Recording on your own

[51m0n]

1 hour ago, bazzbass said:

anyone who thinks garageband is the same as a fully featured DAW has not used a fully featured DAW

 

IMHO YMMV etc etc

Not necessarily true, but they probably haven't needed to push the limits of what GB can do yet and so haven't seen what a DAW is actually capable of either....

 

Or, and I am not trying to seem rude, they have found a DAW too complex or confusing or just different enough from GB to be a too significant a learning curve to get over in order to find the benefits of the  power of a fully operational Death Star, sorry, DAW....

[BigRedX]

1 hour ago, bazzbass said:

anyone who thinks garageband is the same as a fully featured DAW has not used a fully featured DAW

But most people don't really need a fully-featured DAW. I've been a Logic user for almost 25 years now, and I only use a tiny amount of the facilities that the program offers. In fact for a lot of what I do these days Garageband would probably be more than adequate.

Don't forget that the OP is a self-confessed beginner when it comes to recording, and the last thing he probably wants to do is get bogged down in an overly-complicated program just to get a few ideas turned into full-fledged song recordings.

IMO a bit a simplicity can do wonders for focusing the mind and the basic task in hand which is recording your musical ideas and turning them into a fully arranged song. In fact if the OP is new to all this, then he probably already knows the songs and the arrangements and he just needs a way of recording them is quickly and easily as possible, and the fewer new things he needs to spend time learning, the better the end result is likely to be.

Because these days you can buy the same DAW is that used by all the big name studios for a couple of hundred pounds at the most, the choices can be somewhat overwhelming for the new home-recordist.

When I first started recording in the mid 70s you had basically three choices:
Live into a mono or stereo reel-to-reel or cassette recorder
Bouncing between to tracks of a stereo reel-to-reel recorder building up your recording one instrument at a time.
Going into a commercial studio (which unless you had a lot of money to spend would probably only be 4-track)

There was semi-pro studio equipment available, but even the most modest of 4-track studio set ups would cost you several thousand pounds in the days when a new Fender bass cost around a couple of hundred. It wasn't until the original Portastudio came out in 1979 that home recording started to become remotely affordable and simple enough for the average musician to get to grips with.

And this brings me to another point. What exactly does the OP want out of the recordings he makes? And how much is he prepared to spend getting them to sound the way he wants them to. OK he has and iMac and Garageband, but he's still going to need an audio interface and some form of monitoring, he's taking about buying a keyboard for playing the Garageband instruments, and he'll probably also need a microphone, unless all his compositions are instrumentals. All of a sudden you are looking at spending money that could buy you a couple of days in a decent local studio where a well-organised and rehearsed musician could quite easily record and mix a 5-6 track mini album which will most likely sound far better than anything he can do at home.

As others have already said, spending on studio equipment can make even the most rampant bass GAS look completely insignificant.

I have my own cautionary tale of home recording. Having stated at the bottom, recording live onto a stereo cassette recorder and working my way through 4 and 8 track Portastudios adding analogue and then MIDI sequencing along the way, I finally upgraded to a fully-fledged DAW. by this time I had spent well in excess of £30,000 on equipment and the room in which it was all housed (most of which was done over the space of 7 years, and in retrospect for what I was trying to do would have been better spent hiring a pro-studio and producer). And while my recording were improvements over those I was making in the 70s, it was mostly technical improvements in sound quality (the elimination of tape hiss, wow and flutter, and not having to worry about sound degradation when bouncing tracks), and I still wasn't able to make recordings that sounded as good as the records and CDs I was buying. In the end I had the face up to the facts that the weak link in my recording was my (lack of) skill as an engineer - something that was very much brought home to me after a couple of trips to local studios with my last band where it took the engineer a matter of minutes to get a better sound than I was able to achieve on my own in weeks or fiddling at home. I've ended up selling nearly all my studio gear, and for anything other than basic MIDI sequencing and sorting out song arrangements I would go into a decent studio.

