Since starting recording oh so long ago, Ive become more involved in the technicalities of it than I ever thought I would be.
Anyway, I was thinking the other day - what do I wish I knew when I was just starting to put money toward equipment and such? So I thought I'd give three opinions on that to everyone. Chime in with your own 3 aswell!
BTW - this does not touch at all on the cardinal rule that a recording is only as good as the music!! Thats a whole other area, full of subjective opinions lalala.
1. No matter how fancy your gear, it is only as good as your room.
This one applies to mixing more than anything else, but also to actually recording. If the room sounds bad, the recording will sound bad no matter how good the gear. If the room doesn't give a flat frequency response, then you won't be able to mix well. Unless you have a nice big room with a sweet sounding reverb for recording, then you will need treatment. So, putting your money into acoustics sounds more dull than buying gear, but it will give better results.
2. Monitoring is important. If you are going to hear what you've recorded (and are recording) accurately, you need good monitoring.
If your shopping list consists of a preamp and monitors and you have £1000, put £950 into monitors and go and buy this for the preamp:
http://www.studiospares.com/microphone-preamps/studiospares-red520-microphone-preamp/invt/348230?VBMST=preampSeriously. Better preamps can come way down the line. The ones you have on you audio interface will do for now. Buy better monitors.
3. A great recording can be made anyway and all the above is irrelevant.
At the end of the day, the person in front of the mic makes the recording, not the engineer. A great performance trumps anything. If you can capture that without drowning it in noise so it loses all it's emotion/integrity/whatever, then good job and it doesn't matter how you did it...
