Recording

Engineer and producer Bruce Botnick recorded some of the greatest artifacts of West Coast psychedelia, among them the first five albums by The Doors. Here he describes the making of their influential second album and its title track, which saw them develop their live sound through radical experimentation in the studio.

This month, Sound On Sound begins a major new series, looking back in detail at the engineering and production behind some of the most historically significant recordings ever made, with the story of the first and greatest British rock & roll record.

The Doc proffers diagnosis and suitable cures for another batch of reader-submitted meisterwerks.

Musicality isn't everything when you're trying to make a decent-sounding recording at home, even if you're as talented as the multi-instrumentalist Harding family. So the SOS team travelled north to help them get their engineering techniques up to scratch.

For the 2002 album Heathen, David Bowie and Tony Visconti revived one of the greatest artist/producer partnerships in pop history. Following the success of that project, the duo have again worked closely together on Bowie's new album, Reality.

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If you want to incorporate live drumming into your sequencer-based productions, your drummer will almost certainly have to play along to some sort of click track. However, if you're not careful, it could easily end up being more a hindrance than a help.

It seems that almost everyone who's heard Goldfrapp's debut album Felt Mountain has fallen under their spell. Now the duo have returned with a second, Black Cherry, and a harder, synth-based sound.

We follow a location recording project from start to finish, showing you how to plan for and conduct the session, as well as how to avoid common pitfalls.

Most home studio owners now rely heavily on digital audio recording and processing, but you could be sacrificing the quality of your recordings if your system isn't clocked correctly.

Few project studio owners have the space to record a real drum kit to its best advantage. However, drum parts that are completely sample-based can lack a sense of organic authenticity, and can make an otherwise good recording sound like a demo. Fortunately, there are several ways you can tackle this problem for more lively results.

Recording a band is tough enough in the studio, but working on location adds another whole level of complexity. So here's how to overcome the inevitable setup gremlins and fix some of the most common problems at the mixdown stage.

The drum kit can be one of the most time-consuming and frustrating of instruments to record, so it's worth taking a structured approach.

The SOS team visit the sleepy Herefordshire town of Bromyard to help violinist Mike Burnham with his folk recordings.

One of the secrets of overdubbing is setting up good cue monitoring for the performer. There are, however, a number of different approaches and it is important to choose the most appropriate for the task at hand.