Hi, I’m kris. I’ve created this in depth, structured audio engineering course, covering all the major aspects of audio recording from start to finish of setting up your studio, theory, acoustics, recording, mixing and mastering. This is the most in depth audio recording course that is offered for free.  We have over 12 hours of video tutorials, with explanation pages, and downloadable content. 
Best part about it is that it’s completely free. No strings attached. It is my gift to you. I want to empower artists to get the most with what they have.

Now, i just want to set the record straight. I never went to audio school. I’m entirely self taught, by watching lots of YouTube videos, and reading on the online forums, and trial and error. I’m going to teach what I’ve learned, it might be right, it might be wrong, but it works for me. A lot of the methods and techniques in audio recording don’t have a right and wrong, but simply more than one way of doing it. I never had a free resource like this to guide me, so I made a lot of mistakes, spent a lot of time testing equipment, and a lot of time learning the various aspects of sound engineering. It took years to get great sounding recordings. I went down the path of buying better gear every time I wasn't happy with the sound of my recordings, but I now know that the gear I had at the time was perfectly capable of getting the quality I wanted, the problem was me. I had excellent gear, but I didn't understand room acoustics, and I wasn't as good at mixing as I thought I was. I've learned a lot since then, and now I'm able to get the sound quality I desired even with low cost equipment. The most important piece of equipment in the studio is knowledge, and with knowledge, you'll know how to distinguish good sounding equipment from bad sounding equipment, you'll know a good sounding room from a bad sounding one, and you'll know how to control the frequencies in a mix.

 

My biggest philosophy on recording is to capture the audio as clean as possible, and retain the highest fidelity. In other words, maximum clarity.  The word fidelity might mean different things to different people, but to me, it means to be as pure as possible, without contamination. Everything the audio passes through contaminates the sound, from the room, microphone, conversion, daw, monitors, and room again.  My goal is for the least amount of contimation possible, to preserve the purest signal integrity. Even an effect such as an EQ, although it is not intended to preserve the original signal, all EQ's add noise, but some add more than others, and some distort the phase less than others. Some people talk about preamps or microphones that add analog warmth... But to me that’s just white noise added to the signal. Modern equipment and digital recording has potential for very clean, and pristine sound quality. This can sound unpleasant because it’s too sterile, and a little bit of warmth such as whit noise or distortion can make it sound a bit smoother. But in the context of a dense mix, that takes away from the ability to get separation, and have the individual parts punch through. Throughout this course you might notice that my focus is to get the cleanest sound quality, because that's the hard part. if you can acheive that, then you will also be able to add character as desired, and with control, and if you want to dirty it up, well then you always have that option. 

Throughout this course, I’ll be referencing some brands of gear, and how to use it. While I might think some gear is better than others, it is not my intention to make other brands look bad, so I will generally only give positive recognition. I have no affiliations with any brands or companies other than iSK, so any recommendations I make are based on my honest opinion. I will often recommend buying less gear, as there's a lot of unnecessary gear available, and there are also many products on the market that are ineffective.  I want to help you avoid buying those items. There's also a lot of overpriced equipment which I can perhaps offer a lower cost alternative which is equally as good. I'm active on several popular facebook groups and I see it all the time where people are asking "What's the best microphone, preamp, interface, speakers, headphones etc" and they have a budget of like a thousand dollars. Honestly, if you are asking that question... then you probably don't have the skills to make that piece of gear sound as good as it can. Here's the thing..... most people can't hear the difference between good sounding gear, and ok sounding gear. So, they rely on reviews, recommendations, and assume that if it's expensive then it must be good. Manufactures have taken advantage of this and priced some mediocre products really high. Some of these high priced mediocre products are even very popular, and commonly recommend in forums and facebook groups. So when an amateur asks "what's the best $2000 preamp" I think to myself... If you know how to use your $100 preamp, you wouldn't be asking that question. People often think the reason they aren't getting the sound quality they want is because their gear isn't good enough. That's rarely the case. High quality recording equipment has drastically come down in price. The difference between the built in preamps in a focusrite scarlett Gen3 interface, and any $5000 external preamp is extremely subtle. In order to hear that difference, you would need an acoustically controlled space, very expensive monitors, and even then, it still isn't really noticeable unless you're recording a large project with several tracks. If you record a vocalist with 2 identical, high end, large diaphragm condenser microphones, where 1 recording is through a Behringer Midas preamp, and one is through a D.W. Fearn VT-2 preamp.... Nobody will hear the difference. I've owned both these preamps, and a lot of high quality microphones. Where I hear a difference is when I put that vocal recording in a mix, or I record an entire song through better preamps, I get a slightly more natural sound. But it's slight. Very slight. So, do I recommend the Behringer midas preamps... absolutely. They're dirt cheap, and they sound fantastic.


