Jul/090
Home Recording
I saw this post on the guitar lifestyle blog, and I got a big kick out of it. It just goes to show that you don’t have to have the best of the best to make decent recordings. It does indeed cost money to have iPhones and macs, and I’ll also admit that having an “imperfect,” or gritty sound is sometimes desirable (not often the case with classical), but you don’t have to have expensive equipment to make decent recordings. I don’t know if The 88 are going to use that track on their next album, but it sounds pretty good for the internet!
Here are some good free resources for musicians:
Audacity, a free, cross-platform sound editor. This program is great because though it doesn’t replace Protools, it has lots of features, and it can get the job done! Easy to learn, too.
If you need a drum machine, Hydrogen is a good choice (only for GNU/Linux). It’s available in the repos. I haven’t come by a really good one for mac/windows environments. Let me know if you have one!
Basic setup:
As solo guitarists we have an advantage in that our instrument records relatively easily. A few years ago I was given a sony mini-disc player as a gift. I knew it could record, so I used a little money to buy a nicer microphone, the Sony ECM-MS907. I haven’t used either for a few years, since the proprietary software for the minidisc player is incompatible with my system…
Out of necessity I needed to make a short demo. I needed to include a few classical pieces so that I could use them for music samples when people asked for them. At first I went into my bathroom, thinking that since it was more resonant the guitar would sound better– this is not the case! After two days of failed experiments, I decided that I needed a deader room. My closet immediately came to mind.
The Closet
The closet was the ideal space. Full of old hangers of clothes, I moved them aside to make space for myself in the center. I set up a stool to sit on, then placed pillows on the floor where the floor was showing. The door to the closet is made of wood, so I found a plank of wood and set it up so that towels could be hung on either side of me. I set up the microphone by hanging it from a belt on the clothes rack, the little wire slipped under the closed door, plugged into my computers microphone input.
I fired up Audacity, went into my recording booth and started playing. After getting a satisfactory performance, it’s a matter of adding a little reverb if you want it, and reducing microphone hiss, if there is any. That is outside the scope of this article, however.