Expanding a bit now Iām at a keyboardā¦
You can just get away with a simple webcam setup or, at a push, use a phone or tablet. You wonāt get the best sound but itās mostly good enough for an online OM.
@brianlarsen does this and gets good results.
You may need to experiment a bit to get the amp volume and your singing volume reasonably balanced (e.g. by moving closer or further away from the mic, setting the level of the amp, etc.). Do some test recordings for this.
Note that, especially on a laptop, you are going to be quite limited with the camera as itās attached to the laptop lid.
If you want to go further then you can invest in an Audio Interface (AI). You should get at least a 2 input device with monitoring capability. You may also want to invest in some headphones or IEMs, if you donāt already have them.
The starter AI I recommend is the Behringer UMC204HD. Itās cheap and good, and you arenāt paying a premium for the name.
You will also need a microphone and a mic stand of some sort, and mic cables.
For live vocals I would generally recommend a dynamic mic, as these tend to be directional (cardiod pattern) and donāt pick up as much background noise (like the acoustic noise of the guitar strings) as other types of mic, like condenser mics. The Shure SM58 is the classic professional mic for this application, but you can get similar mics from other brands for less money.
The vocal mic will plug into one input on the AI.
For the guitar, it depends on the amp you have and how you want to do things. The classic professional approach is to mic the amp. This is because a lot of the sound of classic amps comes from the output transformer, speaker, and speaker cabinet. If you took a line output from these amps you wouldnāt get the proper sound of the amp.
But thatās partly a historical artefact as, today, we have modelling amps and multifx units. If you have something like a Boss Katana, Fender Mustang, Spark, etc. then these amps will fully create the sound of the amp through their line output. If you have one of those then you can plug the output of the amp directly into the second input on the AI.
Otherwise, if you want to mic the amp then youāll need a second mic (SM57 is the classic, but others exist) and mic stand. Youāll also have to carefully control your environment to make sure you donāt get too much bleed from the amp into the vocal mic. You may want to consider putting the amp and mic in a separate room.
And, yes, itās a faff, and I donāt recommend this approach.
Or, if you have a multi fx unit, you can plug the line out from that into the AI.
Another option, instead of capturing amp and vocal separately, is to get something like a condenser mic and capture both with one mic. This is similar to using the macbook microphones, but is a step up in quality and versatility (as you can place the mic anywhere you want).
Regardless of which approach, I would also recommend getting a separate webcam, as the webcam built into your laptop will be awkward to use.
You can get USB mics which have an inbuilt audio interface. I would recommend against these unless itās something like the Audio Technica ATR2100x-USB which has both USB and XLR to connect to an AI.
Regardless of the approach, you should use headphones. These can be connected to the AI.
Cheers,
Keith