Home Recording

lol! thanks! :rofl:

I should be prepared for multiple meanings to any abbreviation! My workplace is loaded with stuff that doesn’t mean what I think it means.

If you have an amp with a line out, that’s what I would look at. If the amp line-out is also for headphones, and plugging it in mutes the amp, then you can plug headphones into the AI to monitor.

If you have pedals, they would normally go in front of the amp.

Cheers,

Keith

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I have finally gotten back into my guitar journey and am wrapping up grade 2. I’m thankful it has all come back pretty quickly and I am focusing on the lesson 14 information and some of the Blues leads.

I am a complete novice when it comes to recording and have a question. I have a MacBook Pro with Garage Band, which I have only used once to create custom ring tones. When using the gear Justin recommends and Garage Band, can jam tracks be integrated into a recording for practicing leads, etc.? I would like to have a Blues jam track running while I practice attempt leads and record the combination to see how it sounds.

Oh, and can Garage Band include video or is it audio only? I suspect I know the answer but want to confirm.

I think for a lot of us just looking to improve our guitar playing rather than start a home recording studio, any old USB or built-in microphone and whatever free software works for you will be enough. Or even a phone recording.

Recorded myself on PC with Audacity (free, and looks a lot better than it used to) and a USB microphone ($20) I had laying about, and it was plenty sufficient to identify parts of my playing that I thought I had down when jamming along with a song, but were very obviously not so great when listening to just me playing.

So don’t be intimidated by all the fancy stuff in the lesson - you don’t need much to record yourself if your aim is simply to get better at guitar.

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Is a cheap amp better than a audio interface + speaker?

Hi Joe, I didn’t see a response, so I can tell you that Garage Band just uses audio tracks. I have used it to play backing tracks and record while playing my guitar. You can extract the audio from video and import into Garage Band. I haven’t tried yet, but I think you can use iMovie on the Mac for videos.

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Hi,

I just want mention that with some interfaces DAW software is included.
I got a Motu M2 (2 channel) with Ableton Live Lite Windows software.

Headphone amp on this one sounds good to my ears.
Patched Rocksmith 2014 works as well … the original Rocksmith USB Cable is laggy as hell …

Regards

I would advise care with the DAW software bundled with DAWs. It is almost always a version of the DAW with major restrictions, often severely stripped back from their full version and limited by number of tracks or number of plugins, connections, etc.

Some of these are ā€œenough to get startedā€ and may be more than enough for many people going forward, but their limitations are designed so that the majority of people will hit them eventually, and feel the need to upgrade to the full product, which can be quite expensive.

As an example, the unrestricted version of Ableton live is $439 US, and the complete suite is $749.

Of course, at that point, you could switch to a different, less expensive DAW, but the vendors are relying on you having got used to their product and knowing that, whilst many of the concepts are the same, there are substantial differences between DAWs in how you navigate and operate them and learning them is not easy. Also migrating projects from one DAW to another can be problematic.

I would bear this in mind when looking at what DAW to use, and considering the ā€œfreeā€ DAW applications which are bundled with many AIs, as they can turn out to be quite expensive in the long run.

Cheers,

Keith

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