So on March 6th my band (Severe Bass and the Bad Decisions) did a live recording in the practice space. It was pretty bare-bones – literally two random microphones hanging from the ceiling, plugged into my Fast Track Pro<\/a>, recorded into REAPER<\/a> (ie, pretty much the only way I know how to record right now). The performances were somewhat spotty, and the recording was less then awesome, but it was a good learning experience.<\/p>\n I’ve been playing a little bit more with the basic plugins that come with REAPER<\/a>, and checking out<\/a> some<\/a> posts<\/a> on how to mix your sound, and am slowly getting the hang of it. The biggest complaint from the recordings is that the vocals are pretty low (which ended up being b\/c there was a pad on the PA channel for my leads, D’oh!), so I went back and re-did vox on one of the tunes with my brand new Shure Beta SM58.<\/a> I haven’t quite figured out how to remove the vocals from the original track, but it sort of adds a nice background vocal effect (at least on this song). Or maybe I’ve just been listening to it enough that it sounds “sort of nice”.<\/p>\n Anyway, mixing all that together leaves me with a product I’m not entirely satisfied with, but it does give me hope for the future. Long live bare minimum recording elements (and how I wish I had all these tools 4 years ago, especially b\/c they did exist then!)<\/p>\n