Laziness In The Studio

I love digital recording. I love how much power and potential is available to us with a basic home studio and a mind overflowing with ideas. We can accomplish practically anything we can imagine with the help of today’s wonderful sounding and affordable gear. But there is a giant problem creeping up in the modern home studio; the elephant in the room that no one is owning up to…we’re all getting lazy!

Via Ion Chibzii Flickr

To explain myself, here is a brief expert from my new eBook, The #1 Rule of Home Recording…

The moment I was first introduced to computer based recording, I saw the potential for recording millions of takes. At first it made sense to me to just record as much as you can and then pick the best take or takes later. But over the years I have come to realize how much of a hindrance this philosophy was, rather than a help.

I honestly believe that having unlimited takes and hard drive space has made us lazy. It seems we’ve lost that sense of urgency to try to perform our best in the studio and capture a great recording in a few takes. That was part of the magic of recording; it was a challenge to get that once-in-a-lifetime performance!

More importantly, having that feeling of pressure to produce (even slight pressure) created a sense of focus in the studio.

You see, the thing that makes home recording so wonderful (the freedom to create without any time or money constraints) is the very reason we are becoming lazy and creating lackluster recordings. If we want our listeners to take our music seriously, then we are going to have to take our recording sessions seriously. Treat it like a real session in a real studio with real money on the clock! Plan what you are going to do, then execute that plan.

In the eBook I go into more detail on how I like to approach this process in my own studio and how I focus my recording sessions. If you don’t have a copy already, you can download it for free on the top right of the site.

But you may have your own ways of zeroing in on what needs to be done in order to get a great performance in the studio. What has been successful for you? What keeps you focused? What keeps the laziness at bay when you’re making music?