Everyone has their own philosophy of what’s important to getting great sound. There’s not really a right or wrong, but there are some methods that sound better than other methods to some people, and for certain styles of music. I’m going to be teaching my own style and philosophy, which works great for me, and I think it would work for everyone, but I would encourage you to not only learn how I approach recording, but also learn from other instructors and online courses so that you can find your own unique style, which works best for what you want to achieve.

That being said, in my philosophy, the #1 most important and aspect of audio recording is signal clarity. In every link of the recording chain, my goal is to retain the purest possible signal, without adding noise or phase issues, or losing clarity. This is also called fidelity. Check out video #x for tips on retaining fidelity.
With retaining fidelity as a priority, you can still manipulate the audio to make it sound the way you want it to by using processors such as plugins, or external analog processors. Commonly used processing includes compressors, eq’s, and reverb, but there are literally hundreds of different fx plugins and processors available. 
The reason maintaining the purest possible fidelity is so important, is because it helps the final mix. If your project only has one track, then it’s not as important, but when you start blending multiple tracks together, they are all competing with each other to be heard. The more noise and impurities there is in a track, the harder it will be for all tracks to come through. 
You normally can’t hear the noise as noise. It’s not like a fridge running or something like that. It’s more like white noise, fuzz, like the sound of pressurized water coming out of a faucet. Sometimes it’s noticeable, sometimes it’s not, but it’s always there. The goal is not to eliminate it, because that would be impossible, but to reduce it as much as possible. The most common example is the white noise from cranking the gain on a preamp. Low quality preamps get pretty noisy, but even the best preamps available still have some noise. So when you’re stacking tracks, you’re also stacking that noise, even if you can’t hear it, it’s there and it’s making it harder for each track to come through in the mix.
Ok, I know, my explanation isn’t all that good, so go to this link xxxxx, and download the tracks to this song I mixed. On mix A, I kept everything as clean as possible. On mix B, I sent each track out, and through a DW fearn preamp, and back in again. The DW Fearn preamp is super clean, and you can’t hear the fidelity loss on the individual tracks, but on the final mix down, it’s definitely noticeable. 


A lot of the things I will teach throughout this course have several ways of doing it. I will teach it my way.
I once had a guy in the studio criticize me for how I wrap my cables, saying that’s not how they teach it in audio engineering school, and therefore I’m doing it wrong. This is a good example because their are ways to wrap a cable that are blatantly wrong, such as wrapping it in your hand around your elbow, which damages the cable. The way I was wrapping it was twist and loop method, which I find works best for cable lengths of less than 30’, which are pretty much all the cables in my studio. He was saying I should invert every second loop, so the cable doesn’t get twisted. He’s right! But so am I, There’s more than 1 way to do it. Many people will inevitably watch this course, and nit pick things that I’m doing wrong. They might even be right. And if they created a course, I could probably find some things to accuse them of doing wrong. The moral of the story is that best practices are generally not universally agreed upon, but worst practices probably are. What I am teaching works for me, and I do this at a professional level. If you think I am teaching something that is blatantly wrong, please email me to let me know.

As you go through this course, I can provide you with theoretical knowledge, but cannot give you experience. I encourage you after each lesson to open a session and experiment with what you’ve learned.
This is not “the” way... it’s simply one way, and it’s how I do it, and it works.

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Welcome to the course, I hope you learn lots.

-Kris