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.

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)

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.