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Poor man's way to record

W

WookieeForLife

Sep 30, 2008
1,295
1
PA.
#1
This is my contribution to TB. I call this the poor man's way to record. If you dont have alotof money to record, but want to produce something here is my way.


  • First Download a program to record with. My favorite is Audacity, but my guitarist likes Kristal. I'm sure there are many.


  • Next get a rockband USB mic and a 1/4"to 1/8" connector so you can plug your bass into it and then into your computer.


  • Now set up your amp so you dig the tone. if possible set it up in an area with a drop ceiling or a ceiling fan (Something high to hang a mic from). After you amp is set up, hook the USB up to your computer while audacity is up. Push the recording button on audacity. Groove for a good 10 secs and stop and end the recording. Play back through good head phones or good speakers. Tweak the volume until you like it. Groove, record,and listen again to see if the volume is to your liking.If recording multiple tracks you must use headphones after first track.


  • If you can't get good tone this way, take the connector
    AUD-4600.jpg
    and hook either your amp's external speaker jack to it or the bass directly. If you use the external speaker out then you can dial in a tone using you amp. Anyway this will work also.


  • For guitar we use the first method listed here.


  • Drums are harder to do. We put the mic fairly far away from the set and it sounds nice.

With USB mics,however, you do get latency (lag). Latency can be taken out with the cut tool on Audacity. This just takes patients, a keen ear, and lots of cursing :D.

There is better recording methods, but this one is fairly inexpensive and effective.

One more point is, to get the music to sound more full, copy and paste a track so you have two tracks of the same thing and turning the L/R so that one is at 3 O Clock and the other at 10 O'clock.



Have fun recording, don't take it too serious. Hope I helped someone out there. Any better changes to my method will make me happy. Thanks.
 
#3
I DI(from headphone out) into the standard mic inputs on the computer with the 1/4>1/8 connector, had decent luck in past with it. I also use hydrogen for basic rythum/drum idea's and import them into audacity.

I'm having a problem though, didn't have it on my old computer(XP) but me and my friend are having it on our newish laptops(vista). When recording after a few seconds the sound volume will dramatically get lower and I we get a bunch of weird noises. Not sure how to describe them but I've heard similar noises from cellphone video recordings when its loud. Almost sounds like a flanger/chorus thing is cycling in the background or something.. Any idea what could be causing this?
(or at least give me a phrase I can use to describe this sound/fenominome so that I can search for more info...)
 
#4
:eek: Danger: in general, connect your amp's speaker outputs only to appropriately rated speaker cabinets, to an attenuator or dummy load, or to a DI box capable of handling a speaker-level output.

Unless you are looking for misadventure and repair bills, do not connect the amp's speaker output to any mic-level or line-level input--such as your computer's audio input.
 
#7
I think this is relevant:

At rehearsals we felt like recording minus the expense of gear, so we found a Rockband usb mic and draped it over some racks on the ceiling, and recorded it with audacity. Also, a sock was put over the mic ("for good measure"...) :D

Here's a diagram of what the room is like
25iyx45.jpg


As of yet we have no PA, so vocals was just a matter of standing near the mic and letting it rip.

Listen to one song from the rehearsal!

As you can hear, drums and guitar are nicely picked up, albeit prominent clicking from the guitarist's pick and strings and slight distortion on the louder drum hits. Really surprising for something with virtually zero cost!! :hyper: However, the kick and the bass are the things that really suffer - very little is captured below the low mids. Hopefully sometime we'll get some used SM57s and a mixer! as for vocals, we have some spare guitar amps lying around, all we need is a mic...

In other recordings of the same rehearsal, certain bass notes had a large volume boost (one octave above low E), which I didn't notice during playing it. Is that a mic placement/room acoustics issue or a side-effect of the mic's low quality and limited frequency response?
 
#8
I've recorded plenty by plugging my bass straight into the mic/line-in on my MacBook using a 1/4 to 1/8 adaptor. I've also experimented putting an effects unit between the computer and the bass, to get some nice effects (duh) or amp modeling. But, now that I have GarageBand (which comes free with a new MacBook), I can mess with effects and EQing to a pretty satisfactory level. This is just for live solo bass stuff; I tend to use software drums, synths etc. to fill out parts.

The only problem with my Mac line-in and in built mic is a constant buzzing which is near impossible to get rid of, and which kind of ruins the whole thing.. anyone got any ideas?

A few years back I was in a band which did exactly the same thing mentioned earlier in the thread; hanging a mic from the roof and just playing. And even had the singer just standing underneath, doing his thing. To start with we just plugged the mic into a tape recorder, but then upgraded when i got my first laptop and Audacity. Classy stuff.

