All of the Raven Boy Music albums have been recorded in a home recording studio. It started in an apartment in California in 1988. I recorded “Outside of Time” on a 4-track cassette recorder with cheap stage microphones in the living room. But hey. It worked.
As time moved on and I learned more, I got some better equipment. The first main upgrade was to a better 4-track cassette recorder. And I learned about Dolby noise reduction. Those tapes were awfully hissy :-). I also learned about different kinds of mics and actually used barrier mics (plates) on stands to record my 2nd album. I think I learned about this from a Recording Magazine article :-P. Weird, but hey – again, it worked OK.
Years later I recorded with some rented equipment – a digital tape machine called an ADAT. I recorded SOME tracks for “Everything That Matters” on the ADAT. I also recorded one song in a commercial recording studio. But I wasn’t actually happy with how it sounded, so I re-recorded it at home on my upgraded cassette recorder using a condenser mic. It sounded pretty much the same as the one from the commercial studio. So I finished the rest of the songs that way.
Then my grandmother left me a bit of money when she passed away and I bought a Roland VS-880 digital multitrack recorder. From that point on – around 1998, everything was all digital.
The next big thing was the ability to record straight into the computer. I started doing that in about 2003 and have been doing it that way ever since.
If you’d like to see the details how how to set up your own home recording studio, see my 5-part series Setting Up A Home Recording Studio On Your Computer.