Hopefully, this will be a place where you can put some professional recording techniques into your own studio setup, whether it's in your bedroom, the basement, or your garage. It's gonna be about getting good sound for cheap, tricks you can use to improve your sound, and how to get more out of the equipment you already have. And as soon as we find somebody that knows how to do all that, he'll run this forum, but in the meantime, you have me.

To make the jump from a home studio to pro quality sound usually requires a few changes in attitude. One is more patience, and two is the ability to learn from your mistakes. Those "mistakes" are gonna come in handy later in your career, so don't forget them. The patience part of it is about going slow and analysing everything you're doing. Try to figure out what you want, and then choose from among several paths which is best to get where you wanna be.

Some of this stuff is almost "Zen-like", where you bond with a piece of gear, or you just suddenly "get" it; exactly what you hafta do to get the sound you're hearing in your head. And sometimes, you hafta leave a piece of music unfinished for a while, till it jumps up and tells you exactly what's wrong and what it needs.

Hopefully, you'll learn some tricks here that will come in handy right now, or maybe long after this place is gone, something I've said here will suddenly make sense to you. Hopefully, it'll be one of those "Oh, yeah." moments, where everything suddenly clicks into place and nobody will know why you're smiling.

And that's the whole point of this forum: What seems to be a giant leap forward is just a small step, when you look back.

Life, and learning to record, is just a series of small steps.

A couple of quotes to remember:

Success is 5% inspiration, 95% prespiration.

90% of everything is crap.