So to the OP, think carefully about what you want to achieve. Home recording can be a lot of fun, but it can also be very frustrating experience. Just because you are a competent musician doesn't automatically mean that you will be a good engineer as well. From my PoV I'd much rather have a few really professional sounding recordings than what I do have which is lots of "home demos" in various states of (un)completion.

 

[bazzbass]

20 minutes ago, 51m0n said:

Not necessarily true, but they probably haven't needed to push the limits of what GB can do yet and so haven't seen what a DAW is actually capable of either....

 

Or, and I am not trying to seem rude, they have found a DAW too complex or confusing or just different enough from GB to be a too significant a learning curve to get over in order to find the benefits of the  power of a fully operational Death Star, sorry, DAW....

don't get me wrong, I've heard some very decent recordings of original music done entirely in GB, just making the point DAWs can do a LOT more

[BigRedX]

9 minutes ago, bazzbass said:

don't get me wrong, I've heard some very decent recordings of original music done entirely in GB, just making the point DAWs can do a LOT more

True.

But only if the person working the DAW needs/wants/is capable of doing it.

[Skol303]

As I said earlier... great  thread; lots of personal recommendations for people's own preferred software and set ups (all valid and worth noting); and yet my recommendation remains the same:

1. Spend time learning Garageband
2. Only then can you determine whether Garageband meets your needs
3. And if not, then explore other options

As as both 51m0n and BigRedX have pointed out, spend your money wisely - and frugally! It's very easy to blow lots of cash very quickly on audio gear and then discover that you could have made much better choices had you been better informed. So don't spend any big bucks until you've got at least a year of music-making under your belt, by which time you'll begin you start fathoming out what you need.

In the meantime, keep it simple and try to ignore the shiny stuff!

[Skol303]

On 06/04/2018 at 21:24, adi77 said:

remember rebirth?

Hell yes! I loved ReBirth. It's partly why I ended up using Propellerhead Reason as my DAW of choice.

I squeezed just about everything I could out of ReBirth at the time. That and some old tracker software; I think it might have even been called 'SoundTracker' (can't remember). Great fun and a good exercise in making the most of limited tools.

[Guest adi77]

2 hours ago, Skol303 said:

Hell yes! I loved ReBirth. It's partly why I ended up using Propellerhead Reason as my DAW of choice.

I squeezed just about everything I could out of ReBirth at the time. That and some old tracker software; I think it might have even been called 'SoundTracker' (can't remember). Great fun and a good exercise in making the most of limited tools.

Yes couldnt have said it better  made me get reason and made it easier to understand grid based sequencers 

[Guest adi77]

3 hours ago, BigRedX said:

True.

But only if the person working the DAW needs/wants/is capable of doing it.

..and if the track requires it

 

mostly its that

[lowdown]

18 hours ago, tom1946 said:

Thanks guys, I will do that.

The keyboard looks ideal, is it polyphonic? can I play etherial strings etc'? or is that done using one key? I don't know how they work and the advert doesn't say.

Before you splash out on a midi controller, maybe consider this. It seems to come with plenty of decent sounds.

 

 

[51m0n]

4 hours ago, Skol303 said:

As I said earlier... great  thread; lots of personal recommendations for people's own preferred software and set ups (all valid and worth noting); and yet my recommendation remains the same:

1. Spend time learning Garageband
2. Only then can you determine whether Garageband meets your needs
3. And if not, then explore other options

As as both 51m0n and BigRedX have pointed out, spend your money wisely - and frugally! It's very easy to blow lots of cash very quickly on audio gear and then discover that you could have made much better choices had you been better informed. So don't spend any big bucks until you've got at least a year of music-making under your belt, by which time you'll begin you start fathoming out what you need.

In the meantime, keep it simple and try to ignore the shiny stuff!

Yes.

I have spent the better part of 30 years learning sound engineering. Still learn new stuff every mix/recording session/mastering session.

Its been brilliant, I was lucky enough to be mentored by some superb engineers/producers and experience some name bands with actual budgets working in 'real' studios. Beats the hell out of youtube videos when you are immersed in it 24/7 even for a few weeks. You never seem to forget stuff from those experiences.

