Homerecording – first attempts

Since a friend of me and I made plans to start (or join) a band, I started amassing equipment needed for such an enterprise. Here’s a brief list of what I have so far:

• Roland FP-4 – stage piano
• Behringer Xenyx 1202 – 12 band mixer
• Fame MS-58 – low-cost offshoot of the famous SURE SM-58
• Yamaha PianoCraft 400 – PA, Studiomonitor, general purpose HiFi Syste
• Behringer RAGE 158 – Guitar Amp
• Behringer Tube Amp Modeller
• SONY closed Headphones – multi-purpose monitor or whatever I need to hear
• E-Guitar, no name, strat form
• plenty of cables, inserter cables for PC, mono and stereo jack cables, XLR for the mic and so on

So thats not really a lot of hi-spec equipment I have lying around here, but it is quite sufficient for the first humble attempts of getting something recorded. Keep in mind, that this stuff is also supposed to serve as on-stage live equipment, if we ever reach that stage.

Over the last couple of days, I started doing some work on a famous Cologne Karneval song called “Hey Kölle” – German readers might know it. I figured it was easy enough to not make me want to throw the stuff out of the window, but challenging enough for my meager skills at recording.

I started out by doing what was easiest for me – the piano part. That was done rather quickly in 2 hours using three separat tracks for the various parts that interlink. I did some copy and paste for the chorus and had that gave me some acceptable results. Then i started practicing the guitar part – a challenge considering my close to non-existent guitar skills. I managed to arrange some powerchords for the whole thing, but left it at that – the recording was for another day.

For this morning, to be precise. So i revved up the amp, used my amp modeler to produce the sound I wanted and went to work. A few notes on that modeler: The Behringer Rage 158 does reasonably well as an amp, but its built in overdrive is – simply put – unusable. So I use the modeler to do all the overdrive, gain control and so forth. By mid-day, i had the rythm guitar recorded – not mixed yet, it basically kills the effect of the much nicer played piano – I still have to figure out how to make it sound good together.

Forgot to say, I did the drums with a Linux drum engine called Hydrogen. That was rather easy once I figured out what I wanted for drum patterns. That took me about one afternoon. So from the beginning, I recorded the other instruments along the drums, so that I kept the beat rather well – which is not usually one of my strengths.

This afternoon, the base line was due. Whith the nice Roland base guitar preset, I was now left at improvising for an instrument I had never played nor ever investigated any further. Suffice it to say, I am not yet happy with the outcome.

So by the end of this day, I now have drums, piano, rythm guitar and base line in the DAW programm (Ardour – quite nice linux software). The daunting task will be mixing and a lead guitar.