March Acoustic Jam

Last Sunday was the latest meetup of the Downingtown Area Acoustic Jam group. After having made five straight meetups, we missed February because of an emergency need to clean out the basement. We were sad to have missed one, so we were all the more excited to get to this one.

For our two songs, we again brought one new one (The Eagles "Tequila Sunrise") and one repeat (Pure Prairie League's "Amie", which is fun to play and was well received last time.)

As always, it was a fun afternoon of good music and good people. What we played, as best I can remember, is as follows:

• Knocking on Heaven's Door (Bob Dylan)
• Corrine, Corrina (Merle Haggard)
• Nights in White Satin (Moody Blues)
• Tequila Sunrise (Eagles)
• Peaceful Easy Feeling (Eagles)
• Take it Easy (Eagles)
• Bad Moon Rising (CCR)
• You Never Can Tell (Chuck Berry)
• The Rose (Bette Midler)
• Where Have all the Flowers Gone (Pete Seeger)
• Wild Horses (Rolling Stones)
• Hello Marylou (Rick Nelson)
• Amie (Pure Prairie League)
• Angel from Montgomery (John Prine)
• Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
• Hide Your Love Away (Beatles)
• House of the Rising Sun (Amimals)
• Let it Be (Beatles)
• Wagon Wheel (Old Crow Medicine Show)

Recording Workshop

As I mentioned in my last post on recording, I learned that Guitar Center gives free recording workshops on Saturday mornings. It's a four-part workshop, which repeats every month. Part 1 ("Overview on studio setup and capturing audio") was last Saturday, and sounded like just what I need, so I signed up.

Two GC employees ran the demo/workshop - one running the controls and the other playing a guitar. Their setup was an electric guitar, but no amplifier - the guitar ran into an audio interface (exactly like the Tascam unit I now have), and from there into a Macintosh running the GarageBand software. Also attached to the audio interface were a pair of studio monitors (for sound output.)

GarageBand can model a huge number of different amps, settings, and effects. In other words, you can use your Mac as a guitar amp - simply amazing.

GarageBand also has clips and loops you can use. They set up a project and imported a drum loop in. Then they used the multi-track recording capability to record first a rhythm guitar track, and then a guitar solo on top of that. I've done that using Audacity, but the ability to bring in drum loops was eye-opening.

They didn't demo this, but the alternative to using GarageBand as your amp is to record your actual amplifier. You just set up the microphone in front of your amp, and record that.

This was a very valuable session. It was nice to get some confirmation that I'm basically on the right track. But it also showed me how much more there is.

I grabbed Darling Wife's MacBook last Sunday when she was out and fired up GarageBand - playing with some of the amp models. But as cool as GarageBand is, I can't use her laptop as my recording workstation.

I suspect that Cubase has a number of the GB features, just not in as user-friendly a format. I need to figure that out.

The Guitar Center free workshops are highly recommended. Yes, of course they're trying to sell gear, but they're also genuinely trying to help people get set up to record.

Epiphone Casino

I am now the owner of a used Epiphone Casino guitar. I've been interested in electric hollow-body guitars, and the Casino specifically, for a while now. And I look in on the Craigslist "musical instruments for sale" section from time to time, just to see what people are selling. (As Darling Wife noted with raised eyebrow when I told her I'd found a guitar that I wanted to go look at, "One doesn't find without looking." And of course she's right.)

Late last week, I saw an ad for a nearly-new Casino. I wrote and said I was interested to see it, and after some back-and-forth, we settled on a late Sunday afternoon time when I could look at it. It appeared to be in pristine condition (in natural finish, as at right), so I played it for a bit, and we quickly settled on terms.

The Casino is most famously John Lennon's guitar. I'm not such a big Lennon fan that I have to have his guitar, but that is a cool fact. And the previous owner removed the white pickguard (which is shown in the stock pic at right) for a more authentic look, which I like and will keep. (I have the pickguard if I change my mind.)

I put a fresh set of strings on, and it sounds fantastic. So I'm quite pleased. Now begins the process of seeing just what sounds she's capable of - playing with the guitar settings, and seeing what different amp settings do.

I made a promise that I'm not accumulating guitars - that if I got this one that another would go. So my Epiphone Les Paul is now officially for sale. I've put the word out to my musician friends, and if no one bites, it'll be on CL or eBay very shortly. If I can get somewhere near what I paid for it two years ago, I'll have made a very nice trade for not very much money.

Recording: Audio Interface

I posted in December about my initial experiments in recording my guitar playing on my laptop. I ran a guitar amp's "line out" to capture an electric guitar, and used the laptop's voice mic to capture an acoustic guitar. It worked, though the quality was not wonderful, and I was able to record a simple multi-track project that I was able to make into an MP3.

That was basically step 1 - proof of concept. I was certain that it's possible to capture better quality sound, and my Internet research indicated that the first necessity was a USB audio interface. Instead of running amps or microphones directly into the laptop (with its rudimentary sound card), everything plugs into the audio interface unit, which then plugs (via USB) into the laptop.

Musician's Friend has any number of these, and I had a few in mind when I went into Guitar Center with Eric's (Christmas gift) gift card in my pocket. After a discussion with an employee there, I walked out with a Tascam TrackPack SE - an audio interface bundled with a nice microphone, closed-ear headphones, and Cubase LE5 software.

Cubase is an alternative to Audacity - the recording/editing software. It apparently has many more features, but is also considerably more complicated than Audacity, and I simply haven't had the time to go through tutorials and get a feel for it.

I've set up the audio interface, installed drivers, etc., and done a little playing with it, but I still felt like something was missing.

Once again, Guitar Center comes to the rescue. I'm on their e-mail list, and get a list of coupons/promotions just about every day. I noticed that they hold free recording workshops on Saturday mornings - a four week course in home recording with your laptop that repeats every month. Part 1 was yesterday, and I thought that would be perfect - rather than continue to fumble around, I could go and watch someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm very glad I went.

(To be continued)