News There’s A Lot Of Charm In Lo-Fi Recording

Growing up I lived in a sleepy town surrounded by fields. In an age of dial-up Internet and analogue TV there was very little to do and I found refuge in the company of my computer, along with guitars, shitty microphones, keyboards and anything else remotely musical that I could get my hands on. While other kids spent their evenings hanging out drinking white cider getting wanked off, I ‘borrowed’ a 4-track tape recorder from school (which I still use now) and I would use it alongside my PC to record my friends’ bands and then spend hours experimenting with what I had recorded until it sounded how I wanted. The real fun was in not knowing how to do something, and then working out by trial and error how you could achieve it with the limited tools at your disposal.

Some of my favourite albums are the results of low-budget home recordings. Guided By Voices ‘Bee Thousand’ is still rated above any of their subsequent studio efforts. Times New Viking would never have developed their insanely loud and incredibly powerful sound without messing around with 4-tracks, recording all their instruments at stupid volumes. There’s a lot of charm in lo-fi recording, in the imperfections and the unconventional approaches. Just listen to some early Ween stuff like ‘Pod’ to hear how much fun you can have fucking around with the endless possibilities of recording yourself.

Studio recording on a budget can be a very restrictive experience. With the clock ticking and only a set number of hours or days to record all the parts and mix them you may end up having to compromise and include things that you know you could have played better. On top of this you’re paying for somebody who has the equipment and the knowhow to record you but they may or may not understand the sound you want or how to achieve it. Sound engineers will usually know all the rules of recording, like where to point a microphone or what settings to use on a compressor, but they can feel very uncomfortable experimenting outside these conventions. I once suggested to a guy whose studio we were recording in that the drums could use some overdrive, to be told pretty bluntly that it would sound rubbish. He wouldn’t even try it.

These days if you have a computer, you can equip yourself with everything you need to record to a reasonably high standard for basically zero money. Personally I like to record with cheap and cheerful equipment. I love the sound of recording drums on a 4-track tape recorder using microphones bought off eBay for 2 quid each. You could pay somebody £250 a day to recreate the same sound using thousands of pounds worth of condenser microphones and a 24-track digital recording desk, then a bunch of plug-ins made to emulate the sound of a lo-fi recording, but why bother? It’s more fun and you get far more control over the end result if you do it yourself. DIY recording is in no way limited to lo-fi sounds either; if you’ve got a computer you already have 90% of what you need to produce really high quality recordings. The money you’d spend on four days in the studio would buy you all the equipment and software you need to record at home, with money left over for loads of beer or weed or ketamine or whatever. You’ll have no time constraints (aside from your neighbour at the door wielding a kitchen knife when you’re still recording drums at 4am) so you’ll never need to settle for including something you’re not happy with, and your songs can develop and change as you go about the process of recording. It will certainly take longer than getting someone else to record you in a studio but it will be more relaxed, more enjoyable and give you an end result that’s far more individual. If you don’t know where to start, you can learn everything you need to about the rules of sound recording from the Internet, there are swarms of articles, tutorials and general advice. Just remember, the rules are there to be broken.