Engineering Sound for Home Recording and Music Production

Learn what sound is, and what sound waves are so that you can better understand how to manage them. 

Graphs are a great way to create a visual representation of how one element changes in relation to another. A first introduction to the characteristics of sound waves.

A little more about my background experiences. You probably have a story of your own, feel free to share your experiences too!

Amplitude is important to be aware of, as too much or too little sound will affect the quality of the recording you are trying to produce. By the end of this lecture you will have a better understanding of how amplitude affects our ability to effectively capture and reproduce sound.

By the end of this lesson you’ll have a better idea of how to assemble all the different pieces of the audio puzzle into a mix that fits together nicely.

Velocity: Explains the speed of sound in recording.

You will find as you work with audio recording that there are many opportunities for seeing visual representations of sound waves, so it will be good for you to understand how we can define what a sound wave visually looks like.

By the end of this lesson, you will learn why it is important to pay attention to how and where you set your microphones up when you are planning a recording.

Separation  is important in order to minimize leakage or cross-bleed and is something we definitely want to watch out for. Find out more in this lesson!

In this lesson we talk about why it is important to maintain flat frequency response in our system in order to not interfere with the natural sounds that are produced by musical instruments.

By learning about a waveforms envelope you will learn why it important to monitor soundwaves so that we know the exact right time to fade them in or out, or even to split or cut them if they need to be edited.  

What is a Decibel? Here's where you find out!

By the end of this lesson, you will know more about the common methods of measuring the voltage strength of an electrical signal, and what happens if you don’t pay attention to how it affects your equipment.

Probably the single most consideration when making a recording is Setting Recording Levels. Once you have recorded something it is very difficult to affect the level of what you have down on your drive.

In this lesson, we’ll be talking about the most important considerations that you will want to make when making a recording of any sound.

A convenient indication of signal strength is represented on meters which are called a Volume Unit~ abbreviated as VU. In this lesson you will learn about sound meters that measure sound strength measured not in decibels, but in volume units.  

In this lesson, you will learn about the Peak Program meter. Although it looks the same as a VU meter, it is able to indicate sudden instantaneous program peaks, whereas a VU meter does not.  

In this lesson, we’re going to talk about how we hear Sound. Our goal here is to understand how the human ear perceives certain frequencies as being louder than others, even though in reality that may not be the case at all. It is important to know this when you are recording and mixing sounds together, so you can understand why certain frequencies are sometimes emphasized more than others when it comes to the mix down.

In this lesson, you will learn about “The Fletcher-Munson Curves” which help explain some of the quirks that are unique to sound which will help you in preparing your recordings for mixdown.

In this lesson you will learn what is meant by the term “Flat frequency Response .”

In this section we’ll break the frequency spectrum down into distinct parts. That will help you be able to isolate specific frequencies that have their own unique characteristics. It will also make it easier for you to communicate with others about which part of the frequency spectrum you are working with, or trying to fine tune.

In this lesson we wrap things up with a discussion of how sound passes through the entire recording chain.  In this lesson you will get a great overall picture of how sound passes though the recording chain!