Recording your own digital music at home is easier than it ever was before - your hard disk becomes the tape used to store audio tracks, and a variety of software applications are available to mix multiple tracks together. For example, GarageBand is included with all new Apple computers, and professional software such as Logic Audio, Cubase, or Pro Tools is more expensive but higher quality and more intuitive. Other software such as Cakewalk often has trial versions, however, freeware and shareware software options are also available - in fact there is a free limited version of Pro Tools available.
While you can setup one or two microphones in a room and record everything in one pass, most recordings today are done using multiple tracks, called multi-track recording, which allows you to record different elements separately (such as the voice, guitar, piano, etc.), then mix them together to make a final song. This is the way that some professional recordings are made and it is not uncommon to have 32 to 48 tracks used to record a single song, with a track used for each type of drum in a drum set, each separate instrument, and each harmony of the vocals getting a dedicated track. This type of recording gives the most flexibility - if you decide one part of the recording is too loud, you can drop its volume in the mix, or if you decide that one subset of instruments needs to be brighter or needs an effect, you can apply it to that specifically without affecting any of the other tracks. If you record all the music and instruments in one pass on to the same tracks, you are stuck with how it was recorded as a whole, and can only treat the entire track as one.
Some computer tools also allow you to leverage synthesized music, such as keyboards, drums, and other instruments, often using a standard called MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) to synchronize them together, keep them in time with each other, and represent the instruments as specific synthesized sounds and notes. This has recently become a key advantage of digital recording, as it allows a lot of the more difficult instruments to record to be reproduced with MIDI, making the recording process much easier than it had been, for example, synthesizing the drums and string section of a track while recording guitars and vocals in a fraction of the time that it would have taken to actually record the same music with live musicians.
Most multi-track recording starts with a base track, which is a rough recording of the song and sometimes just the drums, to use as a guide to layering the remaining tracks on top. This allows you to have a common reference that keeps all the other tracks in sync with each other, and as a partial reminder of what part of the song you are in. Once this main track is recorded, you can continue to record successive tracks individually or together until all the components are recorded, piece by piece. Once all the tracks are recorded, you can apply tweaks to individual tracks - common changes would be EQ, or to sonically fine-tune a certain track that has too much bass or treble or another specific frequency, or applying effects such as reverb or delay to fatten individual instruments or make them sound more natural. Professionals will often take this a step further and make edits to clean up pitch, timing, or completely rearrange individual tracks, for example making a composite version of multiple lead vocal tracks to get one perfect lead vocal track. The final tracks can then be mixed together to create a single stereo track of the song, which you can then encode to MP3 or another format and share online with others, or burn to a CD and listen to in your home or car.
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