Back in 1998 or so, I had a ton of songs that I wanted to get recorded. It was time to make an actual CD that I could be proud of. My friend said he knew a guy who had a Pro Tools studio set up in his apartment. I grabbed my twelve string and went over there. I did a few tracks. One of which was Who Do You Think You Are. He did a nice job and made everything sound really great. The problem was he wanted like $50 - $100 for that one session.

I thought about the old saying "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Since it was going to cost me between $4,000 to $7,000 to do a disc professionally at a recording studio. Why not just buy Pro Tools and the other recording gear that I need and do it myself? I can do twenty discs if I want to. I can control everything myself. I can do it at home, at my leisure. Plus, I can record other people. Seemed like a no-brainer to me.

I ended up spending around $6,000 on my home studio. I bought Pro Tools and the Digidesign 001. I put together a new PC. I bought some new studio monitors, some mics, a compressor, mixing board, headphones, drum machine, bass, bass pod, midi keyboard, and a few other things and voila...I was ready to do my own music production using my own home recording studio.

I set everything up and began recording. In 2001, I finally had a CD finished. The cd was called SX1000. Named after the bike I had when I was a kid. This CD was mainly acoustic songs beefed up. It's very mellow and dreamy.

The main instrument used was my Yamaha 12 string. Which sounded beautiful with my AKG C 1000 S microphones. I had just inherited a Hammond organ, so that was used heavily throughout the disc. Ebow was also used quite a bit. That really made a few songs come alive.

Everything on the CD was played by me. It was a little tough at times being the talent and the producer, but it was fun. I recorded everything at in my home studio. I did all of the recording, production, mixing and burning myself. I did the all of the graphics myself. I printed all the art on a nice color laser printer. I used the sticker cd labels.

Surprisingly, learning Pro Tools was extremely easy. I had used a four track before and a recording program called n-Track Studio, which for $30 was an incredible piece of software.

Pro Tools was a dream to work with. I could cut and paste. I could use up to 24 tracks for each song, which I did on quite a few tracks. I added effects after the tracks were recorded. Everything was recorded 24 bit. I would definately recomend Pro Tools if you are looking for that professional production sound. It's definately worth the money if you'd like your CD to sound really crisp.

As you can see, it's very easy to produce your own recordings. If you have any computer knowledge and any recording experience, you can do it. It might cost you a little more up front, but it will be worth it in the long run.

Here are some songs from my debut CD SX1000. Go ahead and download all three for free. If you like them, contact me and I can get you a copy of the full CD. I hope to have a way to sell CD's online...soon.

Please feel free to post comments. I like to know what you think of the songs, production, or the playing. Good or bad. I'm always looking for feedback on my songs.

Free Music Downloads
Todd Fugere - Real
Todd Fugerre - The Shivers
Todd Fugere - Who Do You Think You Are?

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