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Not all recording projects aim to capture a finished piece of music. Many musicians compose with their PC, recording one part at a time as they write it. In this scenario, don't worry too much about recording quality and get your ideas down quickly. You can always replace specific instruments later, and you'll probably give a better performance once the composition has taken shape.

The recording location has a huge impact on its quality. Reverberation, or reverb, is the audible result of sounds bouncing off walls and other surfaces. It's why the sounds made in a bathroom or cathedral or on a mountain are all quite different. Reverb simulation is a vital component of mixing, but it's impossible to eliminate natural reverb completely while recording. You have two options: record somewhere where the reverb suits the style of music, or try to reduce it as much as possible so you can mask it with artificial reverb when you come to mix.

There are no hard and fast rules as to what type of reverb suits which music, but people associate specific genres with certain types of venue: choral music in a church, classical music in a concert hall, garage rock in a garage and so on. Electronic genres such as pop, dance and hip-hop tend to make up their own rules, so listen to your favourite CDs for inspiration. If your recording venue is fixed and its acoustics aren't particularly desirable, try to absorb as much reverb as possible by filling the room with soft furnishings such as sofas and duvets. Thin furnishings such as curtains, carpets and egg boxes absorb only high frequencies, so they're not really worth the bother.

Try to minimise unwanted sounds in the microphone. Watch out for background noise, whether it's from traffic,

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pets or your PC's fans, and make sure the click track isn't being picked up from the headphones when recording quiet instruments. If you're recording more than one instrument at once, try to isolate them so there's not too much spill from each instrument into the others' microphones. You can put a guitar amplifier in another room from a drum kit and use a long lead so the two performers can still see each other, which often helps to produce a tight performance.

Alternatively, record instruments one by one. What you lose in live interaction, you may make up for in being able to focus all your attention on one instrument at a time to make sure it's spot on. The accepted wisdom is to start with the drums, then the bass, followed by the guitars, keyboards and any other instruments, and finally the vocals. However, you might want to record a rough 'guide' vocal early on to help the other players keep their place in the song.

Pass the mike

Walk around the room while someone is playing an instrument and you'll notice that the sound varies considerably. This is partly because sound reflections reinforce and cancel out certain frequencies at different points in the room, but also because instruments emit different sounds in different directions. Another variable is caused by the fact that reverberation is at a fairly constant volume throughout the room, but the direct sound coming from the instrument gets much louder the nearer you get to it.

Some instruments such as brass and the voice emit sound from a point source (a single point in space), so positioning the microphone 'on-axis' - that is, directly facing the instrument - is usually the best place to capture a full tone. However, most instruments emit their sound from different parts of the instrument body. This is obvious in a drum kit, but it's equally true of acoustic guitars, pianos, flutes and violins. Therefore, moving the microphone by just a few inches can make a big difference. It's often tempting to get the microphones as close to the instrument as possible to get a healthy level and reduce the relative amount of reverberation, but get too close and you'll just be recording a small area of the instrument's body and missing the blend of its overall tone. Getting too close might also obstruct the performer's movement.