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Basic Needs for Scarlett

#24
eagle67 said:
Great help guys. I have no experience doing this, and I know there is a learning curve, so I want to be fairly sure that a simple program like Abelton Lite or Audacity will fill the bill before I spend too much time. And I would also like to record my bass and vocals at the same time, most likely as a single track, just as if I was playing/singing live. But we will not be doing a lot of fancy mixing here, basically just trying arrangements to see how it all fits
Click to expand...
Heads up - MP3s have a little bit of silence inserted at the beginning of the file. It will mess up syncing your tracks.

I suggest Reaper. Pick a tempo, play with a click, save it as a wave file, upload to a Dropbox or google drive folder.
Your Bandmate sets the same tempo in their DAW, loads the file, creates their track, renders their new track to a wave file and uploads to the same folder.

I started naming the files: title-bpm-instrument-version-date
 
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#25
to the op:

I was messing with my Scarlett 2i2 yesterday, lowering latency for JamKazam. I found that at least for Macs, you can download an app/script directly from Focusrite to lower the latency. This was essential for me to get JamKazam to show acceptable latency for the Mac app.

Good luck!
 
#26
I'm about a month ahead of the OP. Bought a Scarlett 2i2 to record bass and vocals over wav files my daughter was sending me with her singing and playing ukulele.

In the course of learning how to configure and record I tried Reaper, Audacity and Ableton Lite. The manuals and videos helped somewhat, but there's a lot to configure and Reaper was the first one I was able to figure out. It took me hours and hours and I almost gave up, but finally prevailed. Now I pretty much can do what I want, or get close enough. This is for amusement only, so I'm not that picky.

The biggest glitch I had was recording vocals. I couldn't get the mic I had (an audio-technica ATR2100-USB) to record at a reasonable volume. I bought a Cloudlifter to bump the gain and that helped. Then I bought a Shure Beta 58A and it works super! Apparently not all dynamic mics are equal.

I have a new and profound appreciation of skilled recording engineers.
 
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#27
As others have said, the track # limitation in Ableton Lite may cause you to need to upgrade, and the first level upgrade is <>$300. Worth it only if you're doing modern electronic music and heavily dependent on Loops, at which Ableton has no peer. If that's not the case, go straight to Reaper. The paid version is only $60, and the trial is unlimited. Also a million tutorials available.

I found that ProTools First, and the entire Avid business model, is a royal PITA. If you can afford the full package it may be great, but the company sucks.
 
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#28
Small note: if you can get them to send .wav files instead of .mp3 files, that'll minimize the chance of a synchronization issue. The .mp3 encoding process adds a very small amount of silence to the beginning of a file, so if you load one up, record to it from the same audio clip starting point, and send your session export back, it'll sound like it's slightly late until re-sync'd.

.wav files are bigger but that's really not an issue these days; when the mp3 codec was invented, filesize was much more of a concern for all the reasons.
 
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#30
74hc said:
OP asks: "Is there any reason to look into software other than the Ableton Lite that came with the Scarlett?"

Yes, the 8 track limit. We're using Reaper because the unlimited tracks and the free to July 31st license. I think Pro Tools First gives you 16 tracks.

Drums typically take 6 to 8 tracks by itself for my stuff. With Ableton Lite's track limit, I run out very quickly. Whether this track limit is an issue for you is going to depend on how much FX you want to use, and how granular you want to get over control on the final mix.

Two of us have the Scarlet 2i4 which we both like. I don't know what audio interface the others are using. The most disappointing thing about my Scarlett is the limits of Ableton Lite. It's ridiculously limited for bands due to the track limit, but good for oneself, or making click tracks.
Click to expand...
If he's only bringing in a mixed .wav and only recording two tracks at the most (voice and bass) and just mixing that together and sending it back, he doesn't need all eight tracks. He probably only needs two since he wants to record the bass and vocals together. He can do that with a room mic. So I guess this depends on what he might want to do later, if anything.

Me, I can't live with eight tracks; I can use that much for vocals alone.
 
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#31
And I said:
This is not inherent to mp3. If this is happening to you there is some other cause.

The reason to use uncompressed audio is fidelity...
Click to expand...
Correct. If this is happening to you, check your rendering (or bounce) settings. Logic allows you to put in a cushion (or not) at the beginning but I forget what they call it. I suspect other programs do the same. If you want your tracks to sync easily, you need to make sure that isn't on.
 
#32
LBS-bass said:
If he's only bringing in a mixed .wav and only recording two tracks at the most (voice and bass) and just mixing that together and sending it back, he doesn't need all eight tracks. He probably only needs two since he wants to record the bass and vocals together. He can do that with a room mic. So I guess this depends on what he might want to do later, if anything.

Me, I can't live with eight tracks; I can use that much for vocals alone.
Click to expand...

He stated "rest of the guys" so it sounds like a full band. Your method of mixing down in steps will work, but one loses the ability to make any adjustments to all individual tracks in the final mix.

I cannot live with eight tracks either. Found that out the hard way because I wasn't aware of Ableton Lite's track limitation when I started. But then, I can't drive 55 either. ;)

Ableton Lite would be far more useful if it had a 16 track limit. But still, as someone pointed out here, it's great for looping. That's not my thing, but click tracks are and I still use Ableton Lite that's included in the Scarlet box for that.

Reaper is just better all the way around for someone starting out with limited funds, imo. It's light weight, memory-wise, and doesn't have the heavy licensing PITA that Avid has for Pro Tools. Plus, the full version for non-commerical use is only $60.

I think a Linux version is coming out soon as well. It's plugins are not great like Pro Tools or Studio One. However, everything one buys now has plugins included like MIDI controllers. So I don't feel the need to buy a DAW for plugins. Plus there are some good free ones out there... just not Amplesound's precision bass plugin. That's neutered badly to be usable, but for us bass players, who cares, eh? Their free version of the acoustic guitar is actually good.

Bottom line is I'm f'ing bored with these lockdown orders. I need to go back to my regular church gigging. We're having a Zoom meeting later and hopefully there will be some light at the end of the tunnel.
 
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#33
74hc said:
He stated "rest of the guys" so it sounds like a full band. Your method of mixing down in steps will work, but one loses the ability to make any adjustments to all individual tracks in the final mix.
Click to expand...

It sounded to me like the "rest of the guys" are sending him a mixdown of a .wav (1 track) to which he's just adding bass and vocals (he said later that he wants to do that on one track) and which he's going to mix in and send one track back. I guess they're all adding their parts to that track and mixing it in before sending it on.

If that's not correct then you're right that they'll run out of tracks quickly. This is where he starts having to decide if he's going to spend money or not, which is why I pointed it out :)
 
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#34
And I said:
This is not inherent to mp3. If this is happening to you there is some other cause.

The reason to use uncompressed audio is fidelity...
Click to expand...

I used to use drum loops in Acid but that was years ago. An MP3 file would always have that extra little bit at the beginning. I would convert it to wave and remove the extra silence.
I just googled it - some software will deal with it so it’s not an issue.

Agreed, there’s no need to use mp3s with the storage and bandwidth we have now.
 
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#36
If you're into modern trends, really for any style of music, then you may want to look for a DAW that does MPE like the Roli controllers.
I got Bitwig 8 free with a mpe controller I bought, and it is impressive. Better than Ableton in some respects and not just that Ableton doesn't support MPE yet.
It is also good for live playing. Yeah, it's 8 tracks, but DAWs can be synced with Midi, and no problem exporting audio to Ableton, studio one, or any daw.

It's yet another DAW. Way too many to go through. I don't really know of any loser DAWs around. And they all seem to have some unique workflow for different players.
 

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