| That’s one of my favorite parts of the job, helping them get there and just seeing that moment where they’re getting something they wanted and it’s like extreme excitement for the instrument and the music. We all share in that excitement, they do and I do too.”
Kyle has been involved in home audio production for almost a decade and a half. Like many musicians, he got into recording out of curiosity. “I started doing that because I wanted to hear what different guitar parts I was writing sounded like together, or perhaps with a bass line under them, so I started figuring out how to do multitrack recording,” he says. “A while ago, before we were really recording on computers a lot.”
Kyle cut his teeth with early an early four-track recorder, which saved files to an iOmega Zip drive (remember those?). Today, home recording is a much easier process, but it can still be tricky to get started. “Now we’ve got computers in our pocket that can do some of this stuff pretty well,” he says. “Essentially I like to teach people that maybe they buy a bundle pack from Guitar Center that’s got a Focusrite interface with a microphone and headphones, like a starter kit. They get home and it’s like, ‘I don’t just hit a record button?’ I can help people understand the software — and hardware — as well as just configuring them to work together. Once we’ve got that covered, sky’s the limit. What do you want to do? Let’s talk about how we can approach that within the recording environment, and that can involve various types of instrument software, amp simulations for guitar and bass, drum simulations, all that kind of stuff.”
While home recording skills are great to have for musicians, many folks are using the gear and know-how for live streaming. “What we’re seeing more of is people trying to use that type of gear to stream content,” says Kyle. “Maybe they’re not trying to record anything, maybe they just want to broadcast something through Twitch, YouTube Streaming, Facebook, whatever. This type of hardware gives you the ability to hook up a really nice microphone. You’re not just using, like a webcam microphone at that point, you’re using a real vocal microphone, with real software running behind them.” |
