Home Recording: The Scratch Tracks

Our first step in recording our original music will be to create what we refer to as scratch tracks.  The CD is going to be recorded one instrument at a time, but the scratch track will be all of us performing the songs together.  That scratch track will be used by each member of the band.  We will listen to the scratch track through the headphones while we play and recording one instrument at a time.

So we met a few weeks ago to create the scratch tracks.  We set up our equipment as if we were going to play at a gig.    Everyone had a vocal microphone that was plugged into the recorder.  Each instrument amplifier had a microphone in front of it and they were plugged into the recorder.  Then the drums were miked also.  Those microphones were input to a mixer and the two line outs from that mixer were plugged into the recorder.  We needed to do it that way, because our recorder doesn't have enough inputs for the drums to go directly into it for recording with all the vocals and instruments.

We are using a Tascam Digital Portable Studio DP-24 for creating this recording.  We have had two failed attempts at recording this music in the last few years and decided that instead of depending upon others to produce the CD the way we wanted it, we would just do it ourselves.  We pulled together some money and my husband researched home studios and selected this model.  We are sure that it will do a great job.

Recording the scratch tracks was not very difficult at all.  We have played these songs in public many times.  Our original music gets very good crowd response and sometimes we get requests for our original music and that is quite the compliment.

We ran through a few warm up songs, just to get the cobwebs out.  The bands favorite warmup song has to be "The Fireman" the George Strait hit or the Dwight Yoakum version of the Elvis hit "Little Sister."  Those songs are upbeat and fun, they just get you in the right mood for playing music.

After the warmup songs, our engineer turned on the DP-24 and we played one of our originals.  The main point right now is not to be absolutely note for note perfect, but to have the tempo be perfect.  The DP-24 has a click track option, which is like a metronome playing in your ear, but we decided we didn't want to do it that way, so it is up to the drummer to maintain the tempo and not speed up or slow down.  This is critical because as we each lay down our individual tracks we will be listening to this scratch track through the headphones.  If it speeds up or slows down, so will our final product. So this is alot of pressure on the drummer.

We did a few of the scratch tracks on the first take.  That is very satisfying.  Several of them required more than one take, but it went very quickly.  We created scratch tracks for nine original songs in less than an eight hour day.  Very productive

Our next step will be to record the individual drum tracks.  That will be the first track that will be layed down on the final CD product.  Very excited.  I will report back on our progess soon.