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First time home recording.. help?

S

Sarah5string

Nov 30, 2007
211
0
Staffordshire, England
www.myspace.com
#1
Our band have just started attempting to do some home recording.. our guitarists have 4-tracks whereas we (myself and my husband who's the drummer) don't so we record straight into the pc via the mic input... not idea but it's ok for now before we get into proper studio recording..
We have cubase which to be fair is confusing the hell out of me when it comes to editing the actual tracks...

does anyone have any hints and tips for a recording newbie?

Thanks,
Sar x
 
#2
Buy a book. I could literally sit here and show you tricks for days. DAW's are really powerful and theres about 5 ways to do each thing. A good cubase book will get you up and running alot faster. Getting a decent soundcard will eliviate headaches.
 
#3
I'm not sure you can do what you're describing. Assuming I'm understanding you, some of the band is being recorded with a four track and some is recording to your PC? I guess then at some point you'll try to combine the recordings? That will be tricky. I'd suggest getting a decent USB or firewire audio interface for you PC and just recording everything to one source.
 
#4
I disagree, what your trying to do isnt tricky, it can be time consuming but not hard. I get files from people all the time that are done in cubase, reaper, whatever. I only mix in pro tools so i will get th files and throw them in my pro tools to mix. There are 2 way to do this.

The easiest being if you have some sort of OMF file conversion software. Most people dont and its kinda expsensive. It basically allows you to convery cubase files straight to pro tools without any tweaking, nice.

The other way is just throwing them in your DAW one wav at a time. A wav is a wav is a wav. Thats the standard between all DAWs. Say the drummer tracks all the drums at their house and wants to bring them over to you can put drums in your cubase. Just get him to bounch each track down individually, render them as wav files, and import each wav into your DAW one at a time.
 
#5
bluestarbass said:
I disagree, what your trying to do isnt tricky, it can be time consuming but not hard. I get files from people all the time that are done in cubase, reaper, whatever.
Click to expand...
Agreed. It's doable, but time consuming. My take is that it's not really worth the time in this case. To do anything here, you need a proper recording interface for the computer. Once you have that, why bother trying to combine tracks of varying quality into a big noisy mess, why not just re-record everything properly with the same equipment?

If you had different tracks recorded on different gear at some pro studios it would be another story. But, the time spent merging tracks recorded on shoddy equipment could surely be used better by re-recording things through a nice interface. Also keep in mind that the tracks are likely recorded at different tempos (if they're on a click at all) which will make things really difficult to mix.
 
#6
'Home Recording for Musicians for Dummies' is a fab book. It won't show you step by step which menu option to click, but it will go thru EVERYTHING else, from gear to effects to mastering.

Don't be intimidated by the software - treat it like a tape machine. Just plug in your instrument, find the record button and hit it. That's how I learned! One track at a time.

It doesn't sound like you're recording an album (yet) so for now, using the soundcard built into your computer will do fine. Simply plugin into the mic input and you'll be set!

As for audio interfaces, buy the best you can afford, and have fun. This is meant to be fun first - freakin confusing comes a close second when you throw computers in the mix!

(by the way, if anyone has a tape machine with undo and copy/paste features, I'll gladly trade it for my pc recording setup!)
 
#7
If you want an easier to use recording program (that's free to boot) check Audacity [http://audacity.sourceforge.net/] It will only record two tracks at a time, but if you're just using your sound card that's all you've got anyway. Then you just overdub all your other tracks. It's dead simple to use and should be a good intro into PC based recording. You could then step up to something more complicated later.
 

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