Well the fact is you’re not alone; many musicians spend much of their time searching for that special and illusive little something that will take their music from their bedroom to commercial superstar success. The most common mistake is believing that a piece of equipment or musical gear will transform your recording into a Dark Side of the Moon sonic masterpiece. The internet forum network is full of such tortured souls asking whether a new microphone, preamplifier, set of speakers, or piece of software will magically turn them into their idols.

Unfortunately this is not going to happen, and for many the realisation only comes after years of hard work and getting their bots dirty. Experienced artists have come to the realism that the quality of the output is amazingly directly related to the quality of the input! The closer you are to achieving the sound you are after at the sound source the closer the final sound will be to what you want.

So it goes that there is no escaping putting in the leg work for improving your musical abilities and skills. Practice, practice, practice, take lessons, play live, and record those performances for playback latter. Be open to criticism and don’t be too hard on yourself but be honest. It is not about being perfect (No need to mention Bob Dylan here), but it is about presenting in the best possible way the music you have written regardless of genre.

Study the style of music you relate most to, some genre are technical and require a high level of musician ship (Jazz, Metal, classical), others are more character full and require the artist to connect and deliver or perform in a unique way (folk). Listen to different styles of music to broaden your tool kit of musical ideas to draw on. Being able to bring individuality to your music may make it potentially more marketable.

Along with finding out more about the style or genre of music you are inspired by you will also find out about techniques used to record this type of music. Is it recorded live as a band? is it done one instrument at a time(Overdub)? Is it recorded to tape (analogue) or digitally? What type of microphones are commonly used? Do they use Amplifiers or not? All of these questions can be answered if you do a little bit of research into the type of music you like to make.

Very lastly should you be concerned about what it is you are recording your music with. Only when you have done the pre-production ground work will any equipment decisions be of any relevance. Based on what you now know about your music you can start making a plan for the recording sessions. If you have some serious hard yards doing the prep you will realise that the answers to recording a great sounding album lie not within the equipment used but the people using it.