244 back in 83 got completely hooked on home recording. This was back in the day when only had one effect a rollin SRV 2000 with a cool price of anyone who wasn't going to take a guess yet a single reverb unit was over $2,000 so what I had back in the day was four tracks of noisy cassette and one effect price tag of three thousand dollars in mid 80s. dollars was probably about 6000 in today's dollars, so don't you ever complain to me about the price and quality of today's products? I'll have absolutely none of it. Anyway, I read everything I could over the coming years and moved to Hollywood, California in 1987.

When I met a cute girl on the beach, we eloped A few months later. And beyond belief we're still married to this day. I worked in music stores and found out I just had kind of a knack for using this stuff and the word spread that I was the guy to talk to if anybody wanted to learn how to use this duck. Then I had a fortunate set of events where I was hired by a bunch of people to program since and be a tech and consultant to add us like Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins. Diana Ross is going to buy a bunch of people. You just got to remember where I come from, right.

I'm from Little Town in South Australia. Basically just a kid who listened to all this music on the radio FireWire in America and then to start working with these people it was an absolute dream come true. So I decided right then that it was going to be hanging around these kind of people. Then I was gonna learn everything I could from these people that I was basically rubbing shoulders with unbelievably I know what it's like to be in the studio with David plaster, I was actually in the room. When witness huge hit, I will always love you was recorded. I've looked over everyone's shoulder, I could basically peek over.

And I've spent really the last quarter of a century learning really everything I can about this subject. I'm really passionate about it. And I have to be really, when you think about I have to be an absolute idiot not to have learned a thing or two, right? I mean, I assume you're have careers and professions that you've been doing for a long period of time and you know a lot about your area of expertise. I don't know about your stuff, but I really do know this stuff. Now, as you might imagine, we all use different tools to record our stuff.

So I definitely won't be going the details of how to assign effects in your particular unit. For example, we have DVDs on most of the gear out there, if you want specific help on your product, just go ahead and see Pro Audio dvds.com for that Now, having said that, this course is all about developing skills, and really learning the principles that will help you no matter what do you what tool you're recording on. And let me say this, this information is timeless. It won't matter if you're recording today using a node B 1600s, or 2488 or 10 years down the road on that we're recording on Dick Tracy watches. This information is really valuable because you use it forever. And the flip side is this if you don't know this stuff, it won't matter how much crap you buy it Just you just want to get it done.

So let's begin. Now to understand the present way we record we pretty much need to look back at where we've come from, and to look at a brief history of recording. Now, back in the early days, it all started back in depression days, when only really a few people could afford a phonograph. So the market for recorded music was pretty slim. It was many radio, a recording engineers Java back in those times was to sum the outputs from a few microphones, maybe even only one microphone and maybe ellika shown an orchestra and mix it into a mono recording stereo didn't even come on the scene till 1957. So an engineer's job back in that day was to capture the sound of the players and blend them the best he could by positioning them all around a Michael to the horn players were better back.

Maybe a vocalist was up close everything recorded together in one take at one time. If anyone screwed up, you started again or you just played through it. Recordings went directly to disk and meant to type and then something extraordinary happened in 1955. Big thing happened multitrack arrived. Yep. Ampex credit the very first multitrack and a track recorder that was snapped up by legendary guitarist Les Paul.

Now, for the first time ever, you could record a separate tracks of audio in independent tracks, big big deal multitrack recording was born. Now you could do really amazing things here. You don't didn't have to record all the parts at the same time. Each performance can be re recorded, without messing up the others there. You could play all the parts yourself. You could mix each part after the fact and postpone all those mixing decisions until mix down later.

Now after that multitrack start maturing Went from eight tracks and 16 to 24 tracks and life was good, but you had to be rich and famous to record basically anything. The glamour of the recording studio was legendary and it was kind of an I was kind of like hallowed ground, the average musician would never be kind of a part of equipment was great, but very, very expensive. Then something happened. It was a home recording revolution. things started to change in the late 1970s when test camp started the whole home recording revolution with products like the model 80 and others. But the defining product that brought home recording really to the masses was Tascam four track cassette based 144.

This changed our whole plank on back, one of Bruce Springsteen's early albums was recorded on a 144. Then after that, in the 80s, we had the MIDI revolution in the coming years, we had the advent of the synthesizer, drum machines, affectionate recording was pretty much done. Back in those days into sequences that recorded your playing allowed you to edit those performances and then play that data back into your sense. And say drum machines perfectly dislike you were playing them live but all of these recordings were MIDI performances only. No Audio basically recorded back then. But the next bombshell of harm recording happened in 1996 with the introduction of Rollins vs. 880.

Do anybody of you guys have one of these is very popular piece of equipment for the first time ever. Our musician could record audio digitally massive move forward in technology. Basically, everything up to that point had been taped bass. I mean, though, there were digital recorders around at the time, but they were like a quarter million dollars. A Maxi seriously. The Sinclair PA system.

Liquid was about $250,000. And there were really only a handful around. Michael Jackson had one when I was out with him. We actually had a large tent built every concert concert about the size of this room with its own air conditioning, everything to display some of Michael's background vocals, and choirs and sound effects and so on a massive quarter million dollar sprinkler system that today could be replaced by this Mac laptop here as your friend of mine would regularly go over to West Sweden to work on Benny Anderson, who is a keyboard player. From Abbott, he had a synchronous system this stuff was massively out of anyone's budget. But the BSA really open the floodgates to all the digital recorders that we use today everything can go back to that and finally know what happened there.

The average person could now afford a really good recording studio. But the flip side this is back in the past, earning professions with hundreds of thousand dollars of equipment would get to really practice and use this stuff. People with audio engineering courses underneath their belt. This is really, really important because you're being required to know all the stuff that was previous Not only by the people who did this as a full time job, so quit being hard on yourself. Okay? Take a deep breath.

And we'll begin at the beginning and that is basically what are the elements of sound and more importantly, why do you give her it