I'm a little bummed I have a record of so little of my own music from before my thirtieth birthday, but for most of that stuff it's for the best. I think all of the bands mentioned in yesterday's post (such as Steel Fury, to right) actually went into studios with professionals to record their work.
I've never done that, but have just messed around with cheap DIY four track recorders and the digitigal equivalent today In high school I actually daisy chained two-two track recorders, weirdly, some of that stuff I have on old cassettes sounds better than what I can get with Sonar and Mixcraft in the rare time Emily and I have to noodle around since graduate school (most of the results of which are in the Devil in my Pocket links to the far right, including the fun youtube videos). You can tell whenever you listen to any of it that the levels and compression and whatnot are messed up. Even people who have loved any of those bands live have found the recordings almost uniformly unpleasant.
From this life's experience, here's my advice to any new bands. Make demos with your DIY stuff, but even if you have Garage Band, Sonar, Pro Tools, or Mixcraft or whatever- still try to scrounge up the money and time to go into an actual studio to record the final versions you want to share with people.
When you listen to your own recorded stuff you can hear the melodies through it, and this ends up being a tremendous hindrance to your ability to get a good timbre (even if you are antecedently gifted in that way). In addition to timbre it's really, really, really hard to get a recording where the levels continue to be proportional through so many different media: e.g. headphones in the studio, in a car stereo, in some audio-phile's system, condensed down to mp3 format on someone's iphone, over the radio, etc. etc. etc.. This is really, really hard stuff. The ability to write good melodies and perform good live does not predict it at all (in fact the hearing loss and tinitus from live performances, as in my case, usually makes it a lot worse).
And the phenomenology is weird. You may like the way it sounds, but other people won't. Even people who will pay to come see your band will have no interest in listening to something incompetently recorded and mastered. This is of course, unless you are a sui generis timbre genius like Jack White or Jimmy Page, probably the only two people who were both great live performers and whose mastery of studio recordings matches Rick Rubin's. Rubin for that matter, is probably alone in both his ability to capture perfect timbre and recognize good melody. Of the records he produces, the best ones (Danzig, Johny Cash, early Red Hot Chili Peppers, that recent Neal Diamond LP) are where he dictatorially makes the band write fifty or so songs and then crafts the album by picking some of them and combining others. His worst ones are where he is too scared of the band (AC/DC),or doesn't care enough about the band (lots of stuff), to put them through that wrenching process.