Its been challenging (deadline to complete soldering the 32 channel fully balanced desk for the new B Studio we needed to be ready within a couple of weeks was'optimistic' at best). A certain guitarist's attitude was rather trying at times. My ears could only last so long back then because I didn't know how to listen as well, that was hard to understand.

I know I have forgotten more about mic placement than I think most modern chaps learn in college and the next few years of their careers.

My ears a pretty good, they could be better, but they are better than most.

The kit never guarantees a recording, learn the theory and practice of sound engineering as much as you need to to get the results you are hoping for. It not worth learning more unless you are serious about a career in it.

A lack of skills will prevent a reasonable recording more than anything else. Budget gear these days is insanely good for the money, not as good as the big boys toys, but still, unbelievable really.

Having said that, with decent mics/board and just 2 tracks I can record a live take better than most people can mix umpty and three tracks; if the band are on it and the room is good.

HAVE FUN!
Don't beat yourself up, your efforts are going to be woeful for far longer than you stay with GB if the bug bites. Keep learning, go and look at the Gearslutz website (the beginner and budget areas are where your interests should take you, forget the big boys toys, they are useless to you).

[Skol303]

^ Spot on. Especially this bit...

17 minutes ago, 51m0n said:

HAVE FUN! Don't beat yourself up...

...and this bit:

18 minutes ago, 51m0n said:

go and look at the Gearslutz website (the beginner and budget areas are where your interests should take you, forget the big boys toys, they are useless to you).

If you have a partner, just remember to delete your browser history after visiting the 'High End' section of Gearslutz, otherwise you'll have a lot of explaining to do

[51m0n]

9 minutes ago, Skol303 said:

If you have a partner, just remember to delete your browser history after visiting the 'High End' section of Gearslutz, otherwise you'll have a lot of explaining to do

Just one last look, I promise (those walls!):-

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/photo-diaries-of-recording-studio-construction-projects/161575-manifold-recording-studio-construction-thread.html

[Skol303]

9 minutes ago, 51m0n said:

Just one last look, I promise (those walls!):-

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/photo-diaries-of-recording-studio-construction-projects/161575-manifold-recording-studio-construction-thread.html

Wow...! Now that's how to do it.

Looks amazing. Even the location itself.

Have bookmarked for reading through that thread after work...

PS: I notice they're using RPG BAD panels... I've just ordered a very small batch of those. For my garage. And not my multi-million dollar purpose-built, carbon-neutral studio. But heh, other than that point of difference, I'm right with them

[lowdown]

I have just been looking at what you get in GarageBand - It's far more than a basic DAW these days. Plenty to compose/write with. It even has a score editor.

'What Is GarageBand'....

https://help.apple.com/garageband/mac/10.2/#/gbndff5345d9

[tom1946]

I'm a beginner, very much so and I'm not looking to make a career out of it because I'm too old now.

I dabbled a bit on a Yamaha YS100 back in the 80's. I still have it in the loft. Anyone remember them?

[tom1946]

On 09/04/2018 at 09:13, BigRedX said:

But most people don't really need a fully-featured DAW. I've been a Logic user for almost 25 years now, and I only use a tiny amount of the facilities that the program offers. In fact for a lot of what I do these days Garageband would probably be more than adequate.

Don't forget that the OP is a self-confessed beginner when it comes to recording, and the last thing he probably wants to do is get bogged down in an overly-complicated program just to get a few ideas turned into full-fledged song recordings.

IMO a bit a simplicity can do wonders for focusing the mind and the basic task in hand which is recording your musical ideas and turning them into a fully arranged song. In fact if the OP is new to all this, then he probably already knows the songs and the arrangements and he just needs a way of recording them is quickly and easily as possible, and the fewer new things he needs to spend time learning, the better the end result is likely to be.

Because these days you can buy the same DAW is that used by all the big name studios for a couple of hundred pounds at the most, the choices can be somewhat overwhelming for the new home-recordist.

