stefkeB

Apart from software, there is a wealth of possibilities for guitar sounds. From real amplifiers and stomp boxes till software plugins and combined software/hardware products.

Right now, I'm borrowing a Korg ToneWorks AX3000G from my brother, which is mostly a hardware guitar effects and amplifiers simulator. One machine with a nice range of sounds. Maybe I don't need to buy two or more amplifiers and effects at all.

I am re-installing everything. My Powerbook's drive died, so I had to start from scratch (and the partial backup I could recover). I've switched from Tiger to Leopard, but still have iLife '06 for PPC on that machine.

On the iMac, I have the more recent iLife '08 which is nice (especially iPhoto, which we used to reorganize most of our family snapshots). Garagaband seems to be improved somewhat, but not dramatically. I have not had the chance to try others.

Last week, because it was my birthday, I bought a new iMac. It is meant to replace my old Desktop PC from 2000, which did not serve for music for quite some time. While I am happy with the Powerbook, it's still my laptop for work and it's disk died recently. While it is recovering and a new battery is ordered, I had to replace my home computer too. Because of music and graphics I chose the iMac, which is reasonably priced and comes with iLife (including the nice Garageband).

I had a rehearsal/brainstorm with the "Reverse Violin Company", yesterday evening. We listened to eachothers tunes, looked at lyrics and gave suggestions. We also wanted to record a new song, based on a lyric I wrote. It was hard to find a suitable "genre", so we decided to try with drum loops to get into a particular groove. After a few rock oriented drum samples, we settled with a more electronic beat and then the creative energy got bigger.

The worst thing happened. I had ordered an external Lacie drive, two months ago. When it finally arrived, I started making a backup of my laptop and while the system was copying, it hang. I had to force it to shut down and discovered that the internal hard drive could not be found anymore! So I ended up with only a partial backup without pictures, desktop, music and movies folders, but luckily with the few recordings I made last week, during my holiday. And the original data, on the laptop drive is gone forever.

With the Sales day of our local music shop (Leo Caerts in Leuven), I went to buy a decent microphone. The one I have, the Sure SM58 is fine, but is more meant for live-work or for harsh sounds (e.g. drums). They suggested an MXL and I went with the Desktop Recording Kit (http://www.mxlmics.com/Comp_Recording/comprecord_index.html). It was about €100 and included the microphone, the cables, a small microphone stand and a carrier box.I did a short test and noticed a world of difference:

Getting Started with a simple tape recorder

The first songs I wrote used just a guitar and a simple tape recorder with a built-in mike.

Required: guitar + tape recorder

Adding Mixing

Adding a simple audio mixer, I succeeded to do my first multi-tracking, recording additional layers on top of the first recording, on a second tape. This involved lots of noise, but the mixer made for a better control over the levels. Finally I could tweak the voice volume with regard to the music volume.