Recording with Focusrite

A beautifully clean, clear, high-quality vocal can add much to any track. But how do you go about, achieving the perfect take? Read our how-to guide to help you get a great recording.

There’s no instrument in the history of recorded music more iconic than the electric guitar. For clean sounds, the electric guitar offers warm, creamy jazz tones, glassy funk licks, and reggae chops. If distortion is your preference, the electric guitar can produce rock power chords, screaming blues leads, or thrash metal mayhem.

The starting point for an excellent acoustic guitar recording is a clean input stage on your audio interface. Focusrite Scarlett interfaces have clean, uncoloured gain and high-performance analogue-to-digital (A-D) converters so that you can capture your tone, your way.

The bigger, badder sibling to the electric guitar, the bass guitar provides the glue that holds a track together. A solid bass sound ties the rhythm section together, and there’s nothing better than having bass and drums sitting in the pocket, locked in the groove, and driving the mix.

If you have a studio full of hardware synths and drum machines, your audio interface can be your studio centrepiece and time-saver all in one, increasing the efficiency of your workflow. Recording keyboards and synths can be straightforward. These instruments usually have line-level outputs, which connect straight into an audio interface’s line inputs, making it simple to get a great recording quickly. But there are several things to take into account when recording, and some power-user features that you can apply to your workflow to make the most of your keyboards and synths, and stay connected.

Drum recording is one of the most challenging aspects of audio engineering, and a good drum sound can transform a song, bringing dynamic excitement and a planting that heavy groove in peoples’ heads.

When recording acoustic instruments, it’s vital to get a clean sound, free of distortion, noise, and colouration from the audio interface. Which technique you choose will depend on the instrument and the vibe you’re trying to capture, but there are some basic principles you can apply to all acoustic recordings.

Audio interfaces truly come into their own when recording a band. There are three things to consider when choosing an interface for this particular job: the size of the band, what you want to record, and your budget.

For most of us, talking seems so natural — until we come to record our voice. As soon as we hit record, we can suddenly find it hard to speak naturally and can trip over easy words. Don’t worry though, even the most seasoned voiceover artists struggle with recording. That said, there are some things you can do to make the job a little easier.