Help a n00b brother out!

Allright guys, here it comes.

Edited by Tarquin Underspoon - October 25 2009 at 18:32

What instrument(s) were you planning to record? 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO AUDACITY.

Seriously, when you can use Reaper for free for a trial period and the  licence key is so cheap to be able to use it permanently, there is no reason to use Audacity.
It might not offer as good a workflow as Cubase, Ableton or Protools, but it's good enough to get results as good as those 3 and so much better than Audacity it's not funny.
Reaper has full functionality in the trial period


And GOOOOOOOOO:

http://www.reaper.fm/

How much money you got?
I'll suggest some fairly budget minded things for now.

First, ditch the Zoom (well okay, if you wanna keep it that's cool, I didn't mean literally go out and sell it if you don't want to lol).

Depending on your budget, here's a good suggestion:

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=FWinterfaces

These have a good reputation and I regularly speak to people very happy about their Firewire M-Audio interfaces.
Firewire will be able to handle intensive applications.
Can't afford Firewire, they do make USB 2.0 interfaces, but I strongly recommend Firewire over USB 2.0
USB 2.0 is not bad and what powers my current interface, but it does leave a little to be desired at times.

If you plan to record real amps, you'll want a mic obviously. A Shure SM57 will pretty much cover it and they are fairly cheap. Don't worry about the cheap price tag, they're an industry standard microphone that gets used on high budget productions and very popular for guitar amp mic'ing.

Otherwise, if you don't have a real amp/aren't prepared to spend money on a high quality amp, look into software amp sims.
They will kick the pants off any cheap amp, seriously.

If you want software amp VST plugs in, keep me posted in this thread and tell me what style you need, because I know where to get a range  of VST plug in amp sims that will cover anything from good clean tones, classic rock to extreme metal

cobb2 wrote: If you are recording guitar directly, you will probably need a DI (Direct Interface) so you can plug it into the soundcard input. These are relatively cheap.

DI = Direct Injection.
An interface is just an interface dude.
DI boxes allow you to track dry tracks, unaffected signals which allow you to use amp sims and cabinet sims and constantly tweak your tone instead of having to re record with different settings.
Also allows you to reamp with a reamp box and real amplifier.

Tarquin Underspoon wrote:     I'm planning on guitar, bass, midi keys, and, as I said earlier, VST drums. And vocals, too. I don't know whether or not I should record my guitar directly.   This is one of those questions that may make me look like a caveman, but can I not just mic up my amp?   Also, I'd like this to sound as professional as possible while still being "on the cheap", so to speak. I have visions of getting an album or an ep out on the internet for free, using last.fm or something like that (an idea I stole directly from forumer Endless Wire, who put out a nice album of his own that all should check out). So I suppose I just need to know what is standard procedure for this type of thing. I'm definitely not looking to set up a pro studio in my room or anything, but it's gotta sound high quality.

High quality recordings are 90 per cent the man, and 10 percent the machine (your tools, so to speak).
We are talking years of audio engineering study, experimentation and practice, seriously, you can't expect within a few weeks you go from beginner to high quality.
So much of it is in the ears that it's not funny and that ear for good sounds takes a long time to develop.



Edited by Petrovsk Mizinski - October 25 2009 at 22:28

http://lepouplugins.blogspot.com/

Everything from classic rock to extreme metal/high gain leads

http://nickcrowlab.blogspot.com/

8505 is based on the Peavey 5150, and as such is great for lead playing as well as heavy rhythms.
I haven't used 7170 nor TubeDriver, but feel free to experiment with both once you get a good interface.

http://www.voxengo.com/product/boogex/

I use Voxengo Boogex for applying impulses.
Impulses are used to get the power amp stage and cabinet stage of the guitar chain in action. If you don't use them and just use amp sims by themselves it sounds fizzy, which is of course because the power amp and cabinet are integral parts of the sound too.
Boogex has many good impulses in it, however if you're not totally happy with them, there is heaps of other impulses you can track down.
I'm a member of the Andy Sneap forum, so getting heaps of impulses is easy for me)

I don't use Ezy Drummer, nor Reaper (I have Ableton Live Suite 8.0, which is quite expensive, so you can imagine I don't really need Reaper) but I may be able to find that out for you

Blowin Free wrote: progkidjoel wrote: Hey Tarquin! To be honest, I have no real idea. Although I have recorded 2 tracks of decent quality directly into my PC Would it be cool if I asked some Q's whilst I'm in here aswell? I could use help just as much as you To begin with, I'd reccomend downloading Audacity - Its free audio recording software, and it ain't bad! Click here to download Audacity! Audacity is the worst software ever.

There's much worse software out there.

MUCH worst.

Well, here's my advice:

Do as Harry said and get a decent audio interface for the PC ... Firewire is nice, but you can also get an internal card (PCI), I have a ESI Maya 44e, but M-Audio also offers some. Steer clear of USB - it adds to the latency.

Once you have a decent audio interface, you can plug your guitar directly into it and record the dry signal in your favorite DAW (Reaper is fine as a start, you can also use Cubase LE). If your audio interface doesn't offer guitar inputs you might also need a DI box to pre-amplify the signal to line level (my ESI card does that, conveniently).

Once you have the guitar signal in the DAW, you can use software instruments to process it. You have a variety of choices ... the free ones that Harry linked to are nice, but there's also these:

Line 6
Native Instruments (Guitar Rig)
Peavey ReValver

The latter two offer demo versions, so you can try them out before you spend money on them. The best way to do that IMO is to record yourself jamming around for a couple of minutes ... then simply put that on a loop and browse through the presets of the plugins. Keep in mind though that most presets - of any pedal/plugin/whatever - usually require some "tweaking" to sound good.

Yes, they do work in stereo.
However some plug-ins do not, but you'll work out how to use them.
For example, if you have 2 guitar tracks, one panned hard left and the other hard right, if you use the typical free amp sims, often they are mono only, which means you cannot just put one instance of guitar amp sim on both guitar tracks, you must use a separate instance for each guitar track.