In the last post we saw a video of a basic home recording setup. Here’s an example of what you can achieve with that kind of equipment:
This was recorded in one take, straight into Garageband - you’ll notice a couple of glitches in the piano part that I couldn’t be bothered to fix, as this is only for demo purposes. CJ was singing into my M Audio Nova mic - without the pop filter, as it happens - which was sending signal to my Mac via my Edirol UA-4FX digital audio interface (’soundcard’).
The keyboard was my Yamaha DGX-630 lined directly into the Mac - the DGX has its own onboard soundcard and USB output.
Pretty much no mixing, no retakes, no messing about - this is exactly how it sounds, more or less raw. If you spend time really working on it, you could get sufficiently close to a professional sound that a casual listener would have trouble working out you’d recorded it at home. That, of course, depends on you doing something pretty simple: recording voices and few instruments is easy in Garageband. Once you’re getting into complex effects and large numbers of tracks, you’ll find you need to step up both in terms of computing power, software (to something like Logic, Cubase or even Pro Tools) and your physical recording gear.
But for £300 worth of actual equipment, excluding the Mac and the digital piano, this isn’t bad. If you have a PC/Mac and instruments already (and you probably do, if you’re reading this) then you can get up and running with your home recording studio pretty easily.
