Recording and Audacity

I've heard that one way to get better on guitar is to record yourself. It also sounds like fun, and I know that there are freeware software packages that can do fairly sophisticated multi-track recording. The audio recording and editing package that seems to be the standard is Audacity. I had downloaded and installed it, but never really learned how to use it. With some free time over Christmas week, that seemed like the time to learn.

I went through the basic tutorials on the Audacity website, and basic multi-track recording is very easy. So I thought I would try to create a three-track audio clip: bass and rhythm guitar playing a chord progression, and a solo guitar on top.

The first trick was how to capture the guitar or bass? Both my guitar amp and my bass amp have a "line out", and I can run a cord from there to the laptop's "microphone" port. That worked, but the input levels were way off - I had to turn the amp's volume to down below 1 for it to be anything but blaring static. But it did work, and I could get electric guitar and bass tracks that sounded okay, if a bit tinny.

I realized I had a very cheap and very old voice microphone that has to be years old. But I plugged it in and it worked, so I also decided to record an acoustic guitar track. That worked better than I thought, so I experimented with a three-track recording: acoustic (rhythm) guitar, bass, and lead guitar.

It actually worked okay, and I could export the Audacity project into an MP3 file, that if not professional-caliber, was recognizable as music. :-) It was a fun afternoon's project, but in the end it just made me want to figure out how to make better-sounding recordings. And that's where Eric and his family's very generous Christmas gift of a Guitar Center gift card comes in.

Stay tuned.