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Someday, your spare room might look like this.

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7. Band layout
If you're recording a band playing together in a room, you'll have lots of bleed into the various mics. The temptation is to try and screen everyone off. This can work, but it's sometimes better to embrace the problem and keep everyone close together. With the mics nearer to each other the spill they pick up will be less ambient and less delayed, and the overall sound will be tighter.

8. Know your terms
The most common scientific term you'll encounter in the recording business is the decibel (dB). This is a logarithmic scale, and you'll often see it used without any reference value. In this form, +6dB roughly equates to a doubling of voltage and a quadrupling of power. In musical-speak, the subjective term 'twice as loud' roughly equates to an increase of between +6dB and +10dB.

9. Re-recording
If you spend much of your time sourcing sounds from sample libraries, re-recording is one sure-fire way to inject them with new life. Choose a space with interesting acoustics, route your samples through a speaker, then record them back down. For extra interest, why not try sticking them through a guitar amp or headphones.

10. Beware CRT monitors
Haven't got a flatscreen yet? Electric guitars and basses have a habit of picking up interference from all sorts of sources. Often, turning slowly in a CRT field will have a considerable impact on interference levels, so find the best position.

11. Use your space
Although a purpose-built studio may seem like the Holy Grail, our humble abodes offer up all sorts of useable spaces, from the bright sound of a tiled bathroom and the live sound of a wooden-floored room to the deadness of a bedroom. Use these spaces to capture interesting and colourful recordings.

"If you spend much of your time sourcing sounds from sample libraries, re-recording is one sure-fire way to inject them with new life."

12. Understand latency
Recording a signal into computer software and monitoring that signal via the software introduces a processing delay dependent on the buffer size. To deal with this, some interfaces include near-zero latency monitoring options. Also, try monitoring outside the computer using a mixing desk.

13. Back up
Knowing that complete hard disk failures are fairly rare occurrences will only serve to make you feel that much worse if it happens to you – unless, of course, you've done the right thing and backed up all of your data. We can't say this often enough: back up, back up, back up. And if you don't trust yourself to remember, there are plenty of automated packages you can use. No excuses!

14. Maxed out sessions
Pushed your computer to the limit and still want to lay down more tracks? Before your machine gives up completely, try the old tape slave trick. Bounce down a working stereo mix to overdub to, stick this in its own arrangement, and when you're finished recording, drag all your new parts back into your main session.

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