How to record music with your guitar that can rack in the $$

How to record your guitar on your computer.

So, you've slaved hours and hours imprisoned in your mind creating that one piece of work that you hope would give you a boarding pass to fame and fortune. Well before you give it all away, is your baby as dressed up as well as it could be? More specifically, is the quality of the music that you've recorded dressed to impress? Well follow this guide and we'll give the inside scoop on how to turn your piece into a piece of history. Whether you are a casual hobbiest or a musician, there is bound to be something for you, so read on!

Ok, so lets get started. To begin you will need a set-up that is capable of recording, so the first part of this guide is dedicated to ensuring you have the right stuff to record the right sound.

Your Guitar.

Make sure to check that your guitar is fine tuned. This means new strings, as older strings tend to lose their ring due to corrosion, and if your piece of music is involves a lot of finger picking, you would want the full range of sounds that a new set of strings will give you. Checking that the tuning is correct, nothing worst then having a flat sounding E string when cranking those solos.

Your Computer.

Hard Drive: Recording samples takes up a lot of hard drive space, because the files are recorded in high quality WAV files, expect to use about 1GB of space for a song of short duration (about 3 minutes), or more for longer duration a song with multiply instruments i.e. Drums and Bass guitar.

Sound Card: For your computer to digitally record sounds produced by your guitar, a quality sound card is needed. Onboard sound cards can be used, however the quality of the sound is limited by the drivers that are provided by the makers of the motherboard, and generally the support for them is terribly bad. I recommend placing a restraining order on these unless you are seriously low on funds.

There are several sound cards that I would recommend depending on your budget. If your budget is low, then consider getting a standard Creative Audigy card which are cheaper than Tom Hank's haircut in the Castaway. If you can handle a couple of hundred dollars, then look into getting the maudio audiophile series or the Creative Audigy 2 Platinum Pro as they both come with inputs for voice, guitar and MIDI. Getting a MIDI capable sound card is very useful if you only have a guitar, as MIDI can give you a whole range of instruments such as drums, bass, and keyboard that will give a whole new dimension of sounds at your disposal without having to incur the cost ofpurchasing each individual instrument.

Software: We'll talk about the necessary software to add layers to your songs in a later guide, for the moment we'll just focus on creating the individual samples.

Your Microphone.

The ability of the microphone to capture quality is simply described in one phrase, you get what you pay for. Pay for a five dollar microphone and the sound output would sound like a five year old trying to reproduce the sound with their voice. Pay for a twenty dollar microphone and the sound would replicate that of a young Christina Aguilera. Pay for a one hundred dollar microphone and you get the sound of a young Christina in a orchestral hall. My point here is that quality microphones can pick up a larger range of sounds than that their cheaper counterparts. So don't compromise price here, get a mid range microphone at least, or you'll end up sounding like a five year old.

It might also pay off to purchase an adjustable stand for your microphone, if there are any acoustic guitar rifts that needs recording, adjusting the height of the microphone to be in front of the sound hole will provide the best results when recording acoustically.

Your Studio.

Chances are if you are reading this guide then you don't access to an expensive studio so in order to create your own just follow these simple steps. First find a room in the house that filters out external sounds, if this isn't possible during the day then try recording at night. If there is external sound filtering through then try placing a thick certain or sheet over the windows or in the general direction of where the sound is coming from.

Try and not record in a large open room as a good microphone will pick up any echoing that may occur. If this is not an option then place a drop down cloth behind the microphone that is facing you to damping down your voice when you are projecting towards the cloth.

When your computer is recoding and encoding the sound it will use a lot of the processing power of your computer. This generally causes the fan to run quite fast and load to dissipate the heat. Turning off unnecessary programs running on your computer would reduce the load on your computer. Programs that are commonly left running are Skype, and other messaging services, media players such as iTunes, Winamp, windows media player, and if you are quite computer savvy then consider turning off the antivirus.

Let's start recording.

Ok, so equipment wise it is all set up and you are ready to go, so lets make sure the computer settings are correct to record. First check that the line-in is not muted by doubling clicking on the sound icon (looks like a speaker) on the bottom right hand of the screen. Second check that the female jacks are free of dust as it can cause distortion in the sound quality. A simple blow of air into the holes in the guitar (if you have an electric guitar) and the jacks in the sound card should be enough to prevent distortion.

Now depending on what sound card you have purchased, they get bundled with different software.

Most of the applications that are supplied with m-audio and Creative are easy to record. Its pretty much 'plug and play' where all the equipment is plugged in and you press record on the software and it records whatever sound the sound cards receives. But for the purposes of this guide, we'll use an application called Audacity, which is a free piece of software that is very simple to use and did I mention free?

Using Audacity is very simple, its like an old fashion cassette recorder, hit the record button and you are away. There is one final setting to check however; which is the sound sample rate. Press Ctrl+P to open up preferences and click on the 'Quality' tab, although the default is 44100Hz, make sure that this setting has not changed to a lower setting. Once this is done we are ready to record. To record an electric guitar its rather simple, just plug the guitar click the record button and you are away.

To record acoustic guitar there are several steps to take before recording as placement of the microphone is paramount to ensuring quality sound. First you need to place the microphone infront of the sound hole of the guitar, this ensures the sound is clean and untampered with when it reaches the microphone. Second you need test record the volume registered by Audicity, as different guitars have different sounds depending on the wood, string, and design. For example the Dreadnought guitar with size 14 strings would be louder than an Orchestral design with size 12 strings. So in order to compensate for the varying output of sound you need to adjust the distance between the microphone and the sound hole.

There are plenty of editing tools that are provided with Audacity, including volume control, cut and paste of the sample. There are also sound variation 'pedals' with reverb and other sound distortion options for your electric guitar. But I'll leave that for you to play around with as to describe all the tools would be another guide in itself.

Some Recording Tips

*You only need to record the verse and chorus once if you are recording a song that follows the standard ABAB format. Just record one good version of the verse and chorus and thencopy and paste the sample.

* Don't delete every sample you create even if they sound odd or different, because you never know, it may sound awesome when you put the samples together, if you are going to delete, delete the samples with errors.

*Try and record the whole song within the day/night, if you record over the course of a few weeks chances are you will have varying thoughts about how you want the song to sound.Music generally reflects a mood at a point of time, having various moods in a song of a few minutes generally does not work.

*Drink water and warm up your voice before singing, it helps.

* Once you've finished recording your track and think its awesome enough to sell, visit www.voeveo.com and start bringing in the $$