When I first started recording in the mid 70s you had basically three choices:
Live into a mono or stereo reel-to-reel or cassette recorder
Bouncing between to tracks of a stereo reel-to-reel recorder building up your recording one instrument at a time.
Going into a commercial studio (which unless you had a lot of money to spend would probably only be 4-track)

There was semi-pro studio equipment available, but even the most modest of 4-track studio set ups would cost you several thousand pounds in the days when a new Fender bass cost around a couple of hundred. It wasn't until the original Portastudio came out in 1979 that home recording started to become remotely affordable and simple enough for the average musician to get to grips with.

And this brings me to another point. What exactly does the OP want out of the recordings he makes? And how much is he prepared to spend getting them to sound the way he wants them to. OK he has and iMac and Garageband, but he's still going to need an audio interface and some form of monitoring, he's taking about buying a keyboard for playing the Garageband instruments, and he'll probably also need a microphone, unless all his compositions are instrumentals. All of a sudden you are looking at spending money that could buy you a couple of days in a decent local studio where a well-organised and rehearsed musician could quite easily record and mix a 5-6 track mini album which will most likely sound far better than anything he can do at home.

As others have already said, spending on studio equipment can make even the most rampant bass GAS look completely insignificant.

I have my own cautionary tale of home recording. Having stated at the bottom, recording live onto a stereo cassette recorder and working my way through 4 and 8 track Portastudios adding analogue and then MIDI sequencing along the way, I finally upgraded to a fully-fledged DAW. by this time I had spent well in excess of £30,000 on equipment and the room in which it was all housed (most of which was done over the space of 7 years, and in retrospect for what I was trying to do would have been better spent hiring a pro-studio and producer). And while my recording were improvements over those I was making in the 70s, it was mostly technical improvements in sound quality (the elimination of tape hiss, wow and flutter, and not having to worry about sound degradation when bouncing tracks), and I still wasn't able to make recordings that sounded as good as the records and CDs I was buying. In the end I had the face up to the facts that the weak link in my recording was my (lack of) skill as an engineer - something that was very much brought home to me after a couple of trips to local studios with my last band where it took the engineer a matter of minutes to get a better sound than I was able to achieve on my own in weeks or fiddling at home. I've ended up selling nearly all my studio gear, and for anything other than basic MIDI sequencing and sorting out song arrangements I would go into a decent studio.

So to the OP, think carefully about what you want to achieve. Home recording can be a lot of fun, but it can also be very frustrating experience. Just because you are a competent musician doesn't automatically mean that you will be a good engineer as well. From my PoV I'd much rather have a few really professional sounding recordings than what I do have which is lots of "home demos" in various states of (un)completion.

 

Thanks for your input.

What I want from this is to just experiment with playing music into my Mac, organising it and perhaps making a few backing tracks for our church band.

On top of that it would be good to play about with the software sounds to see what I can create.

All simple stuff really.... except it isn't 

[vbance]

take a look at Garageband and beyond on youtube....helped me a in many ways.

[skidder652003]

ok to get you started

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Focusrite-scarlett-2i2-1st-gen-10/282909728923?hash=item41debbe09b:g:4E4AAOSwxa9auqme

https://www.amazon.co.uk/AKG-Dynamic-Handheld-Vocal-Microphone/dp/B000S5JKRQ

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/M-Audio-Oxygen-25-Midi-Keyboard-3rd-Gen/302699082898?hash=item467a457492:g:tbwAAOSwElpaoQ2T

https://www.studiospares.com/Headphones-and-Speakers/Headphones-Studio/Studiospares-M1000-Studio-Headphones_448760.htm?gclid=Cj0KCQjwh7zWBRCiARIsAId9b4r2C3stcoRrjDnONDcSdzyfLJzhR5B9ed-Xu1Q56Uctksizw-jh8fUaAt7GEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Scarlett 2i2 AU interface

 decent vocal mike (we use em on stage),

midi keyboard with full size keys,

and pukka headphones (as recommended on here), everything to get you started and then some for the princely outlay of about 200 quid

 

Edited April 12, 2018 by skidder652003