So essentially, that's how I've gotten by recording just using an adapter and gear I already have. I'd love to get a great sounding recording using the adapter trick, and I'm pretty much there apart from that dang buzzing.
 
#9
derrico1 said:
:eek: Danger: in general, connect your amp's speaker outputs only to appropriately rated speaker cabinets, to an attenuator or dummy load, or to a DI box capable of handling a speaker-level output.

Unless you are looking for misadventure and repair bills, do not connect the amp's speaker output to any mic-level or line-level input--such as your computer's audio input.
Click to expand...

I should have mentioned that I was using the headphone out on them.(line6 guiar amp has headphone out, bass amp through my BOSS GT6B's headphone jack. I'm not sending my 1900watt cavin head into my laptop. :)
 
#10
@nbw & @Ben_Wilkie:

When recording, flip off the wifi [don't just disconnect from the network, disable the adapter] and also unplug the laptop if the battery can last that long.

Laptops, even the highly praised apples, have the dirtist mic plugs that have ever been soldered, even a crummy old desktop PC has a chance of having a grounded soundcard, never such luck on a laptop.

I even know this, but had forgotten, Link Removed wasn't pretty.
 
#11
sorry OP, but your advice is a little lackluster.

As far as audio DAW's go audacity isn't something i'd reccomend.

check out reaper instead www.reaper.fm

as long as you aren't selling music it's free, and it is totally fully featured.

you're recording method may not be useful for many people, workflow/price wise, it's way easier to go DI with just your bass and use a VST preamp, like the ronald passion one

Invalid Link Removed

and you can get far nicer microphones than the rockband microphone for not much at all, a behringer c-1u is about 60 bucks and is a good all round condenser microphone with inbuilt USB for about 70 bucks

Invalid Link Removed

and the issue's of lag can mostly be killed by using a decent asio driver instead of windows **** directX sound driver. like asio4all, which is free.


http://www.asio4all.com/


and build up a repertoire of nice free VST effects, they go a long way if you can get some good one's (i have reccomendations if anyone is interested)

also learn to use EQ's effectively!!! can't stress that enough!
 
#14
nbw said:
I DI(from headphone out) into the standard mic inputs on the computer with the 1/4>1/8 connector, had decent luck in past with it. I also use hydrogen for basic rythum/drum idea's and import them into audacity.

I'm having a problem though, didn't have it on my old computer(XP) but me and my friend are having it on our newish laptops(vista). When recording after a few seconds the sound volume will dramatically get lower and I we get a bunch of weird noises. Not sure how to describe them but I've heard similar noises from cellphone video recordings when its loud. Almost sounds like a flanger/chorus thing is cycling in the background or something.. Any idea what could be causing this?
(or at least give me a phrase I can use to describe this sound/fenominome so that I can search for more info...)
Click to expand...

Disable the build in mic. It is located in the control panel.


Anotherthing I forgot to mention, when running the line out from your amp make sure its not powered. The line out on my bass amp is only a signal, no power to ruin my equiptment.

Rockband mic = 10$
Behinger = 60$


Reaper is good, but I am more familiar with Audacity and I am very satisfied with the end result.

Sorry for neglecting my thread guys. I just remebered it and checked.

There are tons of variations of this method, but this is what worked best for us. Hope it works great for you guys also.
 
#16
Using only my keyboardist's Macbook and it's built in microphone, we got RIDICULOUSLY good results. And by ridiculously good, I mean ridiculously good compared to what we expected. Even while recording the whole band at once. Heck, it was LISTENABLE. Amazing!
 
#18
tekkentool said:
check out reaper instead www.reaper.fm

as long as you aren't selling music it's free, and it is totally fully featured.
Click to expand...

Advice like that will ruin the beautiful business model that gives us Reaper.

It is not FREE.

The demo is full featured. If you like it, do yourself a favor, the rest of us Reaper users a favor, and the Cockos folks a favor, and spend the 60 bucks on a license.
 
#20
ljazz said:
Advice like that will ruin the beautiful business model that gives us Reaper.

It is not FREE.

The demo is full featured. If you like it, do yourself a favor, the rest of us Reaper users a favor, and the Cockos folks a favor, and spend the 60 bucks on a license.
Click to expand...

normally i add "for non commercial purposes only, and that you should buy a lisence if you like the software" but i couldn't be ****ed that time i've reccomended reaper so many times.

i also occasionally leave it out simply to get people to use the thing, there's something about something being free that makes you want to try it, "fully featured demo" doesn't ring as much, and i want people to enjoy it like i do. i want people to have better quality.
 

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