Recording again!

Those of you who've been reading this blog from its inception know that it's about guitars and recording, not just guitars. Well, after a flurry of early experiments, I stopped trying to record and focused on guitar, mostly buying new ones.

I recently found myself with some unexpected time off, so I decided to finally try some serious recording. I turned my PC into a dual-boot XP-Ubuntu machine a while ago and installed all the Ubuntu Studio audio packages but I never had a chance to try it out. Until now.

I've mentioned this before, but I'm a fan of Rob Chapman a.k.a. Rob Chappers a.k.a. The Monkey Lord on YouTube and I became a member of his forum to help design his latest guitar. Apparently, the members of this forum have occasional collaborations and I just happened to notice their latest one, so I wanted to try to record something. I downloaded the backing track - a simple blues progression in E - and got to work trying to figure out Ardour.

My recording rig was slightly comical. I didn't want to plug directly into the computer, but I needed a way to get the sound into Ardour. So I used the microphone I got with Rock Band. Yes, you heard me, I used a Rock Band microphone. It's USB, so it worked just fine with the computer. One thing about Ardour (and Linux in general) is that it's open source, so there's a wealth of information on how to use it. I Googled "ardour usb microphone" and got my setup instructions immediately.

With the microphone set up, I got to work recording. I already have some experience with Jack, the audio connection system, and Patchage, the excellent graphical connection manager, so setting that up wasn't bad. After fumbling around with Ardour I managed to get the backing track imported and I rattled off about eight or nine solos. I also managed to figure out how to export just the tracks I wanted into WAV files, although I still don't know how to export as MP3s, so I brought the WAV into Audacity to convert it to an MP3.

I ended up with one that I thought was pretty good so I submitted it for the collaboration. It was done on my Strat through the neck pickup with the volume on 10 and tone on about 6 and a half, then through my DigiTech RP90 on a custom preset based on a Marshal JCM800, then through my Line 6 Spider III 15 as an amp only - I had it on the clean channel with a flat EQ - then through the Rock Band microphone and into Ardour.

Here it is, I hope you like it. I know it's not perfect (I messed up in a few places) but I think it's pretty good for my first attempt. Enjoy!