As a musician, we all know that making a recording can be a nice and rewarding experience, and it can also be very useful to listen to our own creations from a different perspective. There are many ways to start recording ourselves. Probably the most widely followed approach is just putting a microphone, or a little recording device such as a tape recorder with a built in device, in front of ourselves and press the record button. This sometimes leads to satisfactory, or even nice results. If you need to record more than one instrument, for example guitar and a voice, this approach has certain limitations : if there is a mistake in any of the instruments, it can not be corrected. If any instrument sounds too loud during the recording, it is impossible to make adjustments. The solution consist of a fundamentally different way of recording : multitracking.

Multitracking basics

As the word suggests, multitracking is based on recording on multiple tracks. Each instrument is recorded independently on a different track. During recording, the musician hears the other tracks, usually through a headphone, while his / her instrument is recorded « solo » without any other sounds. When the recording session is finished, all tracks are mixed together, according to personal taste, into the final « mixdown » which can for example be written on a cd.

Multitrack advantages

Multitracking has several advantages over single track recording : - corrections to one single instrument can easily be made - the sound of each instrument can be adjusted independently, even after the recording - the volume of each instrument, as well as its position in the stereo field, can be adjusted after the recording - it becomes easy to apply sound manipulation effects after recording - the musician gets more freedom to experiment with what he or she plays. You can improvise additional tracks, and at the end make a selection between the recorded tracks.

Multitrack technology for everyone

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