Setting Up Your Hardware for Recording

Setting Up your Computer for Recording
For the next round of tutorials, we will be recording live instruments (This makes an assumption that you play some instrument or have a friend that does, if not, go learn an instrument or make some musician friends!)

Before you can record, you’ll need Audacity (See the first couple posts, it’s free) and some equipment for recording. You’ll need some sort of recording device, this could be:

• Microphone (must have a small stereo plug at the end to plug into your sound card, if not, adapters are available at Radio Shack like this one. You also may need some sort of phantom power. There are also USB microphones now available that are very convenient for home recording. For regular microphones, plug them into the mic input on your sound card (usually the pink port)


• Direct Input Device (This could be a direct input box, a modelling pedal or an amplifier with a line-level recording output). I will be using a Roland MicroCube for this example, which is a guitar amp with several amp models. You will need a cable to connect the output from the device to the line input of your sound card. (Usually marked as the blue port)


• Sound Card – You probably already have one of these built into your computer. Quality varies, and at some point you may consider purchasing a specialized recording sound card, such as ones from EMU or M-Audio.

In the next lesson, we will test out recording in Audacity.