The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
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Kim o' the Concrete Jungle's IntroductionRecording songs used to be a big deal. You'd go into a professional studio and pay a hundred bucks an hour for an audio engineer to work his magic on your stuff. And that was a bargain, because he'd be using a million bucks worth of microphones, mixing desks, tape recorders, and outboard effects that you could never have afforded otherwise. But these days, technology has caught up with the music business. You can get a $500 substitute for a $5000 microphone, and you can replace all the expensive tape recorders and outboard effects with a computer. So if you're not Miley Cyrus tracking your next big commercial release, and you just want to record a demo of your song that sounds half decent, you can do it yourself. And you can do it for not much money. And I'm going to show you how. There are plenty of DIY recording guides like this around, so you probably don't need mine as well. However, most guides are pretty general and their author's do a lot of handwaving. It's because there's a lot of different gear you can buy, and they don't want to alienate their potential audience by getting too specific. And that's a problem, because I think you learn more from diving into the nitty-gritty detail. So I'm going to talk about specific equipment and software here. You might not end up with exactly the same set-up, but hopefully a lot of the detail will translate to the gear you get. In fact, where possible, I'll be using stuff that's either cheap or free, so it won't be too hard for you to follow along at home. I'll also be assuming here that you want to go all out and record a big fancy production that sounds like a full band, with lots of drums, instruments, singing, and the whole works, all playing at once -- the big production. I kind of have to assume that, because if you only want to record yourself playing folk on an acoustic guitar, this would be a very short guide. The whole of it would be: go out and buy one of those handheld digital field-recorder thingies. Personally, I have the Roland R-05 and it's good, but they all do the same job. Contents
1. The Computer |
